What does it mean to say a poetry is apocalyptic? Typically, it means that a poetry, or its poet, suggests catastrophe or the quality of conclusion signified in the Book of Revelation, with John the Revelator as apocalyptic model. This can be a helpful designation, but not always. Allusions to Christian omega are inevitable in an apocalyptic poetry, but there is something more at work even in the poems of Blake, for instance, than the revelatory completion of sacred Christian history. Apocalypse is both genre and mode, and each is filled with power. Apocalyptic poetry, then, is language charged with the power to reveal sacred reality, in history and beyond it. “And so there comes a time,” writes Norman O. Brown in a potent little essay entitled “Apocalypse,” “when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, the power which makes all things new.”1 John in Revelation has the revealed God sitting on the throne say, “Behold, I make all things new … I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 21:5–6). It’s the alphabet that makes things new, formed into what Northrop Frye called “words with power.” Poetry.
Thinking about Revelation, Frye identifies two aspects of apocalyptic vision. The first he calls “panoramic apocalypse,” which is “the vision of staggering marvels placed in a near future and just before the end of time. As a panorama, we look at it passively, which means that it is objective to us.”2 This connects the Book of Revelation to generic understandings of apocalypse and apocalypticism, namely, “social movements emphasizing the evilness of the present age and the imminent coming of a new age of righteousness.”3 Apocalypse as a genre began to appear as early as the third century BCE, at the hands of Jewish rebel-visionaries, as “ways of making God accessible to a world in which the divine was no longer present in its traditional form.”4 As it worked in the Jewish imagination, it suffused early Christian theology, carrying over into Islamic thought as it began to develop in the eighth century CE. The Book of Revelation is perhaps the apex of this literary tradition, one of whose functions was to propose a kind of hope for a hopeless world, written for people disenfranchised from power, who could reseize it in this energetic writing—finding power, making all things new.5
Frye contends that the panoramic apocalypse of Revelation yields to a second, transformative aspect, one analogous to the aspect of the apocalyptic poetry in the discussion that follows. “The panoramic apocalypse,” claims Frye, “ends with the restoration of the tree and water of life, the two elements of the original creation.” But this restoration seems to be a type of “upward metamorphosis to a new beginning that is now present,” a kind of mental-physical abolishing of categories that begins when the reader finishes reading, closing the book and putting it down, passing into what Frye identifies as a “second life.” “In this second life,” he insists, “the creator-creature, divine-human antithetical tension has ceased to exist, and the sense of the transcendent person and the split of subject and object no longer limit our vision.”6 Writing about eschatology in The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion, Jonathan Z. Smith puts it this way: “The substance of salvation (God’s forgiveness and eternal life) is available now, in virtue of Christ. But the full expression of salvation can only occur beyond history, where God is all in all, and so does not yet exist.”7 The peculiar power of a truly apocalyptic poetry is its expression of the vitality of a God all in all, beyond history but knowable somehow in it, who does not yet exist but who pulsates a profound, irrefutable influence from an unforeseen future obliquely but entirely recognized in an exegetical totalization of language. Put another way: Apocalyptic poetry is a power load of words. Today, two poets writing such apocalyptic poetry are Joseph Donahue and Pam Rehm.
Donahue and Rehm are different poets at root, even as they belong in the same company. Donahue has spent years mastering long serial poems that combine elements of mysticism, esotericism, protest, and the alienation of the urban experience, exemplified in two early sequences—“Spectral Evidence” and “Christ Enters Manhattan”—but most especially in Terra Lucida, his still-in-process vatic cataclysm. This work places him in a lineage that includes Pound, H.D., Olson, Duncan, and especially Nathaniel Mackey as direct ancestors. Rehm also writes poems in sequence, albeit series typically shorter and more concerned with dilations and contractions of scenes of domestic mysticism, such as the joys and tedium of taking care of her family, than with the esoteric and apocryphal histories that legislate Donahue’s poetry. Rehm’s masters are Dickinson and Niedecker among poets, and the Gospel writers and epistolarians of the New Testament among others. I take her work principally to be an act of protest against the incarcerating concerns of the age, especially material concerns, as well as a gesture of defiance in her insistence that poetry can be a kind of privacy, even as it is secured in a public space.
