Cynthia Hogue
Meditation on Leonard Schwartz’s Poetry, an Appreciation
Myth is the story told of what cannot be told, as mystery is the scene revealed of what cannot be revealed, and the mystic gnosis the thing known that cannot be known.
Robert Duncan, The Truth and Life in Myth
A year after 9/11, Leonard Schwartz sent me a long meditative poem on the attack, in which he subtly disentangled the overwhelmingly raucous and reactionary language responding to the attack on the Twin Towers from the iconography of destruction, the terrible facts of the ensuing war in Afghanistan. I don’t remember why he shared this extraordinary poem in draft with me, but I found it—profound, alert, exploratory—one of the best poems on 9/11 I’d read, if one can make of such a tensile, timely work such a generalization.
I happen upon it now nearly twenty years later, and marvel at how the poem transcends its occasion for being. The poem, entitled “The New Babel,” awes me anew when I stumble upon it in my old files. I had forgotten its perfect fusion of mourning and analytic fury. Wilhelm Reich is quoted, I think sardonically: “Man’s intense longing for peace is never so strong as it is at a time of war.”[1] In truth, Schwartz counters, “The wars come in waves” (ms. 6). And like waves, they do not end. Duncan, more accurate in his outraged understanding of war’s dynamic, is also invoked in its regard:
“the deeper unsatisfied war beneath and behind the declared war”(Duncan), the conflicting egotisms,
the hooligans of hubris, combat groups, policies of chaos, and petroleum spread, all yield to a larger
dialectic. (ms. 19)
As outraged by the Bush administration’s actions as Duncan was by Johnson’s during the Vietnam War, Schwartz mournfully casts back to WW II (as Duncan did to WWI): “Can one figure the number of waves the Pacific has wept since Nagasaki and Hiroshima?” (ms. 5)
The lyric force that animates Schwartz’s lament in this poem is exemplary of the emotional drive that propels his verse in general, but in “The New Babel,” it is in the cerebral contemplation of the kaleidoscopic “babble” of responses to the 9/11 attacks that we find its fiercely brilliant core. Schwartz is a piercing thinker, and his mind moves out from that core to probe the material’s mysterious and complex sociopolitical terrain by invoking the myth that the attack inevitably overlays, the allegory of the Tower of Babel, which represents the story that has not been told of 9/11; the scene revealed of what cannot be revealed (because that which had been there at Ground Zero is now absence); and the babble about what actually cannot be known but only acknowledged of the tragic hubris in action and reaction. As Schwartz puts it in a recent metapoetic series collected in Heavy Sublimation, “Poetry as Explanation,” poetry is explanation:
Because the known is dipped
In the ink of the unknowable.
Because inklings of the unknowable
Show up in language.[2]
The ink/inklings pun alchemizes not only the metaphysical but also the political story of what cannot be told in/as poetry, but which poetry can and does contain. Schwartz navigates the process by which Babel becomes babble, which is to say song (poesis), the roots of words and the situated contexts of seemingly separate events connecting, like a forest’s mycelia—as Schwartz writes in the recent poem “Capitol Forest” --
“That trail underground for miles” (HS, 22).
“The New Babel” enacts the truth of life in myth (pace Duncan). Here to illustrate, its opening stanzas:
Babel of course is the fall of a Tower, followed by a vast, manipulated confusion of words.
Babble is language’s beginning, before it’s a language, while it’s still song.
As Babel is both a ground and a zero, Middle English grund and Arabic zefir,
cipher, Gallacized zero - let’s call it Ground Zero.
Babel is defiance of the demiurge and hubris of the heart, ziggurat aimed at suns yet unborn, inside the mouth the mouth as desire: man creates gods.
Where before stood the North and South Phallus now yawns a smoldering Cleft, smoke subject to variable breezes.
The smoke contains bodies; we breathe one another. Thus, Babel is Kabul. We breathe one another.
(ms. 1)
Babel is Kabul: sounds connect the mythic and the actual cities. In the slippage from myth to life, story to song, the defiance of Babel to the burble of babble—language before it’s language in which inklings of the unknowable show up—Schwartz excavates the connections both housed in and obscured by language itself. He’s thinking-singing, as Hank Lazer has called it,[3] as the lines proceed, the cross-cultural, etymological matters, which analyzed, take us from the languages of loss and enmity and absence to their origins, lifting word and image out of their roots and into something that literally inspires us at the cellular level: We breathe one another. Unknown, unseen, the connections are there, as inescapable as they are literally unsightly, bursting with a precision not of bombs but of speculative, summary insight:
“Working hypothesis #1: a precise for love and not a precision bombing” (ms. 15).
A perfectly balanced and precisely nuanced socio-metaphysical pun that encapsulates what draws me back again and again: the boldness of thought and line, the expressive range of intellect and emotion, the deeply engaged and trenchant, worldly responsiveness so characteristic of Leonard Schwartz’s ever-compelling work.
[1] Manuscript p. 4. All quotations from “The New Babel” are from the manuscript version sent to me by the author in 2002. Hereafter cited parenthetically in text as ms. followed by the page number. But for further reading, see the major monograph on poetics to which this early draft led: Leonard Schwartz, The New Babel: Towards a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (Fayetteville, AR: U of AR P, 2016).
[2] Leonard Schwartz, Heavy Sublimation: New Poems (Northfield, MA: Talisman House, 2018), 36. Hereafter cited in text parenthetically as HS followed by the page number.
