- some notes for my readers,
to accompany a volume of my selected poems
(The Man In the Poem) -
I
I have put together The Man in the Poem: The (Self-) Selected Poems of Gilchrist Haas as a present to myself and to my readers on my 40th birthday. I view it in one sense as a record of what I have done with my youth. Although I spent an additional fifteen years trying to dodge it (in various ways and for various reasons), the calling of poetry was first whispered to me around the age of ten, when I began to hear a poetry in my head that hadn’t yet been written – a poetry that would combine the mellifluousness and metrical wit or humour (note: the archaic English spelling isn’t accidental, although the Windows Panopticon has underscored it with an admonishing red line) of Poe and of our latter-day troubadours such as Bob Dylan and the Beatles, also Tom Lehrer, the Broadway tunesmiths, etc. with the conceptual rigor and thematic richness and depth of Emily Dickinson. I became a poet because there was a poetry that I knew was possible but that didn’t yet exist, and I had to write this poetry myself in order to hear it, receive pleasure from it, and attempt to impart this pleasure to others. In 1990, at the age of 25, after a seven-year apprenticeship to a pair of non-poetic muses (first the piano muse, then the muse of scholarly or critical prose), I suddenly accepted the calling of poetry from the muse that had approached me fifteen years earlier. She wasn’t angry with me, it turned out. It was at that time that I began to write out the poetry that for years I had known (or sensed) was possible. For most of the ensuing time I have lived in isolation both from my native linguistic environment and from other people who write or read poetry, and I have not allied myself with any school, poetic or otherwise. In addition, I have maintained the same non-literary job (teaching children in a foreign country) for as many years, as I have found it to be a highly suitable means of employment for sustaining a long-term devotion to the study and production of literature.
In attempting to summarize in a very general way my activities in poetry for the past fifteen years, I’ll begin by saying that I have taken various cues, particularly with respect to the sort of audience I would like to write for, from Robert Frost – admittedly a high model to aim for, as Frost was perhaps the last very popular poet writing in English. Specifically, as Frost was thoroughly modern without being modernist (and thus tied down to a set of aesthetic viewpoints and technical procedures from which non-initiates are excluded), I would like people to think of my poetry as thoroughly postmodern, without being abstrusely postmodernist (although as I write this sentence I take note of the fact that my understanding of the modernism/postmodernism dichotomy is complex and constantly changing, and I tend to see them intertwined in a single figure as on an Escher print). Which is to say that my goal has been to develop a body of writing, not intended for an intellectual or literary elite, but of as (potentially) wide appeal and of as broad general relevance to (and redolence of) my own time and place as Frost’s poetry was to (and of) his. The non-poetic influences on my writing are broad: popular culture (especially rock music and contemporary song in general), music history and theory, German Idealism, structuralism/post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, writing for children, film, Marxism, technological and intellectual history, TV, world literature, the American stand-up comic tradition…Despite my frequently esoteric interests, however, my goal has always been to write poems that will appeal to the common reader, and a central criterion that I hold for my own poetry is that any given poem must have a generally and immediately communicable sense and enjoyment, despite the heady notions that I may be playing with on, say, a “structural” or “interior” level. Something of a reverse procedure, perhaps, to that of Charlie Parker; as complicated as his sax melodies get from time to time, the common listener can always hear the basic, “common-sensical” structures on which they’re based without being obliged to think too hard on the implications that he draws on the “superstructural”, melodic level. My procedure runs in the opposite direction (as does, I believe, Frost’s) – from “structural” formal or semantic complexity to “superstructural” or “melodic” simplicity that (so I hope) the “naïve” reader can appreciate.
II.
Although I have written frequently about my poetry and the various purposes and intentions behind it, I have rarely written about the most basic formal considerations that govern my writing. Thus: My poetry has taken place in two different “modes” – a “major” mode and a “minor” one. The first, “major” mode has been undertaken predominantly in lines of ten and twelve syllables distributed in consecutive tercets (12-10-12-12-10-12…), although lines of 5, 7, and 17 syllables are also admissible under certain circumstances.
wilted in the whorl
of nature’s indiscretions,
it is a conceit
of cool perfections -
of unannounced metaphors,
fancied trinities,
hidden displays of
unspoken affinities
-- from “Williams and All”
Shu was emperor of the ocean to the south.
