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Planetary Motions
, published by Giant Steps Press, is now available on Amazon for $14.95.



Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems
is available for $16.00 from FootHills Publishing, P.O. Box 68, Kanona NY 14856 or see www.foothillspublishing.com.

Tourist Snapshots was available from Randy Fingland's CC Marimbo, P.O. Box 933, Berkeley CA. CC Marimbo has, unfortunately ceased publishing, though I still have a few copies to spare.

Dada Poetry: An Introduction was published by Nirala Publications. It may be ordered on Amazon.com for $29.99 plus shipping. American buyers may order a copy from me for $23 including shipping.

Each book is available from the author William Seaton. Write seaton@frontiernet.net.


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Tuesday, June 1, 2010

How to be a Poet


(Here, preserved for you as though in amber, a bit of psychedelic nostalgia if no more, a street broadside from 1967 San Francisco.) 


How to be a Poet 

Still your mind a moment -- let the sludge run off. 
Unplug the robot wires that feed the ego cash pump whine. 
Banish the mass media sounds and sights, those hustler demons lower than us at our worst. 
Look around. 
Open your senses one after another; 
   then take a breath 
      and just before exhaling 
         see how they all dance together. 
Think of the modern building you most despise 
   and what it's like: 
      your old uncle frightening with face-creases 
         red and moist at bottom, 
         or a mad monkey, 
         or a vain immortal slug, 
         the breeze from hospital antiseptic. 
Or the building you most love and what it's like: 
   fingers on soft flesh, 
      clouds of good memory, 
         ants relating secret lore, 
         a spicy wind in winter -- 
Think of when you've been highest and lowest 
and what the colors of the planets smelled like then. 
Tell about a street corner familiar as an office-mate, 
a tree distinct from all the rest, 
a squirrel about whom you imply in twenty words a century's career. 
Know that your soul is holy and perfect 
    and base and mortal and easily hurt 
        and there the plot gets thick. 
Know that your sisters and brothers 
beat with the same heart pounding 
    to catch up with itself 
        and you may look to their eyes for the proof. 

 MAKE LOVE TO THE LOVELY WELCOMING YOU!

Introduction toTourist Snapshots

(I here offer something of a theory of travel. This is the introduction to my Tourist Snapshots CC Marimbo put out in 2008.)


I may have striven once to be a sort of anti-tourist (going a good deal on foot and avoiding any place that accepted credit cards at all), and I was resident in the Niger delta for a spell, but my perspective must nonetheless be the tourist’s, for that is the only middle term between stay-at-home and long-term expatriate. The tourist’s perspective, however, is no mean thing; it has to my mind a certain potential for sublimity. Walking without destination one notes the dusty hypnotic tavern signs of down-at-heel Cleveland, or promenades on a bush path past snares with one eye cocked for the dropping mambo, or along Wenceslas Square between sausage stands and sculpted monarchs [1] -- walking through such sights is the richest of pretexts regardless of whether text ever comes trailing behind. The tourist, after all, does nothing but look and listen and sniff the air. Thus his needs are few and “he travels safest in the dark night who travels lightest.” [2]

The tourist is a true saunterer, which the philologists derive from saint terre, as pilgrims travel, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the holy man and the holidaymaker. [3] And the focused gaze in fact makes every land Jerusalem. Thoreau usefully notes that some dissenters would trace the etymology to sans terre, “having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.” Such a saunterer is a professional at wu wei or doing nothing, the activity most greatly prized by the Daoists. [4] Though arguably one of the highest of human pursuits, it is often abandoned to infants, idiots, friends of cannabis, and poets. Hazlitt was on the mark, as he was more often than not, when he said "The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases." [5] The tourist is always on the job, whatever may unfold, and should he get stuck as Patricia and I did, trying to catch a lift on the coast of Algeria merely because we thought there were Roman ruins in Cherchell and we wanted to walk where Augustine once did, that sort of vulnerability has some share in the extraordinary potential of the vulnerability of love.

