13 Dec 11 Catalogue of the Ships

While I had hoped for three more drafts by the end of 2011, I’ve only completed another one, for a total of three. Life, alas, placed many other demands in my way, intervening in the time and peace of mind I needed.

Yet I managed to write a thirty-page essay on Rabindranath Tagore, which I am told will be published this month in India in the journal Rupkatha.com. I began reading Tagore as a very young poet many decades ago and have often thought of writing about him, but dismissed the idea until prodded by the editor, giving me the determination to take a seeming detour into the months of  reading needed to shape my thinking into form. Actually, I had felt for the last year or so that I had to engage with Tagore at a deeper level before finishing The Parliament of Poets, and now feel he has opened further for me a perspective that is highly congruent with what I have already written.

Homer’s catalogue of ships at the end of Book II of the Iliad suggested the third draft of The Parliament of Poets. I was actually quite surprised by the development. As a young writer I had always had an animus against the form. Reading Melville’s Moby Dick, I found his chapters on the history and practice of whaling infuriating. At times I couldn’t control the impatience I felt with his method, wanted to throw the book across the room! A diligent student, I, nevertheless, wasn’t one who could skip chapters, ploughed through them, while salivating for the thread of the plot to return. As an older and perhaps wiser writer, I have made my peace with the form. The catalogue serves a literary and intellectual purpose I’ve come to respect, indeed, come to realize I need, for the good of my story and my reader, though there might be some out there someday annoyed as I once was. I hope they’ll come as I have to respect Homer and Melville’s practice, among other writers who have found similar devices necessary, and consider there are reasons and purposes that only the epic catalogue can fulfill.

Homer recounting in Book X the warriors of his epic, Agamemnon in Book IV reviewing his troops, Virgil in his catalogue of the Latin forces and the Etruscans, Milton that of the fallen angels, all tell us something very important about the epic drama under way. Such devices open out and broaden the scope and elevation of the poem. How much more needed in a global age when we have come to view the earth even from the moon. How much more necessary in an age that embraces so much in terms of human experience.

 Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Dante, Epic, epic catalogue, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, Homer, John Milton, Rabindranath Tagore, Virgil

04 Aug 11 Back from the Voyage.

Back from the Voyage.

August 4, 2011

I finished the second full draft of The Parliament of Poets a few days ago. It’s now a readable manuscript, entirely cast in verse.

For decades I really didn’t know how to begin, though I made notes and thought about the book endlessly. I had written The Bower of Nil as a book-length narrative poem thinking it would be a bridge to writing an epic. In my mind, the three sections were based on the Greek choric dance, which I didn’t actually make clear until the ebook edition in 2010. Nevertheless, the enormous amount of reading of philosophy that I had done for The Bower of Nil helped me to understand how to handle and structure a theme around a cultural story in dramatic, literary terms. That in itself was a considerable leap forward from the lyric poetry of Into the Ruins, at times a story told or suggested in lyric sequence. The universal epic scale proved far more difficult, even arduous. It was extremely difficult and challenging to absorb and synthesize the decades of reading, my whole life, truth be told, and beyond my own personal life, into a literary, epic form that might hope to speak to our global age.

It was Virgil who finally made me realize how to begin. He had written out the Aeneid first in prose and then worked it into verse. I thought of that for years. That opened the door for me. And then the time was right.

I know I can’t possibly be objective about the book. I’ve been completely wrapped up in it. It will be for others to judge if it flies as a universal epic. For me, after decades, since the early 1980s, I feel I’ve at last crossed a threshold and can look back, as it were, from earth to the moon, back at the earth from the moon, the physical manuscript on my desk proving I have made the voyage.

I have three more drafts planned which I hope to finish by the end of this year, each one working on smaller levels of detail, tying up the loose ends. And then perhaps a few more drafts for further polishing, like a cabochon stone.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Aeneid, Epic, epic poetry, Greek Choric Dance, Into the Ruins, The Bower of Nil, The Parliament of Poets, Universal, Virgil, Voyage

21 Jul 11 John Milton. Harold Bloom.

John Milton. Harold Bloom.

