A Defence of Empathy & Sentiment
There is a familial relation—more than sound—between fashion & fascism
What is in fashion is fascism—they are out to leech our complexities of all sentiment
To fight this—keep close to Susan Howe’s artistic scholarship—she honours the archive by fielding it
Or to Robin Blaser who says—I hope that scholarship—the joy of it—the helpless quotation of it—gave greater generosity
There are too many people on earth—you know this—by number we have made ourselves more vulnerable in new ways—you have said so yourself
Fueki Ryūkō—says Bashō—Eternity (what is not changing) & Fashion (what is fashionable & changing)
By number we can
be more easily swayed for Profit & Office—especially if we are fed bad
food—
then poorly
educated—look at us
Working together seems to work only in small cells—four or five syllables at most
Despite “the shipwreck / of the singular” (Oppen)—the defenceless digit—one—is till prime
Its angush & base needs are still the core of all song—all politics—or was—or still might be
Traditionally—empathy accrues by tending to each other & animals—or by travel—or by deep reading which is both
Now—with these routes made precarious by over-population—surveillance technology—& epidemic—we cannot be sure that empathy is alive in us—or welcome in us—with us—of us
Self-promotion—Fash—cannot replace loyalty to language within long memory & active focus
The group—polis—Olson’s word—means also (as Melville says) the common content—of Isolatos—island of the self
Alone to tinker years until done without fanfare is community service
Self-promotion knows no community—even if speaking from within a group
Fasc is all about the glory of the official solo—each expensive garment is a Name
The ego wants attention—not by practise—thoroughness—care—or accountability
From cadenza to tantrum is a decline—a hardening
Getting attention by disturbance—buzz—this is what children do
Who
scoffs at the slowness & isolation of care—is always the impatient secret
handshake—the
restless
& precocious pulpit—voracious children ignored at a party
And who is to be disturbed—kicked—that straw enemy—quietude
But quietude—Ron Silliman’s word—means how the Middle writer tends to settle for comfort—closure—a calm tone
This gentle shutting of the lid of the poem—yes an
elocutionist's trick—the lid becomes a settee—
yes ubiquitous—yes dull
Yet quietude as coined is not a sneer at those who work
quietly in the interlude—who take time &
care with words
Keep close to process—as its choreography evolves—take as long as you are troubled—be open vowels
Each maker inside compulsion falls quiet at the enormity of etymology’s ticket to ride
For example—Tranströmer—C D Wright—& Tsvetaeva are not guilty of quietude
Silence—or the noun quiet—is as if a hardy material in their poems
On a scale of silence—from more to less—the right order is—Tranströmer—C D Wright—Tsvetaeva
Nor are they as noisy at their process as Gertrude Stein is at hers—yet all four writers are eccentric word-carers
Shhh—Tranströmer—C D Wright—Tsvetaeva—Stein—hey!
The original Oulipo conference in France 1960 agreed upon the word potential—instead of experimental
That’s what the “po” in Oulipo is short for—Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle
Potentielle—wherefrom the next word be—an invite—& a wait—low magic—improv
Potentielle accrues—during the journey—along the
dash—or across the caesura—a future-ing—the
go-let
Not—the scientific method—experiment—a forcing of culture—the clinical trial
Waiting the poem out—word by word—even letter by letter—offers deep & wide welcome
Unto intricacy—unto lidlessness
We
are more complicated than the Parade Square or the Framing Square—those sites
& weapons that
encase—display—or define—our legitimacy
A dancing soldier is not a soldier (no Parade Square)
Eventually Hundertwasser would live in only the round (no Framing Square)
Any truth is surprise—over-determined—fleeting—an aerial photo blown up to absurdity
Or a too-close selfie torn & reassembled blind—hey!