Among travel’s charms is the objectification of alienation. Since the fall we have all been wayfaring strangers for all that the ants and the crows seem altogether at home. In the bosom of a warm living room such alienation can gather forbidding metaphysical weight. The talons of the bird tighten on the shoulders and the whole figure threatens to stoop toward agony. But abroad, among crowds of robed figures murmuring unintelligible utterances or crying aloud, before inscrutable dwellings with coded doorposts, the visitor expects to be an outsider. His normative status cannot be measured against others of his group. Instead, he alone defines the American. One’s sense of conspicuous oddity becomes then honorable – the sign of the adventurous, the affluent. The sometimes wearisome business of the day becomes a quest. What a luxury to find identity clear and simple, like a cloudy solution gone suddenly transparent in its Erlenmeyer flask!

The ambulatory eyeball has the rare illusion of objectivity, and it sometimes happens that ego recedes in the most writerly of texts. As the focus turns outward, the traveler’s vision is clarified by the automatic triangulation one cannot avoid as a literal as well as an existential étranger. At home this is food-, here food is that – one can only conclude that the category encompasses long-known, newly known, and a goodly quantity of unknown to boot, and in that way proceed a step toward truth. Even the colors differ in different languages. A like advantage accrues to the reader of texts from other times and places, for whom, as for the tourist, every experience has comparison and contrast ready-made. Only the American black with DuBois’ double consciousness is similarly cued to check and measure all that occurs.

Whether traversing the globe’s surface or the printed page, the observer often has imperfect knowledge of his interlocutor’s tongue. His lack of familiarity with local culture and conditions is likely to be a rich source of suggestive misprisions. It is no bad thing that, as Dr. Johnson said “a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge,” though our knowledge is always provisional, awaiting the next word from abroad. One returns with not ideas only but affect as well, for as the man said in As You Like It, “the sundry contemplation of my travels . . . wraps me in a most humorous sadness.” While the traveler may indeed be a bore, he is most probably a bore with a message. And the message may be the fruit of a moment in which sensation so overpowered consciousness that the ego flickered.

I recall for instance: orchids on a steep slope after rain, a gnarled monkey paw hairy and accusing on the market table, fetid air and oil on a dark green Seine. I tasted the roughest raw tequila while hearing the sweetest soulful song in a cantina with a leaky roof and a dozen men with pistols in their belts speaking Tarahumara, and the drunkest was getting aggressive. And, in the market of Ourika near Marrakech utilitarian goods are on display: spade blades and sickles, food and detergent. Boys dash past with flayed carcasses. Hassan practices economics as recreation and sociability, considers every meat table there, negotiates with several dealers in energetic conversational bursts, laughing and exclaiming, then buys a kilo and takes it to another stall for cooking. As we sit in a hut with walls of fronds, we eat the meat with mint tea and round loaves, white and whole wheat, while drummers and string pluckers keen and warble and trill, and great rough clouds of smoke from cookfires that have smoldered for centuries drift through this new and most temporary Eden.


1 In the fall of 1999 the traditional Wenceslas at one end of the square was balanced by a new version at the other who rode his inverted mount’s belly. The good soldier Schweik would have been amused.

2 Cortez, quoted in Prescott V, 3. In the case of the conquistadores considerable stores must have been required, though rather for thieving than for tourism.

3 The problem is old as Dame Margery Kempe could testify, whose 14th century companions on pilgrimage asked her not to speak of religion but rather to make merry at meals as they did (Ch. 27 The Booke of Margery Kempe).

