The Open Space of the Imagination

THE OPEN SPACE OF THE IMAGINATION The Poetic Moment and the Black Mountain Poets Gerry McFarland Critical Paper and Program Bibliography Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2011 2 The Open Space of the Imagination: The Poetic Moment and the Black Mountain Poets During what I call a poetic moment the world looks different than it did before. It is a moment of intense concentration that appears to suspend time, an experience of limitlessness. The experience is quite desirable. For myself it becomes meaningful and lasting when it is translated into the body of a poem so that it can last beyond the moment. In making something lasting I attempt transcendence of time. This phenomenon could be called by many names: an “Aha!” moment, when the solution to a mind-bending puzzle becomes obvious; a moment of enlightenment when the river becomes more than a river and the trees more than trees; when you look in the mirror and see at last, perhaps painfully, what you must do. For myself, it is a moment of clarity that presents itself without reason or apparent cause. I could be sleepless or well rested, sitting at my desk at home, raking leaves in the yard, or hiking in the mountains. It is inexplicable, undeniable, unbound by time and space. In such moments, time seems to disappear. The written poem is a translation of that experience into a configuration of words on a page. The Black Mountain poets seemed tuned into this as well. I get a sense of open space, of limitlessness from the Black Mountain poets. They emphasized the experience of writing a poem that opens a poet to the moment so that it doesn’t escape unnoticed, an awareness that allows the poet to see “eternity in an hour.” It is a state of mind. 3 What I get out of the Black Mountain poets, out of “field poetics,” is that sense of timelessness, of endlessness, of wonder, the absence of beginnings and endings. What can be described as truly endless but time itself? Charles Olson creates an outline for what I have described as the poetic moment. He explains, in “Projective Verse,” that poetry is composed primarily through the experience of an energy field surrounding and including the poet, and the poet’s job is to interpret that experience. “Field poetics” comes from modern physics where all matter is actually billions of protons and neutrons swirling about each other creating an “energy field” that holds all matter together (Glazner1). I can imagine an endless world containing billions of energy 1 Greg Glazner suggested the relationship between physics and “field poetics” while we discussed the Black Mountain poets over lunch at Pacific Lutheran University in August 2010. I asked him via email in October, 2010 to clarify more fully how the two topics were related. Part of his email response is below. He is referring to “field theory” and by extension field poetics: “physics undermines the notion of matter . in this way. A particle, an electron, for example, isn't localized. It's a field in the same way magnetism is a field. The electron ‘localizes’ into a distinct particle only when it's observed. Then it goes back to being a field. So field theory isn't about parts at all. In fact, it's an attack on the notion that particles are distinct, localized entities. You might say that particles in field theory are more like tendencies toward actions. Imagine trying to describe a magnetic field as a particle. Impossible. Field theory suggests that maybe everything is like that.” 4 fields everywhere, the end of one indistinguishable from the next. What I get from the Black Mountain poets, out of “field poetics,” is a sense of endlessness, the absence of beginnings and endings, but also of wonder and the enrichment of time. My experience of the poetic moment is like finding an open space in the mind, a glimpse of that endlessness. In her essay “Interweavings: Reflections on the Role of Dreams in the Making of Poems,” in Light Up the Cave, Denise Levertov points out a “poem-making state” akin to dreams beyond, or nearly beyond, conscious experience. She wrote: “Can I distinguish between dreaming and writing—that is between dream images and those that come into being while I am in the poem-making state? I’m not sure” (29). 5 The Question of Form The altered state of mind during the act of creation brings about art. A more deliberate consciousness becomes useful, however, when contemplating what form the art is to take. How shall this poem look on the page? Where shall I put the line breaks? Should there be an equal or unequal number of stresses in each line? Some have said the only difference between prose and poetry is that poetry is written in lines and prose in sentences. The question of form dominates the differences between the so-called New Critics and the Black Mountain poets. Each of the Black Mountain poets has something to say about his argument with the so-called New Critics over the issue of form. Robert Creeley explains in his “Introduction to the New Writing in the USA,” that the New Critics were obstacles to poetic expression: The colleges and universities were dominant in their insistence upon an idea of form extrinsic to the given instance. Poems were equivalent to cars insofar as many could occur of similar pattern—although each was, of course, 'singular.' But it was this assumption of a mold, of a means that could be gained beyond the literal fact of the writing here and now (his emphasis), that had authority (1). In his essay “Ideas on the Meaning of Form” in Fictive Certainties, Robert Duncan wrote that an overemphasis on form “most mistakes the exuberance of my soul,” (90). He believed in poetry as an ordering of the senses, a poetry that makes its own form rather than inhabiting a received form or having a form forced upon the experience. 6 Duncan continues: “Form, for the mind obsessed by convention, is significant in so far as it shows control.” Does he suggest, then, that form has value only to those “obsessed by convention” (90)? I don’t think so. His work presents a seemingly endless variation of forms, as if the point was to create a freestanding new form with every poem, not avoid form altogether. He argues with a New Critic, whom he calls “Miss Drew.” She defends the “metrical scheme” as “a mechanical framework, a convention within which and against which the poet orders his individual poetic movement” (91-92). This point of view does not seem overly rigid to me. Isn’t this what poets do? Duncan argues at the beginning that “the key to (a poem’s) music lay in the melody of the language itself.” He writes about the “laws of thermodynamics” suggesting the force field that defines matter, and he opposes “rationalists who contend against the imagination . .” Thus I say, . against the Gnostics, who would free the sparks of spirit from what is the matter, and against the positivists and semanticists who would free the matter from its inspirational chaos, I am glad that there are night and day, Heaven and Hell, love and wrath, sanity and ecstasie, together in a little place. Having taken thought upon death, I would be infected by what is (89). Duncan suggests here that poetry is, first of all, music, and reflects our common human experience. Poetry is the “what is” found in the field, in the poetic moment, and cannot be defined by its outward shape. 7 Then what is form? Which aspect is most important? Rhythm? Rhyme? Line length? If none of those aspects of form is used, is it still a poem? What makes a poem a poem and not a sentence or paragraph? The answer to these questions animated these poets toward “Projective Verse” because of the emphasis brought there to the act of creation itself, beyond formality, rhyme and meter. The poet need only be present in the moment, focus there and proceed. 8 The Principles of Projective Verse Olson’s “Projective Verse,” outlines, in an abstract manner, some “rules” for understanding my own experience of the poetic moment and interpreting it. Olson describes three aspects of projective verse useful in seeing how a poet is to manage the experience of the poem: kinetics, principle and process. 1. Kinetics suggests that writing poetry is an energetic enterprise. Words knock against each other like neutrons and electrons. The poet will experience this energy “which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is a third term, will take away” (“Projective Verse,”16). 2. The principle “is this: FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT (or so it was phrased by one R. Creeley . .)” (his emphasis) (16). If the poet is aware of the field from which, Olson says, the energy for the creative task comes, form can only follow content. Consciousness of how the poem should look on the page cannot be considered in the midst of the original experience. The poem ends when the experience indicates, not at the most appropriate place for punctuation, or when considering its shape on the page or its rhythm or rhyme structure. The Black Mountain poets avoided traditional forms such as rhyme, meter, and other formal structures, preferring to create their own forms as they wrote, which freed them up to experiment, to make poetry their own.

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