In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

80 The VOICE inside WATER First the voice dies, then I. First the voice, then a flowing underneath is heard, a moment-movement-lightening, fire and current, up and to the side, down and sidewards the other way. Christopher Smart, an English poet in the time between Pope and Wordsworth, along with his imaginary nephew William Blake (they never met), was ablaze and rampant. Kit Smart had cyclothymia, a kind of pulsing mania for praying in public, any time, any place, whether wanted or not, out loud and loudly. He did so love his sonorous voice saying, in the close quarters of a carriage, or before a cage of chatt’ring monkeys, or for the pleasure of serenely blinking lions, a few mild sets of alligator eyes, adrift and listening, or in a church while the preacher himself is having at it, or behind a line of drunks peeing against a high brick wall and within its afternoon shadow, Praise God. There he is, talking to the immensity, and me. He says about his arrest, For I blessed God in St. James’s Park till I routed all the company. (89b)1 He was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital for the insane on May 6, 1757, and let out a year later with the designation discharged uncured. 1 These numbers refer to Karina Williamson’s text. It is not easy to find a full copy of what survives of this incomplete, strange, and masterful poem. Williamson’s is the best: The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Karina Williamson, vol. 1, Jubilate Agno (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). The references in this poem and its notes are all to fragment B. Jubilate Agno, in Latin, means Rejoice in the Lamb. For almost two centuries the poem never be- 81 I do not now know whether this stroke2 is obstacle, adversity, a hardship of the head, or a blessing—the unexpected luck I got dressed up for, suit and tie, and went out in my truck early on a Sunday morning to find. Later, Christopher Smart was forced to be admitted again, this time to a private madhouse, Mr. Potter’s asylum,3 where he was treated well, given books and writing materials, and allowed to sit in the garden and work on his poetry— still, of course, bitter about being confined. came more than Smart’s handwritten-in-the-madhouse pages. He may not have intended publication. He may have written rather for his own solitary, incantatory pleasure, though surely that is a part of every poet’s motive, and the antiphonal structure, the alternating Let and For line beginnings, certainly implies a performance (probably liturgical) possibility. The call-and-response echoing (infrequent, but definitely there at times) of words and images between the Let and For lines convinces me that Smart had in mind some way of putting his Jubilate out into a larger world beyond the private voice he recorded in such careful, intense script. That manuscript of thirty-two pages is preserved in the Houghton Library at Harvard, though how and where the manuscript survived from the eighteenth century is mostly a mystery. The poem was totally unknown to the public before 1939, when William Force Stead published Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song from Bedlam (Stead’s title). 2 I had a stroke on February 27, 2011. It affected my speech, with hesitation glitch-halts, what my therapist calls verbal dysfunctions: “Everyone has several of those when reading a short paragraph.” Mine were more than that, though, and my voice resonance was changed too. I called off all public appearances for four months. A year and a half later now (August 2012) my speech has almost returned to normal. There are still glitches. I find I require much more sleep, ten hours. There is no tired like neurological tired. I am back out on the road doing readings with music, but some nights are better than others. I don’t want to pretend that I am not damaged. I feel it in my throat and in my head, a sense of exhaustion I have never felt before. Travel is not so breezy now. Something in me is trembling, hoping there will not be a second stroke during the stress of the road. It is all very tentative, this living, and moreso now. Fear and trembling aside, I am certainly not up to Smart’s LEVEL of RESONANCE, to use his vital capitals, as I once was...

Share