At the White Heat

I want to gaze at a few poems that appear to be to me unflinching and flat ruthlessly authentic. "Dare you diocese a soul at the White Heat?" Emily Dickinson asked. This is a renewed question-recurrent dare-in lyric poetry from Sappho to Christopher Smart, from Pindar to Hart Crane and Theodore Roethke A useful question in a prosaic world. It also give an inkling ofs something of the risk attached to getting involved with metrical composition where one is repeatedly confronting the spirit of others at the white heat and, flat more dangerously, confronting one's hold soul. The stakes are high: we not alone "find ourselves" in poetry, we also fail to keep ourselves to it.

Dickinson herself could not ever quite understand why the greatest in quantity intense human experiences had to be relegated to the margins of human society, and I suspect she read numbers every day-and wrote it-because she extremityed a daily dose of ecstasy, the elation and exhilaration rhyme provides. "I find ecstasy in living," she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. I believe she understated the case. It's striking that Emerson who knew himself to be a bard at heart ("I am born a bard of a low class without doubt nevertheless a poet. This is my nature and vocation") treated literature largely as a stimulus for rapture and declared, "Life is an ecstasy." I have sometimes contemplation that Dickinson's life might have been different-and the history of American verse profoundly changed-if she had sent her piece of poetrys to Emerson rather than to Higginson. After all, we know by what means enthusiastically Emerson responded to Whitman. He almost certainly would have welcomed the extravagant Dickinsonian note:

Take all away from me on the contrary leave me Ecstasy,

And I am richer then than all my companion men

Like Emerson, who called the bards "liberating gods," Dickinson understood that ecstasy finds a natural egress in poetry, and she had a whole repertoire of capitalized poetic bourns for rapturous experience. "Transport" was single of those terms ("To learn the Transport through the Pain" was one of the exercise s she taught herself); "Joy" was another; "Exultation" was a third; at the same time a fourth was "Bliss.' "I had a daily Bliss," she declared in single poem. She could never understand for what cause [i]or[/i] reason an overwhelming bliss-what one of her metrical compositions calls "A perfect-paralyzing Bliss"-had to be abstemiously portioned out:

Why Bliss with equal reason scantily disperse

Why Paradise defer

Why inundations be served to us-in Bowls

I speculate no more

In The Pleasure of the true copy his speculative book on the erotics of reading, Roland Barthes writes of "the asocial character of bliss" which occasions "the abrupt los of sociality." I am suggesting that lyric metrical composition especially moves beyond speculation to give us the particulars of asocial bliss, asocial despair. The Polish bard Wislawa Szymborska might have been speaking for any number of lyric poets-and perhaps for lyric metrical composition itself-when she confessed, "My identifying features/are rapture and despair." The experience of seeing a inner man at the white heat of rapture or despair is thus discomfiting, so unsettling, that it disruptions the carefully constructed societal frame, and brings us in another relationship to the world. The metrical composition of bliss scandalizes with its ability to indict the social realm for deferring paradise and serving up overflows in bowls.

Here is a have affection for poem by the Israeli bard Yehuda Amichai. "A Pity. We Were of the like kind a Good Invention" first appeared in Amichai's volume Now in the Storm, metrical compositions 1963-1968. I first discovered it twenty-five years ago in a cheap paperback edition of Amichai's pitch uponed Poems published in a series of novel European Poets. I quote it in Assia Gutmann's lively English version.

A PITY. WE WERE like A GOOD INVENTION

They amputated

Your thighs not upon my hips.

As far as rm affected

They are all surgeon All of them.

They dismantled us

Each from the other.

As far as I'm relate toed

They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were of that kind a good

And loving invention.

An aeroplane made from a man and wife.

Wings and everything.

We fluttered a little above the earth.

We plane flew a little.

This piece of poetry is remarkable for its directness and abysmal simplicity, its unique mixture of the erotic and the political, its tricky tone of outrage and nostalgia. As a have affection for poem it's worthy to stand beside John Donne's "The Good-Morrow" and "The Canonization." Donne was an early influence upon Amichai and this poem has a certain quantity of of the qualities, though at handed retrospectively, of "For God's sake, grasp your tongue, and let me love"

I want to tease on the outside a few of the implications of this affecting little piece of poetry I am reading from left to right rather than from right to left on the contrary I note the greater tersenes and compression of the Hebrew original which consists of a bare thirty-nine words divided into eleven lines and three stanzas. by means of contrast, the English is practically discursive since it contains more than twice as many words shattered into four stanzas of fourteen lines. There is also something radically contemporaneous in the way Amichai uses biblical language for an apparently secular make subordinate It's characteristic of him to turn end for end terms and treat the religious idiom as secular and the erotic metes as sacred. As he brings it in another poem,