Ivan Arguelles, Madonna: A Poem (The Runaway Spoon Press)
My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current
in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language
bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-
goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and
that this remains the language of true poetry...[T]he early Greek
philosophers...were strongly opposed to magical poetry as
threatening their new religion of logic, and under their
influence a rational poetic language (now called the Classical)
was elaborated...[I am concerned with] the rediscovery of the
lost rudiments of poetry..."the question of what survives of the
beloved."
�Robert Graves, The White Goddess
if I could enter the sky being without concern if I could join
wave to wave with the fur of my fingers and sing as the blood
sings in its urgency to reach the light even in death there is
too little fire
�Ivan Arg�elles, "story of the spanish nun," The
Invention of Spain
Heaven is within us and all around us, even though we seem to be
living in hell.
�Thomas Merton, Bread in the Wilderness
One of the problems of writing poetry in an Age of Prose
is the fact that no one knows who you are. The number of "famous
poets"�unlike the number of famous movie stars or famous
singers�seems to be severely limited. Even worse is the fact that
people don't know how to read what you write. What passes for
poetry is often nothing more than short prose with line breaks.
Ivan Arg�elles has been publishing superb poetry for over
twenty years. His first book, Instamatic Reconditioning, appeared
in 1978, when the author was in his late thirties. I want to
begin with a poem from his second book, The Invention of Spain,
also published in 1978. Its title is "para el soldado
desconocido," "for the unknown soldier":
one day you will wake and see your joy was a
prison all that furious galloping without getting past the door
did the warden share his bread with you? hours and hours you
spent reading the good book in the dark who explained there was
no key? the immortal ox died beside you the invincible horse wept
in your shadow the bride was allowed to look only when they set
you on fire you called out the names of the lord and the statue's
hands fell off what did it mean when the judge gave you life?
every crumb was a blessing you were happy to go barefoot and when
the war broke out it was a stick they gave you with which to
kill! teresa lies naked on the straw were it not for her eyes in
which the sky's cold rubric slowly shifts you'd think she were as
dead as you whisper your name in her ear and watch her mouth
devour the light
I doubt that the poem is well known even among those
people who wish to know about poetry, but it is masterful. Many
of Arg�elles' early poems are dramatic monologues, somewhat in
the tradition of early Pound or early Eliot. This is not quite a
dramatic monologue, but it deliberately focuses on a single
figure. The soldier is dead, but "one day you will wake" only to
discover a life which was nothing less than a living death: "your
joy was a prison." The poem is extraordinarily vivid not because
it hews to the "facts" about the soldier's life�no one knows what
the facts are, he is the "unknown soldier"�but because it
"invents" so much and so freely. Fictional "events" of the
soldier's life�little narratives�occur almost line by line, and
the language remains open, enigmatic. Does "key" in "who
explained there was no key" refer back to the prison or to the
"good book"? The speaker asks, "what did it mean when the judge /
gave you life?"� but the soldier is dead. (In what sense can a
judge "give life"?) The "bride" too is a mysterious figure. She
is named "Teresa"�undoubtedly after the saint. (Again, the book
is called The Invention of Spain.) Her "nakedness" seems
momentarily erotic, but her eyes reflect "the sky's cold rubric"
and by the concluding lines she has become a "devourer"�something
approximating a vagina dentata. The poem is full of fear and
darkness, "close," as Arg�elles once said, "to the apocalyptic
vision." It has considerable interest in sound: "eyes" / "sky's,"
"which" / "shifts":
were it not for her eyes in which
the sky's cold rubric slowly
shifts...
Ivan and his twin brother Joe ("Jos�") were conceived in
Mexico but born in their mother's home town, Rochester,
Minnesota. They spent their first five years in Mexico City.
