The Open Word: A Letter to Peter O’Leary

This coming Friday I'll be speaking, along with Harvard's Patrick Pritchett, Xavier's Norman Finkelstein, and Duke's David Need, at a panel at The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 called "The New Gnostics—Vectors in Postmodern Poetry II."  As the name implies, it's part of a Gnostic double bill, following the first "New Gnostics" panel given by Edward Foster, Joe Donahue, Mark Scroggins, and Peter O'Leary.  It's a project Donahue, Pritchett, and I dreamed up while having a drink at the National Poetry Foundation's conference in Orono last year, and Pritchett has had the temerity to actually make it happen.

Since O'Leary's at the conference, and my paper is about his work, and since Peter's a great lover of letters, I've written it in the form of a letter to him.  Here it is, still a hundred or so words too long for the official format.

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Dear Peter,

What has your vocabulary done to you? To me?  To us?  Or, to narrow it down a bit, to John Latta, who wrote, a propos your book Depth Theology:

Dysthymia: thymos being Greek mind, and dys- ascending out of Sanskrit dus- meaning bad, difficult, &c. O’Leary’s an inveterate neologist: in notes to Depth Theology he points to various “coinages from taxonomic roots: an apiologist (a word Emerson once used) is one who studies bees; a parulidologist is one who studies warblers.”

Your vocabulary also staggered Broc Rossell, who said in the Colorado Review that the lexical “register of Luminous Epinoia might be the most elevated in American poetry since Hart Crane.”

            You make up a fair number of words, Peter, and revive many more from the realm of the hapax legomenon, or the deeply buried Greco-cum-Latin-cum-Sanskrit & Aramaic lexicon.

            Of course there are strange words and there are strange words.  I once wrote something about the difference, and it went more or less like this:

Consider “kuboaa,” a word invented by the great modern Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, and put into the mouth of the starving hero of his masterwork, the novel Hunger. For Hamsun's delirious hero, the word was a pure sound, something outside, even above, the realm of signifying language. Always aware of the absurd, and with a longing after purity that led him into some dark corners of the psyche, Hamsun meant for his “kuboaa” to be a word free from reference. To encounter it was to encounter something alien, something of untainted otherness. You could say “kuboaa” was to be the verbal equivalent of one of Kazimir Malevich's paintings of a red square on a white background: everything familiar was to be left behind in the encounter with the unassimilated and elemental. Kuboaa was the word of the modern primitive, the word of regrounding, of beginning again, outside existing language and away from the freight of civilization.

        John Peck's “argura,” is another made-up word, and the title of his fourth volume of poetry. But it is a creature altogether different from kuboaa. As Peck writes in the notes to his Collected Shorter Poems, argura “corresponds to no single Latin word, but rather to elements that derive from roots shared among several terms.” This is not the neologism as word-free-of-reference; this is the polysemous neologism, the word that bears the trace of several meanings, and the weight of several etymologies, but that remains, finally, elusive. Argentum (silver, or money), argumentum (argument or evidence), and arguro (to make clear, but also to censure or reprove) — are all words with relevance to Peck's poetry, and lurking in argura's syllables. The point of a word like “argura” is not to lift the reader up above the trails of signification, but to send the reader down those trails in pursuit of historical and linguistic references. If kuboaa is the word of the modern primitive, argura is the word of the modern classical, sending the reader to the word-horde of Latin antiquity.

        I take the difference between a word like kuboaa and a word like argura as a cue on how to read your books, Peter—and I need cues for your books.  They’re among the most challenging — and most rewarding – books of poetry by an American poet of your generation (you can use that in a blurb if you like). No primitive, you, Mr. O’Leary, no primitive, but a poet whose work twines together classical references, history, and the present.

            If this sounds a bit like Ezra Pound, it should: you come late onto the stage of modernism, but you belong there, I think — belong, in essence, to the same wing of modernist poetry as does Ole Ez.  His, after all, is the wing of “make it new”—of the reclaiming of those elements of the cultural past that lie fallow.  It’s certainly not Marinetti’s futurist wing of “the first dawn is now,” and the shaking loose from a supposedly burdensome past—still less is it the avant-garde of denotation-free word art like Zaum or Merz, or the Dada of Hugo Ball chanting the syllables of “Karawane” at the Caberet Voltaire.

