The Alsop Review

Here, to begin with, is my introduction:

poetry is never written
it comes out automatically
and when it comes out automatically
it is a gift of god
BHAGVAN IS GREAT!

—Ivan Argüelles

I recently received a review copy of Empire Express, a book about building the first transcontinental railroad. The book’s publisher, Viking Press, expected that the book would sell well, perhaps even reach the best seller list. The book’s author, David Haward Bain, is a noted historian who has written three previous works of “nonfiction.” The book totals 798 pages. Viking publishes poetry—including work by prominent poets like Diane di Prima and Michael McClure. The likelihood of their publishing a book of such size, written by a poet, is quite small. Poets are expected to produce “thin volumes,” and even when they don’t, their work is usually cut down until it fits the formula.

Ivan Argüelles has produced a number of books. In each case, however, the manuscript from which the book was culled was considerably longer than what finally met the public’s eye. There are poets who produce little—and sometimes that little is of considerable quality, as in the case of T. S. Eliot. But Argüelles’ imagination has always thrived on size. Sheer quantity releases something in him which one would be hard-put to find if he had limited himself to the relatively short, more or less autonomous thing that usually passes as a “poem.” Like certain kinds of novelists, Argüelles requires length in order to achieve depth. At long last, Madonna Septet allows us to experience Argüelles’ work as the author himself intended it. It is by no means a thin volume: it is the entire manuscript.In one poem Argüelles asks,

what is poetry
if not the other
eternally trying to name the Other...

other than naming the Other
what is there
to say

The assertion seems simpler than it is. The concept of the “Other” stretches into the world, into history and myth, into the longed for and the unobtainable. You will find all of that here. Argüelles’ work deliberately reaches into areas of the mind most poets are unaware exist at all. Admittedly, his writing is often difficult, problematical, even at times maddening. It deliberately challenges our capacity to read it. This poet is like an explorer in some dark, chaotic, utterly chancy realm. You’re never certain what you’re going to get. But what he brings back is always, in Pound’s phrase, news that stays news.

The Madonna Septet is an attempt by one of our finest to tell it all. For once, Argüelles is getting the space he needs to do it.

This review is by Jake Berry. It was published in The Beatlicks: Nashville’s Poetry Newsletter and is forthcoming in Mythosphere.

For decades Ivan Argüelles was known for his short to medium length dense modernist-cum- surreal poetry. By the mid-eighties he was one of the most widely published poets in circulation. His work in this form reached its pinnacle with Searching for Mary Lou: Illegal Syntax, in which Argüelles’s poetry was accompanied by the photographs of Craig Stockfleth. That book received the William Carlos Williams Award, coming in ahead of Gregory Corso’s Mindfields, among other notables. Then came Pantograph, an at least 10-volume (some of it remains unpublished) reworking of the epic poem that runs as far back as Homer and Gilgamesh without abandoning James Joyce or Elvis Presley. That’s quite a stretch, but half a dozen pages into the epic and one realizes that Argüelles is more than up to the task; in fact he makes it look easy.

After the completion of Pantograph, what next? What could be left to do? The answer comes roaring at us out of the new two volume work, Madonna Septet. In the interim between the two books Argüelles drove himself through a period on intense experimentation with language and form which included collaborations with Jack Foley and John M. Bennett: that produced work quite unlike anything he had produced before. He brings those experiences as well as haunting memories, extensive reading of Sanskrit texts among other readings, and a sense of unfettered abandon to the new work. And for all that can be said about the epic nature and scope of Argüelles’s poetry (and Madonna is saturated with that quality), he is as good line by line as any poet alive and then some. There is an intensity and dense lyricism that proves the work in its music alone. Reading the poem one is struck repeatedly by the sheer beauty of the poet’s use of language(s) and is compelled to slow down and savor it. To generate this kind of response in a poem almost 900 pages long is simply unheard of in contemporary poetry.

Pantograph began with a volume called “That” Goddess, and she reappears almost immediately in the new work. Of course the madonna is a goddess form and one is inclined to read this as an extension of the earlier work. However, this is Argüelles as we have never read him before. Due to the period of experiment we see a looser, even broken form: words break in the middle only to continue later in the poem; or sometimes we get the second half first. One constantly must re‑evaluate what one is reading and so becomes aware of deeper currents and countercurrents. The result is that once again he has reopened the epic lyric. Pound, for all his research and intelligence never devised anything so multiply complex, or explored the hinterlands of human imagination so exhaustively. Argüelles is a soul geographer. Love/ lust/ the erotic engines of the ages carry the poem, remain its medium right through oblivion and beyond.

oblivion as is every line I write obli
vious of you every time I look you are obli
vious that I am looking at every line is gone
you are OBLIVION for ‑saking every had a line?
…
holy madam of Sex what is this ire we are come
ing to fold over centerpiece

