|
|
|
|
Ultimately, it may be pointless to write critically about the poems of a man who claimed "I wished, from the beginning, to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand." [1] New Critical tools aren't much help, surely. I have gone so very far out of my way not to write critically about poets like Ronald Johnson, partially because I love their work in a way that feels vulnerable, impressionistic, and not about knowing. I've also fled from the task for another reason. It is terrifically hard. With that caveat, I aim to begin a different kind of research than I am used to. This essay is, more than anything else, meant as a prose paean to one of my dearest, ghostly fathers. I try to do something like close-reading here, because I think the work demands it, but ultimately, in the spirit of Johnson's project, I make few pretensions to know. With any luck this will shelter me from certain kinds of academic scrutiny (especially academic self-scrutiny) and allow me to say something of what I see when I look into Johnson's poetry. I have always thought of Ronald Johnson as a mystical poet. Calling him one seems an obvious enough thing to do. After all, in the note to ARK that I've already quoted, he claims Blake as his "guiding spirit." He is certainly prone to declarations of his own mystification. Take for example the record of seeings and hearings that make up The Book of the Green Man's Summer section, especially "What the Leaf Told Me": The first two lines, drawn (as Johnson notes) from the diaries of Francis Kilvert, seem mystical enough in their provenance. The poplar's leaves bear their own unique signature - a trace of divine semiosis - which is immediately recognizable to the attentive observer. [3] Language, literary invention, and the natural life process seem to become identities in this poem: "As a leaf startles out / ... so the word did." But is this gesture necessarily mystical? I've begun to wonder about the utility of labels like "mystical" or "visionary." Partially, they seem to be a catchall for anything that resists analysis, anything that takes up the oblique tones of high prophecy, or anything with religious texture that seems too cool to be connected to religion and its bugbears. Gnosticism, in particular, has emerged (in large part due to the work of Elaine Pagels) as Christianity's sanitized double, offering the Western tradition a form of spiritual engagement that feels indigenous while eschewing Christianity's embarrassing history of errors. The scope of this essay will not afford any judgment of this religio-cultural project. I bring it up only to explain why I think my initial take on Johnson's work was misguided. Mysticism, especially Gnostic mysticism, is about knowing something secret, hence the etymology of Gnosticism in gnosis: intuitive knowledge of spiritual truth. The mystic receives rather than forges this truth. My sense of Johnson's poem is that the desire for "knowing nothing but a will to create and matter at hand" eclipses the possibility of a strictly mystical reading. I don't mean to say Johnson isn't doing something related to mysticism, or that there is only one kind of mysticism. Instead, I just want to move past the analytical cul-de-sac of vision qua vision. What makes Johnson's poems remarkable is the nature of what he sees and the clarity with which he renders it; or, to reverse his own formulation, it is the matter at hand and his will to create. Johnson is a rustic inventor. Like Le Facteur Cheval, Johnson is a bricoleur. He is also a devotional poet, however. To my mind, a list of Johnson's poetic precursors should include more 'conservative' pastoral (in the sense of 'priestly') poets like George Herbert as well as more 'free-wheeling' visionary poets like Blake. Herbert's religious culture was very different from Johnson's, obviously, but the two poets share a productive, albeit ambivalent, attitude towards the sacramentality of literary invention. In "Jordan (II)," Herbert writes:
Nothing could seem too rich to clothe the sun, In his short essays on Johnson's work, Guy Davenport reminds us that the word "invention" originally meant "to find." This point is certainly not lost on Herbert, but his erasure of the word from the title of his poem, coupled with the poem's semantic interest in relinquishing creative control, suggests that he also understood the word to mean something like what we more typically take the word to mean today: to create from one's own materials. When it comes to Johnson's work, Davenport's point is certainly valid, especially as Johnson "finds" the text of Radi os in Milton's Paradise Lost. Johnson's treatment of intertextual material in The Book of the Green Man, however, is closer to Herbert's aesthetic. As Herbert disavows his own creative agency, in "Jordan (II)", it flares up all the stronger. This is the compelling, generative irony of humiltas, and it is a fundamental component of the projects of both poets. Kilvert's notes and the leaf itself in "What the Leaf Told Me" function much as the mysterious voice delivering the final three lines of "Jordan (II)," a vestige of the concerned bystander trope