Burt Kimmelman
George Quasha’s Linear Music
There is such a thing as a George Quasha poetic line. What it is can be defined, essentially, by one particular aspect of it: its gravitational field. This field makes possible an inner integrity, the line’s cohesive dynamic—which has often been commented upon, including by Quasha himself. This cohesive, self-contained, quality is a part of all his creations. In discussing his axial stones artworks, he has spoken of “a poetics that favors art acting at the boundary of its own definition” (“The Axial” 112). There has yet to be a full accounting of Quasha’s line, however; what I hope to do here is to enlarge and deepen an understanding of it.
To this end, let me begin by observing that especially Quasha has wanted to claim for his nevertheless unique practice of making poetry the influence not only of William Blake’s poetic practice but also his ideas about, and practice of, making visual art. For Quasha, key to Blake’s philosophy of art, as well as his way of doing it, is his notion of a “bounding line” (hence Quasha’s use of the term “boundary,” above). Meant specifically to demarcate the edge of a visual image on a canvas, as a trope the “bounding line” possesses a potential still, I think, to be fully realized. And seeing already how Quasha has appropriated it in order to conceive of the sui generis work of art or poem, it can provide insight into a body of near-contemporary poetry and theorizing I believe to have been equally important in Quasha’s artistic, poetic development. Blake’s influence on Quasha has been enormous. Even so, Quasha’s poetics are, I am suggesting, just as much a consequence of his knowing and reading Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and other poets of the post-World War Two avant garde. The gravitational force holding Quasha’s lines and poems together comes as much or more from them. Quasha’s poetic achievement emerges out of this welter of persons, ideas and aesthetics. What is remarkable is how his poetry transcends them.
To explain how this is so I must first turn back to Blake, specifically to that particular coinage of his, the “bounding line.” Not only did he use the phrase to indicate that which is to be made distinct within a visual field (he meant it to criticize the “blurring techniques” of older artists like Rembrandt and Rubens [Damon 319]). More largely, as Blake writes of his “bounding line,” it “distinguishes honesty from knavery”; to be sure, whatever its physical property, it is the “line of rectitude and certainty in” a person’s “actions and intentions”—for “Every Line is the Line of Beauty” (A Descriptive Catalogue xv). Blake’s influence on Quasha, then, is not merely to be located in his apprehension of form per se.
Quasha’s poetry resists being considered solely on its own—although his poems, his lines, do not depend on anything other than themselves—rather than in conjunction with his work as artist, musician, and serious Tai Chi practitioner. While the “bounding line” for Blake was, nonetheless, to be located principally in terms of visual art, Quasha—a painter and sculptor who can think about poetry within the dimension of space as well as time—has developed his important concepts of axis and axiality, which obtain to all of his imaginative or aesthetic activities. Axiality, derived from Tai Chi, informs his endeavors as an artist. It also has played a generative role in his writing, and so treating his poetry within the context of the bounding line can be of great use. The gravitational field in Quasha’s verse line, for instance, is non-linguistic—even as its presence is felt through the words of the line, through strings of words, through syntax. It is also the case that, more often than not, a single line on the page stands on its own, as distinct and intact; thus, in this sense, the bounding line accenting visual figuration has become a line that bounds across the page or, when read aloud, across the time of an utterance.
All of Quasha’s creative activities exist within his verse line. The line is a synthesis of them all. Another way of saying this might be that the line performs a dance. Like Tai Chi, dance exists simultaneously on both the spatial and temporal planes. Furthermore, dance occurs within a gravitational field. Quasha has said that his “’measure’ is proprioceptive,” and he speaks of a “’field proprioception’” (“The Axial” 112). Here, then, is the source of Quasha’s prosody.
Quasha’s utterance is frequently a single breath. His linearity—as it has come to its fullness within the multi-volume preverbs project—is singular. Yes, of course, it has its music, which one might sense comes from dance or, more fundamentally, from the human body’s movement, that is to say a proprioception. It is this music I find most remarkable, inasmuch as it resides within writing. Quasha’s poems, whose energy is derived from his syntax, have managed to elude the trap of language—unlike the work of his predecessor poets. In this way his lines, not simply music, do not merely possess the quality of the poetic. More to the point, his lines make the poetic the foreground of their reader’s experience. They foreground themselves as poetry. The Quasha poetic line is poetry; it also performs it.
