On Being Bookish
Arwulf on Poetics (part two of three)
l'd like to speak for the autodidacts, who read without a curriculum and who harbor no grade-point averages. In this famous university community, of all places, with our libraries and book stores, we really do not need anyone to tell us how to study. The spirits are there, between the pages, and under the pines at the back of the arboretum.
Evolution
Have you been to see the Alkman mosaic at the Kelsey Museum? It' s the most amazingly beautiful piece of antiquity I've ever met face to face. There, encircled by birds and fruits, is the face of a poet who wrote odes to be sung by choirs of virgins. Alkman of Sparta, who carne along a little earlier than Sappho, and whose surviving verses are almost as deep and timeless as hers.
Nearly 700 years B.C.E., Alkman wrote the ultimate Resting Poem. He said: Everything is asleep. Mountains and ravines, they are sleeping. Look at em. Entire societies of honeybees, crashed out. Tribes of birds and schools of deep sea eels, everything everywhere is fast asleep.
Cut to New York City, 1929. Federico Garcia Lorca visits Manhattan Island. He is terrified by the immensity of the place, and notes that back home in Andalusia, things are tiny by comparison. In Granada, says Lorca, they even diminutize their verbs.
So Lorca finds himself on the Brooklyn Bridge in the middle of the night. He's still recovering from what he saw in Wall Street, (he arrived just in time to witness the immediate aftermath of the stock market crash), where, he says, "as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit. .."
Lorca looks around him: so many lights burning, and the city never ever still. As if in answer to Alkman across more than twenty-five centuries, Lorca writes: No one is asleep. No one. Everything is awake. Lunar creatures sniff at the back door; living iguanas will nibble at you as you lay awake, not dreaming. Watch out! Life is not a dream.
And we have entered the age of insomnia.
On Being Bookish
I'm writing this in honor of my mother, Helen Grenier, nee Biadaszkiewicz, who celebrates her 80th birthday this month. My musia, as the Polish boy says, is a part-time Creative Writing consultant and student at Washtenaw Community College. She is also a remarkable poetic force, and I am very honored to have grown up within the glow of her influence. Musia it was who encouraged me to be bookish, and she has inadvertantly demonstrated to me the virtues of creative insomnia. The world is much quieter after 2 AM. One can get a lot of studying done at that hour.
Now some of this certainly carne to me through the umbilicus. Heredity; I seem to sometimes be a walking echo of my grandfather, who was deeply bookish. But I want to acknowledge a very bookish upbringing; being around my mother, I grew up textually. Some of my earliest memories include dozing off with the smell of bookbindings in my little nostrils.
At the age of thirteen I was taken by my musia to the house in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lived for most of his life. I sat in his chair, stood at the angled writing table where he composed with ink and paper while staring out the window. And I stood there in the silence and stared out Longfellow's window. (Poor Longfellow isn't taken very seriously any more but I like his vibe. Him and Tennyson.) In Concord I was able to visit the graves of the poets up on what's called Author's Ridge. Special turf with an unforgettable mystery about it.
There's lots happening inside the heart and mind of a child when spirits are invoked; the spirit of the written word, and the spirits of places themselves. If we stop goofing off and pay attention to the miracles which are right in front of us, the stories will come up out of the ground, right through the soles of our feet, and start speaking to us, through us.
The Library is full of Spirits. So is the Bog nine miles outside of town. Mick Vranich, working class poet from Detroit, would want me to acknowledge the spirits of the River Rouge Plant. The Ghosts of the SlagHeap. All places are willing to talk. The listener must listen. And maybe, after a great deal of listening, begin to try and do some telling.
What's been told in writing can have a special power all its own. A silent voice happens in the skull when you read to yourself. Can you hear it now as you read these words? What is this voice, and where did it come from? How lucky we are to be able to read what's been written. Literacy is a privilege, taken for granted by privileged people. College educations are purchased for the furthering of careers. The very real magic which lives in the literature becomes incidental to personal success. College students are concerned with high scores, on their exams and in the stadium. Little else holds meaning for most of them, for the time being. They want to be winners.
Having chosen, long ago, a path which is not lucrative, prestigious nor clearly condoned or delineated by the system, I'd like to speak for the autodidacts, who read without a curriculum and who harbor no grade-point averages. In this famous university community, of all places, with our libraries and book stores, we really do not need anyone to tell us how to study. The spirits are there, between the pages, and under the pines at the back of the arboretum.
Light
Lastly there are these words spoken by Diane di Prima at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in June of 1975: "It seems to me. . .that the actual stuff poetry is made out of is light. There are poems where the light actually comes through the page, the same way that it comes through the canvas in certain Flemish paintings, so that you're not seeing light reflected off the painting, but light that comes through, and I don't know the tricks that make this happen.
"But I know they're there and you can really tell when it's happening and when it's not. So I've been trying to figure out what makes it happen. And I think it's not very different from the light of meditation. So that I'm beginning to suspect that what makes it happen is the way sound moves in you, moving your spirit in a certain way to produce a certain effect which is like an effect of light."
Di Prima has me back in front of the Alkman mosaic in the Kelsey Museum, watching the light come through the eyes of the poet from more than twenty-five centuries back. And I'm standing inside of Lew Welch's Ring of Bone, realizing that Ring is what a Bell does, and Bone is all you get to leave behind excepting your Words, and I want to thank all of the spirits for letting me stand among them on this earth, with the echoes so full and sweet in the seashell of my skull. Everybody's got a skull. It's up to you to use your own for harvesting the echoes, for catching the light.