4 The Tao in its regular course does nothing, and so there is nothing which it does not do. (Tao teh King, 37 in Legge’s old version) The Old Master also notes that “the skilful traveller leaves no traces.” (27)

5 William Hazlitt (1778-1830), "On Going a Journey," Table Talk, 1822.

Two More Portraits from the Floating World

Jack

“You look too prosperous to be staying in this neighborhood,” said Jack, né Jürg. (He had not been pleased to learn that his German name sounds very much like “jerk” to Americans.) He is proprietor of the Good Stuff Restaurant on a narrow lane of Varanasi’s old town. He has assimilated sufficiently to shout in a peremptory manner at dogs, cattle, and people whom he considers intruders in his establishment’s space.

He had, he told us, in his slimmer youth been in the Kampfschwimmerkompanie of the Bundeswehr (the German version of the US Navy’s SEALs) and later had worked on pipeline construction in the field. “I would have died if I had kept to that. My father had three sons. The oldest he didn’t care for; the youngest is clearly the kind who would never fall down, but for me in the middle, he was always worried. ‘Something is not quite right with Jürg,’ he would say, ‘but I don’t know what.’ When my father died, I came to Varanasi. I have found my climate. I am 100% at home.”

Jack had built the restaurant from a space empty of everything but debris. Surely dealing with the governmental and commercial bureaucracies must have been a greater challenge than cleaning up. His menu differed only slightly from many Indian owned eating places, but when we actually tried to order, we found that he lacked supplies. “The Titanic is going down. I made no money yesterday; I have no gas to cook today. I can do nothing but recreate. So, I will call it a good day.”

He took little interest in the news or in politics. When I brought up the recent attack in Mumbai, he said, “I can’t worry about terrorists. A bomb is an excellent way to die – instantly and without pain.” He was, though, sufficiently engagé to note, “Of course we Germans are socialists. Is it not only human and natural to take care of one another?”

“Going to Kathmandu, are you?” he said at parting, “Bring a gas mask. I’m not going anywhere.”

Varanasi, 2009


Gahlia

At the outdoor pavilion of the enclosed gardens at the charmingly decayed Doctors Cave Hotel in Montego Bay is a Jacuzzi. During our visit, the only other guest to enter these precincts was Gahlia. As the lovebirds in a hanging cage peeped, she told us, “It used to be Dahlia, but my life was not what I wanted, and I was told if I changed even just one letter, my life would change.”
“And did it work?”

“Oh, yes,” she said as if surprised at the question. Then she purred, “Mmmmmm . . . Jamaica.”

Before long she was boasting that seven of the Jamaican “boys” she had met on her last trip had been writing to her in Tel Aviv. The hotel was holding its staff’s holiday party that night, and she had, she told us, been the only outsider invited. She had promised not only to attend, but to appear, as she told us, “nothing less than a knockout.”

The next morning she was working on a carafe of coffee in the hotel restaurant at a table with a corn-rowed fellow half her age.

“Keep your love forever, honeys,” she said, a rhinestone peace symbol sparkling on her chest. Her breakfast companion was silent.

Montego Bay, 2007

A Cabinet of Turkish Curiosities

1. 
Troy 

In Troy the visitor’s a demigod 
and sees millennia like layer cake. 
Behold the sea and battle plain below – 
and then the gabble of the speaking stones, 
the cries and sighs of lives gone out in gore, 
ecstatic moans and agony -- but most 
speak just of games or groceries or a galling itch. 
A rock’s beneath my boot; down there’s the coast. 



2. 
The roosters of Denizli sing 
until their energy is altogether spent. 
They faint and lie on earth 
    as though in trance 
and then they rise and strut renewed 
    and with a name among their flock of fellow birds 
    and armed with power from another realm. 

The Denizli roosters, so celebrated for their song, are classified for competitions into one of six color groups and one of three body types. In addition, there are two categories of comb. Their song is labeled high, medium, and low in pitch, and its clarity designated by one of four terms: sad, shrill, wavy, and comic. Their crowing is marked by one of four postures: lion, wolf, hero, and pus (or mist). The best singers will start slowly, build to a climax, and slow again to conclude. 