The preverbs project began, Quasha has said, “as a way of reflecting on and within William Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’ [wherein the] wisdom proverb is inverted, breaking convention to recover ‘wisdom’ as a non-dogmatic state of visionary—let’s say gnoetic apperception” (“pre gnoetic” 133). It is worth noting that the proverbs, providing a foundation for the creation of Quasha’s preverbs (cf., e.g., “pre” 175), do not much rely on the comma. The preverbs mostly abjure it. Reminiscent of Blake’s lineation in the proverbs, the preverbs often take form in luxuriantly long lines, moreover. There are counter phrases in shorter lines; and the shorter lines do contain commas that, relative to them, are rare in the long lines. In any case, a number of these long lines embody the basic impulse to be found within Quasha’s poetic music.
Here is one of Blake’s generously long lines, with which Quasha may have been especially enamored:
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
Here’s another:
The most sublime act is to set another before you.
For all their sententious pith—which is there to be heard in the preverbs—Blake’s lines surprise their reader in what they propose. The fact that they are propositions does not go unnoticed.
Of course, Blake is working out of a historical long-line tradition. This tradition includes, for instance, Virgil’s Aeneid, which can be seen and heard in these opening lines:
Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit
litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram.
Virgil’s first three lines give way to the fourth, completing a syntactic unit. A momentum carries the ensemble to completion. Likewise, here are the opening lines of Whitman’s Song of Myself; note the near absence of a caesura in the longer lines:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
In Song of Myself Whitman’s very structure is devoted to the long line, whose symbolism and even feel both exemplify the optimism of the poem’s speaker and connote the breadth of the American continent. The very long fifth line (above) contains no comma. It’s not missing.
Some of the Proverbs’ long lines unfold with their needed pauses; some purposively are not meant to tarry. Here’s a Quasha preverb, in answer to the first of Blake’s proverbs I’ve quoted (above):
You won’t catch me lazing about in wisdom.
(“only the truly living can truly die” The Daimon of the Moment 52)
Or take this longer line whose sentiment is, relative to Blake’s line, more tenuous although it shares his outlook:
Looking for a line that has not yet occurred to not miss a future world long visible. (52)
As for the second quoted line by Blake (above), here is a likely response, which is more intimate, just as authentic:
“How can I address the you who is only now you? (53)
Here is a larger portion of one of Quasha’s preverbs poems; titled “playing out,” it is beautifully symmetrical in its entirety, as it flows, ebbs, and flows:
Stand on principle at the precipice lest it get away.
A line, a flow, a sphere, a little fear, blink! Surrounded.
This black-and-white mystery is that we are enjoined to be here.
Surf her a letter at a time.
Life in the cursive green room rimes high, free-running beyond strife.
Line up a sail to propel us between nothing and something.
Glance flows, cloud shows, graph trail knows.
(verbal paradise 23)
The longer lines (ll. 3 and 6, even l. 5), extended beyond a reader’s expectation, establish both the speaker’s presence and what Quasha might call his “pre-wisdom” voice (“pre-gnoetic” 133).
In thinking about the hexameter tradition, simply in the juxtaposition of Quasha’s luxuriously long lines—as they are counterpoised within a greater musical rhetoric—we acknowledge what the hexameter has done for poetry overall, especially once poetry comes to exist more in its written than oral milieu—taking into account the logical operations literacy establishes. The forerunner of the syllogism that is a product of literacy is the memorable verbal formulation. Along with rhyme and meter, preliterate poetry’s prosody, as it were, consisted of epithets and other phrasings and formulas created to serve as a matrix within which the sceop or griot could place information for retrieval upon occasion. The syllogism proper, however, not so unlike the wisdom proverb hearkening back to preliterate times, emerges only with higher-order abstract thinking literacy makes possible.
The preverbs, which are exquisitely literate, undo the literacy-orality hierarchy. Nevertheless, we find in them the capacity for abstraction; and, remarkably, it is this capacity that allows for a purchase on dreaming. Quasha has thought a lot about dreaming, and I would say it is a driving force for him. We might contemplate the phenomenon of dreaming after hearing or reading Quasha’s preverbs—we who are, paradoxically, alienated from our very dreams by our literate consciousness. In “telling tales on dreaming,” a prose commentary, Quasha writes that “[n]othing is more tantalizing than the dream as an ‘object’ of thought, because it won’t stay still. It won’t even stay there. Its nature as object seems to end up challenging the nature of objects” (3). We can refer to this situation as a condition of alienation, in the grandest sense the condition of modernity, which could not have come about without the spread of literacy (as Walter Ong and a great many other scholars have shown).
