For Márton, Erwin, and Miklos

1.
I ASK MYSELF first what kind of statement about poetry I might make, in a certain situation. Invited statements often have an air of blank formality about them; and so I envisage a situation, in which my three Hungarian friends, a poet, a composer and a novelist, ask me to talk. I have to tell them what I think about poetry. I no longer know whether we are in my tiny house among the hills in Texas, or in the room where Miklos lived in Berlin. The reader must know that the fragmentary conjectures which follow are not programmatic but a part of a possible conversation.

To begin: I feel uncertain and ignorant about poetry, especially when there are scholars around. Remember this if I seem to become assertive. I can read poetry in three European languages, and from one of them I have made translations. In translation, too, I have read many poems from non-European cultures. My own poems have been written amid constant feelings of uncertainty and ignorance. This world is not such a place as to allow one to declare, blithely, that poetry is play, or a luxury, that it happens in the exceedingly fragile and uncomfortable substance of language, and that it voices the interdependence of what is essential and what is actual, of the oneiric and the ordinary domains of human attention. Why, too, are poems so often misinterpreted? Why, again, is so much of it, poetry I mean, pompous blather?

I ask myself this: is poetry, an art with a long, variegated and difficult history, fundamental now to human life on this planet? Have we any evidence of a profound biological impulse at the roots of poetic imagination? Perhaps it matters, or perhaps not. Most people, if you told them that a poem can pump fresh air through certain vents in the walls of sense which imprison the human brain, would say you are making a stupid category mistake.

Then someone might ask: Do you mean that certain kinds of word-tissue present an active pattern of mental energy, which can reveal to me my own capacity for ordering my mental energies in an economical and productive way, feeling along the lifelines between biosphere and noosphere . . .? After a doubtful silence, someone else says: Show me, then, a poem, which is a model of ordered and articulate mental energy, a model which integrates interior and exterior worlds. For once I would like to see the spectrum of my passions as a rainbow. So you do show him, or better, recite to him Baudelaire's 'Invitation', then a certain poem by Wang Wei, also Rilke's 'Archaischer Torso Apollos' plus, for good measure, Rimbaud's 'Mémoire' and Pound's Canto XVII. Too much. Dismal demonstrations. Soon he's pulling from his pocket the text of Tzara's 'Maison Flake' and asking: Can this be called order, this incredible flying zigzag, this pure movement of delight?

Aha, says he, somewhat later, so it is the dialectic of outward appearances as they interlock with your unfathomable imaginative projections; the great biological motors of chance and design breathe in the rhythms which compose these particles of language; we catch, red-handed, the spirit of paradox, beauty as a form of tension, is that it? Yes, or something like that, you might reply, if you could be sure that he was joking.

Still you are wondering. Was it the poems that made you wonder? Is wonder the word we assign to the event of a mind's suddenly admitting and expelling this magical breath, which is the information poetry brings about life and death? Sometimes, to be sure, you are reading a poem and are assailed by awareness of a fresh kind and of a quality which makes your whole being glow in the presence of a structure peculiar to consciousness and yet, somehow, other than it. Quoted with approval by Montaigne, St Augustine said: 'The mean (modus) is clearly wonderful, whereby spirits cleave to our bodies, nor can it be comprehended by man, and that is very man (et hoc ipse homo est).'

2.
Having said as much, I have to remind myself that much of the writing called poetry is as dead as a doornail. Certainly much of it is not a conquest or critique of the dismal-once a Franco-English noun meaning 'a bad day'; nor is it a 'victory of existence' such as that which Francis Ponge attributed in 1948 to a pebble: 'individual, concrete: the victory of coming into my sight and coming to life with the word' (Méthodes).

Another statement by Ponge, a rather grand one, concerns the receptive side of any such 'conquest', the boundless receptivity of poetic intelligence and its being transferred to the reader: 'the function of poetry is to nourish the spirit of man by giving him the cosmos to suckle. We have only to lower our standard of dominating nature and to raise our standard of participating in it in order to make the reconciliation take place.'

Zen thought and Owen Barfield's book Saving the Appearances took life from considerations like these. You could cautiously substitute, for Ponge's word 'nature', the words 'the unknown' or 'the unconscious'-strange relations begin to establish themselves between the plight of our ecosystem and certain 'bad days' in the history of poetry, as a reflector of emergent mind. Hence certain doubts. You cannot wonder about the universals which persist in the language of poetry without feeling horror and perplexity at the conditions which threaten life on this planet.