Apocalypse links these two poets together, giving their work its power. We can see these links in both poets through their connections to apex of the M, a literary journal that ran for six issues in the mid-1990s, and to H.D. Rehm was one of the founding editors of apex of the M, along with Lew Daly (her husband), Alan Gilbert, and Kristen Prevallet, all three of whom were enrolled at the time as graduate students at the State University of New York at Buffalo in its poetics program. (Rehm alone was not a student at Buffalo.) Apex of the M was an unusual and spirited journal to have emerged from this place at this time, which was then best known as one of the primary stations of then-emergent academic Language poetry, led by Charles Bernstein. In contrast to the prevailing Marxist ideology and notions of the fragmentation of language and subject in the time of late capitalism that one attributes to Language poetry, the editors of apex of the M wanted conspicuously to connect their enterprise to notions of the spirit, claiming in the provocative editorial that opened the inaugural issue: “Of primary importance in this shift [away from the current state of the art] is a commitment to heterogeneity and alterity, to the unknown and the unspeakable as material influx leading to love.”8 Defiantly romantic in tenor, the editors excoriated mainstream “workshop” poetry as “deplorable” and insisted that avant-garde poets, in giving priority to language itself, had committed themselves emptily to the conventions of innovation, “leading to the socially inept dead-end of autonomous forms.” “Why, then, should we not resist equally,” asked the editors, “both the suburban vacuity of mainstream poetics and verse, and the avant-garde’s poetics of ‘language itself,’ with its forcefield-like purgation of radical alterity and non-linguistic, material influx and receptivity from what we heed and write?”9 Instead of these, the editors called for a “radical transparency of language” that would resist solipsism or the incorporation of the other into the problem of the poem, instead seeking a poetry of the “Conscious Ear,” one of Dickinson’s definitions of “spirit.”10
Devin Johnston, writing at the time about apex of the M in Chicago Review, noted how the journal espoused an expressivist poetics and a return to romanticism, in which the poet “finds forms of spiritual synthesis in the world,”11 identifying notions of religious concern that set off the journal distinctly from the theoretical and material concerns that seemed to define Language poetry at the time. As the editors claimed:
We feel that perhaps Modernism and probably post-Modernism will be seen as having been but footnotes between, if not two phases of Romanticism—the Platonic and the eschatological, then between Romanticism and the poetries of the approaching millennium, and we hope that, following Dickinson, Melville, Stevens, and others, a new understanding of our task as iconoclasts and not innovators will emerge.12
This first issue of the journal included work by Bernadette Mayer, John Taggart, Nathaniel Mackey, and Will Alexander, alongside that of Elizabeth Willis, Peter Gizzi, and Benjamin Friedlander, all three of whom were also at the time students in the poetics program at SUNY-Buffalo. While I find the work in this issue of the journal—as well as that in the other five of its short run—compelling, it doesn’t as a whole approach the forcefulness and the memorable quality of the editorials that appeared in the first three issues, each of whose romantic spirit was stoked by the insurrectionary language of apocalypse. The first (and best) editorial concludes with this claim:
Only in direct proportion to the way in which speaking disarms us, making us irreplaceable on the path of an urgency by which we must each in our own way remain overcome, will the faint strains of an apocalypse of utterance guide all hierarchy and mediacy into place, overwhelmed by a spiritual force rendering them powerless against a destruction more irreversible than any fall, in the future of a suffusion almost immediately indistinguishable from peace.13
Rehm recalls that the initial editorial in apex of the M was written mainly by Lew Daly and Alan Gilbert. For his part, Daly claims that at the time of writing it, he was involved in reading “a strange mix of Levinas, Captain Ahab, and Mark and Matthew on the end of the world.”14 Daly regards apocalypse as an essentially political genre exposing divine intent, asking, “isn’t apocalypse a cosmic event but also an act of God and a matter of God’s judgment? And God’s judgment is not against the whole world but against the jurisdictions of the world, the dominions of man over man. Perhaps the cosmic part of apocalyptic justice reflects a literature borne of righteous disempowerment.”15 This accords with something Daly wrote in an essay published in 1994, from a series of answers to questions posed to him by Rehm:
This is the remaining mission of the writing act: to each in our own way retain in ourselves the experience of loneliness, to keep it from reaching the world, from exceeding in pointlessness even the furthest field from a point of reference common to all. It will remain my own only when my attention is, as in a way unknown to me which poems convey, transformed into a capacity to become in a sense collaborated with the life of God, and to bring forth into signs all manner of responsibility to the principle of life.16
Questions of divine reality pervade the poetry of Donahue and Rehm, just as they direct Daly’s thought. Is it a surprise that the initial editorial in apex of the M caused controversy among avant-garde poets?17 Contemporary poets, with a few notable exceptions, tend to shun expressions and affirmations of religious realities. Ron Silliman, who can usefully be seen to represent the opinions of avant-garde poets, both at the time this editorial was written and presently, has stated that the death of Charles Olson in 1970 “signaled the end of an ardent interest by many poets in all matters of the occult [and the ‘mystical’ in general], including say historical investigations of earlier religious models.” What replaced this interest was “theory.”18 Even if a few poets and readers would take up the call of the editors of apex of the M, most would reject it.
After the third issue of the journal, no additional editorials were written. By the fifth issue, Daly and Rehm were no longer listed as editors but rather as associate editors. After six issues, apex of the M appeared no more. In the meantime, Daly concluded his academic work at Buffalo, leaving that institution to pursue a master of divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, more or less leaving the poetry world behind for good.19 What does this say about apocalypticism in contemporary poetry? Not necessarily that it’s impossible, or not worth doing, but that it’s a difficult path to take, particularly in a poetry world secularizing at least as rapidly as the rest of the world, where making claims for the spirit and for “the unknown and the unspeakable as material influx leading to love” have become simply too unsettling to take without preparatory ironizing.