The preverbs return us, so to speak, to our unconscious. They are certainly visual, and yet their recovery of an essence of human being involved in and signaled by dreams has to do with time and gravity. “[Dream] seeks a free and easy dance partner,” Quasha maintains, one “capable of reserving a power of all possible dances, yet a power understood by no one” (3). Time depends on gravity, and it is this dimension, in the preverbs, which we feel in the movement of Quasha’s poetic line. This movement, however, will mean ultimately subverting the impulse Blake harnessed and made his own. Quasha’s “poem may need to suspend certain of its own merely familiar modes of self-awareness” (3). Blake’s proverbs, in their irony, are meant to get beneath the easy logic of the apothegm. Quasha’s preverbs, in their utter charm having to do with something other than irony, send us back to confronting the human dilemma of language. As Jacques Derrida writes at the start of Of Grammatology: “[h]owever the topic is considered, the problem of language has never been simply one problem among others” (6). Quasha will insist that “[d]ream is language, and all attempts to understand language as necessarily different from dream impoverish both language and dream. Dream’s refusal to speak points toward a truth of language, the ‘failure’ of language to disclose” (4).
A Quasha preverb (pre-verb, pre-logic, pre-pragmatic) reawakens, releases, from the confines of language, of written language, the force of dream and therefore human essence. Theories of art, literature, music, dance, which hold that we make art in order come to terms with our mortal state, stupendously overlook the profoundly vivid reality of dream consciousness as well as the fact that art is the attempt to cope with dreaming, certainly to commune with our dreams. Quasha knows enough not to get into that wrestling match with the dream, in trying to make sense of it (pace Freud). Rather, he has constructed an access to dreaming. To say this is not to dismiss the preverbs as being mere tools for living, though. Quite the opposite, the preverbs are poetry in its purest form—for that matter they could be a purer form of verse—and thereby they are not suited to the practical efforts necessary in order to live in any commonplace sense.
In thinking about dream, dance, gravity, I would set alongside Blake’s proverbs, which might be viewed as a source of revelation for Quasha, what I think has been an equally generative text for him: Robert Duncan’s poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow.” Duncan’s “place of first permission” in the poem’s penultimate line has, for me, always alluded to the domain of the dream, the unconscious. This poem does not merely represent the engagement by a young George Quasha with the poetry and poetics of the later North American avant garde. In this respect both Quasha’s and Duncan’s work ought to be considered in tandem with that of Charles Olson. Olson’s “Open Field Poetics” is enacted in Duncan’s poem that is a mainstay in his volume The Opening of the Field. Olson’s own “projective” poetry, as well as his game-changing essay “Projective Verse,” sponsor both Quasha and Duncan. Then, too, there is Olson’s essay “Proprioception.” George and Susan Quasha were friendly with both Olson and Duncan. They could not have avoided any of these works.
Olson’s poetry, on the other hand, for all its prosodic grandeur, is not the inspiration for Quasha’s preverbs nor the model Duncan‘s poetry provides. “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” recalling the hexameter tradition, catches the reader up—in part due to its long, flowing lines, the longest of them being the poem’s title preceding “as if it were a scene made-up by the mind”—in a realm of enchantment (the phrase “as if” doing its work), a realm in which a human being is at one with the world. Dream is not sequestered within this world, or otherwise minimized. Yet the poem’s irresistible momentum is equally due to those long lines. The poem’s unfolding underwrites the momentum we find in Quasha’s preverbs (as well as the poems in his precursor volume Ainu Dreams).
Duncan’s choice to use the word “chaos,” in the antepenultimate line (“certain bounds” that resist the “chaos”), creates an interesting proposition. Is it the lack of rules—or might we say the rules of dream do not comport with those of the conscious, rational mind, with the very rationality we use when trying to approach the mystery of dreaming? The dream state will not allow the operations of the logical mind. Hence our waking life, that which the literary apothegm trades upon—even Blake’s version of it—is a chaos in and of itself, in relation the flow of a life force that is part of the natural world out of which the human psyche evolves.
“Often I am Permitted” might serve as an ars poetica for Duncan. In a peculiar, interesting way it is what comes to be Quasha’s poetics. The conduit, the preverb (“pre wisdom”), involves the physical body as well as the metaphysical mind. The natural, visible, tactile world in Duncan’s poem—the dance of “ring a round of roses”—strives to be one with the psyche, to posit a world as a place that makes room for dream, for the unconscious.