            What exactly do I mean by placing you in “the same wing” of modernism as those guys?  To understand, I suppose we have to comment on the nature of the “it” in your version of “make it new.”  My favorite description of the modernist, and neo-modernist, project of making it new via ‘argura’ style vocabulary and the revival of disused words comes from a comment Vincent Sherry made about the poetry of John Matthias: “On the one hand, the pedagogue offers from his word-hoard and reference trove the splendid alterity of unfamiliar speech; on the other, this is our familial tongue, our own language in its deeper memory and reference.”

            What Sherry says is right, I think, but in your case I would qualify it a bit, marking out your particular space in the modernist wing of things.  In your work you send us not just to the past as an end in itself, as would a good liberal humanist professor of literature, a believer in the power of cultural literacy.  I mean, you’re a believer, alright, but you and I both know it’s not some watery liberal humanism in which you believe.  What your arcane vocabulary sends us to isn’t the past in general, but, most frequently and insistently, a particular set of spiritual traditions: the more heterodox branches of Catholicism, and the Gnostic tradition, in both its ancient and its perennial manifestations.  And in doing so, you’re not just out to remind us of history, but to redeem time.

            Here’s what I mean.  Your most consistent poetic project, running from Watchfulness, through Depth Theology and the more recent Luminous Epinoia, has been redemptive, and arcane vocabulary and neologistic invention have always had a role in this project.

            Of course  “redemption” is a loaded word, and when I talk about the redemptive project of your poetry, I’m talking about the Gnostic sense of the word.  As Sean Martin writes, “redemption” for the Gnostic, “is not redemption from original sin, which does not exist in Gnosticism, but is redemption from ignorance.”  Ignorance, specifically, of the divine nature, and its presence within us.  This can mean a deliverance from the utterly fallen material world, but only for the more ascetic of Gnostics, and I don’t think you’re one of them.  While some Gnostics emphasize the evil nature of material reality, others emphasize how our world, which is at a far edge of the Pleroma, many removes from the divine core of being, is nevertheless an emanation of the divine: an unglamorous exurb, to be sure, but still a part of the greater metropolitan area of divinity, if we could only see it as such.  You seem more like that sort of Gnostic to me, like the scribes of the Nag Hammadi texts, who lovingly copied that passage from St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians in which he says “our struggle is not against flesh and blood… but against the world rulers of this darkness and the spirits of evil”—that is, against the forces that keep us from seeing the redemptive light, (in Gnostic terms, the divine spark within us and, in some iterations, in our world).

            We see this already in the first poetic sequences of Watchfulness, “Ikons” and its subordinate parts, “Ikons,” “The House of My Ikon,” and “Midas.”  Here, you give us first the gold of Eastern Mediterranean Christian icons, which through an alchemy of perception convert wooden blocks, egg yolk, and gold dust into the instruments of spiritual transcendence.  You then give us the King Midas of Greek legend, whose transformative powers are altogether less impressive, not converting matter into a pathway to spirit, but merely into other matter, ending with the materiality of gold that is only the beginning of the icon as instrument of spiritual transformation.  The final image of Midas passing a golden grail (“grail” — there’s a loaded word!) from hand to hand as he “changes it unavailed/from gold to gold” is a wonderful underlining of the futility of the merely material world, by the way, and a good exhibit in any case to be made for you as a Gnostic who would free us from subservience to the rulers who would keep us locked in the darkness of the merely historical and material.

            Anyway.  Neologism and linguistic transformation come into play later in the book, in the three “Jerusalem” sections.  Here, we’re amid a lexicon of technical Greek and Latin, and verbs unknown to the OED.  And we get some important hints about your concern with the transformation of vocabulary when you reference the word “shibboleth” and the phrase “brightness fall from the air”—the first reminds us of how the inability of the Ephraimites to pronounce the “sh” sound, and their consequent slaughter by the Gileades when they inadvertently said “sibboleth”; the second refers to one of the greatest typos in the history of English poetry, when Thomas Nashe’s description of the effects of the plague, “brightness falls from the hair,” was accidentally reset into a much more memorable line.  Both remind us of the power of linguistic transformation, whether political or literary—and in the “Ephphatha” section, we see the spiritual power of linguistic transformation.