3. 
The Turkish cats 
have known no prophet’s word, 
no sultan and no plan for coming days. 
Their cogitation seems a simple thing 
and yet their gaze is sharp and clear 
and true and empty of the slightest grain of doubt. 



4. 
The wind’s 
    a breath,     
    a kind of aery blood, 
    a message or a ship 
        from some far port, 
    a bird, 
    a harbinger, 
    a telegram, 
    a dinner dish, 
    a painting, 
    or a god, 
this wind that blew my hat from off my head. 



5. 
Bosporus Flight 

We slid along the calm green Bosporus 
past palaces and mosques and monuments, 
and people ate sweet wafers and drank tea 
and looked at multimillion dollar homes 
and also at the great Galata Tower 
from whose high top the learned Hezarfen 
(according to the dervish Evliya) 
stepped off with wings that he had built himself 
and made the flight from Europe to the East 
four miles to the slopes of Üsküdar 
and then alit, looked round, and tipped his hat. 
Murad the IVth gave him a bag of gold 
and banished him for knowing far too much. 
We drank fresh juice and watched the cormorants 
with wonder though their dives were merely facts, 
but truth’s required to make a warp and woof 
with which the mind may weave a high-borne tale 
to lift itself and all the world besides. 

 Evliya Çelebi in his Seyahatname describes the early 16th century flight of Hezarfen (“the thousand learned”) Ahmet Çelebi who after his flight was said to have been exiled to Algeria where he died. His brother Lagari Hasan Çelebi is said to have ridden in a conical cage propelled by a rocket fueled with gunpowder shortly thereafter.

The Early English Carol and the Play of Convention

     Most literary criticism remains highly Romantic, not least that which sets out to be anti-Romantic. The underlying suppositions are not often argued or even stated. Indeed, it is the fact of their being taken for granted that renders them both significant and dangerous. We habitually oppose the individual genius to the merely conventional writer and celebrate the innovative over the traditional. Among the relatively modern formulations of the antinomy are the ironic, the ambiguous, and the paradoxical which are privileged over the straightforward. The code-breaker has precedence over the conformer, the scriptible over the lisible, and so forth.
     The metaphysical pitfalls that surround this faith in what still passes for Modernism are evident on occasion: for instance, when Culler remarks that only literature of the sort associated with the first of these terms allows “expansion of self.” [1] Whatever this phrase may mean, it illustrates the predatory hunger of critical ingenuity, always ready to pounce on the flanks of the preceding beast before it has had a chance to enjoy its own repast. Thus Paul de Man in his lecture “Lyric and Modernity” evokes the value-laden polarity of the automatized and the defamiliarized (for him between a slavish mimesis and an autonomous obscurity) only to note slyly that “in theory the question of modernity could not therefore be asked of any literature of any time, contemporaneous or not.” [2] For him the categories are finally rhetorical and heuristic. By the lecture’s end, they have been quietly exploded.
     The question of lyric modernity is most radically pursued by interrogating poems whose genre is generally considered to be formally and semantically conventional to an unusually high degree such as those medieval English texts gathered by Greene in his book of carols. [3] Twentieth century rereadings of a variety of medieval texts have made the discovery of their “modernity” no surprise, perhaps, but what is more significant is that poems such as these carols prove to be “modern” not in spite of their conventions, but through them. Their intertextual connections generate a greater semantic density and precision while, at the same time, creating a radically unstable ambiguity. The opposition between the conventional and the unconventional, between the referential and the formal as an index to modernity, or to literary value, is misleading as practical criticism and mistaken as theory.
     The misconception is reinforced rather than questioned by the reconstruction of a selected revisionist canon of the past, appropriating certain works only as approved in terms of the current critical vocabulary. Rather my present object is to examine works that few would regard as outstanding in order to demonstrate something of what constitutes literariness, no less for the carols’ original audiences than for ourselves. What seems at first glance to be “merely” conventional is often ain fact a play of signifiers which, whatever else it may be, represents an end in itself, a formal value intrinsic to all literature, just as certain musical forms delight the listener by elaborating recognizable variations, inversions, and reversals of topoi or themes or melody.
     My reading of some carols points to just such verbal calisthenics, [4] but it does not collapse literature’s claim to referentiality. Far from being a wholly self-contained system, verbal art, when clearly distinguished from other forms of semantic data, retains a conflicted but inevitable reference to lived experience. This is true of religious texts no less than secular ones, though the former, by invoking the original “transcendent signified,” God, make a gesture that might seem to banish uncertainty. [5]
     It is manifestly true that all language, and thus all literary uses of language, is intertextual and every text a revision of earlier texts. The levels of revisionary irony reach back indefinitely in a process graphically evident in strings of bathroom graffiti and at times in another of today’s lapidary genres, the automobile bumper sticker. There is thus no necessarily correct place to initiate investigation. To interpret Greene’s carol 448, a poem on the theme of the holly and the ivy, for instance, it would be legitimate to consider the use of these plants in folklore and ritual of pagan England and elsewhere. To clip the otherwise unlimited semiotic strain, I note only the obvious as an artificial point of origination: that the two plants, by remaining green and visibly alive at a time when many other plants wither to brown, naturally become associated with immortality and the promise of renewed fertility, and thus washed in the color of divinity.
     These connotations were appropriated by Christians who linked the plants particularly with Christ and the Christmas holiday. This poem, though, reads like a courtly love lyric:


Grene growth the holy,
So doth the iue,
Thow winter blastys blow neuer so hye,
Grene growth the holy.

As the holy grouth grene
And neuer chaungyth hew,
So I am, euer hath bene,
Vnto my lady trew.

A[s] the holy grouth grene
With iue all alone
When flowerys cannot be sene,
And grenewode leuys be gone.

Now vnto my lady
Promyse to her I make
Frome all other only
To her I me betake.

Adew, myne owne lady,
Adew, my specyall,
Who hath my hart trewly,
Be suere, and euer shall. [6]


     Here the symbolic force of the holly and the ivy may seem at first to be wholly comprehended in the cluster of meanings special/permanent/love. As such it is implicitly opposed to the flowers and trees so often surrounding other conventional love bowers, but which here are apparently dead. This meaning is so overdetermined that, in fact, the first distich of the burden is a proverbial expression meaning “forever.” [7]
     The hard fact is, of course, that neither holly nor ivy nor human love is really eternal. There are internal revelations or, at any rate, hints of the rhetorical nature of that claim. Apart from the listener’s knowledge of the ultimate death of actual botanical specimens, the poet claims fidelity with the words “I am, euer hath bene,” yet promises in the third stanza to forsake the company of other women. His promise is itselkf the originating proposal for an exclusive relationship rather than evidence of its achievement. The longevity he praises is, at best, potential. Whether the whole idea is to be read as sincere or as a decoratively hyperbolic form of flirtation, the poem’s narrative movement directly contradicts the claim to stability as the speaker bids his lady “adew” in the last stanza.
     The images of the holly and the ivy, which on the surface promised permanence, are further problematized by their intertextual relations. As Volosinov says, signs are without exception social, and exist in “interindividual territory,” [7] and the connections are especially insistent in the case of highly conventional texts. The other texts relevant to the poem’s interpretation, however, do not decode it in any simple way, providing unequivocal meanings to be inserted automatically once the key is known. Rather, as is typical of literary convention, interpretation becomes more complicated and polysemic as more texts are taken into account.
     One willing to venture into the dubious realm of authorial intention would be rewarded to find that this poem is attributed to Henry VIII, but, without straying from the purely textual, the holly and the ivy are inescapably and deeply ambiguous. Among the other poems that Greene prints that use the motif of the holly and the ivy, the two plants are never equivalent or even harmoniously complementary. Among their common conventional significations is the male/female polarity apparent in “as the holy grouth grene,” but it more often appears in poetry (and in ritual) as a conflict or a tension than as a straight love story. The refrain of one carol says:


Nay, iuy, nay, hyt shal not be, iwys;
Let holy hafe the maystery, as the manner ys. [8]


This poem goes on to associate the holly with warmth, health, joy, and maleness, while the ivy is assigned cold, illness, sorrow, and femaleness.
     In “here commys Holly, that is so gent” [9] holly has in fact gained the mastery called for in the previous poem to such an extent that the ivy has vanished altogether. What remains is a vaunt of holly from within the hall, still identified with maleness and power. This tendency is carried to the point of caricature in the version in Sharp’s English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians where the lovers have become a married couple, and the husband, finding “all my pleasure turned to woe,” cuts a switch of greenery with which to beat his wife into submission. [10]
Thus real stable domesticity transforms the lyric longing of the older text into ironic burlesque. The familiar Christmas carol “The Holy and the Ivy,” which, though not printed until the early 18th century, doubtless has roots in the Middle Ages, belongs to a different branch of the same tradition. Declaring that “the holly bears the crown,” it marshals all the machinery of supernatural divinity to bolster the claim. [11]
     On the other hand, Greene prints three poems which celebrate the ivy and exclude the holly. [12] In the first two the ivy is identified with the semi-deified figure of Mary, and in the third it is praised for its more natural attributes as a medicine, an aid against soil erosion, and the like.
     The meaning of the holly-ivy complex is thus clearly not reducible to specific substitutable terms. It is closer to the sort of structure Riffaterre calls a “geometry of extremes” and an “abstract dialectic.” [13] The polarities available from the handful of texts already surveyed would look something like this:


immortal/mortal

male/female

source of pleasure/source of pain


     The terms are only partially unpacked by this schema, but the point should be clear that poetic convention has vastly thickened the plot, that the systems of signification between one poem and another serve to refine and sharpen the meaning. Poetic convention is a conceptual tool that enables the perception and expression of a continuously bifurcating systematization of reality. From the initial oppositions of nonexistence/existence, light/ darkness, water/land, by ever mores subtle gradation, the world is apprehended in all its complexity.
     One function of presenting the world of love in highly symmetrical and patterned oppositions is simply to advance the intertextual series as a self-sustained play of signifying, in the spirit of the ecstasy (jouissance?) of intelligible but detached variation with the same sort of freedom from thematic harness that must inhere in the endless hallelujah of the heavenly chorus and in its earthly incarnation as a Bach fugue or a handsome porcelain teacup. Medieval commentary on the reputations of the troubadours and Minnesinger makes it clear that improvisation within the bounds of convention was admired: the poet strove for originality by producing endless variations using the same generative formulae. The cognoscenti appreciated and cultivated this practice, enjoying the abstract play of form just as any musical phrase or prosodic pattern may be savored as an abstract pattern. [14] Indeed, it is only the ancient insistence, upheld in various forms yet today, that the study of literature is essentially a moral and ethical activity, that makes such a viewpoint sound frivolous or trivial.
     A brief example from a very well-known lyric convention will perhaps clarify the point. Assume, rather arbitrarily, that the genesis of the “nature introduction” in poetry is the reverdie. It is easy to establish that, from the earliest date, a host of variations occur many of which are formal patterns, uninformative either about love or nature. The permutations proceed according to the same principle of bifurcation and continued division already observed. An elementary array of some common nature introduction possibilities (all of which occur) might look something like this:


Nature greens and I, too, am warmed by love.
Nature greens yet I suffer my lover’s coldness.
Nature grows cold and I, too, suffer my lover’s coldness.
Nature grows cold yet I am warmed by love.


