Goethe's view of style as resting “on the deepest fundamental ground of knowledge, on the essence of things,”¹ and the discovery of this essence in a connaturality of reality and subjectivity lie behind Robert Bly's choices for The Selected Poems of David Ignatow. The decisions have been, in Bly's case, further transmogrified by the writings of Carl Jung, who makes no effort to hide the influence of Goethe and German Romanticism on his thinking. Thus, one of America's classic city poets is cast into a role similar to that which Martin Heidegger defines for Friedrich Hölderlin—the poet as mediator of logos (word) and physis (thing). Facing the Tree, Ignatow's newest collection of poems, strengthens this concept of poet as mediator and, given the influence of Goethe on the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emerson's part in shaping American poetics, a reader can begin to see some justification in connecting Ignatow and Hölderlin. Indeed, Joseph N. Riddel's The Inverted Bell (1974) puts Ignatow's mentor, William Carlos Williams, squarely in the “Hölderlin tradition” by making the pronunciamento “no ideas but in things” a plan to enact the same fusion that Heidegger praises in the work of the German poet. Yet, Ignatow's view of the Williams image as being little different from aestheticism and his insistence that style intimately involves social aspects as well as his refusal to recognize a priority of archetype lead to significant differences from Williams and Bly and suggest that the reader examine carefully the areas of “betweenness” in Ignatow's writing in considering both Bly's selection and the poet's own volume. In such a consideration, various interviews and The Notebooks prove enormously useful.

For Bly, connaturality means coming to terms with Nature and, as for Jung, coming to terms with Nature means coming to terms with archetype and “primitive depth of feeling.” Nature represents the instinctive, irrational life “flowing beneath reason,” which if not integrated by the mind results in various violences. In “A Note on Antonio Machado” (1960), Bly makes the lesson of poetry the sensitivity training that Jung specifies is needed for integration: “Every thing which comes from without becomes our own only when we are capable of an inner spaciousness which corresponds to the size of the outer increase. The actual increase in personality is the becoming conscious of a widening, which flows from inner sources.”² Connaturality of reality and subjectivity in Bly is, consequently, psychological, and its morality consists in a kind of mental health. It is, as he explains in the introductory note to the opening section of his selection, the “third thing” that the rational mind often misses when anxiety produces a deadlock of “two alternatives, usually involving opposites.”³ The “third thing” entirely enters and solves the situation. On a social plane, the obstacle to connaturality is not so much rationality as a “statistical mentality” or a predisposition toward quantity. Bly characterizes this “statistical mentality” as leading one into violence as “a way of proving that you can still affect others, and thereby do exist” (SP, 94). Both “deviations” deny Bly's beliefs that behind every civilized person is a superior primitive man and that Nature herself is an irrational force whose repression occurs at the risk of eventual breakdown.

As a product of human invention, the city becomes for Ignatow “natural” (N, 22). Like the machine, it reflects man's need if not himself. In writing about it, the poet “collaborates” with and expresses his time. “Since the lives of the vast majority of people are being lived in the city,” the city with its peculiar characteristics bears deeply, as Goethe suggests, on poetic style. “Obviously,” Ignatow says in boundary 2 (Vol. 3/2 1974), “the relationship between poetic style and living style is not a one to one relationship, but surely you could not place a poem by Eliot beside that of Wordsworth without noting at once the difference in tone and direction” (b2, 454-5). Change is the major characteristic of the city and of reality itself: “Transformation is the principle of change, change is the principle of reality, reality is the principle of being, and being is the principle of existence. Existence is perpetual, but perpetually in change also” (N, 346). “The complete story” of the process enters through the poet's senses and he responds to it sympathetically as he shapes it into his work: “At the base of modern poetry is the need to convey immediacy, the thing there in front of you, in you, the overwhelming force of that within and without as opposed to the rationalization of it” (N, 177). “Form is in flux, in a state of dissolution and flow”; “all our old beliefs are on the go, in question before new material” (N, 3). Ignatow's view of art is, thus, one of ratio rather than of simple mirroring. Much as in medieval art theory and, after 1924, in the work of Williams, the poet imitates the process of nature. His purpose is to extend nature by creating something that stands within and yet apart from her creations. It is, as Ignatow repeatedly insists, a beating the breasts of the “mother for recognition as her superior” (N, 12).