             “Ephphatha,” as the contextualizing passage from the Gospel of Mark you were kind enough to quote as an epigraph makes plain, is the Aramaic word Christ used to mean “opening” or “be open,” or “be thou open”— though in your quote it appears as “Ephpheta,” a variant translated spelling.  And this is a hint of what is to follow, when we delve into the possible etymologies of the word: a Greek transliteration from Aramaic, a Greek transliteration of Hebrew, a Samaritan’s attempt to speak a Hebrew word, and so forth.  We read, too, about St. Jerome’s idiosyncratic apprehension of the word, morphing “eppheta” into “adapirire”—the inadvertent making of new words from old playing into the opening and closing of spiritual possibilities.

            And here we come close to an understanding of the role of linguistic revival, argura-style neologism, and raids on the Mediterranean word hoard in your Gnostic poetics. Let me get at that role by describing a temptation I feel, and resist, when reading your work.

            I’m tempted to say you believe in the imagination as a divine force.  When you titled your book Luminous Epinoia, you were making an obscure reference to The Apocryphon of John, in which the ‘Luminous Epinoia’ is a term for an old Gnostic trope, the “creative or inventive consciousness sent to Adam by God in the form of Eve,” (Eve, in many Gnostic texts, is the seeker of knowledge, and her plucking of the fruit from the tree a redemptive act, rather than a sin).  Me, I’m immersed so thoroughly in Romanticism that I can’t help seeing the idea of the luminous epinoia as similar to Coleridge’s notion in the Biographia Litteraria, when he defines the imagination as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” and the conscious poetic act as “an echo of the former.”  But there’s something different.  Coleridge speaks of creativity as an echo of the divine.  You do, too, I think—but you do so in a vocabulary that specifically references the Gnostic spiritual tradition.  And this leads me to resist the temptation to say you simply see the imagination as divine.  Because, unlike Coleridge, you approach the issue through an arcane vocabulary that refers back to spiritual traditions, I think it’s better to say that you don’t see the individual imagination as divine, so much as you see a specific-yet-perennial tradition of imaginative acts as laying us open to the revelation of the divine.  It’s not as if your work is telling us “invent, and be like God!” — it’s more like your work is pointing us to a long, wayward tradition, and saying, a propos that tradition, “be thou open.”

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A pdf of my review of O'Leary's Luminous Epinoia in Chicago Review.

Peter O'Leary, drawn by Tim Leeming, 2012

The Next Big Thing: A Meme about New Books

Beloved poet and editor Don Share has tagged me to participate in "The Next Big Thing," a meme in which people are interviewed about our upcoming books.  Here are my replies to a bunch of questions about a book of mine due out in a matter of weeks, The Poet Resigns.

What is the working title of the book?

The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World

Where did the idea come from for the book?

This isn’t really a book written, as Dwight MacDonald would say, “in cold blood” — that is, I didn’t sit down and plan to write it.  Instead, it gathers essays I’ve written on poetry and poetics over the last decade or more.

The individual essays were really on whatever topic was getting under my skin at the time.  Is there a connection between formal and political radicalism?  Why are most poets on the political left?  What are we really asking for when we demand a greater public role for poetry?

I’ve had the good fortune to talk to historians of culture and communications theorists and sociologists, and that’s really helped me to approach these issues.  I have a lot of people to thank for hashing out the ideas with me over the years.

What genre does your book fall under?

Literary Criticism.  But some of it is a bit more autobiographical than you might expect.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Let’s see.  Charles Bernstein comes up a lot, and so does Jeremy Prynne.  Although there’s not much physical resemblance, I think Alan Arkin could pull off a good Bernstein act.  And Prynne?  Ian Richardson.  I mean, come on.