3.
Next I want to say something about description in poetry and its neural basis. If you read a taxonomic description by a botanist, you are struck by its almost hallucinatory precision, which seems to interact with the presence of unknown words (technical words). Poetry, too, can have that kind of precision, without unknown words coming into the picture, although unusual words give a special interest to the texture.

However, a poetic description animates what it presents and it does so by distortion-something a botanist avoids. This distorting animation in poetry is what liberates the reader's imagination from a supposed 'real' scene, and binds it to the composition of the linguistic signs themselves. The signs and their composition have intrinsic interest. In some epochs, descriptive poetry flourishes; in others, due to shifts and changes in linguistic usage, which reflect psychic and social changes, for better or worse, descriptive poetry becomes flat, inanimate, devoid of intrinsic interest. (Two old descriptive poems which still have intense charm for me are Cowper's 'Yardley Oak' and Goldsmith's 'The Deserted Village'.)

More often than not, when such poetry becomes inanimate, when its language becomes schematic and perfunctory, its descriptive features will be found to have displaced something else, or to have cut loose from something else. This 'something else', which always has virtue in a poem, is, I believe, the neural base of the mimetic impulse. Even in poetry which invokes unknown presences and so is not descriptive, the activity of that base, of that deep impulse, can be detected in strength.

This 'something else' occurs when a phrase (or larger unit) has the breath-taking balance of a great dancer's motions; when an elegant orphic line scintillates in its context, like Keats's 'To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees'; and when syntax enacts what it says (Robert Duncan's 'Infant snails, pearl pure of the first moisture and light, rise from their cradles of lettuce'). These and like events are signs that the quality of the perceptions voiced in a text (or in the air) make all the difference between a singular poem and a speechless one. They are signs of what I am going to call 'body-consciousness' (even though it sounds like jargon).

Example: the end of George Seferis's poem (1937) 'Mathias Paskalis among the Roses', where the speaker is walking down steps in a garden, thinking:

And then I read of her death in old newspapers
of Antigone's marriage and the marriage of Antigone's
                                                  daughter
without the steps coming to an end or my tobacco
which leaves on my lips the taste of a haunted ship
with a mermaid crucified to the wheel while she was still
                                                  beautiful
         (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

It is not just that the lines have a continuous sensory track. Certain motor-muscular ingredients of experience are active there: and such ingredients are radical to poetry, however abstruse, lofty, or 'pure' its intellectual ingredients may be. If the motor-muscular ingredients are absent even from ordinary speech, it is a sign that speakers are under pressure to allow their language to become dessicated and their minds programmed by external agents-which is what seems to be happening in the U.S.A. Poetic pleasure and muscular pleasure, their kinship springs perhaps from contact between the antagonistic impulses which are voiced, historically, in poetry's time-honoured themes of love and death.

The kind of pleasure I'm talking about transmits signals to other sensory-motor centres and in a moment, as if embraced, the body itself becomes attentive to the 'volume' of words, their 'colour' and their 'musical' value. The matter has been much discussed. And yet it is not an obvious matter or easily determined, nor have its psychic implications been pondered much. I'd rather not harp on it, but mention a book nobody seems to have read: André Spire's Plaisir poétique et plaisir musculaire (New York, S. F. Vanni, 1949).

The poetic functions at which I'm hinting cannot just be due to poetry's happening in the mouth or in the mind. The respiratory and cardiac systems are pleasingly affected by the presentation to consciousness of what is normally hidden, suppressed or not perceived. The solar plexus 'does' something; the lunar plexus too, no doubt. It is in and through the breath-rhythms that a kind of transfiguration of body-mind comes about.

Precisely this body-consciousness has been lacking in much of the descriptive and demonstrative poetry which dominates the English scene. When it does appear, can it still be recognized? Or has everyone become so bookish, set in their ways, and one-dimensional (or indifferent) that they wouldn't notice? My own poems do contain some traces of it, in conjunction with my compulsive themes of being and not-being, here and there, this and 'the other'. But English reviewers have castigated my poems for being 'cold' and 'impersonal', also for being disjointed, obscure and 'skinny'. As if my product were a poor relation of Dr Frankenstein's. The question of personality (whose voice is this?) does arise; readers expect in my poems to meet an open and concordant individual who joins the conversation-they find, instead, a scatty hermit feeling out formal relations between cobwebs and starlight. But relations like those are the stuff of life for the body-consciousness. And I would point out that Montaigne was an intent observer of its operations, its wave-structure of inconstant impulses, its outlines and impressions. Nietzsche discovered it during his 'psychologist' phase; later it forms the infrastructure of Kafka's nightmares.