The ruler of the northern one was Hu.
The land between was governed by one with no mouth,
who provided a rendezvous site for the two.
Chaos was the name of the silent third.
Together the three of them made the best of friends.
Chaos communicated through gestures, not words,
the prized tokens on which friendship depends.
-- from “Hu and Shu in the Kingdom of Chaos”
Sherlock Holmes and Watson went camping and pitched their tent under the stars.
Capricorn and the Dipper, and off to the left was fiery Mars.
-- from “The World’s Second Funniest Joke”
My approach to stress is somewhat more liberal, although the five sorts of lines (5, 7, 10, 12, 17) tend to fall into a limited number of commonly recurring stress patterns. In recent years I have allowed the numbers to break down a bit in the direction of tongue-twisters comprised of very short lines on the one end and unlineated prose poetry on the other. But I still demand from myself a strict numerological adherence via recourse to an a priori or transcendental grid (if you could call it that) of 170 syllables (i.e. 17 x 10 or 12-10-12 x 5) – which is the number of syllables that the average human voice reading (in English) at an average pace covers in about 45 seconds. For instance, there is a section of my long poem from Baron, All Too Baron, “Wallace Stevens,” in which I subject some key words from Stevens’s poetry to a sort of “tongue-twister fantasia” (p. 73 – 77 of Baron, All too Baron, p. 159 – 163 of The Man In the Poem):
Savant,
unrumple your mind.
Remind
it not to vaunt
its rumpled rind.
Mirror
of a gaudy
letter,
let the tawdry
leerer
get the getter
when he leers
through the gears.
The weathers
are fictive as feathers,
yet thicker thither.
They dither
in a cocky climate.
Clocks climb it
in bounties
of orations,
while unrelated counties
count their rations.
Etc. What the reader is unlikely to grasp is that this section has been constructed or “laid down” on three 170-syllable grids, just as the preceding prose paragraph has been constructed on two such grids: So evade it all, Octubre. Evade the ceaseless placatings and the autumns in which they have been anointed. And blare the waltzes – much aggrieved where they rumple in the credences of this unprinked rock. Etc. Thus, the poetry of my “major mode” adheres at the very minimum to an underlying, “transcendental” periodicity of 170-syllables audible at about the 45-second mark of your average Joe’s spoken Andante moderato (or Allegro ma non troppo?...of course there are unmarked differences in “tempo” from poem to poem). (I view my tongue-twisters and prose poetry as opposing terminal limits and don’t plan to “Take It to the Limit” (as in the Eagles song) more than I absolutely have to; 10’s, 12’s and 17’s have served fine for most of what I wish to accomplish within the poetry of my “major mode”.)
The alternating 10’s and 12’s, by the way, are the result of a desire that took hold at the time of my first mature writing to arrive eventually at an updated version of blank verse that would allow me to write long, discursive poems in the manner of Wordsworth, Browning, Frost, etc. but that would avoid the more stifling hindrances of iambic pentameter. The solution that most poets from Spenser to James Merrill have come to when dealing with the asperities of their chosen basic meter has been to not take it too seriously – to mark the weak syllables in such a way that the reader will know that he or she must elide them in his or her “mental performance” of the poem (the common solution of the older English poets) and to add a syllable to this line or subtract one from that line to account for triples and to make for a better flow of verse (the modern American method). My solution is not to have addressed metrical difficulties on a case-by-case, line-by-line basis (as do, say, Frost or Merrill or even someone like Browning) but rather to have arrived at a new linear structure that no longer adheres (at least in theory) to iambic pentameter but seeks to allow for a freer, more “prosaic” interplay between duple and triple patterns by alternating short lines characterized predominantly by duple-foot patterns and long lines by triples (although there are plenty of 10-syllable lines in my poetry that are “under the aspect of 3” rather than 2 and vice versa). The idea is that, via the 2:1 ratio (i.e. 12-10-12), triple patterns are given a slight edge over duples, as I believe they are in post-war American speech, and that the frequent insertion of a strong iambic line (to BE or NOT to BE blah BLAH blah BLAH) serves to put a brake on the triplets so that we don’t find ourselves in some sort of nightmarish Seussian Solla Salloo – “where they NEver have TROUbles, at LEAST very FEW.’