The emphasis on the worldly and sensory as the basis of poetry does not alter, however, the poet's admonitions against a complete reliance on human nature or his chagrin at the old's being discarded for something novel before it has been thoroughly tested (N, 92). Ignatow believes that homosexuality “is man worshipping himself instead of God, worshipping his own possibilities and making of these his illimitable goal of perfection, attributes that belong to God” (N, 177). He also believes that Williams' poetry had not gone deeply enough. The imagery revealed “nothing of his emotions or ideas but [merely] an excitement with the image” (N, 15). Meaning in the work remained surface, “with the image.” In contrast, his own poetry involves “identity,” and his tendency to objectify fuses with the “many events, etc. happening outside us” that prompt the thinking of oneself “finally as events, objects for study and contemplation” (N, 297). Image becomes “identity” and, therefore, requires that the writer “cerebrate” before lightly discarding the “geegaws, refrigerators, cars, golf sticks, deodorants, toilet tissue” (b2, 449) that people use to define themselves. Acknowledging that “the American character is not … introspective” with “opportunities outside itself to be fulfilled in an objective way” and that he, too, finds “inspiration in outward images and outward events” (N, 297, 44), Ignatow describes his own tendency toward images as that of “the man of sorrows,” “getting to the center of life,” “truly engaging … at the level of soul” (N, 169, 304, 137). His is “the kind of mind … suited for subtleties, distinctions, conjectures, rabbinical. It is never more delighted than when it is active in some problematic cause” (N, 169). It values ethics above psychology and situates between history and eternity. Connaturality in his writing becomes, as a result, far more metaphysical than Bly proposes.

Mediation, as it exists in Ignatow's work, occurs between “belief” and “act” rather than between logos and physis. It is an almost Kierkegaardian seizing of the Existential moment: “I believe in the past and I believe in the future. The present is the time to act upon my faith” (N, 221). The ideal poet's role becomes that of “pointing out the bad from the standpoint of forgiveness and peace rather than improvement” (N, 130). Earlier, when he had talked of God, love, and morality, he had actually meant “will to live” or “instinct to survive” (N, 241, 278). In the poetry, the confusion led him to examine and espouse Manichaean and Gnostic positions in regard to necessity and evil. The world appeared at separate times caught up in continual battle between good and evil or ruled by a Divine force who saw evil and refused to correct it. As early as 1964, the poet began to work out of this error by “trying to write a new poetry which relates simply to men and leaves off right there. Calls on no god, draws on no mystic allusion and creates no portentous atmosphere” (N, 247). More recently he said in boundary 2, “The solution … is to lodge man's ultimate meaning in his body where he becomes his own judge, jury, and prosecutor or celebrant” (b2, 460). Facing the Tree takes up this “fixed pole” of the present moment and pits it either against the repetitious and reversible cycles of life or against memories of the dead. Ignatow's poetry, in this way, assumes a basis that is far more fact-obsessed than that of his mentor Williams and infinitely less enigmatic than Bly advocates. By making the fixed pole of action the present, it places more emphasis on individual responsibility and the need for writers to communicate. The “third thing” in his work evolves not to solve alternatives that rationality has fostered but to test the states that change invariably creates.

In presenting these tests, the poetry has inclined at times toward the baroque and transcendental, for the competing alternatives that the initial and changed states seem to set up require, as in baroque music, some sort of transcendence. Often the “cause” of this transcendence goes unprobed; it resides in one of the several gaps or interstices that characterize Ignatow's work. Increasingly, however, the poetry has ended classically. The oppositions, as in Oedipus Rex, turn out to be false, untenable, and temporary, and circumstances return to their former state, made confident by the testing of an indestructible core. In “The Bagel,” for instance, which Bly places among the “Images of the Wild, Third Thing,” the speaker, “rolling down the street / head over heels, one complete somersault / after another like a bagel,” concludes on his own state and not the transformation he has temperamentally assumed (SP, 26). Similarly, the “thing, jumping out of a manhole” in “News Report” to touch the lives of various women does not in any great way alter their identities, however much it leaves marks on them (SP, 47). Occurring in both poems are variations of the “return to original sources, to the beginnings, the root of things” that the poet describes happening in “Rituals” (b2, 470). The result is again “identity,” but “identity” based on instinct rather than gadgetry. In each, man becomes identified with what his imagination fails to make of him, and the identification, in turn, bears on the poet's own belief that “the significance” of his life is its “having failed” in his own eyes (N, 324). Thus, for all, the hope of change rather than change itself is the subject.

