CHRIS TĂNĂSESCU
[Note pentru o poetică a convergenței (non)canoanelor vii]
Textul pune poezia română cu tradițiile istorice şi dezvoltările ei contemporane în context universal şi în principal prin paralele cu poeți şi autori de limbă engleză. Misticul şi trupescul sunt văzute ca fiind indisolubil legate prin forma şi expresia poetică. În acest context, posibilele canoane ale prezentului sunt văzute nu ca seturi fixe de lliste ci ca vii înfăptuiri a unor convergențe transregionale şi culturale.
As Eastern Christians we celebrated not long ago the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, which was enacted in the body (and on a precisely identified date – Sunday April 9th in the year 30 AD.) There is a strong stress on the corporeal in our mysteries quite contrary to certain preconceptions regarding Christianity and mysticism in general. But in fact, that is, de facto, such an experience never parts the “spiritual” for the bodily. They go together all the time, united, each with their own infinity that hopefully will fuse and converge. Thus, the transcendental is the immediate. This is poetry.
Language is itself a body. And its soul is poetry. But since the soul and the body are one and the same, language is poetry.
Poetry is the experience of the body as becoming aware of its own strangeness, that we call the soul or the divine light in ourselves. Thus, poetry becomes experience itself.
As Jimi Hendrix would ask, “Are you experienced?”
Which etymologically means out of a peril, i.e., having just passed through, by, or round a danger. And one of the greatest dangers is death, the lack of any experience. Poetry is therefore being alive while aware of and probing death. Poetry is resurrection.
And this places us as Romanian poets so close to certain American ones, like Rosemarie Waldrop who wrote: “Transcendence is not upward, but horizontal, contextual. It is transcendence of language with its infinite possibilities, infinite connections (…). In other words, no split between spirit and matter” (emphasis mine).
Critic Paul Otremba:
“In composition, spirit is its (own) articulation thru matter.”
“In the beginning was the word and the word became flesh” quotes D.A. Powell from the Gospels to later on add, in the unique style that allows his verse to intertwine in such a compulsive manner mysticism with painfully erotic physiologies and harsh social critique: “the poem is the record of the body ; how the body experiences the world (…) with its constant desire to eat, to shit, to breathe, to be cared for…”
And still, we sense that they are different – the soul and the body, language and poetry – which is good, because names play their own specific role in the uni-verse, and each and every entity should be respected and credited for its own place and autonomy. The more we do that, the more they, and us, we’ll get closer to each other, and con-verge, as writing our own multi-verses in correspondence and consonance.
Poetry and language are therefore not actually one and the same, but when we consistently and diligently work and thus allow them to differentiate from each other, we enact their becoming the same.
Romanian contemporary poets are consequently not afraid of form, since language itself is a form and it is so much the more so when informal. Being informal means a thorough knowledge and a graceful dance with all possible formalism. As Jay Parini recently wrote, “in many ways, free verse is harder then formal poetry (…) The demands of free verse are such that only a poet with an unusually good ear as well as an innate sense of form can work successfully in the genre.” When I read that statement the unique case of Romanian poet Gellu Naum came to mind. He wrote mostly in free verse, but for him that meant reinventing and challenging form with every line he wrote, going back and forth between the traditional origins and the most radical avant-gardes possible all the time, perpetually intertwining denial of inherited and homemade form with self-remaking and fresh cerebral artificialisation.
Robert Pinsky says the technology of poetry resides in using the human body. I totally agree, but in saying that one already asserts the existence of something else within the body than the body itself. Poetry rises from that self-strangeness and the other within. Also from the other without, that becomes through relationship, verbal communication and energetic communion, an innermost presence.
Pinsky himself: “The medium of poetry is a human body.” And later on, “in poetry the medium is the audience’s body.” As a performance poet and a member of the band Margento I know what that means from my own experience. It’s always about the voice, the body as a medium of voice and mental rhythms, the technological media as extensions of the body, and the response of the audience that becomes a living and interacting extension of one’s performance and thus an active member in the band. “Find your voice and use it, use your voice and find it.” One finds a voice that would reach the other within and without, and by using it one finds his true audience and himself and thus discovers a both personal and communal voice.
This medium is actually a multiverse of medium-bodies – the body of the poem as an intersection of the body (corporeal in itself, since it is a corpus) of literature and the body of language(s), the body of the poet (and bodies of poets whom he has read, now celebrated and revived way beyond any anxiety of influence, but within acknowledgement of fluency between voices), the body of audiences that live on the borders of multiple canons, profane non-canonical (sub)cultures and popular / (multi)media infusions and simulacra, the body of the wider communities around us and the aching body of the natural environment, etc, and thus, in one word, the body of the band.
The band is a larger and hopefully ever expanding body. The body eventually becomes an intimate and ever focusing band.