My second or “minor” mode consists of poems based on contemporary song forms and is generally strict with respect to syllabic count and stress. My most ambitious production to date in this mode is a 24-page poem based on a 9-line stanza derived from a Taiwanese pop song and having the following metrical distribution:
/ - / - - /
/ - / - / - / -
/ - / - - / -
- / - / - /
/ - / - - /
/ - / - / - /
/ - / - /
/ - / - /
/ - / - / - - /
It begins as a factual description ala Marianne Moore of Singapore, segue-ways into a series of “Theses on the Philosophy of Poetry” (with reference and allusion to Marx, Benjamin, and Stevens), and concludes with a poem dedicated to my two children about an imaginary island called “Ringamore”. Three excerpts from the respective sections:
Paremswara, it was –
first to take an interest in it.
Barren, pirate-infested
before the time he came.
“Lion’s City,” it means –
though no lions then or now.
16th-century,
Europeans came –
grabbed it up with everything else.
* * *
Origin is the goal.
Revelation’s out of Eden –
not, though, out of an Eden
as if once and for all.
Things begin and begin.
Kraus’ famous maxim means,
“Eden meets its end
at the nodes of IS –
at the Nodal Now, at the Now.”
* * *
There's a place that I know.
You can get there in your barrow.
Everyone is your fellow,
and sunsets go down slow.
We could go there today,
quiz them on the games they play.
For it's warmer there
in the warmer air.
Let's escape this terminal gray!
In both my “major” and “minor” modes, the syllable provides as fundamental a basic unit as the minim in medieval music. It is inconceivable in the Haasian universe to leave out or add a single syllable – as inconceivable as it is for Beethoven, say, to write a measure bearing a fourth quarter-note within a _ time signature. While my poetry is strictly governed by numbers, I don’t, however, expect the reader to sit back and admire the “transcendental” metrical/syllabic specifications of any given poem, although it is my intention that they be remarked at an unconscious level.
III.
I’d like to say something about what my writing owes to the humanists – another aspect of my poetry that I haven’t yet written about. I believe that for the past decade and a half, something in my writing has been attempting to reach back to the humanists – both the milder, Enlightenment-friendly ones such as More and Erasmus, and the more radical, permanently (with respect to our Enlightenment) dissonant ones such as Montaigne, the Elizabethans, and particularly Rabelais. I’d say that an approach back to the humanists was reopened by the demonic cleft that Byron more than anyone else discerned in the modern narrative-poetic voice established principally by Wordsworth (Goethe did the same sort of thing in Central Europe, I guess, but I’m confining myself at present to poetic thinkers immanent to my own linguistic neck of the vernacular woods). I believe that if you keep pushing certain Byronic elements, sort of like a wedged sieve, back through the spidery meshwork1 spun by the Wordsworthian “I”, it is possible to find yourself at a sort of overlook onto the plain of world and literary history on which you can spy this Universal “I” dirempted into the various appealing and colorful representatives who have uttered compelling statements of various sorts from the commodious platform of that same, confoundingly unproblematic first person. On such a plain, Chuang Tsu shakes hands with Tolstoy’s Napoleon, Hildegard of Bingen gives Bart Simpson a pat on the head, Oedipa Maas is wooed to her annoyance by Augustine before his conversion, and Herodotus hires Josef K. as his anonymous and underpaid research assistant. All of literary history becomes one grand morality play ala Erasmus and More.