Abdiel Agonistes…. October 24, 2000

John Milton’s reputation has unjustly suffered a diminution during the last two centuries. The romantics, repulsed by his religious theme of the earthly pilgrimage of the soul, corrupted his poem by maliciously interpreting Satan as the hero, despite Milton’s unequivocal condemnation of Satan and his equally lucid characterization of the repentant Adam as the true hero. T.S. Eliot and those who ape his opinions also find Milton the man and his religious beliefs repellent. The poets of the modern era deride Milton because, in general, they have abandoned religious belief and turned to vague forms of idealism, as in Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, and to the creation of idiosyncratic ersatzes, as in Poe’s Eureka. John Keats’s Endymion and the Hyperion poems fail as much because of their superficial content as their poor structure and execution. In Auden’s analysis, “the modern problem” hamstrings the romantics as much as Yeats or Pound. Milton never suffered from such a malady and hence the envious detestation he has received from minor poets who are unquestionably his inferiors. Milton possesses a serious vision of history and humankind that could only achieve full expression in the most demanding form of poetry–the epic. But most poets of the last few hundred years have not found themselves entrusted with such a vision. Much to the contrary, they excel in every imaginable type of turpitude and triviality that the human mind is capable of producing. Like Yeats they have often thrown together every decadent principle or superstition that has ever happened along. This sorry state of affairs has become so common in postmodern poetry that anyone who would attempt to restore epopee to its glorious heights of noble seriousness and serenity would find ranked against him every academic hack and, as Milton phrased it, every “libidinous and ignorant” poetaster who has “scarce ever heard of that which is the main consistence of a true poem.” Milton knew the “consistence of a true poem,” and both Paradise Lost and many passages scattered throughout his prose attest to it. In The Reason of Church Government he surveys the abilities of such masters as Homer, Virgil, Job, and Sophocles. Along with the modern loss of belief in God has gone his high and serious belief in the office of the poet. Equally banished from the modern conception of poetry is all respect for positive values, morals, and virtues. The story of twentieth-century literature is the abuse and misguided replacement of such healthy standards with the perversions of modernism and postmodernism. In brief, “the modern problem.”

Unlike in the work of Jacques Derrida and his academic flies, the “presence” of God is a reality for Milton. Here in the abstract Milton gives us what throughout Paradise Lost he has been dramatizing–the “principles and presuppositions” to which Adam, representative man, must obediently submit, not merely in Eden, but for the fulfillment of his life during his journey on the earthly plane. In Satan, Milton presents the picture of the rebel, almost a type of the Renaissance hero Benvenuto Cellini, who through pride usurps power and whose fundamental actions and motives have their most appropriate modern analogue, as many have observed, in the archvillains Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Such men fully embody the will to power that the nihilist Nietzsche, as Thomas Mann put it, glorified. Such totalitarian dictators were the inevitable product of the romantic fascination with Satan, as though he were a hero and not an arrogant aspirant after power. Such cultural confusion reveals itself in Goethe’s Faust as well as in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Such errors in judgment, such fundamental confusion of values, mark the modern era and set it off from the spiritually healthier times of Dante, Langland, Spenser, and Milton–healthier only in terms of possessing to a degree a unified spiritual vision that provided universal standards with which to confront the damnable deeds of their day. Far from the banal optimism of the modern era, as in Whitman, they know that the long hard way of man is through suffering and turmoil and that the assurance Michael gives Adam about future generations abides eternally: “Doubt not but that sin / Will reign among them.” Despite Freud’s “freeing” man from sin, the twentieth century proved to be the most sinful in history, precisely because the unique spiritual reality of each soul and its fundamental limitations were denied. The violent, arrogant, insidious deeds of the archvillains of modern political nihilism alone account for the suffering and deaths of hundreds of millions of people, while much of the so-called intelligentsia of the West and East defended or prepared the way for the slaughter. Whereas Virgil denounced war except as the last resort for establishing peace, modern poets have often ignored the inhumanities of our century–save for those like Pound whose totalitarianism abetted the brutalizing of millions of innocents and the early Auden who approved “the necessary murder.” Here at the end of the twentieth century when humankind still stands technologically capable of destroying much of the vast expanse of the globe and much, though not all, of its population, here when a more trustworthy political form has yet to be securely established to channel the will of the citizens of the international community, epopee must again take account of the social domain and man’s earthly journey through these immense atrocities. For by faithfully treading the dark way of horror, by weighing the modern loss of belief, humankind may begin to regain the path in the twenty-first century, and, like Dante’s persona, attain the highest summit of peace and glory.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Dante, Epic, epic poetry, Ezra Pound, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, John Milton, Spenser, T. S. Eliot, Virgil

02 Jun 11 Aristotle’s Poetics and Epic Poetry

Aristotle’s Poetics and Epic Poetry

As of May 27, 2011, I’ve revised each book of The Parliament of Poets through Book VII, since finishing the full rough draft of the entire epic in early February. Past the half way mark of revision feels very good and inspires me to want to push on through the rest of it during the next several weeks, perhaps before the end of the summer, a readable draft of the entire book.