Jeremy Prynne

Ian Richardson in the British version of "House of Cards"

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

We often want more from poetry than it can give, but there are good reasons why we do.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

A few of the essays are a decade or so old, so I suppose the most literally correct answer would be "a decade or more."  But I don’t feel like I really wrote this book: it just sort of happened.  That said, when I read the galley proofs, I realized that the larger theory of poetry I’ve been developing for the book I’m working on now, Making Nothing Happen: Poetry, Autonomy, Society is implicit everywhere in The Poet Resigns.  So maybe I was working on The Poet Resigns when I thought I was working on Making Nothing Happen.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

For me, the biggest inadequately answered question about poetry in our time is ‘what is this stuff for, and why do we write it?’ — and I wanted to look into it, since I've devoted much of my life to reading, writing, and teaching poetry.  I knew I couldn’t give a complete answer, but I felt I could do a lot better than some of the attempts I’d seen.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Here’s what some people I really respect have to say:

Robert Archambeau's book, The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World, is a fascinating study of what it means to practice the art in a new century. Archambeau is a wise and honest writer in assessing the pitfalls of poetry, and the shifting nature of the poet's role as public intellectual or private mutterer in the larger, noisier culture that has never really privileged poetry to the extent that the myth and history of its privilege purports. His personal touch and winning tone make the book suitable to those who favor a rich and friendly discussion of the social and cultural implications, and possible obligations, of poetry in our age. —Maxine Chernoff

"Archambeau is one of our smartest poetic sociologists, and he tackles the biggest problem facing poetry in our time: the dwindling of its audience and the growing divide between poets and a mainstream literary readership." —Norman Finkelstein, Contemporary Literature 

“If you want to see somebody having fun while thinking provocatively about contemporary poetry, try Archambeau: I always do.” —Stephen Burt

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The crack team at the University of Akron Press will be putting it out, just in time for the AWP in Boston.  Big thank-yous to Mary Biddinger, Amy Freels, John Gallaher and the whole UAP crowd.

Make up a question you think is pressing in way of poetry today.

Don Share was asked this, and came up with “Why do we think American poetry is so important?”  I think that’s a good one.

New Cimarron Review: Rejoice!

Proving that we've still got a few months of Saturday mail delivery left before the USPS abandons weekend service, I heard a satisfying clunk in my mailbox yesterday, caused by the arrival of Cimarron Review number 182, featuring various short stories, an unexpected essay about tanning machines by Meagan Ciesla, and by poetry by Sam Hamill, Ruben Quesada, Kate Gleason, and many others, including a couple of poems by some guy named Archambeau: one about Milton's neologisms and one about speaking to an imaginary lecture hall full of a career's worth of former students. Since the speaker of the latter poem is an academic with serious ethical problems, I hasten to add: I am not he — he's more of a composite of roguish profs of the 1970s and 80s, along the Grady Tripp model.  Information about subscribing or about getting your hands on a single issue is available here.

Grady Tripp, disreputable creative writing professor

Nothing in this Life: Nick Cave Among the Poets

The wonderful literary journal Horizon Review has, I've been told, suffered the inevitable fate of most wonderful little journals, and come to an end.  It's inaccessible now, the issues disappeared, the website gone dark—all very sad, since the affair began with great promise.

Since it's no longer available, I'm posting my own contribution to a 2011 Horizon, an essay on Nick Cave and poetry called "Nothing in this Life."  It will appear in somewhat different form in The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World, a book of my essays that will come out later this month.

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A pair of young poets once approached me and asked if I’d like to contribute to an anthology they were editing.  I write prose quickly, but I’m a slow poet, and don’t keep much ready-to-publish material on hand, so I was a bit wary.  “What’s the theme?” I asked, as a series of possibilities for an anthology in which I might belong flickered through my head. Rapidly graying poets? White guys who could lose some pounds?  The last generation of poets to get on the tenure track before the general derailment of academe?  It turned out to be none of the above: the young poets wanted to put together an anthology of poetry inspired by Nick Cave.

            When I mentioned the project to the Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden, he didn’t miss a beat.  Nick Cave?  Lumsden had written a poem for Nick Cave and, through a series of events too complex and unlikely to present here, he’d heard from an octogenarian friend who’d lunched with Cave that the great man himself had pored over the little chapbook in which the poem appeared—pored repeatedly, apparently fascinated, but inscrutable.  There seems to be some special connection between Cave and the poets, and I think I know what it is.