Which is all to say that I believe that there is a certain coincidence in intellectual outlook – one loaded with lots of nice possible Benjaminian Jetztpunkten and tiger’s leaps – between our own (post-Cold War) era and (pre-protestant work ethic) Northern Europe just prior to the rise of the bourgeoisie, early industrialism, etc. (Of course, this is more of a gut feeling than something I could substantiate with sound historical arguments. But that’s the great thing about poetic license. It is indecorous and aesthetically bad for the poet to aim for a precision that is more than general. If one achieves specificity, then so much the better. But it can’t be the aim.)
But in order to surmount this “re-humanicized” plain and have a proper gander at it, it is first necessary to remove oneself from the “murky flats” (a phrase from one of my poems) of modernism (a swampy subjoining region?) – defined here as a modernity from which the Byronic/demoniac element has been expunged or censored from the Universal/Wordsworthian “I”. You can’t, however, just hop out of modernism any more than you can hop out of the Enlightenment; rather, you must find the strains in it that will put you within reach of that Byronic, wedged sieve. I’ve found various strains useful to this end in each of the modernists (principally Wallace Stevens, but also T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, and later modernist offshoots such as Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery insofar as I view him as a modernist rather than a postmodern progenitor…), as well as in Frost’s silent and implicit but still highly modern disregard for modernism, but perhaps most of all in the epochal shift in aesthetic weight, in artistic importance and preeminence, from unmelodied verse to popular song (a trend that takes a century to accomplish, although I generally fix 1962, the year of Bob Dylan’s first songs, as the crucial year…of course, you could also go back alternatively to Robert Johnson, to Tin Pan Alley, Stephen Foster, the 19th-century cotton fields, etc., but for someone surnamed Jones born in the same month (July ’65) as Highway 61 Revisited and “Ballad of a Thin Man,” it’s gotta be Dylan).
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1The same meshwork described in the poem which Emily Dickinson’s editor was wise enough to place at the end of Final Harvest – “I had not minded walls were Universe one rock and far I heard his silver call the other side the block…But ‘tis a single hair, a filament, a law, a cobweb wove of adamant, a battlement of straw, a limit like the veil unto the lady’s face, and every mesh a citadel with dragons in the crease.” [Quote from memory without the usual capitals and dashes.] The “dragon in the crease” is a token of the Byronic/demoniac element within the Wordsworthian/universal I. The Universe in the poem could be interpreted in a variety of ways with respect to contemporary theories of language – the Jamesonian prison-house, irgendwas (in Wittgenstinian terms) der Fall ist, maybe some sort of Derridean notion of writing, and certainly the Lacanian symbolic order/big Other of language. But for me as a poet it’s this first-person “I” which tends more and more to become directly equated with the poet’s vulgar, biographical self after Wordsworth. (It just occurred to me that a comparison with Dickinson here can help explain the big mystery as to why Wallace Stevens did not see fit to include his definitive early and much beloved poem “Blanche McCarthy” in his collected poems. Recall the line, “See how the absent moon waits in a glade of your dark self…” In “Song of Myself,” Whitman had expanded the potential domain of the Wordsworthian first-person to an impossibly and mystically inclusive degree. The absent moon of Stevens’ poem, like Dickinson’s dragons, is a manifestation of the demoniac. Stevens probably felt that to conceive of a self in which an absent moon lies hidden would amount to a contracting of the self back to pre-Whitmanian limitations – thus, a step backwards. It’s probably true that Stevens qua Stevens formally begins, in Harmonium, at a point beyond the self-as-united-through-the-Wordsworthian-I, that he is one of the few poets who has succeeded in doing so or who even recognized the problem…which is probably what Harold Bloom means when he declares that it will take academic literary criticism at least another century to catch up with Stevens, which I’m not so optimistic about, as it’s entirely unclear whether the academic study of literature in its current form or much else for that matter will survive for another century…)
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IV.
