The Mental Fight —Allen Grossman [Jerusalem] And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my Arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire! I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green & pleasant Land.1 This poem is about KNOWING FOR SURE at last and unexpectedly. And what to do about THAT. This poem is about the fundamental requirements of political action in the poetic sense—"Mental Fight." REBUILDING. The political question of Jerusalem is even now in the news. Why FEET that walk? Because feet that walk are confident of path. And path—TAO—is all WE NEED to know. PATH is knowing for sure—knowing the ground. The WALKING of the MASTER in THIS place. All walking—that is, all significant thinking—is following. And all significant building is re-building. The first builder—creating God—looked upon a pattern. "Ancient time" is not clock-time but OTHER time—the time when significance can be found. "Significance" is meaning on the ground. NOT ON THE CLOCK. The master found and followed—he of the big feet and shining face—the path in OUR world. The completion of the action of this poem is an oath upon the sword, the warrant of intention (I WILL NOT CEASE) to continue—not the possession already of anything, certainly not of a truth. The oath commits the singers of this song not to cease from building. That's MENTAL FIGHT against what resists significant human making. That's thought-fighting which KEEPS the body and its world. BUILDS. Poems are not such making, but show what such making is like. Nameless in William Blake's larger text, but called "Jerusalem" in the hymnals of the Church of England, this choral song-poem IS SUNG BY PERSONS TOGETHER. Together they feel (A GREAT RUSH) sudden conviction with respect to a promise, which we are NOW sure CAN BE FULFILLED BY OUR WORK. The meter says: "This legendary story, by its nature impossible to be believed (if it is not IMPOSSIBLE to be believed it is not IMPORTANT to be BELIEVED), has been told of old (ancient) time and we now ALL know it to be true about us, "Yes, yes those feet did . . . HERE . . . FOR US." "True about us" is the bitterly CONTESTED meaning of the name "Jerusalem." How do we know a promise is trustworthy?—This is a hymn to be sung in that church the god of which (whatever god it may be) is a god of the same nation as the singers—e.g., "England," the Biblical Israel of our English language, or (let the god be called by the general name of "nation") of any native tongue. The PROMISED land is the land which language promises. HOW DO WE KNOW A PROMISE IS WORTH TRUST? NOT because the promise proves true, but because everyone trusts (WE TRUST) that it is true. And how do we know everyone trusts that it is (though impossible to be so) true. BECAUSE WE ALL SING THE SAME SONG AND IT IS A BEAUTIFUL SONG. Unlike other occasions of knowing (and EXPERIENCE is nothing other than occasion for knowing) this sudden knowing is a reason for doing—and precisely the best reason for the best doing. Not new knowledge, but confidence that what you know is true. This is the FEEL of the political truth for which WE hope. The experience of KNOWING at last FOR SURE. —NOT SOLITARY KNOWING, BUT KNOWING WHAT EVERYBODY KNOWS WHEN THEY KNOW FOR SURE and what you do about THAT, is the gigantic (POLITICAL) subject of this poem. Truths, Falsehoods, and a Wee Bit of Honesty —Peter Johnson My favorite passage in literature comes from the introductory section of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, called "The Book of the Grotesque." In it, the narrator tells of an old man who lists "hundreds of truths," among them the "truth of virginity, the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths, and they were beautiful." The narrator follows this catalogue of truths with a sentence that, to my mind, explains much about human nature. "And then," he says, "the people came along." Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them. It was the truths that made people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.2

This passage is particularly applicable to politics in the contemporary literary world, which involves a constant negotiation of these kinds of truths. Certainly, as a prose poet, I face prejudices unique to my calling, but most of the problems that confront prose poets are the same ones that verse poets face. For one thing, even the best of editors embrace certain "truths" (how can they not?), which can make them grotesque. Some editors also walk point for different literary movements, and the great irony has always been that the more avant-garde a movement pretends to be—self-consciously pitting itself against a real or imagined Tradition—the more it resembles the snobbiest, most exclusive country club. But at least most editors and schools seem dedicated to their "truths," and there's a certain honesty to that. The scarier politics occur when the "truths" that editors embrace are changeable, based less on conviction than on career moves. "Career" is a word I hear all the time and find very curious when mentioned in the same breath with "poetry." When I first began submitting poems, I imagined sophisticated, open-minded editors sitting in spacious, book-lined studies, reading my poems, then setting them aside, only to return later to savor their deeper resonances. After eight years of running a literary magazine, I now know that any meathead can be