Donahue had two poems published in the third issue of apex of the M, one of them, “Canto Escondito,” an early iteration of Terra Lucida. Donahue clearly took the editorial call of those first issues to heart, or, rather, they reflected what was already in his heart: “I remember very well and with a good deal of excitement the early issues of Apex. I remember feeling, finally! Someone is saying it out loud! I don’t remember the particulars of the opening salvo, but essentially feeling in deep sympathy with it.”20 Rehm had work included in the second issue of the journal. To the initial editorial, for her part, she contributed “the quote, it’s either by H.D. or E.D. and maybe a sentence of two around it but nothing else.”21 She’s referring to a phrase by H.D., quoted in the editorial: “our awareness leaves us defenseless,”22 which comes from section 29 of “The Walls Do Not Fall.” In the way Donahue’s poetic authority arises from an ongoing, permutative questioning of revelation’s capacities, Rehm’s begins from a vulnerable openness arising from the awareness she vitalizes in her writing, typically through questioning and second-guessing. For both poets, I think H.D. can be shown to have provided useful models for revelation and awareness.
The H.D. I’m imagining for thinking about the apocalypticism in Donahue’s and Rehm’s poetry provides two models. The first is the poet who devised a means of projecting mysterious interior realities into poems that involve a kind of direct, oracular speech, psychological masks, and verisimilar biblical pronouncements. This is the poet who lived in the Hotel Regina not far from the Ringstrasse in Vienna in 1933 to be psychoanalyzed by Freud, the poet for whom psychoanalysis and occultism were an equivalency because they activated a universal symbolism, the poet who transformed her experiences of emotional chaos and “war-terror” into an astrological pageant with anagrammatic riddles. This H.D. is the poet who, in a letter to her companion Bryher, in which she relates a dream she had already related to Freud, nevertheless reinterprets that dream, writing to Bryher: “But the exquisite part of the dream is that it expands and contracts and one can see new combinations, all founded on the most trivial incident yet with a universal or astrological symbolism.”23
The second model is the poet who wrote the sequences in Trilogy, whose work brings forth manifestations of angels and the zodiac, on the one hand, and a war-torn, prophetic hopefulness, on the other. Angels serve in Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and Islam as intervening agents, superhuman but subservient to the divine. The angelic hierarchies invoked by H.D. in “Tribute to the Angels” are rooted as much in the Dionysian tradition—presented in the sixth century by Dionysius the Areopagite in The Celestial Hierarchy—as in biblical tradition. Bernard McGinn relates that “the function of the celestial hierarchy in our uplifting is not that we try to become angels or even that we reach God through angelic mediation, but that the proper interpretation and understanding of the angels as multiple manifestations of the divine beauty is anagogic and divinizing.”24 Anagogy is a Neoplatonic term meaning “uplifting,” adapted by Dionysius to signify the act of projecting the mind into the imaginal ranks of angels or realms of scripture toward creating this recognition of the divine nature of the creation within oneself. Though perhaps complicated to conceive of in terms of the typical practices of modernist poetry, it’s nevertheless an apt description of what happens in H.D.’s poem, in that the tribute to the angels that the poet invokes depends on the receptivity of human beings to this divine immanence.
“Tribute to the Angels,” the second part of Trilogy, sequences an angelic summons amid the fallout from the Second World War in England; H.D. explicitly compares her witnessing of this catastrophe with the apocalypse seen by John the Revelator. The third section of the sequence reads:
I John saw. I testify;
if any man shall add
God shall add unto him the plagues,
but he that sat upon the throne said,
I make all things new.
I John saw. I testify,
but I make all things new,
said He of the seven stars,
he of the seventy-times-seven
passionate, bitter wrongs,
He of the seventy-times-seven
bitter, unending wars.25
Though she elsewhere in the poem invokes several angels by name—“Gabriel: // Raphael, Gabriel, Azrael, / three of seven—what is War / to Birth, to Change, to Death?”26—she works a mysterious purpose throughout, suggesting that this procession of angelic beings leads the way for a manifestation of the Goddess archetype: Mary, the Mother of God, Venus, and the ocean all in one, but angelophanic nevertheless—an intermediating messenger clothed in visionary transience:
Now polish the crucible
and in the bowl distill
a word most bitter, marah,
a word bitterer still, mar,
sea, brine, breaker, seducer,
giver of life, giver of tears;
now polish the crucible
and set the jet of flame
under, till marah-mar
are melted, fuse and join
and change and alter,
mer, mere, mere, mater, Maia, Mary,
Star of the Sea,
Mother.27
Much of H.D.’s poem can be seen as an elaboration and articulation of this Goddess, such that “venerate” pulsates with the name of Venus, and the Lady she names is incarnate the world over as “the flowering of the rood,” a sign of life and an affirmation of “thanks that we rise again from death and live.”
I want to stress that I take H.D. not as a source for Donahue’s and Rehm’s poetry but as a model. Donahue’s Terra Lucida, like H.D.’s Trilogy, is written in a procession of free-verse couplets, both poems relating an esoteric geography of the imagination, mapped by an alluring crypto-Christian symbolism. Rehm’s concision of expression and condensation of thought and idea bear more than a passing resemblance to H.D.’s imagist poems, but I think more importantly the tactic of wordplay, anagram, and sense excavation from the sounds of words, as exhibited in the passages from “Tribute to the Angels” quoted above, reinforces Rehm’s own witnessing tendency, her desire to see and to testify in her poems to the awareness that leaves her defenseless.