George Oppen says that truth—also is the pursuit of it
And René Char says that—truth is individual—which I translate to mean—lyric
Only literary fanatics / lawyers / politicians / religious zealots—speak of Truth in a singular— capitalizing—slogan-ish—final way
Work toward surprise—dubious & multiple—to arrive at a music of word as word—this & this & this—collaged notation—not Truth but song
A timed pointing—thus form
To use words—so that they do not taste like paper—while they stay aware of the paper they are set to—has always been radical—avant—despite the preening diatribes of any garde
Each letter in each word is challenged to bring interconnectedness—the sanctuary of the brier-patch—the mulch of etymology—to the billboard waste of the page
But Fash & Fasc—as one public campaign—as if one corporate name—is against all complicated random sanctuaries
It endorses Officiators who—a century after Duchamp’s cleansing avant—would
see philanthropy as
an art—& personal taste as notary
Empathy is against any who would bronze the ready-made—we
have not forgotten the practical uses
of the daily shapes we worked among & now so admire as
designs
Each citizen is—as Blake drew us—a ready-made—functionally elegant—by the necessity of practical innovation
Empathy is against any laurels manufacturer who would dignify by use—as ad copy—what Nicole Brossard has called—Mr Vanguard’s language
Empathy is against those who would coldly tell us to wipe our arses with our first poems—& then claim themselves brother or sister to bp Nichol (the Generous One)
Citizen—hold
up against the manikin's guard-gaze & surety—a copy of Gary Snyder’s Regarding
Wave—hold up Inger Christensen’s Alphabet—or The Axion Esti
by Odysseus Elytis
Make
no mistake—empathy & sentiment are not conservative or formal traits—they
have been diluted into service there
Empathy
& sentiment are the ghost greases in a pact between solidarity & the
incomprehensible—they
are
the black milk we drink in Celan’s “Death Fugue”
When Wilde says—All bad poetry comes from genuine feeling—he is not disputing the importance of the very wick of our humanness
He is arguing against a tradition of pandering sloppiness—as embarrassing in 1895 as now
The way Monique Wittig says “lesbians are not women”—I say Feeling—the third F—is not sentiment
Wherever that wick gets replaced by pop feelings—the poem squeaks forth as magazine verse—white milk—I think that I shall never see
So
hold up a copy of Refuse Global (Montreal August 9th
1948)—or a copy of The Wounds by Norman
Bethune—or
Robin Morgan’s Monster
Don’t forget Char’s Feuillets D’Hypnos (1943-1944)—his French Resistance poetic journal
Let each of us each day change our samples—our evidence—tomorrow Disobedience by Alice Notley—next Bending the Bow by Robert Duncan—or any Neruda—there are many campaneros
Read
out loud Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land (1938)—as translated by
John Berger &
Anna
Bostock—don’t let anyone stop you
Many conquistadors—remember how in 1899 Shiki in Japan accused Bashō of sabi—overtones of quiet meditative loneliness (quietude)
But
remember too—at the Long Liner’s Conference—York U—1984—when sentiment in poems
was
being attacked—M Travis Lane’s little voice on the transcript—I’m all for
it!
She fought the frog to save her child—that old folk tale—made up each time—by each stance
Much that is not History—& not a speech—is nonetheless
choreographically pivotal
Choose the left hand—the shed—what is left off—or left out—what has been shed because it has no
Fash—& therefore (it is argued) no meaning or worth
Writing as process yields a ranging & valenced truthishness
Complexity-music—circular—braided—oval-ing—ovalating
That the languages at all our boundaries be shuffled into a sustaining empathy—omphalos—so laugh more—shalom
OK these times demand a culture of immense lab coats & giant suits who board first
Each line’s natural tug & push—is dried out—insensate—devoid of its animal
OK these times are spelled out as long in-folding immigration line-ups—a labyrinth—entangled homelessness
Opening Night line-ups also try to spell us—boxed—policed—silly-rich—insured to the very nose—velvet-roped
But walk away—empathy’s form—is the owl pellet—not the Fabergé egg
Unless
it is leached away by a Theory campaign—sentiment
is intrinsic to—& in the very interstices
of—the letters of each word—even down to its smallest cell
Which is the letter-word “a”—that indefinite article-sigh—ah
Sentiment—not calculation—is how we came by awareness—how each letter-shape evolves
Sentiment—not sentimentality (that gloaming parody of sentiment that conquistadors love to memorize)
Sentiment—is not clean—it annoys—is wrong-angled—curved—rude—unsaluting
Empathy is language’s d’être & preserve
There is always some fascism in anything that is fashionable
But the lyric is—in each compulsed
blurt—ever only a small turned-away hump or curl of mammal—
a wastrel’s
grimace
A warrening—a warning—the lyric as half-hidden larder & index
Our oddity-cry—a note—a no
--
Phil Hall . Otty Lake . 2014-2020