Finally, I’d like to address the question, “Why the need to characterize one’s writing as “postmodern,” in contrast to other sorts of (presumably earlier) writing understood as “modern”?” As a writer working within the now apparently antiquated medium of unmelodied verse, and as one who would contribute to the revival of that art as a living and vibrant from, it is inevitable that one take a position with respect to the poetic modernists, as they were the last generation of poets whose works were widely read and discussed. Indeed, I have read and re-read the major American poets of the generation born during the late 19th-century and have sought to establish a clear position with respect to each of them – most notably Stevens and Frost (insofar as Frost may be considered a modernist), but also Moore, Eliot, Williams, Pound, Robinson and Crane. Far from understanding my own stance in opposition to this great crew, I rather believe that this generation of poetic modernists established something like a horizon within which our own “post-modern” standpoint discerns itself (although it may turn out that the reverse is equally true, and that the two positions in fact fold in upon and include each other, as in an Escher print).
My interest in modernism and in the sort of stance a poet at present may take with respect to it is manifold, but I would like to say a few words on the question of meaning. While it would be difficult to generalize or to come to a conclusive stance with respect to meaning that would be universally characteristic of such a wide-ranging assortment of authors, I would say that one of the more radical moments in their collective output is the indictment of traditional or romantic conceptions of meaning (or at least of conceptions of meaning that the modernists understood to be traditional or romantic) – of the idea that words (and poems and other literary entities that are constructed from words) can mean otherwise than what they seem or what they are. Thus the life-long attempts on the part of William Carlos Williams to cleanse language of its impetus to point to or indicate something beyond itself, which he carried out as a perpetual search for a poetry of pure description – the activity of which was made thematic in turn in the long philosophical poems of his friend Wallace Stevens. Thus the aestheticism and technical purity of Marianne Moore (and her younger disciples, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill), who endeavored to write poems that would look and sound poetically like more or less exact transcriptions of the mundane archetypes whose descriptions they were designed to be (“The Jerboa,” “Elephants,” etc.). Thus the proto-surrealism of Hart Crane (and that of his disciples, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery), whose grammatical and imagistic substitutions and juxtapositions produce in the reader the strong suspicion that his poetry amounts to little more than a general attack on conventional ideas of meaning (true as well of e. e. cummings). (With Pound (and with T. S. Eliot, at least in certain of his works), the question of meaning seems to be avoided altogether, and literature becomes both a homage to and pastiche of older literatures and a similarly appreciative sampling or foray into other (non-Western) languages and literatures – a frantic attempt to keep tradition and traditional conceptions of meaning going through mimicry, emulation and repetition.)
If the great generation of poetic modernists poses for our literature something like a Year Zero with respect to meaning, I would say that a secret rallying chant that makes itself heard throughout my writings is that of, “Back to Meaning!” Yet it is not at all my view that it would be possible to dispense with those epochal attacks on meaning and return in neo-conservative fashion, say, to the aesthetic of Tennyson or Shelley, who (we’d assume) wrote during a time when words in their semantic roundness and amplitude were (or at least seemed to be) fully available and fully reliable. Rather, I would say that our notions concerning meaning and even the interest we are bound to take in it have been radically transformed due to the position of absolute negativity that was taken with respect to it a century ago by the modernist poets. Here I might venture a quasi-Hegelian trichotomy:
(Romantic/traditional) thesis: Words mean (something beyond themselves). (Modern) antithesis: Words mean nothing (beyond what they are in themselves). (Postmodern) synthesis: Words, it is true, mean nothing, have no meaning beyond themselves; however, this is to say neither that words have nothing to do with meaning nor (further and more drastically) that there is no meaning. Meaning, it is true, does not exist, does not have subsistence. Yet something is produced as an effect of words and as an effect of what producers of words do with them, of how they use them and put them together. And, coming full circle with tradition, we would not (necessarily) be loath to affirm the conventional designation of this something as meaning.
(A variation on the above would be as follows:
Thesis: Through the painstaking and choice use of words, we may learn to express our innermost soul.
Antithesis: All talk of an “innermost soul” is romantic rigmarole. Words are all we have. Together, they neither comprise nor attest to the soul, itself a leftover from commonsensical European self-understanding going back through Christianity to Plato.
