The H.D. Book by Coleman Victor Duncan Robert Boughn Michael

Author:Coleman, Victor, Duncan, Robert, Boughn, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780520948020
Publisher: University of California Press

No poetic fantasy

but a biological reality,

a fact: I am an entity

like bird, insect, plant

or sea-plant cell . . .

where “poetic fantasy,” with its connotation of being made up for fancy’s sake, is not the poet’s term but her interior adversary’s, not then that poetic phantasy in Ficino’s terms identified with the creative imagination, for the tenor of The War Trilogy is that Dream and Life are one—the “spiritual realities” and “eternal realities” are “biological.” It is not only the figure of Man then out of which and to which the individual thread has its weaving of intention, but, beyond Man, in the larger field of Life itself, so that the poet strives for organic form as Life form. This is not a humanist art. The “whole race” is ultimately not the species Man but the race of the living.

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With Olson’s “Projective Verse” the field of the imagination was extended to a form that took its imperative in the atomic particular or the cell. The energy of the poem he saw had its spring in the immediate event: “Let’s start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable.” There is a change then possible that haunts our minds since Olson’s charge—that the formal imperative or intent has its spring back of the word or phrase (back of that civilization of meanings agreed upon that the dictionary represents) in the minim of our speech, the immediate sounding event.

In this minim, in our articulation of vowels, lies the crucial evolutionary fact underlying the word. Speech, our specifically human instrument, is a possibility that arose with the separation of larynx and soft palate. “Specialization, semanticity, arbitrariness,” these functions of language we share with all primates; “discreteness,” “traditional transmission,” with our fellow anthropoids; but with the play of vowel color, we have our own music, giving rise to new qualities in speech: “displacement,” “productivity,” “duality of patterning,” the operations of our natural imagination in which sound makes sense. (See Charles D. Hockett, “The Origins of Speech,” Scientific American, September 1960.)

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So, I see The Walls Do Not Fall develop along lines of an intuited “reality” that is also a melody of vowel tone and rime giving rise to image and mythos and, out of the community of meanings, returning to themes towards its individual close. In her work she consciously follows the lead of image to image, of line to line, or of word to word, which takes her to the brink (as “gone” leads to “guns” in the opening of the poem) of meaning, the poet establishing lines of free (i.e., individual) association within the society of conventional meanings. The form of the poem, of the whole, is an entity or life-time—a “biological reality”—having life as her own body has life.

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