Jay Parini:
“Poetry is liturgical, however secular.”
This sounds or should sound so familiar to a Romanian poet. Think of Dosoftei, who was a high priest in the 17th century, and thus a man of the canon in so many strict ways, but at the same time an innovative, extremely original and experimental poet. His renditions of the Old Testament psalms in Romanian verse “translation” are still so relevant to contemporary audiences through the courage of informing the original text with Romanian cultural, historical, and folkloric elements (his Psalms in Verse were even labeled by a well-renown old Romanian literature author as being the least Hebrew ones around the Europe of those centuries), experimenting with euphonies, accentual rhythms (while his contemporary Miron Costin established our long syllabic tradition), etc. Or later on, in the 19th century, Anton Pann with his expertise in and authorship of theological writings and religious chants (where he would put together both the music and the lyrics) and his still appealing poetry “of the world,” his impudent, restless, Chaucerian, picturesque, picaresque, variegated diction and multilayered chameleonic style.
Or, for that matter, the unique and still overwhelming case of Eminescu whose colossal amplitude ranges from the mystical incantation (such as the famously mellifluous “Rugămu-ne-ndurărilor/ Luceafărului mărilor ;/ Ascult-a noastre plângeri,/ Regină peste îngeri,/ Din neguri te arată/ Lumină dulce clară,/ O Maică Preacurată/ Şi pururea fecioară, Marie”) to the pornography of a human whose tormenting sex drive manages at last to work its way through the chaotically carnal down to the untranslatable painfully jocose glossolalic:
Cum mă trece cald şi frig
Când mă ții de bumburig.
Tu dă-ncoace mascarara
Să mi-o joace bumbarara.
Cum mă trece-nfiorează
Când mă ții de bumbarază…
Typically, from its origins, Romanian poetry has not been afraid it might turn either being “too canonical” and thus over-authoritative and dry, nor lethally non-canonical, and thus too insignificantly marginal or offensively, irrelevantly profane. Just as our culture has been a gate between the east and the west and a living (and in certain epitomizing cases even a balanced) mixture of the two, our poetry has circumscribed and expressed undogmatic dogmas as well as thoughtful rebelliousness. Such verse is by nature (and more often than not, actually) immune to excesses in any direction, because it keeps an eye consistently open to the other – the mystical will never forget s/he lives in this world, while the “lay poet” of everyday life will now and then experience certain ineffable uncreated energies as part of their bodily and wordily worldly metabolism.
Its excess is the relentless commitment to expression, its unquenchable will to express. To ex-press ; to release pressure and thus find ways out of and away from what blocks and confines. And to make an imprint on the other as s/he responds by helping building up the self.
Expression therefore does not necessarily mean content in search for a body (although it may very well mean that, why not?) but also unveiling and proving by means of enactment how languages, persons, and communities can be generated.
Karen Volkman:
“The ‘I’ becomes a locus of sensation that shifts and blurs, essentially an improvisation.”
The beats said we finally did in public what has been done only in private. The modernists said before them forget about the intimately personal and draw the magnetic lines of what keeps together the iron filing of cultures and publically established values. The contemporary poet prefers neither one of the private and the public before the other, but tries to establish a dialogue between the two whereby each of them discovers o sense of itself and the other and thus the two manage to (re)create each other by means of expression within consonance and counterpoint.
For those to whom “the canon” is not a cannon threatening the gates (that should anyway be kept always open), there is no fear of influence. Influence is about fluency – one is not isolated or insular, but open towards all alterity.
Elizabeth Bishop:
“Look, it stands to reason that everything we need can be obtained from the river.”
To be able to concentrate is to be able to listen to others and to the world. Concentration is participating in a concert, both as performer and as spectator. Collages of interest are collegial.
Karen Volkman:
Elements
and gods
have no words
for isolation
Influence is a matter of putting one’s heart and mind to work ; of foreseeing what will soon be seen by one and hopefully many others ; it is a matter of divination.
After influence comes translation. The typical work of the traveler, or better, of the wanderer. Taking a step is the elemental translation. The step unites the palpable space with the rhythms of the body. The heartbeat fuses the bodily pace with the corporeal/embodied reason (the lower mercury of the alchemists). The mouth and ear marry the rhythmical reason of heartbeat with the wordy sense of the mind.
Yet the field one walks through nowadays as a poet-reader has meanwhile become a space of multilayered languages, “fields” of work and study, and cultures that interplay in a Babylonic roaring (and so often anti-environmental) diversity that now and then can still converge (by means of expression) to para-regional and multiethnic specific coherences, living natural harmony, and fathomless commonality.
Given the huge challenge, it is the poets’ work to identify and (re)create a canon that is not a set of carved in concrete lists of names, titles, and norms, but rather a sequence of other-focused living (live and inscribed) performative and communal convergences.