The emotions are engaged
Entering the city
As entering any city.
We are not coeval
With a locality
But we imagine others are,
We encounter them. Actually
A populace flows
Thru the city.
This is a language, therefore, of New York
- Section 3, Of Being Numerous, George Oppen
***
And only the sky arches
the long train ride
between sound and word.
- Matvei Yankelevich, from Alpha Donut
You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology a cosmogony laid out, before all eyes there is no part of yourself you can separate out saying, this is memory, this is sensation this is the work I care about, this is how I make a living it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole you do not "make" it so there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from hangs from the heaven you create every man / every woman carries a firmament inside & the stars in it are not the stars in the sky w/out imagination there is no memory w/out imagination there is no sensation w/out imagination there is no will, desire history is a living weapon in yr hand & you have imagined it, it is thus that you "find out for yourself" history is the dream of what it can be, it is the relation between things in a continuum of imagination what you find out for yourself is what you select out of an infinite sea of possibility no one can inhabit yr world yet it is not lonely, the ground of the imagination is fearlessness discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play but the puppets are in yr hand your counters in a multidimensional chess which is divination & strategy the war that matters is the war against the imagination all other wars are subsumed in it. the ultimate famine is the starvation of the imagination it is death to be sure, but the undead seek to inhabit someone else's world the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism the ultimate claustrophobia is "it all adds up" nothing adds up & nothing stands in for anything else THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT There is no way out of the spiritual battle There is no way to avoid taking sides There is no way you can not have a poetics no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher you do it in the consciousness of making or not making yr world you have a poetics: you step into the world like a suit of readymade clothes or you etch in light your firmament spills into the shape of your room the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves A woman's life / a man's life is an allegory Dig it There is no way out of the spiritual battle the war is the war against the imagination you can't sign up as a conscientious objector the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance it is a war for this world, to keep it a vale of soul-making the taste in all our mouths is the taste of our power and it is bitter as death bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself the war is the war for the human imagination and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you The imagination is not only holy, it is precise it is not only fierce, it is practical men die everyday for the lack of it, it is vast & elegant intellectus means "light of the mind" it is not discourse it is not even language the inner sun the polis is constellated around the sun the fire is central
The first draft of my translation of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” into Farsi was written over three bed-ridden days in a village in India, in the summer of 2005. The date is important to this account for a few reasons — none of them entirely personal.
To begin, I was 23 at the time, younger than Ginsberg when he wrote the poem but in the same developmental ballpark. It also matters that all this predates the events that came on the heel of the Iranian elections in 2009. I am not sure if I would have picked up the poem for translation in the years that have followed — and if I would, the result would have been very different. Finally, I was as surprised as anyone to see that at least four translations of “Howl” appeared in Farsi around the same time I put the finishing touches on mine. All these translators, as far as I know, also belong to my generation, the generation of people who grew up after the ‘79 Revolution.
Here I want to make some sense of the appeal of “Howl” in that particular period in Iran. In the process, I think I will manage to say something about the intersection of the poem, the times, the generation of translators, and the act of translation.
“Howl” is the seminal poem of the Beat Generation. Seminal not in the sense that it was present at the inception of the Generation, but that in hindsight it appears to have brought the Beats into existence. I say in hindsight, because Jack Kerouac had already named the small, underground clique of individuals around him by 1948, eight years before the first reading of the poem. But it’s that first reading that continues to generate the impression that something more than a clique or an attitude had coalesced in the arteries of the great American metropolis.
Generations that have a name usually earn it by being the subject of a disaster: war, famine, exile. Their name refers to a common seal of calamity on the minds of a people born close enough, in time and space, to the impact zone of the disaster. A good translation of Beat into Farsi, koofteh, which connotes both the tired (“I’m beat”) and the rhythmic feelings Kerouac intended, is eerily close to the name often used to refer to my generation in Iran. We are known as nasl-e sookhteh, the Burnt Generation. It’s a name with a collective origin, as much to do with the fires of the eight-year war against Iraq as with the feeling of being burnt out, of being irredeemably damaged before reaching a promised potential. As it stands, it’s a passive name, a given one.
The tremendous social force of “Howl,” unprecedented in American poetry since Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and so far unreplicated, springs from its ambition to actively create a generation. The calamities described in the poem are never passive, received ones. They are the result of the individuals’ chosen journeys. The descriptions are chock-full of failure, but failure that is accepted from the onset and embraced at the closing of an act.
Something I wrote for my friend Lynne’s Exit Strata today: memories of Paul Violi; a poem from his first book, In Baltic Circles; a poem of my own. Also, this cover portrait of him by Linda North is beautiful.
In the old romanticism the poem was an uncommon effect of common experience on the poet. All interest in the poem centered in this mysterious capacity of the poet for overfeeling, for being overaffected. In Poe the old romanticism ended and the new romanticism began. That is, the interest was broadened to include the reader: the end of the poem was pushed ahead a stage, from the poet to the reader. The uncommon effect of experience on the poet became merely incidental to the uncommon effect which he might have on the reader. Mystery was replaced by science; inspiration by psychology. In the first the poet flattered himself and was flattered by others because he had singular reactions to experience; in the second the object of flattery makes himself expert in the art of flattery.
What is a poem? A poem is nothing. By persistence the poem can be made something; but then it is something, not a poem. Why is it nothing? Because it cannot be looked at, heard, touched or read (what can be read is prose). It is not an effect (common or uncommon) or experience; it is the result of an ability to create a vacuum in experience––it is a vacuum and therefore nothing. It cannot be looked at, heard, touched or read because it is a vacuum. Since it is a vacuum it is nothing for which the poet can flatter himself or receive flattery. Since it is a vacuum it cannot be reproduced in an audience. A vacuum is unalterably and untransferably a vacuum––the only thing that can happen to it is destruction. If it were possible to reproduce it in an audience the result would be the destruction of the audience.
The confusion between the poem as effect and the poem as vacuum is easily explained. It is obvious that all is either effect or it is nothing. What the old romanticism meant by an uncommon effect was a something that was not an effect, an over-and-above experience. It did not occur to anyone to imagine nothing, the vacuum; or, if it did, only with abhorrence. The new romanticism remedied this inaccuracy by classifying the poem as the cause of an effect––as both cause and effect. But as both cause and effect the poem counts itself out of experience: proves itself to be nothing masquerading as something. As something it is all that the detractors of poetry say it is; it is false experience. As nothing––well, as nothing it is everything in an existence where everything, being effect of effect without cause, is nothing.
Whenever this vacuum, the poem, occurs, there is agitation on all sides to destroy it, to convert it into something. The conversion of nothing into something is the task of criticism. Literature is the storehouse of these rescued something. In discussing literature one has to use, unfortunately, the same language that one uses in discussing experience. But even so, literature is prefereable to experience, since it is for the most part the closest one can get to nothing.
***
The only productive design is designed waste. Designed creation results in nothing but the destruction of the designer: it is impossible to add to what is; all is and is made. Energy that attempts to make in the sense of making a numerical increase in the sum of made things is spitefully returned to itself unused. It is a would-be-happy-ness ending in unanticipated and disordered unhappiness. Energy that is aware of the impossibility of positive construction devotes itself to an ordered using-up and waste of itself: to an anticipated unhappiness which, because it has design, foreknowledge, is the nearest approach to happiness. Undesigned unhappiness and designed happiness both mean anarchism. Anarchism is not enough.
– Laura Riding
