In his annotations to Pound’s Cantos, Robert Anton Wilson writes that Ezra was privy to a “stoned perception” by an everyday practice of pranayama and “40 some years meditatin’ on Chinese ideograms like a cloud over falling rain over dancing shaman.” He writes this between these lines of Canto XX:
With noise of sea over shingle,
Striking with:
hah hah aha thmm thumb, ah
woh woh araha thumm, bhaaa.
And from the floating bodies, the incense
blue-pale, purple above them,
Shelf of the lotophagoi,
Aerial, cut in the aether.
Wilson writes that “Ez” wasn’t “stoned on dope” like “Baud”[elaire] but nonetheless knew of artificial paradises and their ensuing agony enough to produce lines like the above. Wilson suggests that, having achieved these levels of consciousness with his own poetic-meditative practice, Pound’s stoned consciousness comes off in the poems as a kind of spiritual sensibility — usually represented as a global syncretism of the arts. And this, Wilson argues, led to the consciousness of the “global village” in Pound’s poetry. But, of course, Wilson himself reached the global consciousness by the ways of “Baud.” So what did these thinkers share that transcended the means (drugs or no drugs) and got them likewise to an elevated understanding of global community? [Read More]
 Most people will miss the total solar eclipse that will darken tomorrow’s evening over the South Seas, east of Oceana to Argentina. A lucky family of humpback whales making their way back from a summer in the Antarctic Ocean might be lucky enough to see the illumined phantom. They might even be reminded of an ancestral song composed for such an occasion. An inveterate composer could even be inspired to create their own. And far removed from human eyes and ears, a dirgeful paean for a shaded sun might burst over the dancing foam. [Read More]
Exhausted from war and nearly ready to quit their revolt, the Mayan rebels of the 1850s in what is today the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico, were inspired to continue their uprising by the strange instruction of an alien voice. Crossing Yucatan in an eastward retreat from Merida they were led to a Cenote through the thick Rainforest by rebel Jose Maria Barrera. Here amid the roots of a Ceiba tree (sacred to the Maya as the tree of life, connecting the underworld, the terrestrial world and the world of the skies) he discovered a speaking cross which would henceforth direct the military campaign. [Read More]
Quetzaltepec Volcano, Solstice 2010
With your anticipated baktun shift 585 days away, the penultimate peak of summer before the 5,125 year baktun period terminates obtains the significance of being, in the hot rainy June of the tropics, the last tropical torrents before the last wash of the cycle of the current baktun. This is no more than an organizational scheme, like Monday to Sunday and then again to another Monday, but the meaning of the baktun to a space traveler is much greater than the meaning of a Monday. They might ask, for example, what does Monday mean on Mars?
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Ego contra: erasures of the one — totality in the texture — time without trial and transformation. Ego pro: humility of erasure — texture as personality — time within trial and transformation. Lyn Hejinian’s newest book of poems sprawls such parts across a sea, building a bildung to stretch the expanse of, as she puts it in an earlier work (Oxota: A Short Russian Novel), the single instant of ignorance . . . [what] might correspond to what you have called paradise. [Read More]
Better known for his novels, Roberto Bolaño shirked from the nomen of NOVELIST. . . until a hungry first child forced him to think about making some money–ergo the novels. But it seems that even then he liked to think of his business as POETRY (himself, a detective of poetry)–with or without much white space on the page. But what is so entrancing about the protean referent ‘poetry’ that it might lead a writer to forensically seek poetry beyond the mediocre logic of literary terminology?– into and through the silence of the universe when we call out the name, POEM? Bolaño’s first collection of poems translated to English, The Romantic Dogs, generates a response (if a response can be offered in aether) by cleaving the high reactivity of volatile friends, lovers and poets, to a solvent flow of poetry in its unconstrained-because-uncontained sense: the silence of the universe when we . . . [Read More]
Touted as the most controversial film since The Birth of a Nation, The Cry of Jazz–a 1959 film essay on the spiritual status of blacks in America read through the structure of jazz music–was framed as a response to the consequences of racial division and oppression made clear in D.W. Griffith’s Klan-centered portrayal of post-bellum America. Directed by composer Ed Bland, the highly stylized Cry of Jazz features a very early Sun Ra (then known as Le Sun Ra) with his Arkestra demonstrating the film’s argument: that rhythmic form and harmony in jazz are emanations of the restraint and the futureless future suffered by blacks in America, while melodic improvisation and rhythmic conflict are the joyful freedom and liberating deification of the present, which cry out despite the conditions of constraint. [Read More]
The creation of necessitousness (not need! but the feeling of being necessary) in poetry bathes the inevitability of the poetic line in the moonshine of desire– of passionately feeling that some thing must be this way (or that). Creating this requires that the poet put down the words in such a way that the elixir sinks into them. But what does the relationship of inevitability to intoxication tell us about the strength and weakness, power and vulnerability, of desire? Frank Bidart has distilled a treasure-tub of responses to this question, over a near-half-century career, unpacking the question with technique, reformulating it in the structure of the poetic line, asking careful readers to ask ourselves: what is this poetry we create when we succumb to the need to need? [Read More]
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. [Read More]
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. It started with a translation of Homer’s Neukia episode into Nahuatl–Pound’s Homer through Divus into the language of the Nahua. The structure of the project was imagined hence. But this article is not about that poem–it is about that moment; an article on that poem is forthcoming. I was at an island’s end, low on conviction, heavy on the passion that had brought me so far, wanting to return to it or–at least!–get rid of the DISTASTE for the professionalized HIGH DISREGARD of the artist, the maker, the poet as IS, by which I had been offended at that time. [Read More]
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