This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

The vessel

T H E V E S S E L all her desires, all her deathsmells, blooming again in the starlight. And then the waitnot long, I grant, but all my life— for the small, soft thud of her return among the stones. Can it ever be true— all bodies, one body, one light made of everyone's darkness together? The vessel In scenes of inspiration, as in cases of shamanistic transport, language descends from a higher power to brutalize the human vessel who suffers it knowingly, gnawingly . To assent to this condition is to follow Robert Kelly in believing that "Language is the only genetics," or to follow Robert Duncan's faith in the somatic pantheon of biochemistry guiding the composition of the poem; or, with Jack Spicer, call it dictation from the Martians. Taken together, these and other testimonies insist on the capacity of the language in its most subconscious particularity as nourishing and enabling, while conceding that unilateral "meaning" may be retarded and balked. Why "enlarge" your mind, asks Ishmael: "subtilize it" (MobyDick , chap.74). The dearth of paraphrasable meaning is acutely evident in Zukofsky's "A," a work that proceeds almost without "thinking" but which everywhere incarnates a fund of sapience. It proposes, in fact, a poetics of condensation and density within which any overarching thematic or philosophical assertions clearly occupy positions of limited relevance. Like the Watts Tower of Simon Rodia or the Palais Ideal of Facteur Cheval—acknowledged models for RonaldJohnson's Ark (along with "A" itself)—"A" is a bricolaged monument that is propositional in its means, in the intricacy with which part weds part: this is why it is finally a book of the family, the household, and the secret of why it is also (like Finnegans Wake) conspicuously public (as family life is, as skin, as words). An aggregate cumulonimbus of genetic determination. 83 84 T H I S C O M P O S T To work on a poem spanning fifty years (Pound, Zukofsky) or for several decades (Olson,Johnson) demands not so much stamina as a persistent faith in obscurity , working underground, in the dark, subscribing to indeterminacy as the conditional atmosphere. Negative capability (Keats's famous term adopted as an poetica by Olson): "when man is capableofbeing in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" (Special View of History, 32)— where the key terms are capable of being and without irritable reaching, for fact and reason remain salutary options, and doubts and uncertainties are not being affirmed as desirable but as inevitable. Keats's is a vision of good nature. With slight adjustment, it might be taken as an alchemical dictum. Alchemy is the science of becoming aware of the whole project in which we are being engaged. Alchemy is the science of being used. Alchemy is the science of use. Its name probably means the art of the black, & alludes in all likelihood not to the black soil of Egypt but to the black blankness of the unknown brain, the "silent areas" in which the Operator, bent night & day over his fire, eventually kindles a Voice, one that guides him in the science of penetration, science of final separations. (Kelly, Alchemist toMercury, 82) To suppose with Lacanthat the unconscious islikelanguage isto see in that "black blankness of the unknown brain" an overcharged surface, like Freud's mystic writing pad, a tablet that keeps adding new impressions without erasing the old, becoming a palimpsest of unreadable, impenetrable density. Olson's animation of Gravelly Hill plays on the boundaries of temporal strata (such as glacial and interglacial), incorporating them into a minutely registered proprioceptive geosophy, hatching personhood from the core of density: Gravelly hill was'the source and end (or boundary' of D'town on the waythat leads from the town to Smallmans now Dwelling house, the Lower Road gravelly, how the hill was, not the modern usableness of any thing but leaving it as an adverb as though the Earth herself was active, she had her own characteristics, she could stick her head up out of the earth at a spot and say,to Athena I'm stuck here, all I can show is my head but please, do something about this person I am putting up out of the ground into your hands. For the condition of the poetry is not enclosed in a book, but knitted into your skin; it folds your wrinkles into its holography; it makes reading a compact with [18...