Is it a Coincidence that the Poets

...who are obsessed with etymologies are often the poets skewed towards the Occult, or spiritual intelligences?

Robert Duncan. His spiritual mate, H.D. Guest's bio of H.D. makes it quite clear how seriously she believed in divination and charted her life by omens. But it's in the poetry everywhere. Then Barbara Guest herself: "Hecate managed me." Not as overt in her work, but look carefully. If you don't think her Alexander the Great poem is divination, you're not reading it. She often divinizes in her poetry. Her "The Farewell Stairway." Philip Whalen will often build a poem around an etymon. And the occult is just the everyday for Philip. It's one of his most charming traits. Even Jackson Mac Low's Presidents book puts me in mind of this. The idea that one originating structure and source of power (the Phoenician alphabet) can somehow influence and explain another configuration millenia away (the American Presidents). That's a very funny work. I love that book. You could even teach it to children. Tennyson knew the root of every word in the English language by middle age. And he has a number of occult poems. Back then, many poets wrote such things. I guess today it's considered an atavistic trait. Or, if acknowledged, the assumption is that the poet is ventriloquizing historical impulses and not seriously accepting this methodology as a secret and sacred source of information. Alice Notley is pure psychic energy often. Divination by crystals and lexical matrices. The crystal of the poem. She has a great sense of humor in the works, often, but that doesn't necessarily illegitimize the weird praxis. Remember her Valentine about "how to get an apartment" with the crystal and the oneiromancy? Spaghetti on her child's plate becomes Greek letters. What does she say in the dream at the end, "This is too complicated to even remember!" So funny. And then her masterpiece epic. Her Al who becomes Owl who becomes Alette. Someone you love dies and is transfigured through your love into a divine spiritual intelligence. Talk about alembics. A brother dies and moves through her body into the spiritual realm, doing what, picking up gender from her as he goes?

No surprise these poets are often in the Underworld in their poetry.

In Notley, her New York Subway (and Paris Metro, doubtless?) give additional credence to the setting.

Hart Crane speaking with the dead in the subway in The Bridge. One of the most plangent sections of that masterwork.

I like Ted Berrigan and his work is beautiful and a sanctification of the poet's insane life (Berrigan: the holy work of normalizing defection?) but when you pick up Alice you'd better put down everything else.

I can't say I could touch Tennyson on that, but I do try to memorize where every word comes from and most are fairly obvious. And most poets are known to occasionally open a dictionary and consider it as dessert, and read for a few hours. Poets tend to get lost in dictionaries more than other writers, I think. Knowing how tree leads on to tree...or road. Once you know the Latin and Greek roots, of course, you have more than half the job done. Greater than sixty percent of English words are rooted in Latin. I had four years of that starting in seventh grade and enjoyed it. I hope kids still get that but I'm told it's becoming rarer. I guess they're going more with French, Spanish and German. I'm betting schools out West are hipper and are adding more Japanese (and if they're smart--Farsi!)

Remember that embarrassment when the State Department needed Farsi translators and they could only find one or something like that? Under one of the Bushes.

They kept firing all the gay translators in the military. Not all gay people have gifts for languages, but a larger than expected proportion of men who are gifted with picking up languages easily tend to be gay in my experience. Okay, bi. Whatever. Everybody's bi.

The generation after mine is rampantly bi. Women say it even when they don't always mean it. It's such an easy way to get men's attention. In my experience, when men say it they mean it. Usually they don't say it. To women. But they will to men. Probably most of these will cash in the bi when they turn 29. Or jump over the fence.

Bisexuality is difficult to maintain in the longrun. Like dual citizenship. One country is going to get more demanding on "residency requirements."

Going back to the occult mindset...one could argue a rational basis for this seemingly irrational drift of thought. Linguistic analysis would say these poets were seeing hauntings within language because they're there. The ghosts of other cultures and their values (spiritual, political, praxeological) are still markers in the cultures which absorb them. Talking heads like the metal head that supposedly spoke oracles.

Sometimes Duncan get get goofy. Like his play on the Greek where he simply baldly transliterates into English, and sees a "Cow" where there is none. That's irksome to me.

Pomo poets have done those experiments with homophonic "translations" from French to English, other languages as well.

Those at least have a sense of humor I can appreciate because they know they are trying to be funny, and they won't be grandiloquent at the same time.

But I'm pooh-poohing types of play I actually like.

I'm sulking. Because of yesterday.

The sky sort of fell. Car. Crash today. Indeed.

Of course, there are poets who have wonderful uses for etymology as a basis of poetry but who have no uses for the occult. Myung Mi Kim. Marvelous poet! Celan? But then he had a negative theology and a negative ontology. But I guess he would fit. Poets who have uses for "spiritual intelligences" and poets who don't. To be fair, Mac Low never acknowledged extrasomatic sources and seems to have seen this in the context of Taoism if anything. Taoism originally had a supernatural origin, of course. It was based on the search for immortality using (if I remember correctly) the Five Elements. Most people today who have a use for taoism are usually in admiration of the "middle way" of life which is valued so strongly in the Tao te ching. But Mac Low. I mean even with the I Ching.Cage couldn't find silence, couldn't find true randomness, and where Cage went Mac Low went, right? "Whither thou goest, there I will go" I think he said at one Fluxus meeting.

Robert Desnos and Hannah Weiner seem similar, but I'm not sure to what degree etymology had anything to do with their work. I can't offhand remember it as a strong element in either of their bodies of work. Not the books I have read anyway.

Hannah is transcribing words she sees on the air, reading her environment a la Cheever's The Enormous Radio, and Desnos is more sibylline, slipping into a state below normal waking consciousness that most observers confused with sleep.

That would be an interesting theme for an anthology of poets---poets whose work is strongly influenced and generated by etymology (in various languages).

I call it The Subway. The Subterranean. Some poets take it. Some poets don't. But it's a form of travel like that used by the otherworldlies in Cocteau's films. I think both the Mirrors used by Death and her minions in Orphee and the strange little garden structure La Bete and Belle use in that film are really metaphors for poetry, metaphors for the secret sources of desire....the page being only one of these, the dream another.

I think that could be a strong, flexible house.

An anthology composed only of poets who ride the Subway--most of them poets managed by Hecate.

(That 15% cut is a killer.)