Memory,
though multitudinous & various, exists in each of us as a most
intimate possession. Hume went so far as to suggest that it was “the
source of personal identity.” But the conscious mind exists only in
the present moment and taps only a fragment of memory. Somewhere
within us, we presume, exists the entire body of memory — yet we
can only recover it in bits and pieces. So the poet who takes himself
for his subject is apprehensible only in fragments. Memory is,
however, always “there” to be drawn on, and the poet may fondly
dream that serious, systematic labor of recall (such as an
autobiographical poem) might make it explicit in print. Perhaps
Wordsworth hoped that The Prelude
would be memory transposed to a concrete medium. And, if memory
equals self, the finished work might claim to be more the poet than
that flesh-and-blood creature who called himself Wordsworth. . . .
The
provisional nature of the long poem becomes one of its hallmarks,
even for those poets who did not rely so much on memory. Williams
remarked, when he found it necessary to continue Paterson,
“It called for poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to
discover or make such a context on the ‘thought.’” The context
that might supply unity can hardly do so while still undiscovered or
unmade. How can we know when we have uncovered all our important
memories, and how do we shuffle them into a unity once we have?
Two
poets of our century, David Jones and William Carlos Williams, tended
to deemphasize the importance of unity. They seemed to consider it
desirable, but hardly necessary. Of Paterson
Williams remarked, “As I mulled the thing over in my mind, the
composition began to assume a form which you see in the present poem,
keeping, I fondly hope, a unity directly continuous with the Paterson
of Pat. 1 to 4.
Let’s hope I have succeeded in
doing so.” His curious estrangement from the poem, suggested by
“the composition began to assume a form,” bears a resemblance to
Zukofsky’s withdrawal from full responsibility for his poem. Both
men saw their work developing a life of its own, a life not
necessarily amenable to unity imposed by the author.
Jones’s
conception of unity in The Anathemata
was even more nebulous. “What I have written has no plan, or at
least is not planned. If it has a shape it is chiefly that it returns
to its beginning. It has themes and a theme even if it wanders far.
If it has a unity it is that what goes before conditions what comes
after and vice versa.” For
Jones, discovery is mostly a matter of collecting what is already at
hand. Therefore the chief operation in The Anathemata
is one of arrangement. To have started with a preestablished unity
would have been to assume that the materials would sort themselves
out according to a plan fashioned by Jones. But this is precisely
what Jones wanted to escape.
Furthermore,
Jones’s materials, like Wordsworth’s, are fundamentally
mysterious. They can only be presented, not explained. The poet works
to explore, elaborate, and celebrate them — not bring them down to
his measure. Charles Olson once attempted to grapple with this
process: “Energy is larger than man, but therefore, if he taps it
as it is in himself, his uses of himself are EXTENSIBLE in human
directions & degree not recently granted.” Since Wordsworth,
poets have been seeking that “something” larger than man [sic],
whether we call it memory, divinity, energy, the imagination, or
paradise. Unity becomes a useful way of channeling that larger
dimension into the poem. If the manifestations of that larger entity
can only be perceived multiply, unity is fractured into a collection
of unities. Pound, Williams, Jones, Olson, and Zukofsky were attuned
to a wider spectrum than is tidily manageable.
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| Barry Ahearn |
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