The Sibylline & the Unending War of Poetry

Even in the twenty-first century, the sibylline is still often a lively element in poetry.

Ross just made me think of how most poetry movements will host (tolerate?) one sibylline presence...think Desnos among the surrealists (who of course would be more tolerant in general of the sibylline) or Alice Notley in her generation of the New York School.

H.D. certainly fit this bill among her set--more after the Imagist period, when her artistry developed in this direction, coupling her interest in the sibylline with Freudian ideas.

One could certainly make the case that Hannah Weiner was the sibylline presence in the language poetry movement.

I could definitely do a critical reading of Barbara Guest along those lines, since she's often such a witchy poet, but in her case that would be more accentuating one strand or strain of the writing. Guest: "Hecate managed me." It would be a distorting lens if one overaccentuated that component. But just as it's present (ubiquitous!) in Shakespeare, it's in Barbara Guest.

The degree to which the poet is professing to actually vaticinate or prophesy or scry--to import language from "the old craft"--is of course subject to interpretation (and possibly ridicule).

I'm not arguing for the truth-value or verifiability of these often oneiric forms of poetry.

I just think they are worth recognizing as a recurrent paradigm within the art--an atavism? It's probably a vital form of chthonic catharsis, and seems to be a healthy element of poetry in all ages.

Often the sibylline produces a very powerful form of cultural critique and a counter-narrative to wage war against the dominant cultural narrative. I definitely think of Notley (notably, The Descent of Alette) in this context, and Hannah Weiner's reading of her New York neighbors' thoughts through visualizing their language in the air is probably also a form of this type of psychic warfare. (I was going to say witch-war but people might read negative connotations into that word---connotations which I would not have intended.)

If you read between the lines that Weiner writes, you find yourself encountering a version of Cheever's "The Enormous Radio," where the pattern of desperate thoughts literally floating on the urban air limn a cultural critique of a society driving its citizens mad through class warfare and policy-driven deprivation.

The element of prophecy may or may not be present in what I am calling "the sibylline"--often there is a sense that the fragmented visions are predictive or prophetic as well as diagnostic.

The sibylline often materializes as a form of protest poetry and a form of "jamming," inasmuch as it denies the dominant and "modern" epistemological models; it eschews science for prescience, and attempts to cathartically cleanse the "cultural subconscious" by creating an oneiric poetry which often allows for an insidious attack on dominant ideology. The virtues of rhetorical skulduggery!

Whether the poets who assume such a guise to wage psy-war actually believe they are practicing sortilege or magic arts is probably irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make here.

Some of them do or did believe it (H.D., for example) and some of them, I suspect, are aware of the power of archetypes and appreciate the model as a means of marshaling power within their art.

I don't mean to imply that this is uniquely a function of the feminine, or that only women can fill this role. One could argue that poets like Yeats, Robert Duncan and even James Merrill (to name just a few) could also be seen to participate in this tradition.

It's not even necessary to see this phenomenon as a literary epiphenomenon of an interest or belief in the occult, because for some of these writers it's much more a matter of archetypes, and perhaps a belief in the collective unconscious. And a writer could be a part of this tradition and hold none of those beliefs or interests. It's more about the way the work positions itself, and the literary devices it uses to diagnose "cultural sickness." I think it is almost invariably tied-into the concept of war, which again would hearken back to the model of the Sibyl. Her advice was most valuable then.

Here's the Cave of the Cumaean Sibyl, which is a popular tourist attraction. Didn't Tony's Italian fling (Cosa Nostra hellcat) take him here on one episode of The Sopranos?

I'm pretty sure she did. It was a very weak episode though, I seem to recall. That was a bad period for the writers of the show.