     Now, whatever else is happening in these poems, the poets are certainly playing games with the audience’s expectations. Whether the extrapolation of the audience is likely to make with the data initially given is fulfilled or frustrated or twisted in some manner, the same sort of game is enacted. The spirit of joy in free but patterned play that informs the fugue and the jazz solo alike is surely also one element constitutive of literature. Just as children arrange objects in groupings of hermetic meaning, artists construct artificial languages and audiences take pleasure in their own competence at following the formal action regardless of any referential content.
     It is nonetheless true that, more clearly than in music or visual art, language always bears a relation, however mediated, to a non-textual reality of lived experience. The forms of patterning may depend on connections that arise prior to the encounter with the text. It is neither metaphysical nor willfully perverse to maintain that love contains latent aggression. Such phenomena as pornography and domestic violence are among the insistent testimonies to the reality of this particular paradox.
What is true of the male/female and love/hate polarities is no less true of the divine/human one. The notion of god is dependent on that of the mortal. Many hymns to god imply a hymn to secular love (as the only fitting model for the mystical experience), while, at the same time, insisting on an erasure of that limited terrestrial eros in favor of a greater. Every song of human love, likewise, is conditioned by the awareness of temporality, of the ephemeral nature of human life that makes pleasure at once more piquant and ultimately, as Ecclesiastes would have it, vain.
     The balanced contradictions that can so richly convey dialectical information about the romantic lives of people can also express the same theme from the other side in the desire for the obliteration of all dualities and the yearning for a perfect (or at least perfectly simple) world. The oppositions are never wholly absent; they are frequently quite palpably absent by being explicitly said to be lacking. The explosion of opposites in religious discourse is a theme distributed world-wide [15], forming a poignant if inverted testament to the tensions present in the only life that people really know.
     In the holly and the ivy poems that address religious themes, the polarities are evoked implicitly even if only one element, that is to say, one of the two plants, is mentioned. To listeners familiar with the pairing, absence is as significant as inclusion. In one of the Mary-ivy poems a mysterious lady who visits the speaker in bed turns out to be the Holy Virgin. [16] Here there can be no dilemma such as that presented to Sir Gawain in a similar situation – rather the scene represents perfect resolution of conflict. The poem’s persona is wholly passive. In an infantile way he receives the benefits of Mary’s presence. The real-life problematics of male/female relations associated with the arena of the bed only emphasize the transcendent otherness of this divine caller.
     Another literary formulation of divine/human love is exemplified in the same poem. “Moder sche ys and maydyn trewe” is a cliché for a good reason. In the spirit of Tertullian’s famous dictum, the riddle-like paradox is highlighted and made the authenticating seal of a mystery rather than in any way undermining it. Real mothers, real virgins, and real lovers participate in the Virgin’s glory through their devotion while at the same time they are set well apart from it. In poem 261 the conventional theme of the lament of the abandoned woman who finds herself pregnant is placed in the mouth of Mary for whom, of course, the pregnancy is the occasion of unmitigated joy. [17] With a host of parallel texts in their minds, including other ivy poems, the audience can, in a way, share in the Virgin’s divine nature while appreciating the gap between her unique position and their own more worldly nature.
     A final example of the fruitful intertwining of divine and human strands is the familiar Corpus Christi carol [18] in which the description of a courtly human setting is, by the concluding line, vaulted into the divine realm transforming an earlier vague sense of mystery into a great tremendum.
     The function of convention, then, is not to repeat an automatized expression until is retains little meaning and no power, but rather to trope on it, to turn it, and one of the subtler twists may be to leave it as it is, since the context will unavoidably differentiate every instance. Conventions tend to appear in regularly patterned clusters. The antinomies in a simple holly/ivy text proved to be far from arbitrary. It is relevant to comment on the alienness of one sex to the other and the extraordinary dissolution of the difference in love, or on other themes suggested by the conventional manipulation of the holly and the ivy, but, in the end, if paraphrase at whatever length were adequate to reproduce the significance of the poem, poetry would be redundant. The meaning of the text, unlike all other (non-aesthetic) forms of discourse, is not susceptible to exhaustive paraphrase. This is not, however, due to its information lying in some metaphysical or esoteric realm “beyond words,” but, on the contrary, because of the peculiarly word-based, or literary, sort of message it brings.