Quasha fulfills Duncan’s attempt. His preverbs reside organically within such a world to which the poet enjoys some access. Of course, neither Quasha nor Duncan is working in hexameters; yet there is the sense of the luxurious, expansively long line. Perhaps Pound’s first Canto, its opening seven lines, beginning with “And then went down to the ship,” may very well have served as a baseline for Duncan’s prosody. Duncan’s lines express a sense of communion and revelation; Pound’s lines embody a determination in the face of debacle in order to fulfill a prophecy (Pound wishing to reprise both Homer’s and Virgil’s poems). Each set of lines has its own, appropriate, meter and verbal music. What there is less of in Pound’s poem, in contrast to Duncan’s, in any case, is the sense of the breath as measure, such as Olson spells out in “Projective Verse:
[. . .] the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse (always, that Egyptian thing, it produces twins!). The other child
is the LINE. And together, these two, the syllable and the line, they make a poem, they make that thing, the—what shall we
call it, the Boss of all, the “Single Intelligence.” And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the
man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he,
the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to,
termination.
The trouble with most work, to my taking, since the breaking away from traditional lines and stanzas, and from such wholes as, say,
Chaucer’s Troilus or S’s Lear, is: contemporary workers go lazy RIGHT HERE WHERE THE LINE IS BORN.
Let me put it baldly. The two halves are:
the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE
In Olson’s poems his breathing is also appropriate to his vision and task (“Verse now, 1950 [must] put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes” [“Projective Verse”]). Here, for example, is the opening line of “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You,” which sets a pace: “Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood […].” When I was young I heard Olson read his poetry aloud; his breathing was palpable. It made me realize, as Quasha must have realized, how not only autobiographical but also visceral Olson’s poetics could be. (The reading, quite dramatic, emanated from a huge bulk of a man.)
Reinstating the body in poetry or song has been central, I would argue, to Quasha, and it was so for Duncan, comporting with Pound’s concept of melopoeia. Olson would eschew the unbroken long line such as emerges out of the much older hexameter tradition, as if his own breathing dictated that choice. In contrast, along with Blake Duncan, especially in his unbroken long lines, serves equally as a muse for Quasha who wishes to invoke the subconscious reality of the dream in his preverbs. This is a reality writing itself has purportedly conceded as being beyond either its reach or task. Quasha’s rhetoric of the apothegm à la his other muse, Blake, is put to the purpose of an utterance that is at once deeply human and poetic while, in its insistence as poetry, it succeeds in standing apart from language’s ostensible function.
The preverbs are poetry in some essence, which, like all utterance burdened by words, manages statements that are beautiful and haunting as they bring into the now the imagination in and for itself. What the preverbs also do is to foreground the music of the human voice. This is Quasha’s music, although readers get a sense of it as theirs—embodied in syntaxes we recognize as familiar even if, finally, we do so for reasons having nothing to do with the rational mind. The fact that his long lines are coherent unto themselves is what gives the preverbs their music as they come forth. They are a music that emerges from deep within the body as well as the psyche—a music, to quote Pound, which makes possible “the dance of the intellect” (“How to Read” 25).
Works Cited
Blake, William. The Complete Writings of William Blake. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1972.
_____.. A Descriptive Catalogue. Woodstock Books, 1809.
Damon, Samuel Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, Rev. Ed. Hanover, NH: University Press of
New England, 1988.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Tr. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” http://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Projective_Verse.pdf.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 2013.
Pound, Ezra. “How to Read.” The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. 1918. New York: New Directions, 1935. 15-40.
Quasha, George. "telling tales on dreaming" in Ainu Dreams. George Quasha with Chie (bun) Hasegawa (Barrytown: Station Hill Press,
1999), 127-138, and online: http://www.quasha.com/poetry/ainu-dreams-oeiropoeta.
_____. “The Axial.” Ecopoetics 2.8 (25 November 2002): 108-26.
_____. The Daimon of the Moment (preverbs). Northfield, MA: Talisman House, Publishers, 2015.
_____. “pre.” Things Done for Themselves (preverbs). East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press, 2015. 175-77.
_____. “pre focus.” Things Done for Themselves: preverbs. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press, 2015. 9-10.