The world of “squirrels and cats,” in such circumstances, turns reverie—“that part of my life which I remember from childhood” (N, 68). Nature is innocence, unaltered by man's desires and as indifferent to him as the heavens of Albert Camus' The Stranger (1942). Trees, as a consequence, take on a “mystic symbol of eternity and calm and fullness of life and its goodness.” “When I stand under one and look ahead to the roof they make all around me I can think of nothing more beautiful and soothing” (N, 126-7). Nature provides the “calm voice of wisdom” in the poet's “acceptance of natural processes and events” and allows for his setting in order “history, the city, culture, work, angers and fears, ambition, love and sex” ([“An Interview with David Ignatow,” Some; hereafter cited as S], 29), but nature's inability to imagine makes it less a functioning part of man's psyche than a part of what Bly defines as “the preparation for death that the ancients talked of, a stage of adulthood that in the fortunate man or woman precedes death” (SP, 110). By choosing for The Selected Poems poems like “My Beard Rough as the Beginning” and “Poem: A View of the Mountain,” he reminds readers of the favorable attitudes that Ignatow has taken toward nature. The first sees the woods as a community that the speaker desires, “growing a skin / to make friends / with the squirrels, the fox / and the puma.” He will “be hidden behind their furry selves / and making [his] own sounds” (SP, 14). The second talks of “understanding” a mountain (SP, 16). More recently, however, as part of a growing awareness that man in death becomes nature in his return to both “the womb” and inertia, a “silence” has surfaced approximating the “silence” that Alain Robbe-Grillet writes of in For the New Novel (1963).

This “silence” arises like Robbe-Grillet's, “enhanced with content, with depth of meaning, with a soul—which sends me back at once to my own soul,”⁴ but rather than provide only the “widening from inner sources” that Bly's view of nature indicates, it provides as well a test of man's identity by forcing him at times to accept a failure to grow. “My Enemies,” for instance, turns the Christian admonition to love one's enemies on nature. The speaker recognizes his surroundings initially as an indifferent “other”: “I saw no purpose in a tree growing or in the food set before me. I could see no commerce between men and me.” Eventually he comes to accept nature as a discrete “companion in living,” whose desire “to remain and be” complements his own (FT, 29-30). “Talking to Myself” repeats the indifference: “About my being a poet, the trees certainly haven't expressed an interest, standing at a distance” (FT, 37). The speaker subsequently attacks their inabilities to imagine. “Backyard” returns to an uncritical separation of man and other as a kind of survival: One lives on others with whom he often does not communicate or, as The Notebooks asserts, “We are both exploiters and exploited and whoever protests one or the other role is really stepping outside nature” (FT, 61; N, 21). “In Silence We Sat Across the Table” shows this kind of exploitation between husband and wife “disappearing down our throats / never again to emerge / except as waste” (FT, 76). In each of these poems, communication fails, leaving the individual identified in terms of similarity, contrast, contiguity, and cause-and-effect. The impulse to dissolution has, in every instance, resulted only in further isolation.

Similarly, in the mediation of belief and act, Ignatow prefers to deal with the passive effects of a runaway technology rather than, as Bly suggests, to attack the “statistical mentality.” Individually, Americans may have sought identity in things but, as significantly for Ignatow, their minds and the very shape of their lives are in the control of huge, impersonal interests and forces (b2, 449). These interests and forces so diminish man's role to mere consumer that his flexible and finite parameters are subsumed in their capacity for indefinite expansion and ability to create unlimited needs. In the sixties, a “distorted view of life” emerged, characterized by brutality, indifference, and cynicism. Man killed man “as if it were the necessary right thing to do, as a culture” (S, 28). The figures in Ignatow's poems turn to violence to exemplify this “distorted view” as well as to overcome temporarily their passivity. They regain, at the same time, as Bly indicates, proof of existence by their abilities to affect others, but the source of this “proof” lies as much in their inabilities to imagine and believe as in their capacities to act. In this correlating of belief to “proper” act, Ignatow denies the innate “superiority” of Bly's primitive imagination to the capacity of a mature, rational, urban mentality. He says in boundary 2, “I don't see the possibility of eliminating from our lives the technology by which the modern city is characterized. … It and I must work together to make each other recognizably human and worthwhile” (b2, 478-9). By the very ratio of his art and the condition of community rather than by any pastoral retreat, Ignatow seeks to accomplish this goal.