4.
I shall put it this way: Poetry has the power to make transparent and self-aware the mysterious, undulant body-consciousness which features grammatically in poems as the 'I'. Poetry makes audible the voice of imagination as it projects itself upon the unstable aggregate of impulse and impression I have been calling body-consciousness.

'If a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel', said Keats. So, on the one hand, body-consciousness circumscribes to the limit our 'apprehension, our judgement, and our soul's faculties in general' (Montaigne). On the other hand, in poetry it is the base upon which a model of reality may be constructed, a model with its own distinct linguistic physiognomy, the poem as a 'world' which, although it is objective, other, even alien, has been penetrated and radically transformed by imagination. Hence the violent, but coherent, changes in attitude undergone by the poet in imagining, and, if communication is made, by the reader in responding.

Another statement by Ponge comes to mind: 'Hope therefore lies in a poetry through which the world so invades the spirit of man that he becomes speechless, and later reinvents a language.' In so far as poetry is about itself, it is about this revision of attitudes. The revision occurs as the poem subverts (often by remodelling) the clichés, when it overturns stereotypes, when it infuriates the world into showing its hand. Poetry can thus function as a catalyst to precipitate what therapists of the Gregory Bateson persuasion, like Watzlawick, call secondary changes-your whole frame of reference is changed. In the language of shamanology this is called 'breaking the plane', or 'deconditioning' (disinhibition in the language of neurologists). Here is an illustration, showing that poetry is one of those things that makes you attentive to originality and other enigmas as they penetrate your world at any point. In the summer of 1846 the poet Eduard Mörike went out for a walk; after a time he sat down beneath a tree, became pensive, and then, suddenly, he saw with amazement before him a presence hitherto unseen, unrecognized: his own two feet. Before that moment, in terms of projective imagination, his feet had never even existed.

Mörike's feet and Ponge's pebble figure importantly in my scale of poetic values. So does Cézanne's outburst: The day is coming when a single original carrot shall be pregnant with revolution.' So I go about cultivating microscopism and trying to write in such a way as to undercut the 'foolish-boldness of speech'.

5.
Once there was the vision, shared by poets and sages (in spite of Plato), of the world as a great pattern of interlocking depths and surfaces, a continuous physiognomy or semiotic system, from which could be read, with a little luck, much study, and a measure of belief, the features of the divine mind. Poetry was a minute exegesis of creation, scrupulously composed by one who could believe that he participated in creation's formative processes. And this is what Baudelaire still meant, with his poetics of 'reciprocal analogy', where metaphor is the linguistic agent which divines links between microcosm and macrocosm, between individual body-consciousness and the life of the universe.

Poetry could still, theoretically, function as a bridge between the opaque and the luminous, the unstable body-world and the spiritual-electric aura of supreme fictions. Since then the aura has been lost (Walter Benjamin) and poetry's ground has shifted. The bridge, or the backbone, has been smashed. A poem is now, more or less, a contest with the opaque, conducted in silence, until the human combatant screams out in agony before being crushed ('and later reinvents a language'). My language here is too melodramatic. But I mean to distinguish between suave poetry which has been pushed to the margins, and exigent poetry, hard-bitten poetry, which goes to the limits of the conceivable and thus relocates the centre.

