MAKING MODERNISM NEW

Barry Goldensohn

Skidmore College

David Gordon, Outward (1991), Repairs (1992), Rest (1992), (the first three sections of Voyage) National Poetry Foundation, 1991-, Orono, ME. $9.95 per volume.

Now in his sixties, the poet and translator of Classical Chinese, David Gordon, is a second generation Modernist. He has strong affiliations both to William Carlos Williams, with whom he shares a sense of the local as the true place of art, and to Ezra Pound, with whom he shares the contrary movement, away from the local to the great globe itself with its profusion of languages, cultures, and histories. Outward and Repairs both suggested that the cultural epics of Pound and Williams were dominant for Gordon. The latest section, Rest, is closer to the theological structure that we find in Dante than it is to the "periplum," the voyage as seen through the eyes of the sailor from shipboard that Pound describes as the organizing point of view of the Cantos. The eye of the poet failed to provide an epic structure, as we see in the Cantos and Paterson, and this was a profound concern of Pound and Williams and part of their struggle with the poet's ways of knowing. Now a generation later and the end of a century, the poet-observer has a very muted presence in Gordon's work, which suggests that we may have finally come the full 180 degrees (a wee bit more than a degree a year) from The Prelude and "the growth of the poet's mind" as the paradigm of the knowing mind. What we may experience as merely a personal decorum in Gordon that forbids self-dramatization is at heart a firm disavowal of the claim of self-disclosure as a guarantee of authenticity and significance. As Rest emerges to form the third part of David Gordon's projected ten part poem Voyage, we see the whole enterprise assume the form of the theological epic, like The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. The political and ethical fuse to form a "theology" in the true Confucian manner, and part of the frame seems to be a meditation on the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, an amendment per book, in the first three, and ten books are projected. In a prospectus for Voyage, Gordon explains that he has in mind an orderly structure built around ten levels of expanding consciousness.

Outward and Repairs deal with the process of evolutionary struggle: the journal of the frigate Essex, the scroll of local history showing the development of democratic institutions (particularly the Bill of Rights) in the struggles of the colonies; the right to oppose the impressment of seamen in a dramatic account of the historic confrontation on ship and in court ("Rex vs.Corbett"); Flaubert's three lives (from Trois Contes); Gordon's Maine neighbor Linnie's descent into the underworld and Linnie's granddaughter Carla's education as a biologist; Revolutionary battles and so forth. When the writer's voice appears in these sections, it assumes a profoundly modest role, not that of the artist whose mind and experience are exemplary (as a true heir of the Romantic and Modernist traditions) nor as the seeker whose personal search is all-important. Captain Porter of the Essex, whose journal entries concern his voyage into the Pacific to defend American whalers from the British, is far more important.

The story of Gordon's fellow townsman, Linnie and his granddaughter Carla, grows and develops through these three books (perhaps we should call them sections). In particular, in Rest we begin to understand the Confucian depth and resonance of "a leader's light" as we see glimpses of old Linnie's role as a sage in the family and the community. However, we see him first in his Odyssean voyage to the Underworld, and this suggests a fusion of the Confucian with the Homeric vision of the hero:

With such packed light

underpinning our sills

we woke in cobalt dawn

to cawing crows

and old Linnie, near by,

who once broke his spine:

horse bolted from bee's nest...

fell from hay wain...

heard loud timber-snap...

swift night lit...

saw his bones

laid out in an oak pail

unreeled down

to clean out the stone-lined well,

a Ching well

to seek Wang-ming light,

a leader's light.

(Outward, p.14)

Since Linnie is a man of action with a philosophical concern for order and the right path, he first consults history, as a good Confucian. He adds a concern for honor and the common good--virtues that we do not associate with Odysseus--to that of the seeker.