Donahue appears to have begun writing the sequence of poems in Terra Lucida as early as 1995, when “Canto Escondito” was published in apex of the M. Since then, he has published sections of the poem in a series of chapbooks, first culminating in 2009 with the book publication of Terra Lucida and continuing onward in 2012 with the publication of Dissolves: Terra Lucida IV–VIII, both by Talisman House, and forward to 2015, with the publication of Dark Church, by Verge Books. Since the time that these earlier parts of the poem were published, the sequence has undergone editorial changes as the dimensions of the larger project have become clearer. Through 2004, for instance, when Carolina Wren Press published In This Paradise: Terra Lucida XXI–XL, each section of the poem was given a Roman numeral. With the appearance of The Copper Scroll: From Terra Lucida with Dos Madres Press in 2007, the numbering system was dropped, but with the appearance of Dissolves, it’s clear that the larger groupings within the book are being designated by Roman numerals. In the first Talisman House book, Terra Lucida, the parts of the poem are introduced by double zeros: “00.” But section names—“trifle alm omen,” “in this paradise,” and “the copper scroll”—have been maintained, as have subtitles. (For instance, “canto escondito” opens “in this paradise.”) My sense is that as Donahue registered the detonations and after-echoes of mythohistorical and personal-psychological material in his poems, the process of numerically sequencing his poem began to limit both the associations among the parts of the poem and the imagination by which he was conjuring them. It’s a “disordered devotion,” to borrow a phrase from Duncan, that Donahue presents to us in Terra Lucida. With the publication of Dark Church, the double zeros opening each new section have been dropped as well.
The title means “earth of light” or “land of light.”28 The Islamic scholar and self-declared visionary Henry Corbin used the name terra lucida in a few instances; Donahue is likeliest to have gotten his title from Corbin’s book The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, where Corbin, speaking of the mundus imaginalis, which is an intermediary realm in which the worldly self confronts its angelic self, “a concrete world of archetype-Figures, apparitional Forms, Angels of species and of individuals,”29 declares that in Manicheanism “there is the Earth of Light, Terra lucida, situated in the kingdom of light. It is governed by a divinity of eternal light, surrounded by twelve Splendors.”30 To see this realm, claims Corbin, is an actuality “vouched to the apperception of the active Imagination.”31 Corbin’s memorable coinage for qualifying the productions of the active imagination is imaginal. It’s a useful term to invoke in the light of the considerable esoteric, scriptural, and heretical lore Donahue brings to his poem. For Corbin, the imaginal signifies all that we come upon in the realm of “the Angel,” which is the realm of vision, a transcendent dimension humans can enter through the cultivation of this vision: “Its growth is concomitant with a visionary apperception, giving shape to the supersensory perceptions and constituting that totality of ways of knowing that can be grouped under the term hierognosis.”32
Donahue’s is a decidedly hierognostic poem, revealing “knowledge of the holy.” The sacred knowledge he reveals, however, is only visible to us in the intermediary realm of the terra lucida. In this sense, Donahue seems to be intuiting, if not in fact borrowing, Corbin’s application of the heresy of Docetism to Islamic mysticism. Put somewhat simply, Docetism is the heresy claiming that Christ had merely the appearance of a physical body but not any material or human nature. Some Gnostics in the early centuries were allied to this doctrine. But this heresy was more or less eliminated from early Christianity by Saint Irenaeus of Lyons in the late second century.33 Corbin has argued that the principles of Docetism were incorporated into emergent Islamic mysticism not to discern the true nature of Christ but to understand the visionary realm of the angels. In “The Prophetic Tradition,” his essay on apocalypticism in Islam, Norman O. Brown, defending Corbin’s claim, insists:
The truth is that Docetism is an alternative to the Incarnationalism inherent in Christianity from the start, an undercurrent which became the mainstream in Islam, which is not inspired by the idea that the flesh is evil and that salvation consists in evading the consequences of having a body.… Docetism, as the Greek root of the word indicates, is devotion to appearances, to apparitions, to visionary experience, to vision.34
Reality is angelophanic: When we enter the realm in which we can see angelic presences, we enter the realm in which we can see the divine. But inasmuch as we might strive to tune our vision to see the terra lucida, this very realm is already interfering with the material realm, bringing the havoc of its vision upon us.
Consider this hierophany from Donahue, framed by doubts and meditations on doubt, on the one side, and by a description of early Christian heresy, on the other side:
A mortal is about to see
the majesty of the throne …
Though in the stream of clouds
it may be only the foot of the throne,
or a snarl of white mist in the field
in the first of the sunlight.
Nonetheless, an heretical beauty
floods the ranks of the world.
The black still pours down
but the peaks break free.
Branches aglow with a wet flame …
Sky, a deep violet, surges
behind the charcoal mountain
where the rain is still falling
on a single gorge of brightness
after the sudden storm of
the first night of my death.
Angelic tormentors are silent
The archive of what is stands open.