_____. “pre gnoetic.” The Daimon of the Moment: preverbs. Northfield, MA: Talisman House, Publishers, 2015. 132-35.
_____. Verbal Paradise (preverbs). Canary Islands: Zasterle Press, 2011.
There is such a thing as a George Quasha poetic line. What it is can be defined, essentially, by one particular aspect of it: its gravitational field. This field makes possible an inner integrity, the line’s cohesive dynamic—which has often been commented upon, including by Quasha himself. This cohesive, self-contained, quality is a part of all his creations. In discussing his axial stones artworks, he has spoken of “a poetics that favors art acting at the boundary of its own definition” (“The Axial” 112). There has yet to be a full accounting of Quasha’s line, however; what I hope to do here is to enlarge and deepen an understanding of it.
To this end, let me begin by observing that especially Quasha has wanted to claim for his nevertheless unique practice of making poetry the influence not only of William Blake’s poetic practice but also his ideas about, and practice of, making visual art. For Quasha, key to Blake’s philosophy of art, as well as his way of doing it, is his notion of a “bounding line” (hence Quasha’s use of the term “boundary,” above). Meant specifically to demarcate the edge of a visual image on a canvas, as a trope the “bounding line” possesses a potential still, I think, to be fully realized. And seeing already how Quasha has appropriated it in order to conceive of the sui generis work of art or poem, it can provide insight into a body of near-contemporary poetry and theorizing I believe to have been equally important in Quasha’s artistic, poetic development. Blake’s influence on Quasha has been enormous. Even so, Quasha’s poetics are, I am suggesting, just as much a consequence of his knowing and reading Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and other poets of the post-World War Two avant garde. The gravitational force holding Quasha’s lines and poems together comes as much or more from them. Quasha’s poetic achievement emerges out of this welter of persons, ideas and aesthetics. What is remarkable is how his poetry transcends them.
To explain how this is so I must first turn back to Blake, specifically to that particular coinage of his, the “bounding line.” Not only did he use the phrase to indicate that which is to be made distinct within a visual field (he meant it to criticize the “blurring techniques” of older artists like Rembrandt and Rubens [Damon 319]). More largely, as Blake writes of his “bounding line,” it “distinguishes honesty from knavery”; to be sure, whatever its physical property, it is the “line of rectitude and certainty in” a person’s “actions and intentions”—for “Every Line is the Line of Beauty” (A Descriptive Catalogue xv). Blake’s influence on Quasha, then, is not merely to be located in his apprehension of form per se.
Quasha’s poetry resists being considered solely on its own—although his poems, his lines, do not depend on anything other than themselves—rather than in conjunction with his work as artist, musician, and serious Tai Chi practitioner. While the “bounding line” for Blake was, nonetheless, to be located principally in terms of visual art, Quasha—a painter and sculptor who can think about poetry within the dimension of space as well as time—has developed his important concepts of axis and axiality, which obtain to all of his imaginative or aesthetic activities. Axiality, derived from Tai Chi, informs his endeavors as an artist. It also has played a generative role in his writing, and so treating his poetry within the context of the bounding line can be of great use. The gravitational field in Quasha’s verse line, for instance, is non-linguistic—even as its presence is felt through the words of the line, through strings of words, through syntax. It is also the case that, more often than not, a single line on the page stands on its own, as distinct and intact; thus, in this sense, the bounding line accenting visual figuration has become a line that bounds across the page or, when read aloud, across the time of an utterance.
All of Quasha’s creative activities exist within his verse line. The line is a synthesis of them all. Another way of saying this might be that the line performs a dance. Like Tai Chi, dance exists simultaneously on both the spatial and temporal planes. Furthermore, dance occurs within a gravitational field. Quasha has said that his “’measure’ is proprioceptive,” and he speaks of a “’field proprioception’” (“The Axial” 112). Here, then, is the source of Quasha’s prosody.
Quasha’s utterance is frequently a single breath. His linearity—as it has come to its fullness within the multi-volume preverbs project—is singular. Yes, of course, it has its music, which one might sense comes from dance or, more fundamentally, from the human body’s movement, that is to say a proprioception. It is this music I find most remarkable, inasmuch as it resides within writing. Quasha’s poems, whose energy is derived from his syntax, have managed to elude the trap of language—unlike the work of his predecessor poets. In this way his lines, not simply music, do not merely possess the quality of the poetic. More to the point, his lines make the poetic the foreground of their reader’s experience. They foreground themselves as poetry. The Quasha poetic line is poetry; it also performs it.