This exigent poetry tends to have archipelagic structures. Its movement tends to be a dance, not a walk. It is a poetry balanced over gulfs of silence, a poetry of surprises, a poetry of broken uncertain surfaces, of foregrounded hinterlands. Prototypes early in the century were some of the 1911-13 poems by Apollinaire ('Le musicien de Saint-Merry'), some poems by Tzara (later his L'homme approximatif), Eliot's The Waste Land, Pound's Sextus Propertius. I cannot rightly say what has become of this peculiar sensibility in the versions of it appearing in poems by several New York poets. John Ashbery certainly has roots in it. The American zigzag has an optics determined by American urbanity (including the soul-shredding experience of big-city life). If I prefer the archipelagic zigzag to the sturdy continuous 'prose tradition' of English, it is because the latter has been made, somehow, inaccessible to me by experiences of my own, which are not American experiences. I have battled, often tongue-tied, with my own ambivalences and uncertainties. The multiple 'ego' can easily become a mass of variables which jam the lines of perception. Then again, suddenly, comes an insight, just a modicum, a microscopic 'triumph' of order, in existence, as this or that set of words. Then the laughter is shaken out of the apple tree, as Tzara said: poetry becomes exploration beyond the frontiers of the ego. To poets reduced to anecdotage and confession by their monomania, I submit these words-from a prison in Africa: 'One begins to see all one's efforts and entire life in clear terms of action. How idle we have been, mesmerized by our own ringing voices and bad verse. The true poetry lies in a vast and incalculable suffering, and the will to resist and endure.'

6.
That said, dear Hungarians, you won't mind if I tell a kind of anecdote about my first meeting with substance in poetry. I was about sixteen at the time. And I was convalescing at an old country house used as a school sanatorium, far out in the western hills of England. I am sitting in the grass beside a stream and looking at a Greek poem, by Alcman, the four lines invoking halcyons. My Greek is feeble. Suddenly I am spellbound by the Greek vowels, how their pitches differ, sound like colours, a web of colours, fragile but indelible, I hear them float and see the colours. In those days one did not know how protected one was; yet one did feel the pressure of a fear, by which protectors tried to control everything.

Two years before that I had begun to study cuneiform and hieroglyphics, inspired by Dmitri Merejkovsky's novel about Leonardo da Vinci. Those studies, like Greek, were never continued. It seems I am a persistent inventor of zigzags, some of them false tracks. Later what I liked about Dada, when studying it during the 1960s, was its energetic and volatile zigzag anti-poetics. I liked the long nose Dada made at everything chic and poncif, everything portentous that sat upon a mess of 'normal' iniquity. In sum: I am still in pursuit of halcyons, the sea kingfishers.

That pursuit does not allow me to write as much or as regularly as some people do. They say: yours is not a serious approach to the task of constructing a work. I question the topos of 'approach', on the grounds that you have to be already in the middle of a poem (knowing it or not) before you can assemble all its flying particles. I question too the topos of 'the work'.

Cézanne, Ferdinand Cheval, Jean-Henri Fabre-workers of such heroic stature as these men are exemplary because they lifted the curse from the nineteenth-century work-ethic which propelled them. They never indulged in production for production's sake (ugly sister of art for art's sake); hard put as they were, they took and gave pleasure in creation.

One certainly does 'work'. But poetic work reverses the modern work scheme: it reverses reification, in so far as it projects into the opaque world of objects signs of intense mental life (sometimes just this side of madness). Poetic work declares: Here, at least, is a limit to manipulation at the hands of human beings who have been turned into functions of the economic system, here is a limit to enslavement. A poetic text, even then, may be subject to manipulation, if it is not reflektiert, as the Germans say, to the point of structural transparency.

Mind you, poetry is a curse, altogether sui generis. Not the curse of work but the curse of indeterminacy lies upon it, a curse from which its semantic value does not escape. A poem reflects, after all, its human source, in throwing open to experience quite singular planes and volumes of consciousness. For all its integratedness, a good text explodes with difference. It may not change life, but it gives an indication of how life might be differently perceived. No, it is naive to suppose that poetry can change life, change the ways in which people construe life. Yet it does subvert norms with which people mystify and atrophy themselves. It can enable imaginations to see through general ideas (the terrible simplifications) to the naked living universe. By anatomizing idols, a good text over-throws them. Perhaps it is as inhospitable as that universe. Perhaps indeterminacy here is a precise sign of that forbidding and immense presence, of the mystery we experience when we wonder about that universe and how we are placed in it.

So you go in pursuit of the kingfisher and are fortunate if you so much as glimpse a sparrow. You cannot really fly, at least not always. You don't even mean to catch the kingfisher. You only want to know from the inside how it creates its own bones, the bones which display the colours and sustain the flight.

References
Francis Ponge, The Voice of Things, translated by Beth Archer, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1972.
George Seferis, Collected Poems 1924-55, London, Cape, 1969.

Christopher Middleton's The Lonely Suppers of W. V. Balloon (poems) was published in 1975. This year, Pataxanadu & Other Prose and Bolshevism in Art and Other Expository Writings will appear.