Synthesis: Words do not express anything like a “soul” which might be said to underlie or otherwise preexist them. Yet most everything that humans have ever given rise to or placed into effect, including our wonderful conjurations such as the soul, has been accomplished primarily if not entirely through words. Words are all that we have – words and the fictions that we create with them. We cannot cherish words without also cherishing the local as well as epochal tomfooleries that throughout the ages we have perpetuated with them. Indeed, to banish words to themselves would be the paltriest fiction, and a dangerous one. Words are always getting the better of us. But this should be cause for celebration. Only by celebrating words and the power they place at our disposal of fooling ourselves in all sorts of ways and with all sorts of good and bad results will we remain skeptical enough about them not to let them fool us all the way to perdition – a skepticism through celebration which informs the writings of our greatest authors, such as Chaucer and Rabelais, Shakespeare and Cervantes, Goethe and Nietzsche.
To restate: If it was a traditional (or at least romantic) idea that, in poetry, the poet expresses or brings into expression – via words that often mean more than they seem – something that has previously lay hidden in interiority (the interiority of the poet’s own “innermost soul,” or perhaps that of the character of the place or the event that he or she wishes to describe), an interior truth, that is, beyond the merely superficial façade of words…if such an expression of a previously existing interiority is one of the central motifs or elements of romantic art, then the postmodern idea in contrast would be that it is the poet him- or herself who - through a painstaking and choice assemblage of words that, as the modernists correctly opined, indeed mean and are no more than they seem - produces the effects of meaning, of a meaning, indeed, that is nothing “in itself” apart from the effects through which it is discerned, conjured, imagined or hypothesized. Yet this insubstantial meaning is constantly retroactively coloring and attainting all that we do and think and the words we use to do and think it. Precisely because our words mean nothing are we never free of meaning, for all of its insubstantiality and (often less than) apparent nothingness.
Although these ideas were seldom or never immediately present in mind as I composed the poems that make up my seven books, I believe that this is one of the things I have been after – the desire, that is, to show how people produce meanings of all kinds (including actions and inactions, decisions and indecisions, namings and unnamings, fictions and the deeper, more problematic fictions known as truths…) simply through the words that they use – words that they find themselves speaking and thinking or words that they find others speaking and thinking – words, moreover, that are never simply their own, as they belong to the set of speakers that speak them as to a commonalty (which is not to say that they “mean” or “point to” the words of others; for the idea that words have an intersubjective genesis and utilization is an idea that precludes the traditional notion of underlying meaning or truth – though indeed there’s no reason to go on belaboring the point…).
In the generations subsequent to the modernist heyday we have seen the fading of unmelodied verse as a living and vibrant form of art and written expression – due as much to the modernist sacrifice of an audience in favor of relentless experimentation as to the subsequent rise of popular song as the favored and predominant medium of expression for would-be wordsmiths. I believe, however, that we are coming around to a point at which we can expect to see a renewed flourishing of unmelodied verse. For one, enough time has lapsed between the modernists and ourselves that it becomes possible to examine their achievements with less anxiety and greater sobriety than perhaps had been possible for the generations that intervened between them and us, allowing us perhaps to decide once more for ourselves what poets as the primary custodians of words can and cannot expect from words. For another, the heyday of popular song appears to be drawing to an end (a golden era perhaps inaugurated by Bob Dylan’s watershed year in 1965, in which he proved that popular song had vastly greater literary potential than had previously been acknowledged or suspected), and I believe that few would argue that popular music today is overall as vital, as memorable, or as worthy of collective retention as it was in the immediate post-war era. Thus, I have carried out my writing under the impression that all signs point to an approaching era of renewed interest in unmelodied verse as the best way to get at words and at the ways in which we use them.
