Donald Revellexcerpt from Invisible Green I: Overture
"Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green."Writing continues reading, returning action to the labors and delights of the day. (Returned to eternity, writing is prophecy, but to paraphrase Eckhart, I will not speak of that for now.) To see poems as the culmination of reading or of any process is to turn them against themselves, to make obstacles out of energies, shadows from daylight. Poems do not conduct their sunshine life among the Shades. The aesthete begrudges Orpheus his Eurydice. Yeats knew. The aesthete takes a mess of shadows for his meat.
(Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 193)
And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and lo, a roll of a book was therein; And he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe. Moreover he said unto me, Son of Man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel. So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll. (Ezekiel 2:9-10 and 3:1-2)And I went unto the angel and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey. And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up... (Revelation 10:9-10)Poetry is the fate of reading, a phase of transformation. Ezekiel eats what God has written, incorporates the sacred as himself, and speaks out. The Muse is fuel. The man's book, the Book of Ezekiel, is a fire. St. John of the Revelation offers no scholium excepting a brief savor of bitter and of sweet. He builds instead, in the sequence poems know, a conflagration.* * * A like imperative and sparkling begins The Cantos of Ezra Pound. "Canto I" does indeed open in medias res, but the res is not Ezra's but Homer's, and Pound does nothing to hide it. The writing of The Cantos starts from reading, and very early.And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward Bore us on outward with bellying canvas, Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller, Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end. Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean, Came we then to the bounds of deepest water, To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever With glitter of sun-rays Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven Swartest night stretched over wretched men there. The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place Aforesaid by Circe. (Ezra Pound, Selected Cantos 3)Pound's Englishing of passages from The Odyssey (Book XI) is neither overture nor tour de force. It is practical and it is dutiful. Like Odysseus, even as Odysseus (the "I" of "Canto I" is Pound and the wandering king of Ithaka all at once), he makes pious consultation with the spirits of words prior to his own. Needing to go forward, Odysseus went down among the dead to find his way. It was a matter of survival and then of sunlight. Meaning to begin, Ezra Pound avows the fact and even the literal facticity of what he himself has dearly read.* * * As reading continues in all writing, real attention, the best purpose of poetry, means active mindful moving on. We labor in good company: Orpheus, a fig tree, a turtledove. A mind for the work makes all the difference. I remember a terrible distinction between the heroes Hektor and Aeneas. As each confronted the hour of his greatest trial, each paused a moment to kiss his son. Little Astyanax screamed at the sight of his helmeted father, and so Hektor...lifted from his head the helmet and laid it in all its shining upon the ground. Then taking up his dear son he tossed him about in his arms, and kissed him... (Homer's Iliad, VI 472-474)The later epic offers a less refractory but equally tender moment. Of pious Aeneas, Virgil writes...dressed in mail, he hugs Ascanius and through his helmet gently kisses him: "From me, my son, learn valor and true labor; from others learn of fortune..." (Virgil's Aeneid, XII 584-587)Hektor, if only briefly, removed his helmet. Later he was killed, bequeathing his son a ruined city and an early death. Aeneas, more mindful of his purpose and so, I believe, more loving, kept his helmet on. He triumphed that same day, and he bequeathed Ascanius life and a continuing city. Hektor kisses in the past tense, Aeneas in the present. The poetry is the difference. In his poem "Heroes," Robert Creeley lifts the Virgilian imperative into our time.In all those stories the hero is beyond himself into the next thing, be it those labors of Hercules, or Aeneas going into death. I thought the instant of the one humanness in Virgil's plan of it was that it was of course human enough to die, yet to come back, as he said, hoc opus, hic labor est. That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking. This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil is dead now two thousand years, yet Hercules and the Aeneid, yet all that industrious wis- dom lives in the way the mountains and the desert are waiting for the heroes, and death also can still propose the old labors. (Robert Creeley, The Collected Poems 192)The proposal is splendid restlessness, an urge for the further poem, "the next/thing." "That was the Cumaean Sibyl..." "This is Robert Creeley..." Exactly pious, but never overshadowed, Creeley sees actual mountains really waiting. Work is there.
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.
