The seashore is a summons:
These things I would record:
the drift of sand
at the edge of the sea’s eternal roar
where my dry hands impetuous for sound
unlock from keys
inventions from inventions of the world’s music
The face of the shore is under ceaseless erasure by overinscription, awash with spirit traffic in sublunary plenitude, composing in tidal rhythms “runes upon the sand / from sea-spume.” These traces are nudges and winks from the dead. “They are dead. That is they do not answer. What is this busyness of theirs they do not answer to our calls?” They are nurses of a dismembering undertow, the oceanic vegetal threat Zukofsky feels in “green kelp waves arms, dips / tons my only eyes fear.”
Poets since Whitman have gone to the shore to watch the great trails of writing, entrails of earthscript; to be themselves reduced to spectres and revenants within that typology. In this “Zwischenraum,” or betweenland (to use Rilke’s word), “death also / can still propose the old labors” in the sundering of worlds and realms.
white white white like
a boundary in death advancing
that is our life, that’s love,
line upon line
breaking in radiance, so soft- so dim-
ly glaring, dominating
… as if half the universe
(neither sky nor earth, without
horizon) were forever
breaking into being another half,
obscurity flaring into a surf
upon an answering obscurity.
This between-space of ocean rim is the singular gap—like the inside of Heidegger’s jug whose emptiness is sustenance (Poetry, Language, Thought, 172–73)—the workable ground of tropical poetics. “Like the pieces of a totally unfinished jigsaw puzzle my grandmother left in the bedroom when she died in the living room,” this is the space of life, the uncompleted, which in itself composes purposes of living—“As if my grandmother had chewed on her jigsaw puzzle before she died. / Not as a gesture of contempt for the scattered nature of reality. Not because the pieces would not fit in time. But because this would be the only way to cause an alliance between the dead and the living.”
Necropoetics is a pledge enacted between the dead and the living. In contrast to the Melville scholars ridiculed by Olson (“you must excuse us if we scratch each other’s backs with a dead man’s hand”), necropoetics thrives in the tropical heat of the apprehension that
The realized
is dung of the ground that feeds us, rots
falls apart
into the false,
displaying wounds of the pure
urge, mounds
mulch for covetous burrowing thought.
Thought itself, like an animal snout, roots passages, sniffing its way in to that constant circumference, that spatial and temporal surround of the “realized,” mulched in encircling Okeanos.
Affirming Whitman’s reminder in “This Compost” that the earth is an immense reservoir of pestilence, Duncan’s temporal extension in “Nor Is the Past Pure” realizes a mortuary perimeter. The fantastic anomaly of culture is that the living are exiles or outsiders, the most isolate of all minorities. The small community of the living extends to the past only by trafficking with the dead, whose mounds are “mulch for covetous burrowing thought.” The ground of the dead constitutes the outer limits of the local; and the space of habitation is like a cistern, its hollowness resoundingly provocative. “We have broken through into the meaning of the tomb,” writes Ashbery near the opening of Three Poems, where “To formulate oneself around this hollow, empty sphere” is the immediate challenge. “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn,” as Emerson puts it in “Circles.” In the familiar model of a tossed pebble spreading rings in a pool, the proliferation of circles encompassing other circles benumbs observation. It is a singular narcotic, this manifest realization in stunning symmetry and simplicity, testifying that as we lapse out of ourselves a more vigorous providence scoops up the remainder in a different exaltation—“spelling light for hymn to day recast around loved sound phantom / petal vocable apparent rose stride forward bulky from the tomb.”
To have the whole outline in mind yet not notice the individual changes as they occur, and then one day it dawns on you that you are the change, so naturally you could have seen it coming.
For it is the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance … to heap itself on that ridge, and to solidify and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong, it bursts over that boundary on all sides, and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force, and to immense and innumerable expansions. (“Circles”)
For Duncan, these are “intimations of the secret Mover. / Which we are not permitted without corruption.”
It is only the midden heap, Beauty : shards,
scraps of leftover food, rottings,
the Dump
where we read history, larvae of all dead things,
mixd seeds, waste, off-castings, despised
treasure, vegetable putrifactions:
from this adultery committed,
the plant that provides, Corn
that at Eleusis Kore brought
out of Hell, health manifest.
We live in health by the wealth of Hades’s house. But when Death dons modern garb, as in Olson’s sighting in “Cole’s Island,” it’s in the lugubrious aspect of the property owner and “sportsman.” The natty plaid of the necropolitan real estate developer constellates the modern image of “eternal repose”—funereal effigies of Forest Lawn mocked in the spectre of Mr. Joyboy, ace mortuary cosmetician in The Loved One*
The upshot is
(and this the books did not tell us) the race
does not advance, it is only
better preserved
Now all lie
as Miss Harlow
as Sunday supplement mammoths
in ice, as there used to be
waxworks
as ugly as Jericho’s,
First Citizens, kept there
as skulls, the pink semblance
painted back on
The dead become cosmetic laminations of nature mort in a secular age. But the conditions of composition, as of decomposition, are graphic (like the exhumed woman in Snyder’s poem “Under the Hills Near the Morava River,” with “Diadem of fox teeth round her brow” and “Burnt reindeer-pelvis bone bits / in her mouth”), and it is only as graffiti that writing survives its sediment and stands clear on the rim connecting different times and people, living and dead. In its mortal testimony as graffiti, writing is clutter and debris; trace, husk, scar, sign, particle, element : bodily remains.
Duncan’s title The Opening of the Field declares not just a clearing of space for dancing and benign frolic, but an opening downward, opening the crypt, expounding the glyph of putrefaction. Duncan’s book is a manifesto for trafficking with the dead. Not only does the “Structure of Rime” series propose a set of instructions for handling the raw particles of the composted field, but the efficacy of a composting practice is declared throughout in such poems as “Evocation,” “Nor Is the Past Pure,” “A Poem of Despondencies,” “A Storm of White,” “Out of the Black,” “Bone Dance,” “Under Ground,” and “Food for Fire, Food for Thought.” Olson’s The Distances likewise moves in that vicinity. “The Kingfishers” opens the book, more effective a manifesto than the famous “Projective Verse” essay could possibly be. But nearly every poem in The Distances hinges on death or the dead, though certain pieces strike conclusions of a renewable poetics out of that proximity : “In Cold Hell, In Thicket,” “The Death of Europe,” “As the Dead Prey Upon Us,” and “Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele.” Jack Spicer’s Heads of the Town completes this triptych of 1960, with its Orphic descent into the underworld to liberate the pronouns, in the process depositing a “Textbook of Poetry” that remains profoundly radical in its disintegrative propensity. Spicer’s proximity to the particles of an authentically composted language, taken with the examples of Olson and Duncan, works at the limits of post-Whitmanian necropoetics. Spicer follows Orpheus into a final descent. The emblem of this permission is ancient—as in the memento mori or death’s head iconography of the visual arts : the oracular skull commanding the trade routes of local traffic, incarnate in the living as ephemeral episodes, constituting a passage of life and death out of holes in texts, vowels like sockets, consonants of bones, meaning as moaned.
A deer skull, the nasal passages
like rolled parchment, the forehead
riddled with geometry (bones
are old books and stone liturgies,
hidden as the shores of Egypt …)
~
a sheepskull forehead with its horn prongs
sitting on a boulder—
an offer of the flower of a
million years of nibbling forbs
to the emptiness of intelligence