To be inspired is to be inducted into danger, so the poet wonders:
How can I leave you be in me—
myths to leap inside of—
psyche’s appetite, soul’s mouth
bound to rock
with monster
“I attempt the discontinuities of poetry,” writes Duncan. “To interrupt all sure course of my inspiration.” Is inspiration to be understood as a kind of predation? This might illuminate the furor ignited by The Waste Land in 1922. It was hardly as genteel an affair as it now sounds; a “living literature” of classic titles was being cannibalized for its nutrients, skull soup, and much of it was being flushed through Eliot’s poem as a kind of sewage, until at the end only three Sanskrit words remained, an atavistic remainder. A bestial affair.
Around my life
an animal paces
alternate
in the shadows of leaves,
a beast whose skin
seems all of mouths.
The issue of poetry is a placental hunger, a craving wonder harboring a question : “what, anyway / was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?” “I, too, have eaten / the meals of the dark shore.”
The predatory heritage is at times evident in the carnivore’s heavy breath, the animal pacing in the respiration of the text. Or it can be as simple as the paternal gaze, the maternal determination:
My Father … his
crowned eye, his horny beak,
his lingering cry.
And from the thought of him I go
out of all human shape into that pain,
that crows-skin wizard likeness
ravaging man most is,
having a hand in the claw’s work,
the outraging talon
scraping the hare’s bone.
~
I would be a falcon and go free.
I tread her wrist and wear the hood,
talking to myself, and would draw blood.
“[A]nd so the stain uniquely gives consent.” The language thrives with animal vitality that may be sustained by, but finally outpaces, pleasure in analogy.* In the demonizing suction of language, where texture gushes, where meaning drains away into whimper and gasp, the poem becomes a shadowland where spectres of fright and gratification arise : “The owls shiver down into the secrets of an earth / I began to see when I lookt into the hole I feard”—in which the recessed owls are sentinels of “the brooding of owl-thought, counselings / … ever mute and alive, hidden in all things.” Owls are vowels in another intimation by Duncan:
The vowels are physical corridors of the imagination emitting passionately breaths of flame. In a poem the vowels appear like the flutterings of an owl caught in a web and give aweful intimations of eternal life.
Robert Duncan’s pledge to enlivening predation in “My Mother Would Be a Falconress,” like Robinson Jeffers’s savage alliance with hawks and other predators, is given an alleviating twist in Michael McClure’s Ghost Tantras, where the meat science of the body (routinely glorified by McClure) assumes glottal tremors, vocal stigmata amounting to an inhumanism truly exceeding anything Jeffers considered.
… we are strange and deep
unknown creatures of unspoken melodies:
GRAYHAYYOWW REEEEEER WEEE GRAHH.
—OOOH NAYY TAYOWW WEEEEEB, OOOH
THAH. OOOOOH GRAHHH RAYHOOAYORR
RAHHR ROOOOOW MAH TAY OHWNEY TEEERZ.
These animal roars are not even texts, but ritual incitements to mammal wrath. The whole body, performing them, becomes a suction event, a heave of circulatory rhythms; the arterial walls swell, the brain reverts to reptilian dart-eyed predatory awareness, uncannily calm amidst the moans and growls.
Every poem has an alter ego, an animal body as secret sharer of its respiratory distress and its sexual exultation. The panic-euphoric doppelgänger is made explicit in John Ashbery’s “Litany,” which in its double columns openly shadows the act of reading with its spectral companion (like the apparition in The Waste Land—“always another one walking beside you”). The shadow in “Litany” takes place both alongside and as the text. The parallel columns of verse confound the simple act of reading because each column is haunted by its adjacent twin, unreadable if only for the moment the eyes are already focused on the other column.* The poem stalks itself; its doubling is sinister. “Litany” is a poem working off the hypnotism of the inbreathed, the inscribed encrypted instruction of the text as it arises from both inspiration and expiration.