The preverbs project began, Quasha has said, “as a way of reflecting on and within William Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’ [wherein the] wisdom proverb is inverted, breaking convention to recover ‘wisdom’ as a non-dogmatic state of visionary—let’s say gnoetic apperception” (“pre gnoetic” 133). It is worth noting that the proverbs, providing a foundation for the creation of Quasha’s preverbs (cf., e.g., “pre” 175), do not much rely on the comma. The preverbs mostly abjure it. Reminiscent of Blake’s lineation in the proverbs, the preverbs often take form in luxuriantly long lines, moreover. There are counter phrases in shorter lines; and the shorter lines do contain commas that, relative to them, are rare in the long lines. In any case, a number of these long lines embody the basic impulse to be found within Quasha’s poetic music.
Here is one of Blake’s generously long lines, with which Quasha may have been especially enamored:
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
Here’s another:
The most sublime act is to set another before you.
For all their sententious pith—which is there to be heard in the preverbs—Blake’s lines surprise their reader in what they propose. The fact that they are propositions does not go unnoticed.
Of course, Blake is working out of a historical long-line tradition. This tradition includes, for instance, Virgil’s Aeneid, which can be seen and heard in these opening lines:
Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit
litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram.
Virgil’s first three lines give way to the fourth, completing a syntactic unit. A momentum carries the ensemble to completion. Likewise, here are the opening lines of Whitman’s Song of Myself; note the near absence of a caesura in the longer lines:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
In Song of Myself Whitman’s very structure is devoted to the long line, whose symbolism and even feel both exemplify the optimism of the poem’s speaker and connote the breadth of the American continent. The very long fifth line (above) contains no comma. It’s not missing.
Some of the Proverbs’ long lines unfold with their needed pauses; some purposively are not meant to tarry. Here’s a Quasha preverb, in answer to the first of Blake’s proverbs I’ve quoted (above):
You won’t catch me lazing about in wisdom.
(“only the truly living can truly die” The Daimon of the Moment 52)
Or take this longer line whose sentiment is, relative to Blake’s line, more tenuous although it shares his outlook:
Looking for a line that has not yet occurred to not miss a future world long visible. (52)
As for the second quoted line by Blake (above), here is a likely response, which is more intimate, just as authentic:
“How can I address the you who is only now you? (53)
Here is a larger portion of one of Quasha’s preverbs poems; titled “playing out,” it is beautifully symmetrical in its entirety, as it flows, ebbs, and flows:
Stand on principle at the precipice lest it get away.
A line, a flow, a sphere, a little fear, blink! Surrounded.
This black-and-white mystery is that we are enjoined to be here.
Surf her a letter at a time.
Life in the cursive green room rimes high, free-running beyond strife.
Line up a sail to propel us between nothing and something.
Glance flows, cloud shows, graph trail knows.
(verbal paradise 23)
The longer lines (ll. 3 and 6, even l. 5), extended beyond a reader’s expectation, establish both the speaker’s presence and what Quasha might call his “pre-wisdom” voice (“pre-gnoetic” 133).
In thinking about the hexameter tradition, simply in the juxtaposition of Quasha’s luxuriously long lines—as they are counterpoised within a greater musical rhetoric—we acknowledge what the hexameter has done for poetry overall, especially once poetry comes to exist more in its written than oral milieu—taking into account the logical operations literacy establishes. The forerunner of the syllogism that is a product of literacy is the memorable verbal formulation. Along with rhyme and meter, preliterate poetry’s prosody, as it were, consisted of epithets and other phrasings and formulas created to serve as a matrix within which the sceop or griot could place information for retrieval upon occasion. The syllogism proper, however, not so unlike the wisdom proverb hearkening back to preliterate times, emerges only with higher-order abstract thinking literacy makes possible.
The preverbs, which are exquisitely literate, undo the literacy-orality hierarchy. Nevertheless, we find in them the capacity for abstraction; and, remarkably, it is this capacity that allows for a purchase on dreaming. Quasha has thought a lot about dreaming, and I would say it is a driving force for him. We might contemplate the phenomenon of dreaming after hearing or reading Quasha’s preverbs—we who are, paradoxically, alienated from our very dreams by our literate consciousness. In “telling tales on dreaming,” a prose commentary, Quasha writes that “[n]othing is more tantalizing than the dream as an ‘object’ of thought, because it won’t stay still. It won’t even stay there. Its nature as object seems to end up challenging the nature of objects” (3). We can refer to this situation as a condition of alienation, in the grandest sense the condition of modernity, which could not have come about without the spread of literacy (as Walter Ong and a great many other scholars have shown).