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            It was in December of 1983—right around the time Cave’s early band The Birthday Party was breaking up—that I first put my hands on a scuffed-up bootleg cassette of “Prayers on Fire,” an album the band had cut in Melbourne a couple of years earlier.  I remember clamping the headphones of my Walkman on—that’s the verb that seems most right for the kind of willful, teenaged, cutting oneself off from the world that those headphones represented—hitting play, and hearing the familiar tape-hiss (oh sound of my generation!).  But how to describe what happened after that?  I think Emily Dickinson’s words may be the only way to get at it: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” said Dickinson, “I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it.  Is there any other way?”  Somehow, during that cold night on the Canadian prairies, the top of my head was indeed taken right the fuck off.  We can actually calculate how long it hovered there: between the 2:38 of “Zoo Music Girl” and the 2:03 of “Just You and Me,” my scalp, with its lamentable gel-tipped spikes of hair, took some 29 and a half minutes to reattach to the rest of my thunderstruck self.  I’ve been able to count on a similar effect from Cave’s music—at least from a track or two from every album—ever since.

            I think at least part of the connection I felt, and still feel, to Cave’s music, comes from the one—and, really, only one—fundamental similarity between us.  We’re both the progeny of provincial culturati—which puts us into the same metaphorical shoes, even though his literal shoes are savagely cool black cowboy boots and mine are, more often than not, dopey looking sandals or grubby sneakers.

            Cave was born in Warracknabeal, Australia—a boondock town of some 2,000 souls midway between the glittering metropolises of Wycheproof and Dimboola, a place known mainly for its statistically improbable abundance of highly freckled redheads.  His parents, though, were great lovers of literature—his father was an English teacher, and his mother a librarian.  Later, the family moved to Wangaratta, another small town, one best known for being near the site of the outlaw Ned Kelly’s last stand.  As the son of an art professor in western Canada, I like to think I know a little bit about what this means.  It means a certain division of loyalties, even a kind of dislocation.  On the one hand, you love the place you’re from with the kind of intensity that only the provinces can inspire. The love of a great metropolis like New York is different, more sophisticated and perverse, and tends to take the form of a kind of hatred—would any real Manhattanite be caught dead in an un-ironic “I heart New York” tee shirt?  The love of the provinces is a simpler thing.  On the other hand, you feel connected to a set of high cultural traditions that have their deepest roots somewhere else.  It’s not that there aren’t serious readers in Warracknabeal, or art lovers in Winnipeg—it’s just that, if that’s your thing, you know you’re a little at odds with the dominant local culture. A colleague of my father’s once complained that there could never be much of an art scene in Winnipeg because there was no money to support it.  “There’s enough money,” my dad replied, “but it doesn’t get spent on art—it goes to fishing boats, cabins in the woods, and hockey tickets.”  Nothing wrong with that—but it can leave a young aesthete feeling vaguely dislocated.

            And this brings us to the Romantic poets—the first great laureates of artistic dislocation.  Much ink has been spilled trying to define the nature of Romanticism.  Carl Schmitt argued that Romanticism was all about the individual's “subjective occasionalism,” a kind of fetishizing of the moment of individual spontaneity—one might think of Jack Kerouac, hopped up on Benzedrine, and clattering away on his scroll-fed typewriter, or shouting “Go, man, go!” at Ginsberg's Six Gallery reading of Howl as the late-blooming apotheosis of sort of Romantism.  The Encyclopédie Larousse assures us that it's really all a matter of form, of artists who “freed themselves from the classical rules of composition and style”—one thinks of Paganini cutting loose with defiantly flashy and unruly solos.  M.H. Abrams said it's all a matter of emphasizing the visionary imagination, with the mind seen as a light-casting lamp, not a mirror reflecting the world as it is.  Morse Peckham said it was all a matter of self-assertion, and so did Bertrand Russell. Irving Babbitt went a step further, saying Romanticism was an “anarchy of the imagination,” such as you might find in Rimbaud. But Karl Mannheim went the other way, saying Romanticism was fundamentally conservative; dead-set in opposition to the ever-rising “bourgeois-capitalist mode of experiencing things”—if you've had a look at Wordsworth's depiction of Bartholomew Fair in The Prelude as a Dantean circle of hell, you've seen this kind of Romanticism.