Their father Enrique was Mexican, their mother Ethel was
American. Both Ivan and Jos� read and speak fluent Spanish. A
Classicist and a polyglot, Ivan is also familiar with Latin,
Greek, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Romanian, and several
other languages. Enrique was a policeman�which perhaps has
something to do with the sense of imprisonment in "para el
soldado desconocido"�as well as a talented, though, finally, a
failed painter and a pianist. A "comunista," he was acquainted
with Trotsky and Rivera and was one of those summoned to the
scene when Trotsky was assassinated. "I never saw so many brains
in my life," he commented afterwards. He could be cruel to his
sons�he once kicked Ivan down the stairs�but he encouraged them
to be artists, painters like himself. Ivan's choice of poetry as
a vocation evidently displeased him, and he was never responsive
to his son's work, though he continued to encourage Joe. A sense
of displacement, even a desire to please, haunts Ivan's poetry.
When the family returned to the United States, they
settled in Minnesota. The twins, along with their older sister
Laurita, were brought up in Rochester, the small town which
houses the Mayo Clinic. Their mother was diagnosed with TB�"the
AIDS of the day," Ivan comments�and removed to a "sanitorium"
(which Ivan heard as "cemetary"). Eventually she was able to
return to the family, but the sense of loss never left Ivan. He
discusses his early life in a beautifully-written memoir
published in Gale Research's Contemporary Authors Autobiography
Series, volume 24. "What a shock!," he writes, "This bitter cold
snowy Minnesota winter. How did we get here, lodged in a sterile
bedroom in our grandparents' large white-box boarding house?
Everything was an ineffable and painful mystery."
Predictably, the children did not fare well socially in
their Eisenhower-era home town: "Our first day at Lincoln School,
the kids told my brother and me that we were not Americans but
Indians." Ivan took refuge in literature�he continues to read
voraciously�drugs, and what was then called "kicks." He was
fascinated by all modes of music�he believes this to be an
inheritance from his father�but he became especially interested
in rhythm and blues and devoured all he could find of it. He
likes to point out that he was reading Finnegans Wake and
listening to Elvis Presley at more or less the same time.
"Dislocated or uprooted while growing up," he says, "I became by
nature a nonconformist. Never sure whether I was being accepted
or rejected, usually for the same reasons, I always felt like �a
stranger in my own home town....'" All these factors�the strict,
demanding, frightening, and at times unloving father, the mother
who is out of reach, the twin or double, the inhospitable
environment, even the Mayo Clinic�find their way into Ivan's
poetry, though often in an oblique, enigmatic way.
Arg�elles lived in a variety of places before settling
with his wife Marilla in Berkeley, California in 1978. It was
also in 1978 that his son Max tragically contracted encephalitis.
Max's invalid statis has been a constant fact of life for Ivan
and Marilla, who continue to care for him at home.
Arg�elles dates the beginning of his mature style to his
third collection, Captive of the Vision of Paradise, which
appeared in 1983. "The title of the collection reflects how I
felt being in California," he writes. "The poems I chose for this
set exhibited a greater variety of topics and styles than the two
previous books. The surrealism was more intense. The mystical
eroticism, the unrequited nostalgia, and the great cosmic lesson
of randomness which Max's illness had taught me also informed the
collection."
Here are two poems from that period, "The Need for
Ignition" from Nailed to the Coffin of Life (1984) and "Saint
Erection Day" from The Structure of Hell (1986):
THE NEED FOR IGNITION
my hapless dreams need kindling the days of my youth gone into
the shade of a neatly defined arcadia that's not my idea of
arcadia the mountains the volcanos the consuls-general rambling
in the pseudo-glade the insects devouring the pestilence of their
conscience just a reminder of life devouring life in absentia my
love inside a metal box trying to restore her breath or her lungs
or her ovaries or her red blood replaced by the white blood of a
premature oblivion I read the alphabet primers to her in sleep I
address the cattle of a southern promontory with syllabic
decadence I forget which language they speak in Patagonia or
Tierra del Fuego it is cold I reach into the purse for her heart
it is gone MY HEART I cry reciting the lost verse of the grass-
tribes their drums sound in my hair my ears burn with shame of
their secrets I am naked as they are on an island in the middle
of a vast muddy river the tributary of the great water Ocean the
harpies swoop to pick out my eyes or my finger-nails I am hungry
the cities pass before me in a gallant vision of feasting
skyscrapers of meat and typewriters where they swindle the gifts
of god with guarantees in old french the horn of Roland blasts
its final note shattering my skin and what it stands for I am
blind MY LOVE I am blind
*
SAINT ERECTION DAY
what is this monstrous affliction in my head? PERJURY the woman I
loved dead a fossil dust turning in the eye of a hangover rumors
of cinzano and wars so many distant wars the soul is a prize in
the dark shrubbery where the turkish onanist sleeps unguarded but
my head today is a nation of doubting tombs I climb the spire of
saint erection day and the woman I loved I see her next to the
stilts which reason uses to enter the sea great transparent fish
consume her they leave her fossil on a crimson rune there are too
many thoughts about what has happened I fix my horse with tickets
of spleen and oblivion I wire the next port that the dream is on
its way "you have to be selective about the foreign capitals you
visit" this monstrous affliction which is my head!
