This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

A skin of mouths

j6 T H I S C O M P O S T wants to feel itself scored in mind like a residue of fire, or like life-forms making the long migration from bios to fossil. They are musings, and it is to musings that the Muses attend, and a music begins. the Muse is the 'fate' of the poem its 'allotment,' ahead of time the face of it at the end seen at the beginning Olson coined the word "archetext" asthat which transcends an apparentcondition, rendering the text itself transparent to the primary power it imagines (Muthologos i:58). Myth: not a content of the poem (myth, as is the case with wisdom, "is solely a quality ofthe moment of time in which there might happen to be wisdoms" [Human Universe, 71]), but the envoy of its visionary circumference.And within the domain that circumference establishes, both interior and exterior cosmos allow configurations of their powers and persons, agencies of compost inspiring expiration, envisioning the dispensation of particular adherences: for instance, "mythology is not reference / it is inner inherence" (Charles Olson in Connecticut, 21). Things hold together like the clutch of organs in the bodily cavity, proprioceptively poised. Given with this condition—the abounding bond of mortals—is sophrosyne, "the skill of mortality" (Arrowsmith,in Shepard, "Post-Historic Primitivism," 81). A skin of mouths To be inspired is to be inducted into danger, so the poet wonders: How can I leave you be in me— myths to leap inside of— psyche's appetite, soul's mouth bound to rock with monster "I attempt the discontinuities of poetry," writes Duncan. "To interrupt all sure course of my inspiration." Is inspiration to be understood as a kind of predation? This might illuminate the furor ignited by The Waste Land in 1922. It was hardly as genteel an affair as it now sounds; a "living literature" of classictitles wasbeing cannibalized for its nutrients, skull soup, and much of it wasbeing flushed through A S K I N OF M O U T H S JJ Eliot's poem as a kind of sewage, until at the end only three Sanskrit words remained , an atavistic remainder. A bestial affair. Around my life an animal paces alternate in the shadows of leaves, a beast whose skin seems all of mouths. The issue of poetry is a placental hunger, a craving wonder harboring a question: "what, anyway / wasthat sticky infusion, that rankflavorof blood, that poetry, by which I lived?""I,too,have eaten / the meals of the dark shore." The predatory heritage is at times evident in the carnivore's heavy breath, the animal pacing in the respiration of the text. Or it can be as simple as the paternal gaze, the maternal determination: My Father... his crowned eye,his horny beak, his lingeringcry. And from the thought of him I go out of all human shape into that pain, that crows-skin wizard likeness ravaging man most is, having a hand in the claw's work, the outraging talon scraping the hare's bone. I would be a falcon and go free. I tread her wrist and wear the hood, talking to myself, and would draw blood. "[A]nd so the stain uniquely gives consent." The language thrives with animal vitality that may be sustained by, but finally outpaces, pleasure in analogy* In * In Beasts of the Modern Imagination, Margot Norris considers "writers whose worksconstitute animal gestures or acts of fatality," artists "who create as the animal.. . with their animality speaking" (i). In this "biocentric" lineage an organic vitality prevails over ideas and systems. Norris singles out Darwin,Nietzsche, Kafka, Lawrence, and Max Ernst; but 7 8 T H I S C O M P O S T the demonizing suction of language, where texture gushes, where meaning drains away into whimper and gasp, the poem becomes a shadowland where spectres of fright and gratification arise: "The owls shiver down into the secrets of an earth / I began to see when I lookt into the hole I feard"—in which the recessed owls are sentinels of "the brooding of owl-thought, counselings / ... ever mute and alive, hidden in all things." Owls are vowels in another intimation by Duncan: The vowels are physical corridors of the imagination emitting passionately breaths of flame. In a poem the vowels appear like the flutterings of an owl caught in a web and give aweful intimations of...