            Since Romanticism can appear in so many aspects, it's no wonder, really, that Arthur O. Lovejoy shook his head in despair and said we should give the term the chuck.  I was almost willing to join him, until the great Franco-Brazilian sociologist Michael Löwy set me straight.  What holds all these loose strands together, for Löwy, is their opposition to modernity, their sense of not fitting at a comfortable angle vis-à-vis industrialism, the quantification and rationalization of all things, technocracy, and the general disenchantment of the world.  Anarchists? Backward-looking reactionaries?  Imaginative visionaries? Stylistic malcontents? Individualist outsiders?  Come on in, people—Löwy's bigtop is a commodious place.  But its inhabitants all have one thing in common: the modern world has left them homeless—sometimes literally, in the form of the poète maudit kicked out of his garret by a greedy landlord—but usually in a more metaphorical way.  It makes sense.  Think about the state of things when the first generations of Romantic writers came of age: the arts, long the handmaidens of church and state, had lost that affiliation in the breakdown of the old social order, and had yet to find a new one in the gaudy commercial world that would take its place.  Displaced from their old social roles, Romantic writers would leap into invented worlds, like Blake did.  Or they'd dream of a transformed future world, of revolution and Utopia, like P.B. Shelley.  Or they'd look to what they imagined as a lost, better world: like childhood, or village life deep in the provinces—Wordsworth's great themes.  Sometimes they yearned for the fuller, more organic social life in the middle ages, the period of the romances that gave the Romantic movement its name.  If they were particularly bright and observant, like the nineteen year old Mary Shelley, holed up in Switzerland with her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and their egos, they might dream of monstrous outsiders whose great minds and open hearts meant nothing to the torch-and-pitchfork bearing peasants who drove them to endless wanderings.  The world did not fit, felt these dislocated artists and intellectuals, and wherever they looked, it was to turn away from the modern bourgeois world of getting and spending that seemed to have no place for them.  Perhaps Baudelaire got at the situation best, when he called for a voyage going “anywhere out of the world.”

            Of course all this mattered for the kind of art these writers produced.  Earlier poets, sitting comfortably on the knee of aristocratic patronage, knew their audiences, and how to write for them.  When Lord Godolphin asked Joseph Addison for a poem commemorating the battle of Blenheim, Addison knew the political point of view, the formal norms, and the level of readability his patron expected, and for which he would pay.  Even when the market began to make its first inroads into the old patronage system, the world of paying readers was small enough that Alexander Pope knew exactly what they'd want—commonly shared views elegantly expressed in digestible couplets; or, as Pope put it, “what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed.”  But how to write in conditions when no patron, no institution, and no real market exists for the poet's work?  What to do, that is, in the Romantics' position?  Well, if there's nothing left to lose by way of worldly reward, there is, at least, a compensating freedom—a freedom for art to get as freaky as it wants to be.  And so with the Romantics we enter the world of cryptic symbols (what does Coleridge's pleasure dome stand for?); we launch off into the deep space of visionary dreams (have a look at Blake's Book of Urizen, but only after you strap yourself in for a long, strange trip); and instead of the clear, crisp pronouncements of Pope, get ready for Keats' negative capability, with its refusal to settle down into a clear statement of fact.  From here to Surrealism is just short ride on the Metro. 

