So Whatever Happened to that Epic Poem, Edgar?

Before Homer’s Odysseus there was a certain Atra-Hasis, king of the Shurruppak in the Fertile Crescent before the flood, who became an enemy to the lazy gods because of his desire to make tools and survive the disaster (1800 BCE). Before Atra-Hasis, there was one Who Saw the Deep, ol’ Gilgamesh, who probably ruled sometime around 2700 BCE. And before Gilgamesh, if memory could possibly stretch so far back, there was the original progenitor: the kindler of light in the gyrating whorl of night upon night upon night… who we perceive to this day, in darkened moments, as the force of ingenuity, procreation, inner flame.

Summer, 2009: At the far end of an island, I found myself pulled down, pulled to pieces, pulled in half. Should I stay or should I go I asked myself many times. And as many times, I had no answer. So I smoked and I drank and I began to work on my epic poem, “Atlantis”, thinking it, if nothing else, would satisfy as direction, religion and conviction. I began my great, long poem with a view of history in two distinct time-scapes: the strictly historic — the roll of events as they had culminated and were colliding into the present moment—AND the roll of events as they were captured, organized, and made meaningful in the present moment, moving forward—the view (as Hydra’s Mr. Moctezuma has described it to me) within the end of all time. This view from within the end of all time, if I could make it happen, would be the voice which would transcend, or tear through, the gutless voice of a lyrical speaker detailing past events. The poem (in my mind) could be no escape for a speaker, but an effort of hefting time into the timeless, history into the immediate sphere of poetry and sensation. And, to bring it all together, that history would roll out events in the materials of a living world—my world, this world, the world as is; this EPIC would shine through and beyond me. And it would begin as far back as my family history could be imagined.

Oh, first lines! What troubles you generate for confreres which follow. Would there be a battle, or would there be peace? Well, I asked myself, what had my family known? To what extreme had the savagery of conflict characterized my tribe–that is, the tribe of the expansive genealogical index, of biological and intellectual fathers… how deep had the bloodshed of many hundred years entered the psyche of a poet working within the end of all time? I imagined myself as an intersection: of Spanish, Portuguese and Nahua warriors; of Mayan, English and American thinkers; and of African, Amerindian and Mestizo blood medleys. Yes–I realized–there would have to be a great intermingling of blood, on battlefields and in bedrooms.

I began the poem with the departure of Cortez’s expedition from Cuba to the Yucatan coast and onward to the interior. But the poem was not meant to be about Cortez. It was about the ship-hands, the slaves, the warriors and others spitting obscenities to each other, unwittingly generating history as they stumbled along. The beginning lines captured the bobbing ship’s crest in ivy and crystal, growth and the time-freeze, the living and the life in perpetuity:

And as their sails at last allowed
themselves outward, seawater springing like ivy

crystal over the ship’s crest,
a caulker manning a towed fishnet

tied fast the rope’s feed and breathed…

But breathed what? A number of things to his confreres—but mostly criminal poeticisms—imprisoned misdemeanors of lyric transgression. His language, I mean to say, was caught between a historical account and a constant attempt to breach history, to break into the place of metaphor and steal a real world from a place outside time. For weeks I attempted to work through the voice. I determined its scope: roughly 1518-present day. Co-texts: Rodriguez de Montalvo’s Sergas de Esplandian (written c. 1496) to Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990). Movements: the conquest of Latin America, the African influx, Northern journeys. And still I was stuck, like mud on history’s roots, to twisty genealogies that seemed neither to lead to me or from me.

What the hell did I care about Cortez, killer the conquistador foe? Or even Fortun Ximenez, who was sent northward to his death by Cortez on the grounds that he might discover the land of the female Caliphate (California), replete of course with gold, and thereupon conquer? Leaf split lengthwise / in the Southern California air / drifting through a hangover / “Fuck this place,” Fortun began… But how could I, who had been made by that place and now made that place, say with such crass rejection, “fuck this place?” How could I for whom that place was home say the things that Fortun was saying? No–the voice was wrong. The intrusions were violent. The conquistadors still had a stranglehold on my throat.

So would I kill them? Would the bloodshed extend into the world of my poem? Stay the hell away–I wanted to hurl back–let go of the limpidity of these lines, you killers, you destroyers, demon men. The poem was a few cantos in and it was already sagging with the monsters of history. And I could not generate delight with these monsters in the foreground. Since I could not deny them a place in history, I could not repair the damage to the lifeforce of delight in the poetry. So I smoked and I drank and I translated Homer’s Neukia episode into Nahuatl—Auh Onitemoc Acallpa… Pound’s Homer through (Andreas) Divus into the language of the Yucatan, to give back a blood transfusion while I was spilling the stuff elsewhere.

And all over–I felt that the poem was dying in a heavy historical hemorrhaging. And still–for months I couldn’t abandon the thing, fearing that I would be abandoning what might still be salvageable of certain living moments. I walked deadlands in Manhattan, descending charnel steps and stepping among the lifeless, searching for the light of life, from the subways through the streets to the filthy, sewage-throated coasts. And I stood on the seashore and stared my eyes into a salty melt of supplication; and what I wouldn’t have sacrificed to find the delight in these events! And I walked through the streets and saw in every person’s flat distant stare the work of much bloodshed, displacement and the destruction of greed, conquest and expulsion. How came they to this grim coast, I asked myself, and the answer blackened my mind.

So I buried the poem, with peaceable rites, closing its eyes so that it would know no shame. And I left that city for the redemption of the hills, the pagan spark enlivened in solitary exultation among wild and the natural things. In that ol’ spirit of the aesthetic pagan, I read in such a way that did not offend my spirit, and wrote poems and recalled family histories with a heart full of pride for the wily victories and stunning chicanery—the string of unlikely stories that had brought me where I was and would take me everywhere: rethought the histories of the countries of the world as a pulse vibrating through me, and remembered that my tribe was full of victories and outlandish examples of the rebellious spirit of artists and passionate types. And my heart returned with a rhythm in stride with the simple rhythm of life’s delights.

And I reconstituted the epic for this life: beginning with one poem a day, posted to a web site on which I could track any progress. 99 poems passed, of varying quality—but always (most importantly!) tracking a kind of natural growth, until on the hundredth, I broke free. “C” which stands for ‘centum’ was the beginning of the endless poem which would be about everything. It began with a hundred ants among the roots and moved through such world into the spheres, constellations, and higher fields of life—the crystal and the ivy—presence and generation: My family would soon make a natural entry. This was the poem of procreation—epic blood mingling as we find in bedrooms and ancient bowers.

Have we then unsealed the garden, Edgar? I do not know—but this new poem will work out its genealogies and associations; roots and extensions; progenitors and lovers; in order to position the poet between the end of time (at the ever-present ocean-expanse of the unwritten lines to come) and the active collision of EVERYTHING inside him. These things would be the metonyms, materials, the THINGS, recalling a world with every sensation: clusters that release / cosmologies that precede / the clusters / the natural few in whose love we maneuver. The collision generating excitement and demonstrating the excited life of the inner flame would be the delight of every line. And line upon line, the history of the tribe would be the story of the transferral of this flame. The poet, as always, seeing the deep and desiring to make a fire, will find that his people have already started one for him.