It was as a young poet, holed up in some rental room or house, choosing to live in poverty in order to have the time to study and write, in Detroit or in the country, none of my family or friends understanding what I was doing, that I first read Aristotle’s Poetics, some thirty-five years ago. I reread it many times, or parts of it, going back to it through the years. It is the touchstone of the literary art.

Aristotle was right, in so many ways, nowhere more than when he wrote, in the Poetics, a useful critical work, rightly revered by poets for millennia, unlike the vapid theories that have been for decades the scourge of American and English poetry:

“So from these considerations it is evident that the poet should be a maker of his plots more than of his verses, insofar as he is a poet by virtue of his imitations and what he imitates is actions.” (Tr. Gerald F. Else)

The plot presents the most formidable challenge to an epic poet, selecting the incidents and structuring the chain of events, as well as the  perspective on them, the hammer in the stonemason’s hand. After long decades of pondering and searching for the Idea, a dream in the night can come as from another realm. In contrast, one thinks of Ezra Pound’s plotless, rambling attempt at epic, and other modern efforts, without exception mere series of poems, pastiche, or mock epics, though there is no reason a universal epic for our time cannot include humor and delight along with wisdom. The great epics, East and West, need not bind our hands but guide them.

And beyond sophistry,  Aristotle observes, “imitation comes naturally to us, and melody and rhythm too”; talking of already ancient epic, “the soberer spirits were imitating noble actions and the actions of noble persons,” which I have always read as the rare qualities of character exemplifying humanity at its best, ideally, for instance, as with Dante’s persona, his longing for Beatrice. Further, too, I should say, the language of an epic, in our lingua franca, must be carefully chosen if it is to have any chance of reaching a global readership, of speaking to people around the globe. While not condescending to their audience, the greatest epics were simple and direct, seeking to communicate with their listeners and readers.

Of the embellishment of poetic style, Aristotle writes,

“But by far the most important thing is to be good at metaphor. This is the only part of the job that cannot be learned from others; on the contrary it is a token of high native gifts, for making good metaphors depends on perceiving the likenesses in things.”

Similarly, anthropologists have argued precisely that the distinguishing attribute of Homo sapiens is the ability for symbolic thought and metaphor. I would add metaphor comprises many levels of language and form, shading into structural devices and image, grounded in sensibility, temperament, and in that regard Aristotle is correct that metaphor can’t be learned, but lived, lived into, is a way of thinking. The prerequisites for that journey presuppose a search of the highest order.

Epic problems and their solutions lead to mimesis, imitation of things, in one of three ways: “the way they were or are; the way they are said or thought to be; the way they ought to be.” Homer and Sophocles set the best example by “portraying people as they ought to be.” Epic poetry can do no less than strive to approach their standard and is ultimately judged by its own failure and success.

Aristotle’s Poetics are as universally applicable to the greatest epics of Eastern and Asian literature as they are to those of the Western Greco-Roman and English tradition, applicable to all of world literature.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Aristotle, ars poetica, Epic, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, Homer, Horace, Poetics, Sophocles

06 Feb 11 The Parliament of Poets

The Parliament of Poets

February 4, 2011

Book XII

Mbeku, the flying African tortoise, like the last stage of a Saturn V rocket, propels us out of earth orbit into a quarter of a million miles to the moon, 25,000 miles per hour, clutching me in his feathered arms, his cracked shell pointing backwards at the moon, hurtling, pirouetting, twirling, in the weightlessness of space, in brilliant white sunlight, in the blackest black of eternity, through timelessness, into the future.

Back to the Sea of Tranquility, back to the descent stage of the Lunar Module, of Apollo 11.  Third time on the moon, the Poet of the Moon, more times than any astronaut. After a long journey, arduous, an ordeal.

The far side of the moon, as dark as the dark night of the soul. The starry cosmos, a universe of galaxies, sextillions of stars. Lunar sunrise. Earthrise…

The end of Nihilism and Scientism, the unity of science and religion, reason and intuition, the Imagination, the two cultures reconciled. The unity of Unity, oneness, our fragile, delicate Earth, three dimensional in its fullness, floating through eternal timelesssness. A new panorama rises before humanity.