It goes without saying that
To have it make sense you
Would have to belong to all who are asleep
Making no sense …
A different predator hounds Olson in the late Maximus Poems. The animal succulence of devotional address is menacing, demanding its share.
Space and Time the saliva
in the mouth
your own living hand amputated living on
in the mouth
of the Dog
The Dog here is the perimeter of human habitation : (i) as bios the dog is the outer circumference of the personal habitus; (2) as logos the dog takes a hand, which writes, into his mouth, which does not speak since it’s animal : writing is “animal” in its substitution of grapheme for phoneme, writing as biomorphic marking; and (3) as mythos the dog belongs to another order of actions and only intersects with the poem and the personal life as an obliquity. There is a bit of vampirism, too, in Keats’s “living hand,” mano a mano with Olson’s in the spook of Dogtown. To pass across the perimeter, to trespass the circumference of bios-logos-mythos, is to be penetrated by a circumferation: to feel its bite, the circumference of its threat.
the dirty filthy whining ultimate thing
entered,
when none present knew
entered as the dog,
slept in the night
tore the bloody cloak then
literally tore the flesh
of the conjoined
love I was
a dog who had
bitten into
her body
as it was joined
to mine,
naturally
the demon
the canine
head piercing
right through the letter carrier
trousers and into the
bone, the teeth of Fenris
craves and locks
directly
into
the flesh, there isn’t
any room
except for
pieces, holes
are left
The darkness soaks through the holes. The holes might have been eyes. (The ashes might have been pleasures : “through this hole / at the bottom of the cavern / of death, the imagination / escapes intact.”)
I heard words
and words full
of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.
“Here the holes in the sieve of your mind open wider. Chunks of forgotten matter drift in. You follow a trail of remains. You get lost, disoriented, hunted. You notice your skin, how the pores themselves can open and close like millions of tiny fish mouths” (Hurd, 142). The hole keeps pouring and aching as long as the language flows. Antonin Artaud picked at his psychic scabs to keep the pus in flow. In History Robert Lowell embalmed the pus and sealed each scab as public ornament or mimic monument. The New England jeremiads commemorated in Lord Weary’s Castle were the elixir in his blood, at once arousing “the jack-hammer jabs” of his cadences and leaving him ruefully surveying his past : “Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them,” Lowell wrote in “Fishnet”: “genius hums the auditorium dead.” Model poet for his generation, Lowell knew himself to be prey as well:
… I heard
The birds inside me, and I knew the Third
Person possessed me, for I was the bird
Of Paradise, the parrot whose absurd
Garblings are glory.
Lowell understood better than anyone the perils of adulation and eminence in a culture confusing aesthetics with commerce. Armand Schwerner, like Olson, finds a predator in the quotidian : “the enemy surrounds us. Words lose their substance, are coopted by mimetic IBM ads, depress; the attitude of distrust toward words spreads to objects. We need a new language, one that we cannot speak, may not be able to speak, unseizable, proliferating like elementary particles in physics : no end to it” (The Tablets 136). In fact, his last Tablets portend such inscrutable proliferation:
Each word is a boundary where the speech-breath upends into conductive herms of letters. An entire narrative hinges on the indiscretions of particles; holes in words and words in holes—fracture of an ancient shamanistic lore in Empedocles’s parables of transmigration. “All things have intelligence, and a share of thought” is his guiding principle (56). “Press these things into / the pit of your stomach,” he recommends in one fragment; and in another, “sift these words through the guts of your being” (55, 33).* “And you will bring back from Hades a dead man’s strength” (56). Language is the animal that returns, recurs.
I lie without sleeping, remembering
the ripped body
of hen, the warmth of hen flesh
frightening my hand,
all her desires,
all her deathsmells,
blooming again in the starlight. And then the wait—
not long, I grant, but all my life—
for the small, soft
thud of her return among the stones.
Can it ever be true—
all bodies, one body, one light
made of everyone’s darkness together?