The following passage continues from the last as a bridge to the third section of Outward, and while it employs the half-lines of Anglo-Saxon, it handles the stress and alliteration with greater subtlety, flexibility and beauty than we usually find in modern versions of it:

And as Linnie was lowered

down the well shaft,

heard drone, far off voices,

rasping flint throats,

stringy old men, tough,

bull-chest men, boys,

scared whispers, screams, women,

from close at hand

as out of the stones

along the well wall:

(Outward, p.15)

This introduces the next section of the poem, which is a meditation in the form of quotes, "voices...as out of the stones", from 18th and 17th century Massachusetts (of which Maine was a part) documents, as it continues to echo the descent into the underworld--understood in Confucian, not Christian, terms as the voices of the dead, come to tell us about their struggles in the Colony. In this sense, they are similar to the Homeric dead, who are full of individuality and pathos. And the voices that follow are quotations going from 1791 back to 1584 dealing with political, economic and domestic life.

The book's most conspicuous difference from the Cantos is its commitment to clarity of texture and design. What seems like echoes of the Cantos at various points may finally be a reminder of the power and urgency of the Pound legacy. Gordon's interest in American politics is fundamentally different. He envisions the development of the institutions of civil liberties as the slow, hesitant growth of an urgent and often baffling human need, and not as Pound's passionate political rectitude revealed in crystalline moments by emblems of virtue and vice.

The underworld that we see in Outward is not primarily a moral geography, as in the Divine Comedy, nor "a hell for other people" (Eliot's judgement), as in Pound's Hell Cantos. It is a historical exploration of the background of the Maine world in which Gordon finds himself. Startlingly, it is presented in reverse chronological order.

1779 Septr 6

"...in the...expedition

to Penobscot...filed a Complaint...

Lieut Colonel Paul Revere

for disobedience...for behavior

tending to cowardice..."

...

1755 June 14

"...after their

killing

& barberously

using and Sculping

one boy,

they...killed

or carried

captive

another..."

June 9

"...for every Scalp

of such Female

or Male

Indian

under Twelve

Years of Age

Twenty Pounds."

1638

"Yf any mans

servant takes

a distast

against his

master, away

the go to

their pleasure"

(Outward, pp. 25, 40, 62)

The technique is disorienting and then reorienting. The first thing to be shifted is the sense of causality and as a result, of inevitability, fate, destiny--especially the politically treacherous notions of national or regional destiny. (These ideas play a satisfyingly complex role in Rest.) The reverse chronology in Outward is not upward and inspirational but downward and exploratory, explanatory, moving toward the root, the matrix, not the cause but the context. What emerges most clearly in this sequence is the variety of human voices, mostly individual, but occasionally institutional--the language of law, and of political declarations in which the brutalities of the anti-colonial and Indian wars are all the more evident.

A great deal of quotation is incorporated in the poem in the form of very artful arrangement, but there is little sense of the passive or the pastiche in the making of it. In Outward, the sources vary from seagoing journals to legal and political documents of Maine history to personal letters and diaries. In Repairs we move beyond Maine history to larger national issues of the Revolutionary period, like the right to self-defense of seamen resisting being impressed on a British man-o'-war. The technique is fascinating. All of the quotations are resonant, as they must be, within the context of the poem, but there is something about many of them that enables Gordon to turn them into poetry while others, by contrast, stay hacked prose. And in Rest, we find passages of geological history that are intended to remain simply interpolated prose.

The voyage outward, in this first book, is the voyage inward by the same motion: "Human work is the search into self...into the unknown." This line from the conclusion to Outward (p.67) defines a path that Pound forswore often, choosing instead to dramatize the self. Nor do we have here the growth of the poet's soul as a paradigm of the moral world and of "human work." We have instead a historical setting, implying that we are revealed not by human nature but by a human history. This is the real meaning of the local for poets. It is the growth of the soul of a place that we are given by William Carlos Williams and David Gordon, and as they succeed they do so with a vision that it is not only all art that is local, but all life as well.

Repairs has a bolder and more individual music than Outward: there is less of the found poem and more movement into its own territory, with parallel images of growth and change and the metamorphosis underlying them, the development of rights during the revolutionary period in America, and the interweaving (already mentioned) of microbiology with Flaubert's exploration of unselfish service. It is in this spectrum of concerns that we recognize one of the triumphs of High Modernism, its appropriation of incongruous and 'unliterary' learning into its vision of wholeness. The local is clearly not a limit of focus. The local Maine Abenaki language begins Repairs and its music is discussed with Gordon's own remarkable music that plays it back for us:

thrush tongue unfolds old tune-husk: arpeggio,

jagged,

strings,

distinct,

plucked;