The "I" in these poems is as anguished as the dead
soldier in "para el soldado desconocido," and there is no
suggestion that the poet is in any way distanced from it. Both
poems plunge towards their conclusions with considerable
intensity. Both are deeply involved with the experience of loss,
and both involve a woman who is lost or dead. As in "para el
soldado," life is seen as an experience of "devouring": "life
devouring life." Despite the use of the personal pronoun�and
despite the presence of autobiographical elements�neither of
these poems seems very "personal." The "I" becomes the "site" in
which loss registers, and language becomes the means by which it
is made visible. Again, "invention"�the mind's capacity to
create�is extremely important.
In a sense, everything in "The Need for Ignition" means
exactly the same thing: "the insects devouring the pestilence of
their conscience" means loss; "my love inside a metal box trying
to restore her breath" means loss; "I am blind MY LOVE I am
blind" means loss. Indeed, the "horn of Roland" here has the
quality of the last Trumpet: total loss. Yet the inventiveness of
the poem is constant�one thinks of a jazz musician improvising
around a given melody or chord structure�and the amount of
material in it is absolutely extraordinary: arcadia, mountains,
insects, a "metal box," the alphabet, cattle, Patagonia, drums,
the "great water Ocean," harpies, skyscrapers, typewriters, the
horn of Roland. The power of the poem resides in the tension
between the mind's capacity to explore absolutely anything�its
intense creativity and freedom�and the fact that everything
brings the mind back to its inescapable condition: "I am blind MY
LOVE I am blind."
Arg�elles mentions "mystical eroticism" in his comments
on Captive of the Vision of Paradise. The opening words of the
second poem's title, "Saint Erection Day," suggest precisely
that. Again biography is relevant but does not exhaust the
meaning of the poem. Arg�elles has an earlier poem,
"Encephalitis" in Manicomio (1984), which deals with both the
poet's own feelings and what he imagines his stricken son to be
experiencing. Here�heartbreakingly�he seems momentarily to take
on his son's condition: "what is this monstrous affliction in my
head?" The enigmatic, capitalized word, "PERJURY," moves us
violently in another direction, however, and the poem is suddenly
about a dead lover: "the woman I loved dead a fossil." Both
events�the death of the woman, the affliction of the child�are
horrifically linked. That would be enough for most poets, but for
Arg�elles there is more. The poem is shot through with
sexuality�"erection," "onanist," even "my horse"�so that "head"
suggests the head of a penis. The poet is indeed plagued by an
"erection" since his lover is dead and cannot satisfy him. She is
not only dead but a "fossil," something in a museum, so his
relationship with her appears to be an aspect of the long- gone
past. Indeed, on this "Saint Erection Day," two "saints"�his son
and the woman�are being "erected," created: their suffering has
in effect canonized them! (Though we should remember that the
poet says he lives in a nation not of believers but of "doubting
tombs"�or "Toms.") By the conclusion of the poem, the
"affliction" is no longer in the poet's head, it is the poet's
head�the very burden of his life. Indeed, his "affliction" makes
him, ironically, a kind of "saint" himself, a martyr. There is a
sense of comedy here as well as tragedy. (Arg�elles' humor is
rarely pointed out but it is fiercely present in most of his
poems.) Given all this�and there is more: the phrase "distant
wars" is of considerable importance, for example�the poet is
nonetheless able to fashion out of the chaos of his "head" an
image of extraordinary beauty, an example of what the Surrealists
called "the marvelous":
great transparent fish consume
her
they leave her fossil on a
crimson rune.