*

            If we ride that same train a few more stops, we arrive at the early concerts given by Nick Cave and The Birthday Party.  I was too rusticated in the provinces to see them, and too young to get in even if I'd been in the right places.  But Duane Davis, the great bearded guru of rock history and presiding spirit of Wax Trax Records in Denver, Colorado, was kind enough to clue me in about those shows.  Here's what he said about them in Waste Paper #30 some 20 years ago, in prose he has since come to see as a bit hot-house (“I was deep in the grip of Bataille and Baudrillard,” he told me, when he sent his article my way):

The intensities of experience, the desire to act out a daily suicide in the face of an uncertain and questionable re-birth, the compulsion to burn away all the wicker of the socially woven masks our families and communities demand we wear, the immersions in pain and pleasure that take brute feeling past all points of endurance and the arrogance of total marginalization, the refusal of a Utility that measures the individual only to determine his/her productive capacities: somehow Cave has survived all this -- and more: is still searching for a performance that is a language at once private, personal and interior that can be understood by the audience, the Other, that haunts his darkest, most solipsistic, nightmares.

That's the Romantic stuff: implacably opposed to the modern, utilitarian world, and acting out its alienation in intense, dark ways.  “Everything that was him is mere charcoal and waste;” says Davis, “what is left standing is monstrous and alien.”  This is Cave as Childe Harold, as Frankenstein's monster, as Baudelaire's disheveled nighttime-wanderer in the city streets.

            Unlike a lot of rock Romantics, Cave never really left that alienation behind.  Instead, he made it the bedrock of his career.  Consider the lyrics to “There She Goes, My Beautiful World,” from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' 2004 double album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, a song I've chosen more or less at random (it came on my iPod Shuffle when last I hit the treadmill).  The song makes all the big Romantic gestures.  Here's the opening:

The wintergreen, the juniper,

the cornflower and the chicory,

all the words you said to me

still vibrating in the air.

The elm, the ash and the linden tree,

the dark and deep, enchanted sea

the trembling moon and the stars unfurled

there she goes, my beautiful world,

There she goes, my beautiful world,

There she goes, my beautiful world,

There she goes, my beautiful world,

There she goes again.

Well, it's certainly cryptic—the opening imagery is a bit hard to parse, but I do think there's a unifying theme to it.  Cornflowers were traditionally worn by young men pining for love, the idea being that their hopes would wither with the flowers.  Chicory was used in times of deprivation to substitute for coffee, and wintergreen was similarly used as a substitute for tea.  And the juniper?  Well, it was in a juniper tree that the prophet Elijah found shelter.  So we're dealing with a time of deprivation, a time when we need shelter and sustenance to get by.  The notion of the prophet in hard times is important, too: as we'll see in lines to come, the thing that Cave is missing here is his muse, so he's presenting himself as a kind of Romantic poet-prophet deprived of inspiration, which had been the only thing that made the world a beautiful, bearable place.  And, like a true Romantic, Cave sees the best world as something in the process of disappearing.

            Things become a bit clearer as the song goes on, introducing a catalog of outsider writers producing their work in a world that doesn't care for it, or for them:

John Wilmot penned his poetry

riddled with the pox;

Nabokov wrote on index cards,

at a lectern, in his socks;

St. John of the Cross did his best stuff

imprisoned in a box;

and Johnny Thunders was half alive

when he wrote "Chinese Rocks"

John Wilmot, better known as the Earl of Rochester, the man Lord Byron wished he could be; Nabokov, the amoral émigré aesthete; San Juan de la Cruz, mystic and martyr; Johnny Thunders, prototypical rocker junkie—Cave's given us a roll-call of alienated creative visionaries.  It's sort of perfect, and only an odious, ink-stained pedant would point out that it was Dee Dee Ramone and Richard Hell, not Johnny Thunders, who wrote “Chinese Rocks.”

            Let's send the pedant away, then, and get on with the song.  The next bit is where we see that it is of the muse Cave sings:

Well, me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears.

Me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears.

Me, I'm lying here, for what seems years.

I'm just lying on my bed with nothing in my head.

Send that stuff on down to me,

Send that stuff on down to me,

Send that stuff on down to me,

Send that stuff on down to me.

The world offers nothing: only inspiration from on high matters.  We hear this, and then we hear about more alienated visionaries enduring, or failing to endure, in an uncaring world:

Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles

while writing Das Kapital.

And Gauguin, he buggered off, man,

and went all tropical.

While Philip Larkin stuck it out

in a library in Hull.

And Dylan Thomas died drunk in

St. Vincent's hospital.