"aboriginal language"

of these streams, swales,

Father Rasles jotted down

a word list,

a branch of the Algonquin language;

as clavichord

lightly thrummed, or Bream's lute

This passage draws to a close with a celebration of the Abenaki word itself:

Ne

tess

ke

nets

bena

"We sing in response

to the song"

Netesskenetsbena

(Repairs, pp 1-2)

In a manner very different from this interlingual high music (including the beautifully English jagged arpeggio of distinct consonants in the first lines) we have an English vernacular carrying meter, the non-alliterative half-lines with a much more varied stress pattern than Anglo-Saxon, in which we can hear Gordon's musical sophistication. The following lines concern Carla's decision to return from college to be with her dying mother: unselfish service here and in Maine, both a Christian and Confucian pattern of nurture.

Snow gamed, dibbed,

tiffed the clinched pane:

"Her dying, want to be

at her side, home;

battened down in

a class room, I can't."

Stove's flame sucked wind,

muttered, whined:

"Have to slog through it

no matter how

tough, then in your own

thumbs you'll find trust."

(Repairs, p. 46)

This carrying meter may be Gordon's greatest gift to the craft. It is crabbed and personal, and it turns colloquial speech into lyric intensity with what seems like an effortless sacrifice of the fluent and graceful. There is no sense here of the laxity of real conversation. This is talk about what matters and it has found its form.

In Rest Gordon has launched a number of voyages seeking rest--in the shape of the homeland, the place variously of people's own language and culture, conscience, religion, art and the artful cultivation of the land, like the ingenious schemes of irrigation by the Acadians in Nova Scotia. Unlike the first two sections, Rest hammers away at its themes, and as the political, ethical and philosophical framework becomes more elaborate, Gordon devises many more parallel structures, thematically arranged, including a continuation of the overall structural plan of Voyage that follows the Bill of Rights in each book. Rest refers repeatedly to troops being billeted against the will of native populations. In Outward we find references to free speech (but referred to Aeschylus and Homer) and in Repairs references to the right to bear arms (supported not by the Bill of Rights or the National Rifle Association but by Gandhi!) The future Confucian scholars of Voyage will find a citation from Book II of Ta Hsueh in Repairs and in from Book III in Rest concerning the idea of rest.

However, Rest is not a philosophical tract. It is full of stories, many of them terribly violent, and their parallels shape the poem. We have a sequence of narratives of battles for homelands and especially against enforced loyalty to secular and religious authorities:

the massacre at Glencoe, Scotland, in 1692;

the mass suicide to avoid submission at Masada;

the Viking raids in England and France, and their attempts to settle in North America;

the suppression of Languedoc;

the murder and dispersal of the Acadians;

the Huguenot Massacres.

Interwoven with these histories are the historical geology of the Maine landscape, Gordon's home, and the growth and education of Carla. There are other interweavings elaborated from the earlier books--Flaubert's three lives, Felicite, Julien the Hospitaler and the dual story of John the Baptist/Herodias. Captain Porter of the U.S. Frigate Essex continues his voyage to keep the seas clear of foreign intervention with American commerce. Starting with Maine's native Abenaki, the flood of languages now includes Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Medieval and Seventeenth Century French, Old Norse, Gaelic, Cajun French, and Indo-European roots.

This third section concerns the centrality and sanctity of home, the place of rest, where you start from and where you end up, and opens with the behavior of birds and slime mold, the American Revolution, and historical geology:

Ice-sheets covered all New England except...

a few of the highest peaks...post-Tertiary time

sculpted mountains, carved hills, valleys, vast plough

meted out top-soil, powdered rock, the glaciers

graphed their language beneath land forms;

and gave us our place on earth to be....

(Rest, p.5)

Gordon gives us a glimpse of the sick and disillusioned Ezra Pound looking for a home after he left St. Elizabeths Hospital, in a "Verifax" distributed to a short list of friends, among whom was Gordon:

"Italy is NOT

centre

of 1959 world; doubt

if even

centre of europe...

GET it that

I cannot sit

up for very long

at a time."