While in the ruins of an orchard
with its stretch of tree-stumps
like the broken guards
of a once sublime palace,
birds lie quietly on the grass.35
Nonetheless, an heretical beauty / floods the ranks of a world. An interesting pun whiffs from “ranks”: Donahue is invoking the ranks of the angelic hierarchy imagined by Dionysius (and Rilke), just as he is alluding to the rank and file of the world below. But isn’t there a smell here, the rank odor of the human world below, which, despite its stench, streams with a beauty from the light emanating from God’s eternal throne? In Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem points out that “the earliest form of Jewish mysticism was throne-mysticism.”36 Unlike the forms of absorbed contemplation elaborated in theosophical Kabbalah, the subject of much of Scholem’s book, throne mysticism is characterized by “perception of [God’s] appearance on the throne, as described by Ezekiel, and cognition of the mysteries of the celestial throne-world.”37 Scholem goes on to compare throne mysticism to early Christian mystical and Gnostic practices, comparable to what Corbin identified as the active Imagination in Islamic mysticism, or what we might think of nowadays as creative visualization.38 The silent angelic tormentors Donahue summons in this part of his poem stand perhaps for the interferences this visionary realm works on our consciousness: whether we seek this earth of light ourselves or find ourselves suddenly staring at the blinding throne of God, insight combines with anguish to give us the archive of what is in the ruined grounds of a once-sublime palace.
Like Nathaniel Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou,” Donahue’s Terra Lucida follows the course of an oblique plot in which a questing subject transforms at times into a collective subjectivity, moving through “A world dark as anthracite / & lit by flames of an invisible war,”39 gaining insight, suffering sadness, finding death and resurrection, and battling evil: “And during those two days / when our souls were elsewhere, // dazzled in pavilions of the spirit, / with angels, martyrs, and rock stars, // what evil slipped into me? What curse got me?”40 Similar to Mackey’s series as well, Terra Lucida gives the sense that the phantasmal world the poem takes place in is as untrustworthy as it is revelatory:
Then will all
be nothing?
Then will every
death be a delusion?
Then will our lives
be ways of shade
in the roaring core of
the sun at night,
be shadows
in the dazzle?41
Shadows in the dazzle: this could stand as a statement for Donahue’s hierognostic conclusions about reality.
If one thing characterizes the active imagination Donahue brings to bear on his poem, it’s his desire that the visionary reality he has entered not be merely some dream but a place of absolute reality. His skill at conveying this feeling seems unmatched by any other contemporary American poet, such that parts of his poem exhibit a simultaneous lightness of touch and gravitational pull, where surrealistic follies vie with imaginal intensities. One of the best examples of Donahue’s mastery appears in the midst of “in this paradise,” in lines that combine throne mysticism with the look and feel of a Richard Diebenkorn painting:
One heaven for optics, one
for mysticism, & down the hall,
idling, on a stage, a string quartet.
A hawk shakes the trees as the sun falls
over these houses, over these hills
where, since this is California,
a father tells his son: there are
two kinds of infinities,
those that can be counted,
& those that cannot. And later,
at bedtime, the mother will add
and there are those crossed
by souls once they have drunk
from white cups of magnolia
blossom over a sunlit deck, in
a forest, where festive guests toast
the abracadabra of zero,
as, at a low-limbed tree where
the path meets the stream,
the ghosts of two girls wait in
the shade for a passerby, purer
than you, from whom to slice
the heart, & read in its red
the whim of the stars.
I’m drowsy, but I don’t want
to sleep, one girl says to the other.
I don’t want our marvelous
death to be only a dream.
The abracadabra of zero: it’s that quality of inevitability Donahue manages in these lines, the expression of death as marvelous, and the sense that the heart has in it the whim of the stars that both ventilates and intensifies the apocalypse we get glimpses from in his poetry.
Where Donahue’s apocalypticism is dazzling, literary, and esoteric, Rehm’s is more sober and melancholic, expressing the anxieties of the Gospels themselves or the urgencies of Paul’s letters, with their sense that “the form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31). Like Emily Dickinson, Rehm combines audacity and rue in her poems in equal measure. Consider this poem by Dickinson:
One Crucifixion is recorded—only—
How many be
Is not affirmed of Mathematics—
Or History—
One Calvary—exhibited to stranger—
As many be
As Persons—or Peninsulas—
Gethsemane—
Is but a Province—in the Being’s Centre—
Judea—
For Journey—or Crusade’s Achieving—
Too near—
Our Lord—indeed—made Compound Witness—
And yet—
There’s newer—nearer Crucifixion
Than That—42
The poem hinges on the striking phrase that Gethsemane is but a province in the center of our being, which opens the door to the wild claim that Christ’s “Compound Witness” looks into her own being, where a newer, nearer, and presumably equally harrowing crucifixion is happening. As Harold Bloom notes, “Dickinson’s Jesus did not love her, nor she him: she believed neither in the Resurrection nor the Atonement. Yet she shared in the sufferings of Jesus, and in what she took to be his triumph over them.”43 What Bloom appears to miss in his assessment of Dickinson’s religion is the sense of regret that stains her claims of one Calvary for each sufferer. It’s a bold claim, but a rueful one, too.