The preverbs return us, so to speak, to our unconscious. They are certainly visual, and yet their recovery of an essence of human being involved in and signaled by dreams has to do with time and gravity. “[Dream] seeks a free and easy dance partner,” Quasha maintains, one “capable of reserving a power of all possible dances, yet a power understood by no one” (3). Time depends on gravity, and it is this dimension, in the preverbs, which we feel in the movement of Quasha’s poetic line. This movement, however, will mean ultimately subverting the impulse Blake harnessed and made his own. Quasha’s “poem may need to suspend certain of its own merely familiar modes of self-awareness” (3). Blake’s proverbs, in their irony, are meant to get beneath the easy logic of the apothegm. Quasha’s preverbs, in their utter charm having to do with something other than irony, send us back to confronting the human dilemma of language. As Jacques Derrida writes at the start of Of Grammatology: “[h]owever the topic is considered, the problem of language has never been simply one problem among others” (6). Quasha will insist that “[d]ream is language, and all attempts to understand language as necessarily different from dream impoverish both language and dream. Dream’s refusal to speak points toward a truth of language, the ‘failure’ of language to disclose” (4).
A Quasha preverb (pre-verb, pre-logic, pre-pragmatic) reawakens, releases, from the confines of language, of written language, the force of dream and therefore human essence. Theories of art, literature, music, dance, which hold that we make art in order come to terms with our mortal state, stupendously overlook the profoundly vivid reality of dream consciousness as well as the fact that art is the attempt to cope with dreaming, certainly to commune with our dreams. Quasha knows enough not to get into that wrestling match with the dream, in trying to make sense of it (pace Freud). Rather, he has constructed an access to dreaming. To say this is not to dismiss the preverbs as being mere tools for living, though. Quite the opposite, the preverbs are poetry in its purest form—for that matter they could be a purer form of verse—and thereby they are not suited to the practical efforts necessary in order to live in any commonplace sense.
In thinking about dream, dance, gravity, I would set alongside Blake’s proverbs, which might be viewed as a source of revelation for Quasha, what I think has been an equally generative text for him: Robert Duncan’s poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow.” Duncan’s “place of first permission” in the poem’s penultimate line has, for me, always alluded to the domain of the dream, the unconscious. This poem does not merely represent the engagement by a young George Quasha with the poetry and poetics of the later North American avant garde. In this respect both Quasha’s and Duncan’s work ought to be considered in tandem with that of Charles Olson. Olson’s “Open Field Poetics” is enacted in Duncan’s poem that is a mainstay in his volume The Opening of the Field. Olson’s own “projective” poetry, as well as his game-changing essay “Projective Verse,” sponsor both Quasha and Duncan. Then, too, there is Olson’s essay “Proprioception.” George and Susan Quasha were friendly with both Olson and Duncan. They could not have avoided any of these works.
Olson’s poetry, on the other hand, for all its prosodic grandeur, is not the inspiration for Quasha’s preverbs nor the model Duncan‘s poetry provides. “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” recalling the hexameter tradition, catches the reader up—in part due to its long, flowing lines, the longest of them being the poem’s title preceding “as if it were a scene made-up by the mind”—in a realm of enchantment (the phrase “as if” doing its work), a realm in which a human being is at one with the world. Dream is not sequestered within this world, or otherwise minimized. Yet the poem’s irresistible momentum is equally due to those long lines. The poem’s unfolding underwrites the momentum we find in Quasha’s preverbs (as well as the poems in his precursor volume Ainu Dreams).
Duncan’s choice to use the word “chaos,” in the antepenultimate line (“certain bounds” that resist the “chaos”), creates an interesting proposition. Is it the lack of rules—or might we say the rules of dream do not comport with those of the conscious, rational mind, with the very rationality we use when trying to approach the mystery of dreaming? The dream state will not allow the operations of the logical mind. Hence our waking life, that which the literary apothegm trades upon—even Blake’s version of it—is a chaos in and of itself, in relation the flow of a life force that is part of the natural world out of which the human psyche evolves.
“Often I am Permitted” might serve as an ars poetica for Duncan. In a peculiar, interesting way it is what comes to be Quasha’s poetics. The conduit, the preverb (“pre wisdom”), involves the physical body as well as the metaphysical mind. The natural, visible, tactile world in Duncan’s poem—the dance of “ring a round of roses”—strives to be one with the psyche, to posit a world as a place that makes room for dream, for the unconscious.