At home or abroad, these are exiles, displaced, working without hope of worldly reward, and sustained only by a kind of autotelos, a commitment to one's private muse.  The fate of the artist deprived of this one sustaining thing is made starkly clear with the invocation of Dylan Thomas' inglorious end.

            The next verse shows with absolute clarity the Romantic bargain: utterly alienated from this mundane world, the disciple of the muse receives something eternal instead:

I will kneel at your feet

I will lie at your door

I will rock you to sleep

I will roll on the floor

And I'll ask for nothing

Nothing in this life

I'll ask for nothing

Give me ever-lasting life

“Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes in holy dread,” say the townsfolk, when they see the poet-visionary at the end of Coleridge's “Khubla Khan,” “for he on honeydew hath fed / And drunk the milk of paradise.”  Cave offers the other perspective, that of the visionary who's turned his back on the quotidian.  He'll ask for “nothing in this life,” but that's not because he's unambitious, it's because, to paraphrase Lord Byron, he aspires beyond the fitting medium of ordinary desire, and aims at the eternal.

            With this vast ambition comes the dream—perhaps the delusion—of the outcast visionary or Romantic prophet:

I just want to move the world,

I just want to move the world,

I just want to move the world,

I just want to move.

In the first three lines, we're not just out to free ourselves from an uncaring, mundane world: we're out to transfigure it with the power of the muse.  I've always thought there should be a band called the “Unacknowledged Legislators,” since there's such a powerful strain of mystical world-changing desire in rock music, just as their was in Shelley's dream of a world secretly remade by poetry.  Greil Marcus wrote, in Lipstick Traces, about the strange feeling one gets at a great rock show, the sense that something powerful is happening, that the disenchanted world outside the club doors is somehow about to be transformed forever.  He knew what he was talking about.  But Cave does him one better, with the change we see in the last line of the verse.  It's a confession of sorts, an acknowledgement that the world won't be remade by the song.  But the singer might be, and the deliriously dancing audience in front of him—at least as long as the spell lasts.

            As we move toward the end of the song, there's a further acknowledgment of limitations, along with a kind of affirmation:

So if you got a trumpet, get on your feet,

brother, and blow it.

If you've got a field, that don't yield,

well get up and hoe it.

I look at you and you look at me and

deep in our hearts know it —

that you weren't much of a muse,

but then I weren't much of a poet.

The muse, it turns out, wasn't some celestial goddess, but merely a real person.  The song wasn't earth-shattering prophecy.  But that doesn't mean we should give up in resignation.  It just means we'll have to carry on, doing the best we can with whatever means of creation we have available in this otherwise fruitless world.  It's important, as Cave makes clear in the closing lyrics, still addressed to the muse despite his understanding that she is, to some extent, the creation of his own imagination, a projection onto the real person at whom he's looking:

I will be your slave,

I will peel you grapes,

up on your pedestal,

with your ivory and apes

with your book of ideas,

with your alchemy.

Oh come on,

send that stuff on down to me,

send that stuff on down to me,

send that stuff on down to me,

send that stuff on down to me,

send that stuff on down to me,

send it all around the world.

'Cause here she comes, my beautiful girl.

There she goes, my beautiful world…

The double movement at the end's the thing, isn't it?  The muse arrives—but at just that moment the vision slips away again.  That's the real Romantic state, burning with passionate intensity that can never slip into complacency, because the better world for which one wishes is always in the process of vanishing, and the merely mundane world from which one feels alienated—the world of Coleridge's farmer from Porlock—is always ready to intrude on the evanescent realm of the visionary.

            So.  When I think about all the poets I know who love Cave's work, and all the poets I don't know, whose poems on Cave will soon fill an anthology, I think I understand the connection.  Poets, more than novelists or playwrights or memoirists, are out on the fringes of the utilitarian world we live in.  “Give up verse, my boy, there's nothing in it,” said Mr. Nixon, the successful novelist in Ezra Pound's “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.”  That was 1920, and the world hasn't become less commercial since.  If you're plugging away as a poet nowadays, odds are you're in some sense a Romantic.  And I bet when you hit the treadmill (since only the most Romantic of Romantics aims at an early death), you've got Nick Cave on your iPod.