Compare Dickinson’s poem to one of Rehm’s:
A roof is no guarantee
that you’ll sleep
The unease of premises
pins together the curtains
at night
Waiting for a clearness
of purpose
Eating 3 meals a day
we go to bed hungry
Privacy is not a remedy
We’ve become separated
by “efficiencies”
Nobody can do anything with
A kind of machine person
Floundering in the dark
It’s hard to believe
5 sparrows were sold for this44
Like Dickinson’s, Rehm’s poem hinges on a claim whose critique stems from perception: here, the sense that our lives are filled with things that make it easier but worse. And also like Dickinson, Rehm works in her poems through aphorisms—“a roof is no guarantee that you’ll sleep”—but ones she modulates with a resigned disdain that verges on despair: “It’s hard to believe 5 sparrows were sold for this.” “This poem,” writes Rehm, “is about the frustration of living in a culture that separates humans from the natural world. It’s a poem that wonders what it means to live among things that I wouldn’t consider to be essential to living.” It’s hard not to hear echoes of the opening of George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” here: “There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / Is to know ourselves.’ ”45 The self-knowledge Rehm’s poem elicits, however, is, to make use of H.D.’s phrase from “The Walls Do Not Fall” again, an awareness that leaves her defenseless. “The sparrows,” continues Rehm, “are a reference to Luke 12:6.”46
The twelfth chapter of Luke finds Jesus defending himself against the Pharisees, who are “lying in wait for him and seeking to catch something out of his mouth, that they might accuse him” (Luke 11:54). He begins to speak—there’s a sense of cunning to his oratory because he has a huge audience of followers, “many thousands,” so many that they are beginning to crowd each other and step upon one another. When Jesus begins to speak, he points an argumentative finger at the Pharisees themselves: “Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed nor hidden that shall not be known. For whatsoever things you have spoken in darkness shall be published in the light, and that which you have spoken in the ear in the chambers shall be proclaimed upon the housetops” (Luke 12:1–3). For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed. This is the essence of the Gospels’ apocalypticism: Unlike the flamboyant witnessing of John the Revelator, reflected so vividly in Donahue’s poetry, here in Luke, revelation is soothsaying. As Jesus continues, having accused the Pharisees of their hidden agenda, he tells the crowd whom they should truly fear:
And I say to you, my friends, be not afraid of them that kill the body and after that have no more that they can do. But I will shew you whom ye shall fear: fear ye him who after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell. Yea I say to you: fear him. Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.
(Luke 12:4–7)
In The Historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan refers to “the message of an open secret” in reference to the mission of Jesus and his disciples: “The missionaries have a message that is neither private nor clandestine, neither hidden nor occult, neither secret nor mysterious.”47 One way to look at this passage in Luke is to see that Jesus, arguing that nothing that is hidden will not one day be revealed, is calling for full and open confession. The sparrows stand for a currency in this economy of the open secret: God is aware that these sparrows are being sold in the market as a good deal; he’s also aware of every hair and blemish on your body. And he wants to reassure you that you are worth more than these sparrows.
Rehm, in a curious but potent inversion of Jesus’s teaching, uses the buying and the selling of the sparrows to stand for something more troubling: The realization that we live in a culture that disastrously separates humans from the natural world, placing worth on creatures we intend to use for our own ends, and that none of Christ’s radical teaching has had much of an impact on this exchange. Rehm’s genius is to focus on the sparrows in her poem. Trading for these efficiencies leads only to false comforts, without guarantees, and eventual despair. “It’s hard to believe / 5 sparrows were sold for this.” Reading Luke, she seems to tell us, our thoughts shouldn’t be focused on the evil one who might cast us into hell after we die; rather, our thoughts should be on the poor sparrows, worth much more than the sad world we live in with them. Rehm’s sympathies for the animal world are as keen as they are revelatory. In “Acts of Fiction,” from Small Works, she writes:
I turned. I saw a door open
between my confessions.
On it were written these words:
The animals are angels
I then drew near the earth with
bended knee. The flowers were
so small and bright.
The birds were glowing like stars.48
In Rehm’s poetry, animals intermediate our knowledge of the world.
Rehm’s principal tool of revelation in her poetry is the anagram. Typically, she identifies a word with some significance to her poem, from out of which she seeks hidden meanings and associations. Certainly, there’s a playfulness to her rearrangements of the letters in a word, but there’s also a gravity she seems to locate, connecting her practice, for me, to the exercise of notarikon, the practice in ecstatic Kabbalah of rearranging the letters in the name of God—or in other things—to uplift one’s praying mind to a transcendent realm of meaning. Words of power in Rehm’s poetry yield kinetic meaning as they modulate from one arrangement of letters to another. In the Sefer Yetsirah, a work of Jewish mysticism compiled between the third and sixth centuries, we read: “Twenty-two elemental letters. God engraved them, carved them, weighed them, permuted them, and transposed them, forming them with everything formed and everything destined to be formed.”49 For comparison, take these lines from “When Poverty Is Unobtainable”:
Behold
a wilderness of voices
crying within one
Pursuit
The tension created between proof
and devotion
When reveal becomes a lever
and you press it
your heart will feel gallantly
recreated50
In a sense, the exhortation to behold in these lines prompts the poet and reader to look to see that there is a lever hidden in the letters of “reveal.” Rehm’s anagrammatic process is premised on consequence: It’s not so much that there is “a lever” in “reveal” if you can find it. It’s that a lever in reveal will be revealed—“When”—at which point it must be pressed.