Quasha fulfills Duncan’s attempt. His preverbs reside organically within such a world to which the poet enjoys some access. Of course, neither Quasha nor Duncan is working in hexameters; yet there is the sense of the luxurious, expansively long line. Perhaps Pound’s first Canto, its opening seven lines, beginning with “And then went down to the ship,” may very well have served as a baseline for Duncan’s prosody. Duncan’s lines express a sense of communion and revelation; Pound’s lines embody a determination in the face of debacle in order to fulfill a prophecy (Pound wishing to reprise both Homer’s and Virgil’s poems). Each set of lines has its own, appropriate, meter and verbal music. What there is less of in Pound’s poem, in contrast to Duncan’s, in any case, is the sense of the breath as measure, such as Olson spells out in “Projective Verse:
[. . .] the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse (always, that Egyptian thing, it produces twins!). The other child
is the LINE. And together, these two, the syllable and the line, they make a poem, they make that thing, the—what shall we
call it, the Boss of all, the “Single Intelligence.” And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the
man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he,
the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to,
termination.
The trouble with most work, to my taking, since the breaking away from traditional lines and stanzas, and from such wholes as, say,
Chaucer’s Troilus or S’s Lear, is: contemporary workers go lazy RIGHT HERE WHERE THE LINE IS BORN.
Let me put it baldly. The two halves are:
the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE
In Olson’s poems his breathing is also appropriate to his vision and task (“Verse now, 1950 [must] put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes” [“Projective Verse”]). Here, for example, is the opening line of “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You,” which sets a pace: “Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood […].” When I was young I heard Olson read his poetry aloud; his breathing was palpable. It made me realize, as Quasha must have realized, how not only autobiographical but also visceral Olson’s poetics could be. (The reading, quite dramatic, emanated from a huge bulk of a man.)
Reinstating the body in poetry or song has been central, I would argue, to Quasha, and it was so for Duncan, comporting with Pound’s concept of melopoeia. Olson would eschew the unbroken long line such as emerges out of the much older hexameter tradition, as if his own breathing dictated that choice. In contrast, along with Blake Duncan, especially in his unbroken long lines, serves equally as a muse for Quasha who wishes to invoke the subconscious reality of the dream in his preverbs. This is a reality writing itself has purportedly conceded as being beyond either its reach or task. Quasha’s rhetoric of the apothegm à la his other muse, Blake, is put to the purpose of an utterance that is at once deeply human and poetic while, in its insistence as poetry, it succeeds in standing apart from language’s ostensible function.
The preverbs are poetry in some essence, which, like all utterance burdened by words, manages statements that are beautiful and haunting as they bring into the now the imagination in and for itself. What the preverbs also do is to foreground the music of the human voice. This is Quasha’s music, although readers get a sense of it as theirs—embodied in syntaxes we recognize as familiar even if, finally, we do so for reasons having nothing to do with the rational mind. The fact that his long lines are coherent unto themselves is what gives the preverbs their music as they come forth. They are a music that emerges from deep within the body as well as the psyche—a music, to quote Pound, which makes possible “the dance of the intellect” (“How to Read” 25).
Works Cited
Blake, William. The Complete Writings of William Blake. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1972.
_____.. A Descriptive Catalogue. Woodstock Books, 1809.
Damon, Samuel Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, Rev. Ed. Hanover, NH: University Press of
New England, 1988.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Tr. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” http://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Projective_Verse.pdf.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 2013.
Pound, Ezra. “How to Read.” The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. 1918. New York: New Directions, 1935. 15-40.
Quasha, George. "telling tales on dreaming" in Ainu Dreams. George Quasha with Chie (bun) Hasegawa (Barrytown: Station Hill Press,
1999), 127-138, and online: http://www.quasha.com/poetry/ainu-dreams-oeiropoeta.
_____. “The Axial.” Ecopoetics 2.8 (25 November 2002): 108-26.
_____. The Daimon of the Moment (preverbs). Northfield, MA: Talisman House, Publishers, 2015.
_____. “pre.” Things Done for Themselves (preverbs). East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press, 2015. 175-77.
_____. “pre focus.” Things Done for Themselves: preverbs. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press, 2015. 9-10.
_____. “pre gnoetic.” The Daimon of the Moment: preverbs. Northfield, MA: Talisman House, Publishers, 2015. 132-35.
_____. Verbal Paradise (preverbs). Canary Islands: Zasterle Press, 2011.