One should be always reticent when it comes to relying too heavily on aesthetic schema, particularly the names of poetic "schools." But they can have value, when used as the rough tools they are--giving an outline, a shape, to something, allowing us to see forces at play in the mass of texts which we call "literary history." EP, like so many of the modernists, wasn't afraid to use them, even generate them via fiat. Michael Levenson reports that one spring day, at a tea-shop in Kensington, 1912, Pound declared Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle "les imagistes," a title H.D would hold onto even by the time of her Trilogy in the mid-1940s (Levenson 69). It is probably as an imagist that H.D. is best known, for those tight, lovely, short free-verse lyrics, even when those lyrics had classically inflected names (such as "Oread"). But, after reading Trilogy, a series of 3 long poems written during WWII (particularly inspired by the London bombings), I'd like to offer a few connections between H.D. and Language poetry, specifically the LangPo I know best, Susan Howe.
In one sense, this is a strange connection, since H.D. is working out of an explicitly esoteric, mystical, trans-religious sense of things. The Trilogy is full of allusions to Greek and Egyptian myths, as well as Christian and pagan rituals, and it is a sense of the historical oneness of things that she's trying to articulate for a fractured world. My understanding of LangPo is that they would be explicitly against such immateriality. Moreover, H.D. is unapologetic when it comes to adopting an overtly strong poetic voice:
but my mind (yours)
has its peculiar ego-centric
personal approach
to the eternal realities
and differs from every other
in minute particulars,
as the vein-paths on any leaf
differ from those of every other leaf
in the forest, as every snow-flake
has its particular star, coral or prism shape. (52)
This is, yet again, an articulation of the modernist problem (Stevens wrote a lifetime of poems trying to explicate it): how do you deal with the mind as objectively as possible? How do you even retain "mind" without slipping back into notions of genius or reducing mind to mere positivism? H.D.'s solution in these lines is fascinating. By studying one leaf, tracing its patterns, we learn something about vegetable reproduction in general; in the single snowflake, the physics of crystalization are present. The particular contains all of the elements of the general, and, thus, is a safer route (perhaps) to the general.
But there is also a certain hermeticism running in this, a "the world in a grain of sand" approach to things. And the poetic approaches in Trilogy hinge on the somewhat strange but nevertheless undeniable connection in language between words like "mind" and "mine." The poetic mining of history brings to the surface these mysterious linkages, the things "words conceal" (14)--words as such, not just these words. The making of poetic history, then, is a fraught enterprise, since it is interacting with the power trapped in language as such:
your stylus is dipped in corrosive sublimate,
how can you scratch out
indelible ink of the palimpsest
of past misadventure? (6).
The pen itself is poisoned: "corrosive sublimate," according to the OED, is a term for "mercuric chloride (bichloride or perchloride of mercury), a white crystalline powder, which acts as a violent poison"; a more general sense of the word is the product of sublimating ("subliming or converting a solid substance by means of heat into vapour, which resolidifies on cooling"--boiling language until something solid, and different, emerges). But H.D., who was analyzed by Freud, could not have missed the psychoanalytic resonance of both "sublimate" and "palimpsest," and thus the unconscious itself, both collective and individual, is simultaneous a poison, a reactive process, and a writing. An historical poetics is situated between its own potentially destructive energy and that of the past, the pre-sublimated solid that makes an historical moment possible. That which is concealed within the words, indeed.
For H.D., there is something a bit divine (and/or a practice of divination) in all of this. The Holy Ghost is both "the Dream" and "acts as go-between, interpreter" (29). But all of the divine (as well as The Interpretation of Dreams) is grounded in what Derrida famously called the metaphysics of the sign. And yet, as she evokes this metaphysics, H.D. plays on it--she performs something like deconstruction when Derrida is a 14 year old kicking a soccer ball:
[. . .] I know, I feel
the meaning that words hide;
they are anagrams, cryptograms,
little boxes, conditioned
to hatch butterflies. . . (53)
And then, on the next page, in separately numbered poem (no inside/outside):
For example:
Osiris equates O-sir-is or O-Sire-is
Osiris,
the star Sirius
relates resurrection myth
and resurrection reality
through the ages; (54).
It is as if language itself contains, like a cocoon, a code, a "cryptogram," the suppressed reality of our spiritual and psychic lives; the dictionary as the holy writ. The poet, like the alchemist, makes all of this evident. The opening up of "sir" and "Sire" out of Osiris, a clearly LangPo technique, is used even more directly later on. Playing on the Hebrew words marah ("bitter," when in the feminine form) and mar (masculine version of the same word, and, thanks to a helpful Heath Anthology footnote, also "Hebrew title for Mr.; and Hebrew verb for ruin, mar, break"):
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, mère, mater, Maia, Mary,
Star of the Sea,
Mother. (71)
Somewhere between associative chains, the talking cure, play, and what Sontag would call the erotics of the text, outside of interpretation, is where H.D.'s metaphysical musings reside.
Since this post has gotten rather longish, and everyone has other things to do, I'll provide simply point out the obvious: that these techniques of word working, explicitly alchemical and hermetical in H.D., are picked up by LangPoets like Susan Howe. (Indeed, for readers of Howe, I imagine that the lines quoted above sound remarkably similar.) A list, pithy, and unfair, by way of conclusion: 1. Isn't it fair to say that, on the surface, there is something almost magical about the practices of LangPo? Someone once told me, somewhere, and this may be wrong, that (borrowing from Wittgenstein, probably the philosopher of contemporary poetics, "if my language is the limits of my world, then changing my language changes the world." The doctrine of correspondences, redux. 2. If we consider that H.D. is writing on the cusp of modernism and what comes after, and if Howe et al are what come after, I will assent to the term "postmodern" in the sense of "after" modernism for their poetics (yet another critical "term"! But after all this talk of the latent powers of words, perhaps my use of them, does, ever so slightly, alter the world). The line between the two might be drawn between the sense of what is actually happening in the manipulation of words--where H.D. sees continuity and oneness, a sign of correspondance, LangPo might see. . . what? 3. If anyone could point me to other texts on H.D.'s position in all of this, I'd like to see them. I found a passing reference in an essay by Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Howe, and I'm sure there's more out there.
Posted by pjaussen at March 27, 2007 02:59 PM | TrackBack