Myth of the blaze

Al Filreis

The blaze in George Oppen's “Myth of the Blaze”, a great poem of war and political ethics and guilt, is the burning bright of Blake's “tyger” in the poem (and spelled that way).

Blake’s “forests of the night”: the woods of the so-called Bulge in the horrendous battle of that name, the Rhineland campaign of winter 1944, through France to the Rhine.

“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” This is a story of tiger and lamb.

The tiger of antifascism beyond theory: In November 1942 George suddenly moves to Detroit, thus triggering the lifting of his draft exemption, and off he goes to fight in, as it turns out, some of the war’s more horrific battles. To fight — in spite of fear, and an inner pacifism (George the lamb here) — and, most startingly at the time, perhaps most dangerously — in spite of the state policy of the Communist Party of the United States.

“Myth of the Blaze” is the most sensitive poetic expression I know of the impossible moment for the communist left of the time, between September 1939 and June 1941, when the party asked its members to support the Nazi-Soviet Pact by favoring peace over war, nonaggression over rapid armament, to turn against the united front against fascism.

We know that George and Mary were most active in the party between 1936 and 1941, and that of course includes two years of suppressing their political impulses. Already feeling guilt over his failure to go to Spain in 1936 and ’37, George goes to war in ’42, now his politics once again aligned, tiger and lamb lying down together, fearful symmetry between Soviet Union and United States struck.

The “myth” in “Myth of the Blaze”: First, the imagination’s burning bright, the folklore of the alluring forest, just a myth. Bunk. Not real. “This crime” —in the poem — “This crime I will not recover / from” or “I will not recover / from that landscape it will be in my mind / it will fill my mind and this is horrible / dead bed.” Second, on the contrary, the myth is real. The imagination is the only thing. As one lies in a foxhole. He is bombarded by mortar fire, and wounded – all those he’s with are killed. More guilt. All he has, his mind and heart racing, are a lyric of Wyatt and “Rezi’s” (Reznikoff) “running thru my mind / in the destroyed (and guilty) Theatre of the War.”

The blaze is real, the fire this time. The blaze is real and not a myth.

The blaze – in Rezi’s poem about the blaze of the real in the imagination — is the myth. Guilt about thinking poems when the world is coming to an end, while one’s friends are dead and one is alive. (“[W]hy had they not / killed me — why did they fire that warning?”)

Guilt about surviving. Guilt about suppressing one’s political instinct for the two years of the party line. Coming to help Europe, to stop the slaughter of the Jews, too late. Where were we when they needed us?

Guilt about (now that the war is over) the awarded Purple Heart awarded, about leaving the party for the return to poetry, to the beautiful quiet peaceful “shack on the coast” of Maine (looking back out across the Atlantic), doing nothing much but smelling the scent of the pine needles. A scent that, anyway, reminds him of the French forest.

The knife at the end of the poem is perfectly opaque: the knife of the lamb — merely to butter one’s daily abundant American? Or the sharp killing knife-likeness of the war, the war-like imagination.

George Oppen at 100 bespeaks the reason to — and also the reason not to — affirm the reality of the political act outside the poem. The best thing about the problem is that, here, it is inside it, as follows:

I believe

in the world

because it is

Or:

I believe

in the world

because it is
impossible.

To hear a recording of the above, and to get some context for my interpretation of this poem, see the entry just above.

April 10, 2008

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.