Assuredly, as The Selected Poems illustrates, Ignatow is interested in dreams, wit-work, and surrealism, and there is no question that many of his early and middle poems contain the tensions that Bly chronicles. In the business world, matters tend to become either/or, and the city does tend to force one into extreme statements. Decision, evasion, dream, and wit become, in these circumstances, means of transcendence, but since the mid-sixties, Ignatow has taught, and his teaching has allowed a certain meditative tone to enter and strengthen his work. He has also lived at times in suburban and rural atmospheres. His expressed liking for the thought of Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and Kierkegaard, and his particular affinity with Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952) have comprised part of the result (b2, 456), but Ignatow has remained willfully independent of their “abstractions from experience” and despite an increase in landscape, his work has remained attached to the local and city. Consequently, a “Selected Poems” chosen to agree with Ignatow's current preoccupations would by slighting the early tensions be no more representative. As “No Theory” recently maintained, no theory is adequate to the separate ways the imagination moves from what exists to an equally worldly future reality.

The need by readers to nail down a particular source for all these imaginative moves leads even today into misinterpretation. Bly's analyses of “Rescue the Dead,” for example, especially in regard to the poem's view of love, have come to stand as unfortunate “maps of misreading.” He interpreted the piece originally in “Slipping toward the Instinct” (1968), and the reading has been rejected by the poet, first in The Tennessee Poetry Journal (1970) and later in Some (1973) and boundary 2. Bly sought originally to minimize the ironic, Existential “bad faith” characteristics of love that appear in the poem because they run counter to his own notion of Nature: “To love is to be led away / into a forest where the secret grave / is dug.” This love is meant to be as “deadening” as the “Sartrean freedom” of the poem's “Not to love is to live” (SP, 125). Ignatow knows that both love and death have nothing to do with design and that W. H. Auden's suggestion that man could “love or die” is as absurd as Randall Jarrell proposed. Ignatow told Scott Chisholm, “In the last analysis, you love yourself, which is manifested in the fact that you continue to live” ([“An Interview with David Ignatow,” Tennessee Poetry Journal], 32). Bly softens his reading for The Selected Poems, saying merely that “the meanings of ‘to live’ and ‘to be dead’ keep shifting, as well as the meanings of ‘to love’ and ‘to be alive’” (SP, 128), but, by excluding from the collection so many of Ignatow's poems of love, anguish, and commiseration, Bly continues to show bafflement in these areas. The impression of his volume, despite the overall high quality of the selections, is angrier, more polemical, and surer of its values and enemies than either Poems 1934-1969 (1970), The Notebooks, or Facing the Tree.

Enough elements have remained constant in these imaginative moves, however, to characterize a typical Ignatow poem: It is short; its sensibility is concrete and urban, and its themes are identity, violence, and suffering. “I Showed Him My Wound,” for instance, claims, “to suffer is to know I am” (FT, 32). The suffering is often a response to change or to the crises in identity that changes cause, and it constitutes a stimulus to imagine. Much as thought was problem-solving for John Dewey, poetry becomes pain-solving. “Pain,” Ignatow writes in The Notebooks, “is my favorite subject. … Pain is what attracts people to a subject, the manifestation and development of pain to its right conclusion” (N, 47). In tracing this development, he becomes “the kind of poet that makes it tough for himself by sticking to story.” He sees a story and goes for it, “sticking to the line, letting nothing get in the way regardless of what else I feel” (N, 172). The formal elements may include “irony, absurdity, empathy with suffering and loss, the self as metaphor for all this, and the use of the vernacular and its rhythms to reinforce the reality of these modes” (b2, 447), but the narrative plot fixes on the anguish involved in abandoning the past and accepting a role in the new. Ignatow's speakers wish to keep the things-that-are in power either physically or in memory because they sense a need for the identity attached to these things and can envision no better alternatives to them. Their attachment is partly the result of Ignatow's choosing the present as the fixed pole from which to work, but their reluctance to change is also part of the general passivity that Ignatow sees present. Attacks on the city are, consequently, accompanied by the belief that “the city cannot be abandoned or destroyed without the peril of destroying or abandoning civilization itself” (b2, 455). Attacks on modern man carry the comparable reminder that any other alternative is unacceptable.