an editor. I'm the perfect example. All you need is a minimal amount of money to print a small volume. Or, even easier, you can hover around an established journal and wait for the editors to die off. And there is a career track, every bit as delineated as the one at IBM— solicit and publish the big-name poets; anticipate who the new movers-and-groovers will be; and publish or write book reviews for all of them. In spite of this "political" nonsense, poets who care about their work will continue to write and to submit. Witness prose poets, who have more problems to deal with than the average poet. For one thing, some editors—though not as many as there used to be—either hate prose poetry, or don't think it exists. Publication of prose poems also depends on an editor's knowledge of the genre, and some may not be well-versed in any kind of prose-poem tradition, or be open to the genre's endless possibilities. Consequently, if you're trying to do something very different, you may end up being the best least-read prose poet of your generation. Of course, there are no solutions to political in- and out- fighting in the literary world, a fact that gives us permission to whine endlessly when our work is rejected. This is good for the soul, and we should keep in mind that this year's biggest whiner is very often next year's superstar. Nevertheless, I do think that we could create a better literary climate if we would become more honest and organized about our politics. For example, every literary movement could be run like a political party, and every poet could be made to join one of these parties. To show my good faith, as of today, I am officially founding the Prose-Poem Party. It will include both living and dead authors. Russell Edson will be the President and Gertrude Stein his First Lady, with Rimbaud their enfant terrible. All prose poets will move to Why, Arizona, where we'll create our own State. Our constitution will be the preface to Paris Spleen. The State mascot will be the platypus; the State seal, a question mark. Any prose poet refusing to join the Party will be banished to Bread Loaf without a tennis racket. Our literary journal will be called Linear—Sometimes, and its content, except for the editor's name, will be published in invisible ink. You will have to read our journal backwards; you will have to read it blind-folded. Solicited poems will be returned unread; unsolicited ones will be glanced at between 4:00 and 4:05 p.m. on January 13th. Please no prose poems about mothers, fathers, children, flowers or sex acts. Definitely no working-class poems. So let it be written. So let it be done. Past Paraphrase —Karen Volkman Osip Mandelstam disliked paraphrase. How ironic, then, that he has become an emblem: the iconic poet of integrity and privacy destroyed by a totalitarian system. This is true, and terrible, but it is a paraphrase, guilty of all the impoverishing reduction Mandelstam so adamantly opposed. Written in 1933, four years before the poet's imprisonment and death, his "Conversation About Dante" is a fascinating document of this resistance. Discussing a work renowned for its monumental architecture and affirmation of hierarchy, Mandelstam instead celebrates in Dante the disruption and deformation of structure. His medium: conversation and its mutable motion. "You could not keep my lips from moving," writes Mandelstam in one late poem. Speech fed his writing. He composed out loud, attentive to each nuance of vocal quality, and insisted that Dante was meant to be recited, acquiring new dimensions of meaning in enunciation. In contrast to the constrained conditions of the Stalinist era, in which anyone could be an informer and all conversation was tainted, circumscribed and suspect, conversation throughout The Comedy is the impetus to movement—this "journey with conversations" is a trajectory of talk. The Pilgrim's knowledge is acquired through discussion, largely with his guides, Virgil and Beatrice, but even his enemies are obliged to help him in telling their tales, contributing to his upward spiral along the path of enlightenment. The persecuted Mandelstam is acutely aware of the Pilgrim's constraint in voicing questions, characterizing them as "hatched" by the two successive mentors, who sense again and again his winging impulse, the thought-bird. Speech, sensual and material, lives by travel. Like poetry, discourse is a journey of shifts and turns. "The step, linked with breathing and saturated with thought, [he] understood as the beginning of prosody. . . In Dante poetry and philosophy are constantly on the go. Even a stop is but a variety of accumulated motion. . . . The metrical foot is the inhalation and exhalation of the step." This movement is purposeful, transformative and future-seeking, cross-breeding elements and species: from the hatched bird grows the speech-fruit, the earthbound step from saturate thought. When matter disappears in The Paradiso, speech continues, and Mandelstam names Dante's new hybrid "phonetic light." "How many shoe soles, how many oxhide soles, how many pairs of sandals did Alighieri wear out during the course of his poetic work?" The step measures prosodic pace, but the poem contains other time-realms. Mandelstam complicates chronological cycles with alternate measures—the clock of etymology, mineral weather, Dante's synchronic fabrications, all ignited in the "instinct for form creation" which