Arg�elles is in the habit of writing his poems during the lunch
break from his job as university librarian at UC Berkeley. In
1989, his Looking for Mary Lou: Illegal Syntax, a collaboration
with the late photographer Craig Stockfleth, won the Poetry
Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award for best
poetry book published by a non-commercial press, edging out
Gregory Corso's selected poems, Mindfields. Arg�elles writes, "I
was saying goodbye to the daily lunch poem with this collection."
In 1990, "in a white heat of two months," he wrote the opening
section of his long poem, Pantograph. The section was published
in 1992 as "THAT" Goddess.
Arg�elles' title is a reference to "The Death of Stalin,"
from Pieces of the Bone Text Still There (1987). These are the
concluding lines of the poem, which, incidentally, includes
references to both Trotsky and the Mayo Clinic:
You are dead the Mayo Clinic tells me
no more sports
no more swimming backwards through the documents of the
river Lethe
You are one with Achilles & Hector heroes of Byzantium!
with what philosophy to reproach these assertions?
the paralytic president the claustrophobic dictator the
Holy Roman Emperor
are dead without salvation
Mecca Transylvania the Third Rome the Ideal City the
Genetic Map
through what grassy banks do my knees wavering buckle?
are these doctors communists? which of the three doors
shall I choose?
is this chemical thaumaturgy in reverse? and then there
is that Idea
about that woman that Goddess
if I
can begin to follow her
The "I" of Arg�elles' poems is always problematical.
Stalin is Stalin, but he is also Arg�elles to some extent as well
as his "communist" father, to say nothing of the Homeric heroes
Achilles and Hector. (Dante and Virgil, who, like Homer, wrote
epics featuring a visit to the land of the dead, haunt Arg�elles'
poetry.)
But the concluding couplet names a personage who is
equally important in the poet's work and who will merge with the
various mother/lovers who occupy so much of his poetry. "It was
THAT Goddess who informed [Pantograph]," writes Arg�elles, "the
White Goddess of Robert Graves, the muses of poetical
convention, both the erotic and the sacred...."
Pantograph, not all of which has yet been published,
would require a separate essay. The sections which have made
their way into print�"THAT" Goddess, Momus, Hapax Legomenon (a
grammarian's term meaning "a word or phrase occurring only once")
and Enigma & Variations: Paradise is Persian for Park�are
remarkable. Arg�elles describes the entire project as an attempt
to "touch on all the major themes of Western history, myth,
death, and the archaic, from Gilgamesh to Teotihuacan":
I filled up a dozen or so spiral-bound
notebooks in a little over two years, typically noting in the
surroundings that gave me the most anonymity: pizza joints, with
large-screen TVs playing All My Children, and hi-amped jukeboxes
roaring out punk music. This apparent cacophony allowed me to
immerse myself in the poem. The atmosphere was designed to be as
opposite to that of a librarian cataloging works of German
intellectual history for the Library of Congress [his occupation]
as possible. In this environment all my senses were attuned to
contemporary speech, subculture styles and music, which directly
contributed to the mosaic composition of my work. Writing outside
of such a "living" atmosphere, writing, for example, only on a
PC, is unthinkable for me. Not only do I need Homer, but I also
need Sid Vicious.
The subject of this review, Madonna: A Poem, is a much
shorter work than Pantograph. But little has been written about
Arg�elles' work, and I felt that some sort of overview of his
career and methods would be of use in introducing this complex,
fascinating, and compelling poem. Arg�elles' work is nothing if
not self-referential, and as it moves forward it constantly looks
back.
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