from Petrarchan love lyrics. The effect is one of simultaneous simulation and sincerity; it is the effect produced by a literary energy coming somewhere between invention's current denotation and its etymological trace. In both of these poems, the authors are approaching the numinous by direct and indirect means. There is a sense that mixed methods are the only proper way. "Jordan (II)" openly declares the poet's work can only turn out as bustling - or sweaty, as Berryman's poetry was once described - when compared to its object. "What the Leaf Told Me" seems to make a similar claim by implication, as it excludes any reference to the poet's own agency. The friendly voices dictating parts of both of these poems have a kind of license to speak beautifully and uninhibitedly and thereby to put the "sweetness" and "dazzle" of being into human language. Whence come these voices, then? The superficial answer would be: the voice in Herbert's poem is Christ's, and the voices in Johnson's poem are those of discrete things (poplar leaf, wren's eye, etc.). The superficial answer is not an incorrect one, by any means, but it doesn't satisfy me. In our moment, we are prone to doubt that Herbert had direct hierophantic access or that Johnson could read nature's signatures. They are both writing about what they consider to be ontological objects, but there is no room in their aesthetic projects for direct ontology. Direct ontology, one assumes, is silent and therefore antagonistic to literary vocation. Dictation, in these cases, as in Jack Spicer's lectures, makes the most sense to me as a discursive fulcrum for getting over the accumulation of prohibitions and stupefactions standing between poets and what they love (dare I say, what they believe in). Dictation allows Herbert to sustain his humanistic sensibilities and also shed them. Dictation allows Johnson to sustain his animistic sensibilities and also shed them. Contrary to Spicer's (perhaps half-in-jest) convictions, I'd say that dictation is a form of invention in the sense I've outlined above; it is not innocent of individual subjective will and desire. I remember the shudder of recognition I felt many years ago when I read a note at the end of Donald Revell's Beautiful Shirt: "completed ... in The Netherlands, southern France, and the Ozarks, where Revell traveled so that he 'might be distanced from familiar voice and language in order to make poems entirely dependant upon immediate physical and verbal circumstances." That "entirely dependant" helped me make sense of what Revell was doing in his poems even if I now feel such dependence or such entirety is not possible. Surely, one can operate in something like immediate circumstances (and must, for my poetry dollar) in making poems, but subjectivity is stuck on the poet like meat on the bone, and Beautiful Shirt (a beautiful book) is proof enough of that. Much later, lecturing on The Cantos & Maximus, Revell would tell me "take your pattern from nature," citing Canto LX: "He ordered 'em to prepare a total anatomy et, / qu'ils veillerent a la purete du langage / et qu'on n'employat que des termes propres / (namely CH'ing ming)." Call things by their right names. Again, the prospect is simple and fairly unassailable, but it must be an approximation. Unlike Pound, George Herbert and Ronald Johnson recognize the obligation to call things by their right names and the impossibility of the endeavor. For me, Herbert's work and Johnson's work share an orientation
towards the intersection of metaphysical and material experience, simultaneously
affirming and denying authorial subjectivity as a controlling presence.
This bi-modal stance towards the egotistical sublime helps produce again
and again in their poetry the effect of identity (or continuity) between
things and words as well as the poet's identity (or language-mediated
self). Pound did not trust effects, but this identity effect in
Johnson's work is the one of the most powerful interpretations and implementations
of what Pound proscribed. Pound's skepticism is what often prevented
him from achieving his ideal as coherently as Johnson achieved it.
Finding marks of distinction between early-modern and post-modern aesthetic
and cultural artifacts is easy enough. Belief, however, in a significant
overlap between reality effect and Reality as a thing in itself is what
links my idea of the great early-modern poem and the great post-modern
poem. Ultimately, it is this kind of belief in the sufficiency of
marginal ontology (or, the mixed experience of what is real with what
seems real) that makes Ronald Johnson a signal poet of bodily and spiritual
experience, an inventor who finds what he makes and makes what he finds
and a creature who takes what he is given.
[1] Johnson, Ronald. "A Note," ARK, Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1996. [2] Johnson, Ronald. The Book of the Green Man. (New York: Norton), 1967, 54. [3] See Jacob Boehme's Signatura Rerum for a classic example of the mystic's perspective on the textual dimension of all natural objects. [4] Herbert, George. George Hebert and Henry Vaughn. Ed. Louis Martz. (Oxford: Oxford UP), 1986, 90.
|
|