The Monkey and the Wrench by Mary Biddinger

Author:Mary Biddinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781931968911
Publisher: University of Akron Press

Persona and the Mystical Poem

Elizabeth Robinson

In this essay, I will open a discussion on one of many possibilities for a contemporary poetry that embraces mysticism. By mysticism I mean an experience of presence or union that resists rational explanation; I do not find it necessary to make explicit a divinity or religious tradition or practice in this definition. A transcendent mystical experience, it would seem, is no longer available to the postmodern poet. Still, I have confidence in the great resourcefulness of poetry to find way: to query and then shape findings into a poetry that enters a terrain of experience that can’t be accounted for by conventional logic.

Immediately, within this domain the problems of source and voice arise: what is the source of poetry and how does it find voice? If an individual poet articulates a purportedly mystical vision or experience, how does the limitation and partiality of that voice mediate mystical “information”? From the outset, let me acknowledge that the issue of “source” can’t be resolved. It is a marker of the value of poetic practice that such irresolution is a spur to poetry’s ongoing exploration rather than an obstacle to it. Yet where there is no stable originary site, the poem itself becomes a site, the site, animated by curiosity, and perhaps even wonder. Ann Lauterbach gets at the heart of my concern and commitment when she asserts that the poem makes a claim, as if “you could write away from and into simultaneously, so that the temporal articulates only presence” (13).

Presence, as itchy as that word is, provides, in my estimation, the most enduring value of poetry. Correspondingly, that poetry can register many sorts of presence is a sign of its hardiness. A healthy art will beguile multiple voices without undue consternation that their discrete origins can’t be clearly traced. Thus I’ll turn to a consideration of persona as concurrently invocation and mediation of the mystical. It’s long been a poetic truism that the poet is a conduit for the muse or for the spirit. My investigation here will consider the ways modern and contemporary poets have deliberately cultivated other voices and/or personae as a means of invoking, cultivating, or creating presence. Writing within the guise of a persona may be intrinsic to writing itself, as Rimbaud’s “I is an other” reminds us. Nevertheless, personae offer the poet powerful tools into the speculative, multivocal authority of the poem’s more uncanny movements.

The nature of presence in poetry and mystical utterance is fraught. How can the distinct textures of an author’s voice be relevant if that speaker is only a vehicle for utterance that originates in unmapped sites? It’s easy to suspect that the author is self-aggrandizing, claiming authority that has been swiped from a source whose legitimacy cannot be checked or is inarguable. Anne Carson addresses exactly this problem in part four of her essay “Decreation,” when she observes the contradiction between mystic women writers insisting that mystical experience hinges upon the erasure, even annihilation of the

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