Consider how the reader/listener must almost “sing” the word obli/vious. We are in the throes of an amazing song which defies all limitation while simultaneously remaining true to its obsession. The kind of passion with which this poet sings has vanished except for a handful of brave souls, and few of those can work in the thin air of the heights Argüelles explores as a matter of habit. Much philosophy and art of the 20th century required a leap of mind, of imagination into a domain that lay beyond the worn-out metaphysics of the previous twenty-five centuries. Argüelles is well aware of that, but rather than unweaving the neurosis of the past by quasi-ontology he uses the modernist tools of mythos, liberated verse and transformed line to transcend modernism into a poetry that conforms to nothing, not even its own practice: “a s-ystematic but leap into CHAOS.” And what chaos does he mean? The chaos of systems theory, as the line seems to suggest, or is this mythology--the Greek preternatural chaos, the “without form and void” of the Bible--or something we might only experience by way of the poem? Like Artaud, Argüelles constantly struggles against the limitations that confront anyone working at the boundaries of language, and he is no less vigilant, even violent in defeating those limitations time and again.

Yet, through every line we are confronted with a poem that is unlike anything that anyone has ever written. It takes more chances, makes audacious proclamations, profanes all poetry in the act of transfiguring the art according to intuition’s disruptive convolutions. This is not to suggest that the poem ever becomes athematic or purely automatic writing. Paradoxically, it is simultaneously chaotic and always on theme. Argüelles writes/sings here, perhaps more than in any of his previous poems, as if he were driven, as if he were ridden by forces that insist on the poem’s appearance. One imagines him day after day writing in a fevered sweat to get the voices out before they are overwhelmed by the next chorus. As with much of his work, but especially here, he seems to be articulating a beautiful, exquisitely detailed madness, and no matter how deeply we engage the poem we will never be able to drink the full draught of that madness. What we can do however is open ourselves to how the poem might live in us and allow it to inhabit the unique space it demands, at the same time remembering that a work like Madonna Septet has no ultimate resolution. Instead, it sounds and reverberates and invokes those chthonic and heavenly powers which have fascinated all humanity always and probably forever will. As such it is, like all Argüelles poetry, a vital oracle, to consult and dwell within, to revel in its music and revelation and be grateful the poet was there to bring the voices forward for the rest of us to hear. Madonna Septet is a record of Argüelles at the top of his art, quintessential work by an artist essential to know.

The second review is by John M. Bennett. It was published in small press review (March-April, 2001):

I/have given up the notion of literature

Using language as a parabola
what comes back is of the night
....
stains the morpheme of logic
all else the inane the unin-
flux of intelligence through
love's weaving between hands
a what a face it is up there
....
the world's ever a
enigma & versions later
night

Ivan Argüelles has created a poetry beyond “poetry,” a monumental text that is completely “other than” any of the current strains of poetry. It is thus profoundly original, yet it goes back to the very origins of poetry, or of language itself, as a human activity or function of consciousness/unconsciousness: the Madonna Septet is a saying of the world, a REALIZING (in the sense of “making real”) the world, and is a way to place humankind’s isolating self‑consciousness into a direct creating-and-receiving relationship with all that is.

The work's pretense, its “excuse,” is a vast hymn to Madonna, the pop star: “if you call her what is her name but the Pain/at the root of the sleep of the she cannot/come back but as that dolorous enigma/that whatever denies the grass its context/night after night back to the window her slot.” The fact that such a trivial and fleetingly famous icon of our celebrity culture is the starting seed for this work is significant and is a source of one of its essential “meanings”: that everything is connected, that everything is together. The name “Madonna,” of course, has multiple referents, and all of them come into play here. The work in general is relentless in its swarming and “contradictory” references, images, topics, voices; as if the whole universe and all time were present in a single instant, “squadrons of humming ‘things’ in my sleep.” The poem is rather like a Hindu temple (in fact, the references to Hindu mythology and the Vedic hymns are legion throughout the book) or an Aztec divinity (I think of Coatlicue, for example, as written about by Justino Fernandez): a mass of topics, referents, images, beings; all with double- and multiple-entendres. It forms a structure with no true edges; no ending nor beginning (one canto opens, “no it can never end”).

And yet as one reads the Madonna Septet, like a story, which it also is, in linear time, as one must read, certain themes keep popping up: love and eroticism, mortality and loss, consciousness or “knowing” and the essential mystery of knowing (how do I know?), and language as the essence of consciousness.