     This principle may have seemed a few decades ago very much a la mode, but the fact is that it forms the basis for the precepts of classical and medieval rhetorical treatises like those of Matthew of Vendome, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland. These documents of literary theory are sytill sometimes regarded (in the manner of Manly’s famous article [19] of several generations ago), as stereotyped and hackneyed formulae for sterile repetitive poetry. In fact their technical recommendations, especially the whole maligned system of tropes and figures, all foster an increase in semiotic density, a linguistic “thickening of the plot.” Far from cultivating willful obscurity, these devices move toward greater precision, an enrichment and sharpening of the poetic language leading toward inclusion of a greater amount of data in the coding. Through troping and other techniques, through twisting recognizable expressions, ideas, sentiments, and even narrative flow in unexpectable ways, they realized what Geoffrey called the “rejuvenation” [20] of language.
     The patterning of literary conventions makes them intelligible just as paradigms of verb conjugations make small phonetic variation meaningful. These patterns, while exemplifying the literary quality of formal play as a self-fulfilling value, also transmit information about lived experience. Poetry is a unique technology of consciousness in that it never presents its data straight. This constant refraction underlies the ancient association of literature with lying and of the literary text with irony, ambiguity, and the like, as well as illuminating the claims of deconstruction.
     In discussing the intractable problematics of human experience, literary texts evoke relevant oppositions, tensions, and contradictions. They may or may not privilege one of the terms, but they always contain or imply both, suggesting that the dance of life is a formal exuberance that can be read only throiugh a dialectical approach to the structure of semantic content.
     Religious texts affirm the same facts from the far side of the margin of reality. There the opposing terms are adduced only to be shunted aside in the denial of duality or exacty balanced in a formula that encodes true Presence in encyclopedic inclusivity which either contains or banishes all antinomies. Apparently stereotyped linguistic usage is in fact the very freshest, because it is the most belated, a rehashing of old images toward new ends; it is always beyond and in reaction to the prior processed data; it is always hermeneia.
     Speaking of Hermes or Thoth, the signifier god, the trickster (in the vernacular of black American street narrative, the signifying monkey) Derrida says, “This messenger-god is truly a god of the absolute passage between opposites. If he has any identity – but he is precisely the god of non-identity – he would be that coincidentia oppositorum to which we will have recourse again. In distinguishing himself from his opposite, Thoth also imitates it, becomes its sign and representative, obeys it and conforms to it, replaces it, by violence if need be . . .a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play.” [21]




1. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 129.

2. In Rueben A. Brower, Forms of Lyric (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 151.

3. R. L. Greene, The Early English Carols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).

4. The term is derived from Michael Riffaterre. See his Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 78.

5. The question is raised by Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 20.

6. Greene, p. 273.

7. V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York and London: Seminar, 1973), p. 12.

8. Greene, poem 136, p. 82.

9. Greene, poem 137, p. 83.

10. Cecil Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 341.

11. Included in The Oxford Book of Carols (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 80.

12. Greene, poems, 138, 139, and 139.1, pp. 83-4.

13. Riffaterre, pp. 44 and 46.

14. See, for instance, the mercurial, never-repeating stanza form of the well-known Harley lyric “When the nightegale singes.”

15. Examples of the praise of a primeval undifferentiation include Lao Tzu or even the Golden Age depicted in the Metamorphoses of Ovid or in Vergil’s Georgics.

16. Greene, p. 164.

17. Greene, p. 195.

18. Greene, poem 332, p. 195.

19. 19. John M. Manly, “Chaucer and the Rhetoricians,” Warton Lecture on English Poetry, Publications of the British Academy (London: Oxford University Press, 1926).

20. Ernest Gallo ed. And trans., The Poetria Nova and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), line 769.

21. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 93.