Elsewhere in Small Works, her book from 2005, we find in the poem “A Charm for Sleep” claims such as “Fear has an ear / in it,” “My balm was a lamb,” and “To ward something off / draw it.”51 But Rehm’s poem “Eden” might be read as an ars poetica for her anagrammatic technique as well as a demonstration of her skills with this method:
Endure has an end
you may rue
at the outset
But it also has need
and need is an Eden
(if you know what I mean)
Eden = Need
One and the same
the same
How I hold it.52
Endure is one of these words of power in Rehm’s body of work: It locates her feelings of frustration with the world of getting and spending she tolerates and suffers in, but it also suggests the ability to bear something difficult without breaking—the definition of virtue in Rehm’s world. But even endurance has an end, one manifested in need. The hinge of this poem is the ironic intensity of her declaration/discovery that “need is an Eden,” underscored by the parenthetical aside, which we can read as something said under the breath and meant to be funny or, more likely, as something deadly serious. (Do we really know what she means? Probably not.) To reinforce her point, she makes plain the equation Eden = Need, which then allows her to finish the poem with a repetition—“the same”—and an assertion—“How I hold it”—calling the whole poem into momentary question, in that it sounds suddenly as resolved as it does desperate.
The mysterious word in “Eden” is rue, a word I’ve used already to characterize Rehm’s (and Dickinson’s) poetry. In this poem, it’s the residue of letters/sounds left behind after “end” has been extracted from “endure.” Ruefulness is sorrow, regret, and grief: an unusual feeling to drive one’s work. Rehm uses rueful feelings in her poetry the way the fathers of the early Christian church elaborated the concept of penthos. These early Christian thinkers borrowed from paganism the idea of penthos—which is a specialized kind of mourning, typically for relatives or friends, or even lamentation for a dead god (the word shares an etymological root with pathos)—which they refined further into the special feeling of compunction that offers the possibility of comfort. This notion derives from the beatitudes, in which Matthew has Jesus say, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:4). (One Greek word—penthountes—stands for “those who mourn.”) For the desert fathers, penthos was a blessing because it required so much discernment: It was believed to strike suddenly and to plant itself deep within the soul. Saint Gregory of Nyssa wrote, “Penthos (in general) is a sorrowful disposition of the soul, caused by the privation of something desirable.” Irénée Hausherr explains that “there is one word that expresses all that is desirable: salvation.… Here then is the first concept of penthos: mourning for lost salvation, whether one’s own or that of others.”53
I don’t necessarily think in these poems Rehm is mourning for the lost salvation of herself or anyone else, though I do think the binary of woundedness/healing stands for the problem of salvation in her work, wrapped up in the problem of worthiness that similarly pervades her poetry. Nevertheless, the conceptualization of something like penthos is helpful for imagining the kind of rue that works in Rehm’s poetry, a plaintiveness arising from connections made, connections lost, and the sense of the importance of recognizing these connections even as they cannot satisfy the Edenic needs that trigger them. In one poem, Rehm describes “A paradise of loneliness // incurred.”54 That a paradise of loneliness exists in the human soul is a distinct possibility; Rehm qualifies that phrase to make sure we understand that human solitude is both punishment and debt, even as its reality is like that of the primordial garden longed for since the dawn of human consciousness.