Facing the Tree redirects the elements of these typical Ignatow plots into the medium of the prose poem. By his own account, Ignatow began to feel “uneasy about the direct lyrical method” he was using and still uses on occasion: “I had begun to feel it repetitious for me, keeping me in a kind of groove.” The prose poem allowed him, instead, “to disregard end lines and to concentrate on the total poem itself which, after all, was the original purpose of the rebellion against the formalism of the traditional poem patterns” (b2, 475). The prose poem allows, too, more control over emotions by permitting an exploration of language: “It's my language that I'm exploring to its limits and, if possible, beyond” (b2, 475). Ignatow inherits this interest in exploring language from the Modernists, who along with Ezra Pound saw that when language got inexact and slushy society began to come apart. Ignatow, however, sees more clearly than many of them the dangers in making the exploration of language a means of furthering a separation of literature from life. He is not interested in refined “pseudo-statement.” His language must remain accessible to action. Therefore, he concentrates on the vernacular in forms that allow greatest accessibility to the public. The prose poem—because it minimizes the intensity and gaps of the lyric and brings Ignatow's message closer to the everyday—is to be preferred to a less accessible lyric form. There are fewer things unsaid, and the new form itself works, as prose does in Williams, as a test on the lyrical, challenging an old self with a new. The success of the Notebook entries in conveying this other self in prose may itself be an added consideration.

One result is that Facing the Tree emerges as Ignatow's best single volume to date. It is proof not only of his own continuing growth but of his ability to draw nearer his dream of his “rightful role, the national poet of America, the central voice, the one who speaks for the millions and who speaks to the person, who makes listening a must by the soul of his voice” (N, 180). “Invocation” begins the volume on a strong note, and other lyrics such as “Reading the Headlines,” “I'm Here” (a fine companion piece to “A First on TV”), “The Refuse Man,” “Somehow It Doesn't Write Itself,” “When News Came of His Death,” “Melpomene in Manhattan,” and “Their Mouths Full” number among the best lyrics that Ignatow has written. But the prose poems with their clarity, their modulations and surprises, take up the ethical stances of the lyric form and become moving and alerting parables or fables for modern man. Ignatow's increased reliance on the stream of consciousness and contexts of experience, moreover, as well as his rejection of detached metaphysical speculation places him squarely in the one philosophical tradition America has produced—pragmatism. On the other hand, his pursuits of the new by challenging the old and abandoning what can be left place him squarely in the industrial tradition whose orientation, as J. H. Plumb points out, “is towards change rather than conservation, towards exploitation and consumption” and whose “new methods, new processes, new forms of living … have no sanction in the past and no roots in it.”⁵Facing the Tree is a bold new direction for Ignatow and a “must” for all serious readers of literature.

Notes

1. Quoted in Alfred Hofstadter, Truth and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 25.

2. Carl G. Jung, Psychological Reflections, ed. Jolande Jacobi (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), p. 276.

3. Robert Bly, The Selected Poems of David Ignatow (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), p. 13; hereafter it and the following works will be cited in the text, using these abbreviations and appropriate page numbers: SP—The Selected Poems of David Ignatow; FT—Facing the Tree (Boston: Atlantic, Little-Brown, 1975); N—The Notebooks of David Ignatow, ed. Ralph Mills, Jr. (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1973); b2—“A Dialogue with William Spanos,” boundary 2, 2/3 (1974), 443-81; S—“An Interview with David Ignatow,” Some, No. 3 (Winter 1973), pp. 21-30; TPJ—“An Interview with David Ignatow,” Tennessee Poetry Journal, 3/2 (Winter 1970), 22-41.

4. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Dehumanizing Nature,” in Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr., The Modern Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 371.

5. J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (London: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1973), p. 14.