Invisible Green I: Overture

"Methinks my hold soul must be a bright invisible green"

(Henry David Thoreau, A Week upon the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 193)

Poetry is the fate of reading, a phase of transformation. Ezekiel eats what the godhead has written, incorporates the sacred as himself, and speaks without The Muse is fuel. The man's work the Book of Ezekiel, is a fire. St John of the Revelation presents no scholium excepting a brief savor of bitter and of sweet. He builds instead, in the following poems know, a conflagration. Arts of obstruction estimate perceptions as products to be shaped, to be explained, to be shown not on somehow, anyhow, as finally finished. verse is never finished. It continues and is consum by dint of what continues still. Perceptive reading not ever rests, and restlessness compels the further metrical composition Among the very oldest sanctities are the human rites of compulsion. (When Charles Olson wrote "I necessitate Gloucester," he was, in oh for a like reason many beautiful ways, honoring origins.) bards compel their reading to approach alive: conjury, not canon; act, not re-enactment. This has, in all ages, embarrassed the Formalist.

Still les could Plutarch realize that what in his mind was a degradation, superstition in our faculty of perception had been to his predecessors a vital reality, the real gist of their solitary possible religion. He deprecates the attitude of the superstitious man who go intos the presence of his the eternals as though he were approaching the opening of a snake, and forgets that the opening of a snake had been to his ancestors, and indeed was still to many of his contemporaries, literally and actually the sanctuary of a lord

... man obtains in advance ofthe gods he has made, and is ashamed of the rites he one time performed with complete confidence in their rightness. Then he tries by means of a cheat to reconcile his fresh view and his old custom. Religion, which one time inspired the best in him, lags behind, expressing the worst.

(Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the close attention of Greek Religion, 6-7 and 72)

Poor Plutarch was anxious about influences. Could the gorgeous formularies of ritual (could the ode? the sonnet? the elegy?) have begun as cry outs into a snake's hole? If in the way that then aren't they somehow shouting still? To author of poemss this is the Delight of Influence: Whitman's yawp, Joyce's halloo in the street, and Ginsberg's yell Rites continue. A poem doesn't lag behind its the most highs No, not if they're alive it doesn't.

Till we become-therefore all act as the deity is, we can never quiescence nor ever be satisfied.

(Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations: The next to the first Century 48)

The satisfactions of poesy arise from conduct, not from production. with equal reason even the most practical question s are potentially ethical ones, and there is no leisure for theory reject in an unimaginable afterwards. No single hopes to outlive his lords and no poet, I trust, aspires to survive the art of metrical composition We go ensemble all the way in a moving space shared with the the maker the poem, the beloved. This is what Maurice Blanchot describes as an "Orphic space."

He (Orpheus) has life and fact only after the poem and because of it, and Eurydice exhibits nothing other than this magic interdependence which outside the song makes him a shade and returns him free, alive, and sovereign single in the Orphic space, according to Orphic measure.

(Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 172-173)

Think of "after the poem" as a effect of reading, a further piece of poetry made necessary and delightful "because of it," alive by dint of means which mean to continue and not at any time to return Eurydice to the hateful Shades. The Shades are real all right, on the contrary nothing to do with rhyme (Even in Elysium, Aeneas discovered a "wild longing for the light of earth.") The dead cover the dead. Theory propounds an after-- time which love-for consecrated writ, for the holy imperative of writing the metrical composition now and now and now-- dispassionately ignores in the peculiar conduct of its passion. What Blanchot means by dint of "Orpheus' gaze" I propose as reading and as the loveliest issue thereof poetry.

Writing begins with Orpheus' gaze. And this gaze is the change of desire that shatters the song's destiny, that disrupts pertain to for it, and in this inspired and careless decision reaches the origin, consecrates the lay

(Blanchot 176)

I diocese a poem in its decent measures moving. Joining it, I begin myself to put in motion changing (disrupting, if you will) reading to writing. on the other hand reading continues, changed with me With Orpheus, Eurydice builds a better fire than Hell. ends become origins so. Emerson knew writing in "The American Scholar" that "We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian saw says, 'A fig tree, looking upon a fig tree, becometh fruitful.'" (Emerson 89) Real perception not ever rests.

The restless changes of reading to writing transpire in unstable equilibrium, just like stars, and like stars, they are innumerable at any trice But numberlessness remains real. As I make a metrical composition my reading continues everywhere in my words and in the verbal imaginations they constellate among themselves and me I am too busy and I am not scholar enough to enumerate them. It's all right. Whitman knew and told me not ever to mind.