(Rest, p.4)

The choppy half-lines move with hesitation and doubt. (A few passing references to figures in the Pound circle at St. Elizabeths appear through the latter two books--to Hollis Frampton, Louis Dudek and Sheri Martinelli: "working for eternity/ while time/ erases your work.") Throughout Rest Gordon has contrived a complex interplay between the local and a wider culture: as young Carla learns classical ballet, Linnie builds her a practice barre out of an old wagon thill in the barn and plays her country dance tunes on his fiddle.

The very multiplicity of these parallel stories of invasions, massacres, losses, betrayals, settlements, and colonies, launches an attack on nostalgia for the ontological certainties of land and home. The struggle itself is the chief fact. There is no longing or argument for manifest destiny or a particular homeland here. The emphasis falls on the humanness of this drive, the rarity of peace and rest, and how closely we regard them as the essence of our being. All through this book Gordon searches for cognates for "being," the sanctified core term of Western metaphysics, and finds them in terms like "dwelling" and "settling."

The philosophy (in lieu of a theology) is Confucian, humanistic--that is, focused on human need and not on divine demand or the status of Being--and its principles are reinforced with the strong political parallels drawn from the two-century- old tradition of civil rights. This suggests the profound rationalism at the base of Gordon's thought, an impression reinforced by the steady resort to sciences (biology and geology) for metaphors. Phylogeny recapitulates the birth of the Republic. While the sense of the local pervades the work (as in Paterson, Maximus and the Divine Comedy), the profusion of histories, cultures, and their languages lets us know that Gordon's attention is on needs that underlie the local forms. We have occasional glimpses of Maine through an eye that must be the poet's (though never identified as such). When Gordon uses the first person plural at a few points while speaking of the exiled Acadians and the persecuted in Languedoc, the surprise gives these shifts a resonance not unlike the way we are startled by "O my swineherd" when it explodes in the impersonal decorum of the Odyssey, and we find the narrator speaking with the returned Odysseus.

The love of learning and the richness and diversity of language and reference is as clear in "Lycidas" (good homey-talking Frost's favorite poem) as it is in the Cantos. In Rest, especially, this becomes a phenomenology of language, an exploration of the thingness of a medium that we usually consider the essence of abstraction. Gordon undertakes mad cognate hunts, one of his methods for "proving" his argument, that enable us to hear an odd scholarly music of speculation and exploration that takes full advantage of the varied alliteration inherent in the enterprise: "(...freogan, 'free'=freond, 'friend')".

Likewise we can hear a sophisticated music in the passages that interpolate the Old Norse texts (among others) with the narrative. While we may feel as if we are back in a language class working through a translation, we can also hear what lovely sounds we missed by not listening. The following central passage states the complex central theme of Rest, and we should notice the skill with which these effects are used.

As sunball burst through wave's logarithmic spiral,

We Vikingar, Deniscan,

came, sought land,

sea-wolves,

saewicingas...mid Sweom ond mid Geatum,

we of sea-inlet, Vik, with twin instincts...

to plunder, settle

seek sills, put down roots...

(Rest, p. 37)

Again, a snatch of Acadian song and one of the cognate hunts in (a note tells us) Latin, Old High German, German and Old Norse:

"tee twa tratiel...

teye twa trakcil...

as waves rose, broke,

groaned on the rock, gulls cried:

"quies, hwila, weile, hvila, quiet while."

(Rest, p.134-5)

This lament for rest and peace accompanies the march of the Acadians into exile, and the fragment of Cajun song quoted above (even with its words that we can only guess at--a note suggests "tranquil") give us the sound and taste of language as the heart of the enterprise. It feels this way in these words--the poet's basic way of giving us the experience those people had, and our way of connecting it with the larger continuities of our species. A gift to the verbal and auditory imagination, it is here in the service of a vision that promises to fulfill the marred achievement of the Cantos with a more generous and comprehensive Confucian vision than Pound's. It is not incidental that Gordon was Pound's resident Chinese consultant during the Rock Drill years.

Rest concludes with a meditation on sleep, rest and dawn that is evocative and beautiful, in the voice of the older Carla--the last line quoted is the antiphon of the young Carla that runs through this lyrical coda:

(then as east grays, half-waked, know

action, rest disclose

a cadence that completes, flows

toward final harmonic repose)

...

and dance, ioieuse, wave, crag

dark, hill-top, peak --