Humanistic Philosophy, Shaman Culture, and the Nature of Poetry
Until the development of "String Theory" (ca.1975 - 1995), the modern world had a philosophy based on the intellectual ascendancy of the "inanimate universe" that became total after the Age of Newton. There is little place in a dead universe for living words from a god - no place for incantations as we find in the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the Hebrew Bible. Yet the central problem of the human condition (as stated in these books) still remains unchanged (if ignored). Man still cannot live in his rotting flesh forever and humans have an unquenchable thirst for meaning to explain why we have been so situated. I do not make an academic theory here, I speak from actual evidence and statements made from people who have responded to my work in each corner of the earth. The body will die and science is irrelevant to this discussion. Incantation, whether by religion, or by poetry, or even cropped together pseudo "humanism" - all wish to honor a communication of magical origin, that has the element of authority, human beauty, and organizes human temporality with pleasing, sudden, and permanent clarity. We see it taking over the conscious thought of our contemporary society as I write this sentence.
I have witnessed in my time our education institutions and our film industry now giving more prestige each day to honoring spiritual means of understanding the human condition and our national story. There was a time when native Indians were characters designed to fall off horses when shot. It is now current that we have ancient Indian shamans as central and honored portrayal in our culture, as well as a strong identity with medieval themes of magic now projected into the future with Science Fiction - resembling not so much faithless technology, as a direct injection of faith based projections (as the "Force" in Star wars, as only one well known example) - straight from the Age of Faith.
I feel we are at a cultural period of poetic flowering that America has never seen before. As I said in my first book, the discovery of the unaccountability of the physical world (i.e. String Theory) has actually led thought back to the prestige of metaphysics. The Romantic Age in literature was the soul's reaction to Newton's soulless "dead universe". Now that scientists finally, if reluctantly, identify as many as eleven dimensions in physics, and it is agreed that the physical universe is essentially not observable with the five senses, now we are back to where we started - we are still souls that cannot have exact knowledge of the human condition on earth. That makes the human a mystery by any definition. This identifies us as being closer to poetry than physical science. Dear reader, what I am saying in so many words is that the Age of Poetry is now back within the possible. Poets may have the prestige and honor in a Western society - one that values and honors the shaman. And the Shaman culture sings its visions. Hence popular music has developed into "Rap" music in a West becoming more shamanistic.
To finally put our answer into modern context: Clear and sudden communication of the unaccountable is the core competency of poetry. It appears to us as the "strange" that we instantly recognize. It is with a stranger that we find "identity in difference" - and we call this human love. The meeting of the strange seems to be a peculiarly human cycle, repeating itself endlessly. God seems to be obsessed with the stranger and how we deal with the stranger determines how he deals with us. My poetry explores the meeting of the strange, and the stranger, without rest. I do not suggest another eclectic New Age religion or wish to cloud the clear divisions between poetry and religion. I am not so blind to the lines that separate religious activity and the secular lyric. Rilke will always be the master of the Western lyric. He is my first teacher. Rilke taught us German as Baudelaire teaches us French. Yet Rilke tried to create a new language that had a self-contained religion. His way to battle the new scientific societies was to simply withdraw into himself - and other poets have made this mistake as well. I still believe that poets can find incantation in daily life - and I have proved it - and still do not pretend to create a new religion. I am trying to see life as it appears to me each day - and I can't keep up with it - I never will. There is nothing quantifiable about life and thus life can only be expressed by representations of symbol. This is the honor of art.
A poem must achieve a core competency in the affluent West. To me this mantra insists that a poem should 1) create a living incantation (song), 2) order the chaos (unaccountability) of human life, 3) produce a sudden and clear presentation of the strange, and finally, 4) be idiomatic speech. A living poet has only one task: to master the unaccountable. This requires a mastery of human song, measure, and language. A poet has to tell you what you never knew about the human condition in such a way that you suddenly and permanently recognize it - and marvel that you never saw it before - and after, the reader never sees life again without this new coloring. Poetry, like man, is essentially the sudden arrival of the strange - but instantly recognized. In my view, the earth exists to memorialize the appearance of the strange (see poem, Red Earth). And once perfectly memorialized in poetry, it becomes a permanent expression of wisdom in the language. This is the only reason why art can claim to be a positive influence in human societies. This is the only claim the poet has to be the most vital worker in a nation's cultural landscape.
The poetry of Mantra Rain is written in the language of incantation, yet does not appear to use any artificial or elevated voice. Nor does it recommend any language of past ages or cultures. I can recognize no language of former styles that I would prefer to modern American language. The voice I have created cannot have its effect in a language of any other period than the present. It takes breath only in the idiom of the present age. I've read the sizable record of dead and living poets and feel that most of our best loved poems come down to a single favorite line, a tone, a single stanza that still rings true, or a striking quality of a single, brief voice. A people's incantations are all that remains of a culture of men who trained their minds together. The paramount quality of great art is the sense of authority it projects - that it is somehow perfect in the degree to which it aims to message. Nothing can be added or taken away that would not lesson the achievement. That is the nature of incantation. It becomes a living power. Mantra Rain seeks authority as it expands the American Idiom.
Incantation is dangerous. Its power is perfect and unforgettable. When a poet finds a perfect expression it has instant authority, and the words live forever in the language. Its authority may coexist uneasily with the state's authority - or go against it. This is why tyrants in history always had to make a clientage of great poets, to control the power of their message. In this sense all great poets are dangerous to the state - if they do not already depend on the state for their survival. Great poets must always be welded to the state in bondage - or marginalized in exile. Virgil is a good Roman example of the Poet Laureate; Ovid, of the poet that must be exiled from the state. And any poet from English canon, such as Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Johnson, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Arnold, all had their hands in the state coffers - and glorified their leaders. Those poets not favored by the state, as Blake, were marginalized. Byron chose self-exile with Shelley. Wilde had to be exiled to France. Rilke escaped from country to country, house to house, sanctuary to sanctuary. Pound faced exile and prison for praising the wrong side. But otherwise, American writers have never been a danger to anyone.
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