The Parliament of Poets, nearly three years of writing, after decades, a full rough draft.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Apollo 11, Epic, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, Mbeku, moon, nihilism, Parliament of poets, Scientism, the flying tortoise

12 Nov 10 Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness

November 12, 2010

A griot woman, robes and calabash flowing in the air, takes the Persona into the heart of darkness.  Sogolon, Sunjata’s mother. A dense jungle, a village in a clearing. A compound, a round, mud-brick hut.

Raped and brutalized, bodies, and a refugee camp. Hutus and Tutsis, Rwandans and Ugandans, Congolese and many factions.

A grieving, healing griot song, rings out above the human misery.

Mbeku, the Flying Tortoise, lifts the Persona to skyland, back to the Moon.

Out of America, out of Africa, back to the Moon.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Africa, Congo, epic poetry, Flying Tortoise, Frederick Glaysher, Griot, Heart of Darkness, Mbeku, Sogolon, Sunjata

22 May 10 Borges. Moon Mirror. Mirror Moon.

Borges. Moon Mirror. Mirror Moon.

On the pampas. Buenos Aires. “O Poet of the Moon!” Under the Southern Cross, bitter juntas of the soul.

And so I find myself standing before what I’ve thought of for decades but have not been able to confront, write about. Thinking of it, year after year. An omnipresent obstacle, challenge, too hot to handle, stepping around it, sensing always its presence, why me, why me, who assigned this to me? A choice, an answer to a call, by default, delegation, destiny, long refused, evaded, a sense of futility overwhelming, filling me with a loathing for its very terms, find another scapegoat….

Mirror moon draws me in, and I cannot refuse to go, on to another continent… time come… its arduous demands, relentless, sacrifice of self, safety and content, all past, receding, far away now…

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Africa, Buenos Aires, Epic, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, Jorge Luis Borges, South America

13 Oct 09 Job. Hebrew Poets. Baal.

It took months of study, thought, reflection, and prayer, but I found my way forward, rose from zazen on the lunar platform, spoke with Job on an ash heap of moon dust. The Hebrew poets of Andalusia widened the perspective, with Hanagid directing Yehuda Halevi to guide me below to Mt. Carmel and Elijah’s slaughter of the prophets of Baal. Dante lifted the Persona from that scene of horror, flying up the boot of Italy, into Europe….

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Elijah, Epic, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, Hanagid, Hebrew Poets of Andalusia, Job, Mt. Carmel, Prophets of Baal, Yehuda Halevi

22 May 09 Gravity

The struggle, so intense. I had thought it would be relatively easy to write about the exclusive religions, since I had spent my whole life in their cultures, reading, steeped in their scriptures, theology, art, and literature. Yet now I find perhaps the opposite is the case. I know all too much, making it difficult to see and select what is essential or evocative in the right way, though that’s not really it, either. Rather, the scope is so challenging, the embrace so wide, the view from the moon so vast, it’s often overwhelming. And it’s the pain, pain and despair, of facing the blank page every day, trying to resolve the many strands into one. The enormous study and reflection required, so many years, solitary, my study feeling at times like a dungeon, a deep, dark, black pit. Easier to walk away, avoid it, the feeling of talking only to one’s self, dispiriting. Weakness and the dread pull of inertia. Gravity, even on the moon.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Epic, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, Gravity, Moon Ground, parliament of poetry, The Black Pit

25 Mar 09 Back on the Moon

Past the Kingdom of Silla, to the mountains of Lake Biwa, where Basho and Saigyo rested from their long journeys. Like all of Japan, the view of the lake has changed since Basho was interred at the Temple of Gichu-ji on its southern shore. Saigyo guided the Persona back to his great metaphor, the moon:

In the mountains’ deep
Places, the moon of the mind
Resides in light serene:
Moon mirrors all things everywhere,
Mind mirrors moon . . . in satori now.

(Tr. William R. LaFleur)

Basho too taught the Persona the oneness of his vision, a Vinegar Drinker in his own way:

Four gates
And four different sects
Sleep as one
Under the bright moon.

(Tr. Nobuyuki Yuasa)

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Basho, Epic, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, Japan, Lake Biwa, Saigyo, Tadanori, Zeami