While, as mentioned above, I have always tried to keep in mind that I am working within an aesthetic horizon that was established collectively by the modernists, I have sought wide inspiration elsewhere – in older poetry, in philosophy and in intellectual history, and certainly also in popular music. While accepting that the technical parameters that guide the composition of unmelodied verse are fundamentally different from those that guide the composition of song lyrics, I have looked to popular music with admiration as a vast semantic system from which no individual work may be strictly isolated without compromise both to the system and to the work itself. In fact, I would say that I have tried to elaborate my own work into such a system, in which each new utterance makes itself understood in terms of what has gone before and in turn adds something to the system that can’t be taken away from it subsequently. I have also acknowledged that the system that my writing forms is but a more or less individual and individuated derivative of the larger system of post-war American English (or, “a fanciful diversion both from and on the part of that system”?). Thus, I have largely shunned (modernist) experimentation at the level of language and have strived for a poetic language that understands itself as an affect or reflex of the standard prose of the age in which I’ve lived (“prose” understood here as written speech). At the same time, however, I have considered that, while poetry ultimately derives from speech or from the written speech that we call prose, it must differ from the latter in some essential way other than simply division into lines that look like verse (“versified prose,” as Robert Frost already called it – which, after the high modernist period, gradually won out as the prevailing style of the academies and of the poetic journals they sponsor – the standard confessional/descriptive mush that I once referred to as the “As-I-saw-the-geese-flying-over-the-summer-veranda” mainstream of Anglo-American poetry). With this in mind, I have shunned what is commonly termed “free-verse,” as a modernist experiment whose aesthetic legitimacy has long run out its course, in favor of rhyme and regular meters.
Finally, I would like to mention that I have derived great inspiration during the years that I have been writing from two of my contemporaries: first, from Wu Bai, the Taiwanese singer/songwriter/guitarist, who, seemingly immune to the many Circean traps of pop stardom, has demonstrated, from recording to recording, song to song, that the predominant musico-lyrical artform of the contemporary period still has much life in it despite its gradual and ongoing decline in its countries of origin (America and the U.K.); second, from the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who has almost single-handedly reclaimed philosophical criticism and intellectual prose from the soulless mire of unread academic journals into which higher thought has been plunging since the aging of the great generation of European thinkers born in the first half of the 20th-century. These two great spirits have given me constant inspiration and encouragement over the past decade, reminding me time and time again of Badiou’s dictum that, once you’re on to something good, you must strive at all costs to “Keep going!”
The actor Jamie Foxx, in receiving an Oscar for his portrayal of Ray Charles, exclaimed in his acceptance speech that he had lived “the African-American Dream.” I had previously not considered that the American Dream might have different subsets, such as an African-American one. But in reflecting on his comment, it has occurred to me that I have spent the past couple of months since completing my fifth and sixth books of poetry under the impression that I too have been fortunate to have lived such a dream – a dream that I suppose could only have one name. Call it the Whitmanian-American dream. The dream, implanted in me as early as primary school by classroom readings of Dickinson, Frost, Poe and Robinson, of fashioning a poetry native to my time and to my place, derived from the same fabric of American speech, the same material of spoken language into which I was born, into which and via which I grew as a thinking and speaking being, as a producer both of words that are spoken and of words that are merely thought.
The first inspiration of youth is one thing, however, and a lifetime of thought and consideration that has been carefully planned, just as carelessly unplanned, and then planned and unplanned again is needed to make good on it. As with the provincials in Kafka’s story, “The Great Wall of China,” who devote entire lifetimes in their efforts to discern the directives that are presumably being broadcast to them from a headquarters located at too remote a distance to even have memorable fixed coordinates in time and space, attempts at literature often seem like little more than educated guesswork at something infinitely vast and unattainably sublime. At times one doubts that there even exists a literature resembling the one to which one is attempting to contribute. Yet often it’s at precisely those moments of greatest exasperation, when the proper names of literary history suddenly turn into so many clutched straws, that it occurs to one that one has been scraping along, half in the dark, feeling one’s way toward an unoccupied node in a system that one knows (and that knows one!) far better than one suspects, to a seat behind a vast and wondrous control-board – one fitted out with gadgets that have never yet been tried – a seat that for an undetermined span of time, perhaps moments, perhaps ages, has been awaiting its rightful claimant. It is at such a time that the full sense of Merleau-Ponty’s saying obtains, that
by myself, I bring about, for myself,
the tradition that I elect to carry on.
Gilchrist Haas
Taipei
March through June, 2005