exceeds and extends syntactic coordinates. At these speeds, sentence structure is subsumed, leaving "merely a magnetized impulse." But in Mandelstam's taxonomy, Dante's greatest mutant species is a kind of poetic anti-matter machine, canceling by accretion: enter "the Heraclitean metaphor; it so strongly emphasizes the fluidity of the phenomenon and cancels it with such a flourish, that direct contemplation, after the metaphor has completed its work, is essentially left with nothing to sustain it." Jane Gary Harris, editor and co-translator of Mandelstam's collected critical prose, suggests Andrey Bely as the silent partner of the conversation. A writer of intricate prose (and unremarkable poetry), whose 1916 masterpiece, Petersburg, weaves terrorist plots and paranoia, Bely himself occupied a peculiar position in the restructured hierarchy. Half Symbolist, mystical dandy, half hallucinatory satirist, he was a major prose innovator and a main proponent of the dense textured style known as Ornamentalism. Petersburg is an early 20th century riff on the damned city visions of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Mandelstam—who in his own poems christens Petersburg "transparent Petropolis"—posits Hell as a nebulous, toxic city, spectral Florence: "like an epidemic, an infectious disease or the plague, it spreads like a contagion, even though it is not spatial." Through Bely, an entire lineage joins in as interlocutors. The ornamental and the excessive are another point of contact with Bely, as Mandelstam notes another form of Dantean transmutation— the image as agitated energy, irreducible pure propulsion. "Dante is by his very nature one who shakes up meaning and destroys the integrity of the image. The composition of his cantos resembles an airline schedule or the indefatigable flight of carrier pigeons." Mandelstam insists on the value of surplus in Dante's imagistic strings; essential BECAUSE dispensable, the superfluous takes on value "in direct proportion to our ability to do without it." The Dostoevskian "superfluous man" lurks in these words, as do his real-life Soviet counterparts, the intellectual, the artist, the kulak. Here excess becomes exactly the value of form-making—the poet as augmenter of volumes, instigator of increase, a force of nature—"Ornament is good precisely because it preserves traces of its origin like a piece of nature enacted." It should be remembered that Mandelstam never rejected the values of the Revolution. In Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir Hope Against Hope, his wife speaks of the romance of the word and the devotion it compelled from so many in the midst of the harshest persecution. The poet's fascination with Dante's animating of impulse and energy, the poesis of "phonetic light" and crystal complex structures, shows him linking the great writer to the same spirit of aesthetic exuberance that characterized the years preceding and following 1917—and to the darker, more anguished impulse that shaped his late poems. While Mandelstam never adopted the radical style of a Mayakovsky or Khlebnikov—virtually all of his poetry is rhymed and metrically regular, a fact often buried in English translations—the poems perform astonishing upheavals, cataclysmic resistances, within their taut constraints. Joseph Brodsky describes the late poems of the Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks as "an incredible psychic acceleration," a "honing of speeds." Mandelstam's scornful dismissal of Dante's interpretation in overtly political or theological terms, his insistence that such concerns were merely a frame for the "instinct for form-creation," could be taken simply as a rejection of the content-based prescriptions of Socialist Realism. Or even more simply, as justified caution. The poet demands we resist these reductions. Apparent, certainly, is his empathy for the medieval exile adrift in political corruption. But the interlacing of these two poetic velocities outpaces parallels; it cries for collaboration, for a dynamic launching of the fluid, unstable form underlying the circumscriptions of structure. Traces of this insurgence inhere in a human and artistic conversation accomplished across centuries and space, in the tangle of speech-roots that grow and reach. "What distinguishes poetry from automatic speech is that it rouses us and shakes us into wakefulness in the middle of a word. Then it turns out that the word is much longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means to be forever on the road."

WORKS CITED: Joseph Brodsky, "Introduction" to Osip Mandelstam: 50 Poems, translated by Bernard Meares (New York: Persea, 1977). Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, translated by Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970). Osip Mandelstam, "Conversation About Dante" in Osip Mandelstam: Critical Prose and Letters, edited by Jane Gary Harris, translated by Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979). Osip Mandelstam, Tristia, translated by Bruce McClelland (Barrytown, New York: Station Hill Press, 1987). Osip Mandelstam, The Voronezh Notebooks, translated by Richard and Elizabeth McKane (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1996). NOTES: 1 These quatrains by William Blake appear in the Preface to his poem Milton (1804-10). 2 Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (Penguin, 1992, 1919), pp. 23-24.