We can look to a selection from an earlier poem to see the apocalyptic qualities the ruefulness in Rehm’s poetry elicits. “Where Oh Where Has My Little God Gone?” appears in Gone to Earth, published in 2001, though the poem first appeared in 1996 in LVNG 6. The poem, which is a sequence of eight unnumbered parts, seeks to address its own opening question, “By what are you thwarted?,” cataloguing spiritual, material, emotional, and actual impingements. The second part of the poem depicts existential hardship in the face of market realities:
Economic life
will run down blind alleys
a specter
“Eternity’s curtain”
pulled by purse strings
Once apprehended
the coin becomes a relic
diminished by the number
of deaths in our time
The gibbering shades of the departed
It is absurd to speak
of the spirit presenting itself
to make us live again
The body is an echo
in the shadow-image of Pantheism55
This section of the poem resounds with several words of power: specter, coin/relic, gibbering shades, absurd, body/echo, shadow-image, Pantheism. Each word facilitates what feels to be an excoriating meditation on the deus absconditus of the poem’s title. Rehm’s clarification of the specters and gibbering shades as something like the body itself—echoes in the shadow image of an earlier, unified, but superstitious religious reality—is, well, haunting. There’s no better word for it. For Rehm, apocalypticism is not an anticipation as much as it is a means of expressing the oppressing realities of the present. In this sense, her approach to apocalypse accords with Daly’s sense that as a genre, apocalypse is embroiled with political economy; he calls it “a literature of complete yet coded protest against worldly domination structures.”56 For Rehm, more so than for John the Revelator or for Donahue, in whom the spectacle of apocalypse resides, apocalypse is an actuality once apprehended that shows eternity’s curtain pulled open not by religious longing but by purse strings. And what do we see in eternity? Shadow images. Spirits presenting themselves absurdly, speaking of salvation and resurrection. Here, it’s a sobering vision. For Rehm—who can be an intensely joyful poet—salvation comes at the hands of connections to loved ones, to beloved figures from myth and history, and to books. Her poem “Acts of Knowledge” reads:
As if a book
were a kind of
voluntary nurse
looking for the wound
inside you
Words and senses
Terror and delicacy
Wisdom
The leaves on the tree
grew57
A WAY FORWARD IN POETRY
Blake’s “Night the Ninth Being the Last Judgment,” the cataclysmic finale to “The Four Zoas,” begins:
And Los & Enitharmon builded Jerusalem weeping
Over the Sepulcher & over the Crucified body
Which to their Phantom Eyes appear’d Still in the Sepulcher
But Jesus stood beside them in the Spirit Separating
Their spirit from their body. Terrified at Non Existence
For such they deemd the death of the body. Los his vegetable hands
Outstretchd his right hand branching out in fibrous strength
Siezd the Sun. His left hand like dark roots coverd the Moon
And tore them down cracking the heavens across from immense to immense
Then fell the fires of Eternity with loud & shrill
Sound of Loud Trumpet thundering along from heaven to heaven
A mighty sound articulate Awake ye dead & come
To Judgment from the four winds! Awake & Come away58
There is no creative explosion comparable to the one Blake enacts in “The Four Zoas,” according to Northrop Frye. “In this ninth Night,” he claims, “Blake seems to have found his way back to the very headwaters of Western imagination, to the crystalline purity of vision of the Völuspa or Muspilli, where the end of time is perceived, not as a vague hope, an allegory or an indigestible dogma, but as a physical fact as literal as a battle and as imminent as death.”59 Blake’s visionary eruption models infinity as theophanic fact—the actuality of God perceived in an eternal present. Donahue’s poetry presents apocalyptic theophany as imaginal summa: an Earth of Light intermediating the eyesight of insight poetic vision enables. Rehm’s poetry presents apocalyptic fact as a battle as imminent as death, as the awareness that leaves us defenseless. Both extend Blake’s aims. Ruminating on the potency of Blake’s commanding poem, Frye continues:
For the whole point about an apocalypse is that the darkening sun and the falling stars and the rest of the fireworks represent a kind of vision that is disappearing because it is unreal, whereas what takes place is permanent because it is real, and if real, familiar. With a deafening clangor of trumpets and a blinding flash of light, Man comes awake with the sun in his eyes and his alarm clock ringing beside him, and finds himself in what he now sees to have been all the time his own home.60
Where is our own home now? More than two decades since the editors of apex of the M issued their call for an apocalyptic poetry of radical transparency, what has ensued? Where do we find ourselves? For one thing, there has been the institutionalization of Language poetry, which might be characterized as antiapocalyptic (nonrevelatory). Language poetry currently represents a default mode for experimentation in poetry, in contrast to the vatic/apocalyptic mode that characterized some of the innovative poetry of the mid–twentieth century, especially in San Francisco (Duncan, Blaser, Everson, and Ginsberg, for instance). In some senses, Language poetry displaced this vatic mode, which was what the editors of apex of the M strove nevertheless to represent in the pages of their magazine.
For another thing, we’ve seen the institutionalization of creative writing programs for poets to attend. There are many things to say about this, probably best done by someone more qualified than myself. But it’s hard to repress the sense that this trend represents a general drift from poetry as a kind of awakening to poetry as a kind of complacency.
Most prominently, we have seen the rise of the Internet in relation to the lives of poets, initially in the form of listservs, then in the form of poetry blogs and places like the Poetry Foundation website, and more recently in the telegraphic modes of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, good places for promoting poetry but bad places for appreciating and understanding it. As much as I value and make daily use of the archival element of poetry on the Internet, I don’t believe the shift of poetry to the Internet has done poetry much discernible good. That may still come, but at the present, the Internet has encouraged the rise to prominence of the opinionater and the curator as poetry’s primary spokespeople and of opinion making and curation as poets’ primary activities.
A poetry of apocalypse is no easier to find today than it was twenty years ago. It’s no coincidence that both Donahue and Rehm are obscure poets whose work is attended to by small but dedicated audiences. In their work, they carry forward the achievements of what is for me the most compelling strain in American poetry, practiced in the past century by H.D., Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, Susan Howe, Fanny Howe, John Taggart, Lissa Wolsak, and Nathaniel Mackey. Nevertheless, an apocalyptic poetry remains something difficult to write for a poetry world filled with allergies to the spirit. But if poetry has a way forward through the glaring electronic darkness of the present, if there is a poet who will stretch a vegetable hand, flexing it in fibrous strength to seize the sun, it will be a poet who has attended to the apocalyptic clarion sounded in Donahue’s and Rehm’s words of power, telling that poet clearly and plainly, “Awake & Come away.”