[3] Hank Lazer, “Thinking / Singing and the Metaphysics of Sound,” Lyric & Spirit (Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Press, 2008), 188.
Robert Duncan, The Truth and Life in Myth
A year after 9/11, Leonard Schwartz sent me a long meditative poem on the attack, in which he subtly disentangled the overwhelmingly raucous and reactionary language responding to the attack on the Twin Towers from the iconography of destruction, the terrible facts of the ensuing war in Afghanistan. I don’t remember why he shared this extraordinary poem in draft with me, but I found it—profound, alert, exploratory—one of the best poems on 9/11 I’d read, if one can make of such a tensile, timely work such a generalization.
I happen upon it now nearly twenty years later, and marvel at how the poem transcends its occasion for being. The poem, entitled “The New Babel,” awes me anew when I stumble upon it in my old files. I had forgotten its perfect fusion of mourning and analytic fury. Wilhelm Reich is quoted, I think sardonically: “Man’s intense longing for peace is never so strong as it is at a time of war.”[1] In truth, Schwartz counters, “The wars come in waves” (ms. 6). And like waves, they do not end. Duncan, more accurate in his outraged understanding of war’s dynamic, is also invoked in its regard:
“the deeper unsatisfied war beneath and behind the declared war”(Duncan), the conflicting egotisms,
the hooligans of hubris, combat groups, policies of chaos, and petroleum spread, all yield to a larger
dialectic. (ms. 19)
As outraged by the Bush administration’s actions as Duncan was by Johnson’s during the Vietnam War, Schwartz mournfully casts back to WW II (as Duncan did to WWI): “Can one figure the number of waves the Pacific has wept since Nagasaki and Hiroshima?” (ms. 5)
The lyric force that animates Schwartz’s lament in this poem is exemplary of the emotional drive that propels his verse in general, but in “The New Babel,” it is in the cerebral contemplation of the kaleidoscopic “babble” of responses to the 9/11 attacks that we find its fiercely brilliant core. Schwartz is a piercing thinker, and his mind moves out from that core to probe the material’s mysterious and complex sociopolitical terrain by invoking the myth that the attack inevitably overlays, the allegory of the Tower of Babel, which represents the story that has not been told of 9/11; the scene revealed of what cannot be revealed (because that which had been there at Ground Zero is now absence); and the babble about what actually cannot be known but only acknowledged of the tragic hubris in action and reaction. As Schwartz puts it in a recent metapoetic series collected in Heavy Sublimation, “Poetry as Explanation,” poetry is explanation:
Because the known is dipped
In the ink of the unknowable.
Because inklings of the unknowable
Show up in language.[2]
The ink/inklings pun alchemizes not only the metaphysical but also the political story of what cannot be told in/as poetry, but which poetry can and does contain. Schwartz navigates the process by which Babel becomes babble, which is to say song (poesis), the roots of words and the situated contexts of seemingly separate events connecting, like a forest’s mycelia—as Schwartz writes in the recent poem “Capitol Forest” --
“That trail underground for miles” (HS, 22).
“The New Babel” enacts the truth of life in myth (pace Duncan). Here to illustrate, its opening stanzas:
Babel of course is the fall of a Tower, followed by a vast, manipulated confusion of words.
Babble is language’s beginning, before it’s a language, while it’s still song.
As Babel is both a ground and a zero, Middle English grund and Arabic zefir,
cipher, Gallacized zero - let’s call it Ground Zero.
Babel is defiance of the demiurge and hubris of the heart, ziggurat aimed at suns yet unborn, inside the mouth the mouth as desire: man creates gods.
Where before stood the North and South Phallus now yawns a smoldering Cleft, smoke subject to variable breezes.
The smoke contains bodies; we breathe one another. Thus, Babel is Kabul. We breathe one another.
(ms. 1)
Babel is Kabul: sounds connect the mythic and the actual cities. In the slippage from myth to life, story to song, the defiance of Babel to the burble of babble—language before it’s language in which inklings of the unknowable show up—Schwartz excavates the connections both housed in and obscured by language itself. He’s thinking-singing, as Hank Lazer has called it,[3] as the lines proceed, the cross-cultural, etymological matters, which analyzed, take us from the languages of loss and enmity and absence to their origins, lifting word and image out of their roots and into something that literally inspires us at the cellular level: We breathe one another. Unknown, unseen, the connections are there, as inescapable as they are literally unsightly, bursting with a precision not of bombs but of speculative, summary insight:
“Working hypothesis #1: a precise for love and not a precision bombing” (ms. 15).
A perfectly balanced and precisely nuanced socio-metaphysical pun that encapsulates what draws me back again and again: the boldness of thought and line, the expressive range of intellect and emotion, the deeply engaged and trenchant, worldly responsiveness so characteristic of Leonard Schwartz’s ever-compelling work.
[1] Manuscript p. 4. All quotations from “The New Babel” are from the manuscript version sent to me by the author in 2002. Hereafter cited parenthetically in text as ms. followed by the page number. But for further reading, see the major monograph on poetics to which this early draft led: Leonard Schwartz, The New Babel: Towards a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (Fayetteville, AR: U of AR P, 2016).
[2] Leonard Schwartz, Heavy Sublimation: New Poems (Northfield, MA: Talisman House, 2018), 36. Hereafter cited in text parenthetically as HS followed by the page number.
[3] Hank Lazer, “Thinking / Singing and the Metaphysics of Sound,” Lyric & Spirit (Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Press, 2008), 188.