The language itself presents that face of totality: it suggests and contains all languages (English, Spanish, Hindi, Italian, German, Latin, Greek, Persian, and others), and becomes translinguistic, polysemic at all levels. Within each language, English, say, there are multiplicities: esoteric and/or “elite” diction is mixed right in with the slangiest demotics, just as the topic of “Madonna” is mixed up with religious ideas and with Beatrice of Dante’s La Divina Commedia. One of the most pervasive themes is the poem’s eroticism (which, again, ranges from the smuttiest sexuality to the most “sublime” religious‑like adoration—in this poem these “opposites” occupy the same plain of value). This eroticism is present not only as a theme, but in the poem’s very language, in its swirling disjunctive (which is really CONjunctive) syntax and lexicon: all language, all parts of all languages, come together at once.

This sense of the true identity or union of apparent “opposites” makes the poem read like a Buddhist text, of course, and there are indeed many moments of Buddhist or Zen clarity throughout: “whatever is mind is/mind’s a thing in envelope/like cunt or diaphragm/otherwise mind is empty/no mind is like that/and detachment is out/of mind as house burns/so mind is the ashes/of that ‘thought’ which/is the burning of thought/linking it to No Thing/radiance unforetold!” More explicit, however, are the references to Hindu thought (Buddhism's background, after all), which, I think, forms more of the consciously “intellectual” structure of this work.

The poem’s disjunctive language has the at-first-glance appearance of being “cut-up,” but it was not written that way: this poem is not reshuffled texts but was written/realized just as you read it, in sequence:

What is happening here is that there are numerous narrations going on simultaneously. These lines of story or voice join up as one reads—assuming one can read with a wide and open attention. It is more possible to read this work “like a novel” than most any other disjunctive (or “cut-up” style) writing I know of. You can read it rapidly and find it “makes sense”: a “meaning” (or meanings) comes through. This is quite extraordinary: the poem speaks to/through the “part” of the mind that contains ALL language, simultaneously. I’m speaking of the genetically inherent ur-language mind: the Madonna Septet speaks that mind’s language—and does so in a unique and inimitable way, through the topics, obsessions, and languages of one very particular individual, Ivan Argüelles. Any work of literature which so fully addresses both the broadest or deepest universals and the most particular individuality has to be considered a masterpiece, as this work surely is.

I should point out that in spite of the poem’s “difficulty,” its length, its disjunctive structures and syntax, the language is amazingly sensual, passionate, with incredible surrealist imagery: “moon dives beneath a steel/wave twitching its glandular/muscle...”; “stands on light the dancer summoned from the/prison of language.”

The imagery is often juxtaposed directly with very specific “real” places and things, for example, the references to Culver City and Los Angeles in the City of Angels section: “justice dispensing her right wrist/sunbright spots blinded for a moment on Rodeo/then tunnel south again”; “the right hemisphere where you/find it slams glass the Northridge earthquake/what a morning our breasts heaving the poem/jettisoned.”

The work as a whole is quite varied among its sections. For example, the two volumes of Madonna Septet are themselves very different, with vol. 1 being more overtly passionate and vol. 2 more meditative, more “distanced” from the material in vol. 1. The effect is that vol. 2 sounds more narrative or discursive, even though on close examination it uses the same “cut-up” techniques, ellipses, and other structures.

These differences between sections can be quite striking and add enormously to the richness of the work. Two sections are especially distinctive. One is the “Epilogue” in the center of vol. 1 (at the end of the “Footnotes” section). In this “Epilogue” the voice and perspective of the work undergo a radical shift and become extremely self-conscious, meta-literary. The voice speaks about “itself,” about who “Madonna” is, about the poem, and all expands into a swarm of mirrors: what’s real?, who’s Ivan Argüelles", who’s the reader?, who’s saying this poem?, and so on: “...it is all here/or it is nowhere. Myth, Obsession/Possession,/Devotion, Sehnsucht. Nothing works, so the Poem/has to be everything, all pages both blank and/irreversible where the sheer illegibility/becomes a beauty of almost unbearable/proportions, involving as it does the reader's/entire attention, an attention that will never/be given, so the text will never be read, but/exists only in its own fulminating/paradoxicality.....” (I would argue with this: this text not only can be read, but should be, and anyone who reads it will never forget it.)

The last section is also unique: “(un titl (d))” functions rather like a haiku at the end of a haibun or a kharja at the end of a muwashshah in its short lines, in its ineffable clarity. There is a sudden illuminated quality to the disjunctive “cut‑up” lines. The section is a summary of the whole work, with all its themes and topics coming at the reader in fragments, arranged like a mandala or kaleidoscope: “bodies in the maze,” “joy is a frequency wave,” “void ed of thought the mind,” “finiti si mal/in all directions.”

Peter Ganick is to be congratulated for publishing this enormous history-making work. For Argüelles, the work is clearly a culmination of a long career, and for 21st-century poetry, the Madonna Septet is an awesome opening.

Ivan Argüelles, Madonna Septet (Poets Press)

Jack Foley

Ivan Argüelles, Madonna Septet
(Poets Press)