Donald Revellexcerpt from Invisible Green II
"Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green."We must not look for poetry in poems. Poetry has further to go and greater occasions. As energy, it outspeeds the mass and manners of art, passing through words along the way to life. It is itself alive, and bursts from poems in actual ecstasy. ("Energy is Eternal Delight"--William Blake.) I want to write of ecstasy, the continuous motion of poetry out of confinements, out of poems. Poetry asserts the consequence of delight, i.e. an outside and worldly life where purposes are real, where methods are issues of morality. Poetry must be good. Blake made no idle allusion: "The Authors are in Eternity" (letter to Thomas Butts, April 25, 1803). In motion always, eternity is indistinguishable from creation, and there the link between ecstasy and ethics shines with sunshine life. Looking for poetry, we are moved to action brightly by action. Jane Ellen Harrison, in her passion for source-work, evinced the actions of human art as energies seeking entirety.
(Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 193)
We have seen that art promotes a part of life, the spiritual, image-making side. But this side, wonderful though it is, is never the whole of actual life. There is always the practical side. The artist is always also a man. Now the aesthete tries to make his whole attitude artistic--that is, contemplative. He is always looking and prying and savouring, savourant, as he would say, when he ought to be living. The result is that there is nothing to savourer. All art springs by way of ritual out of keen emotion towards life, and even the power to appreciate art needs this emotional reality in the spectator. The aesthete leads at best a parasite, artistic life, dogged always by death and corruption. (Ancient Art and Ritual, 215)Anything less than life is not alive. Anything short of action is corruption. Poetry "springs" via the poem "towards life." To remain confined by an object of contemplative reading degrades poetry to parasitism, and in that state its powers dissipate and die. Death or ecstasy: there are no other options. And so again, ecstasy shows itself to be a practical matter. "The artist is always also a man," and as Harrison's beautifully emphatic prepositions--"by" & "out" & "towards"--aver, when practice is human, practice is conduct, i.e. ethical. Without aesthetic immunity, poetry is real behavior, timely and first-hand. When value is worldly, poetry goes to the world.The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar," 88)Poetry, the soul of poems, does not reside or rest in them. It goes. We follow. We read to go where poetry has gone and to preserve the possibility of a delightful contact. In "The Poet," Emerson describes the ways of an ecstatic pursuit.The universe is the externalization of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. (266)The beginning bursts. Soul seeks an outside, where poetry has led. Reality runs the risk of appearing.Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word. (269)The outside is unprecedented, and poetry has no word for it. But in the delightful moment, it finds a new word which is nothing less than itself, suddenly atoned. This kind of thing can happen. There are records: poems.Language is fossil poetry. (271)There are records, but no rest. A fossil proves that life has gone. Faith adds a preposition: gone on. Poetry must be good faith.But nature has a higher end...than security, namely ascension...(272)The italics are Emerson's. Faith is meant for bursting forth. Cast your eyes down for fossils. For poetry, look up. "for/ christ's sake, look/ out where yr going"--Robert Creeley, "I Know a Man." (The italics are mine.)For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. (279)It is good to be going. I mean, it is Good to be going. Some poems show the way.
Donald Revell is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently There Are Three (Wesleyan, 1998). He is professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.
