#374

Drum Henry out, called some. Others called No,

he did a deed once, damn to chastise him so;

the regiment can bear him.

—He tore the precincts down, cried the vicious first.

Learned & stealthy he attacked & cursed

our whole art of arms, holy, dim.

Worse still, he won praise overseas by this,

affording himself his own rules. Well, we hiss

& close our eyes at his freaks.

—You got enemies, Mr. Bones. I’low

many will seek your skin & your parts below.

—I have sat here for weeks

and years. There was a time when I almost poisoned my cook.

Unamuno wrote in the Visitors’ Book

‘a humble man & a tramp’.

No challenges have come. Only the jackals howl

and Henry is fierce in blackness as an owl

on a field-mouse at the edge of my camp.

Sun Tzu is remembered for his treatise on The Art of War. This DS 374 finally articulates something that has been circulating beneath The Dream Songs all along. We might title it “The War of Art.” I’ve addressed B.’s take on art as competitive before, but here he takes it a step further and sets up an extended metaphor of the artist as a warrior engaged in a military campaign. There may be justifiable reasons for it (Patton marching his army across France toward Berlin, Sherman tearing his way through Georgia), but armies are mostly about destroying something. Ideally other armies, but there is collateral damage along the way, and too often the collateral damage becomes monstrous—whole cities, whole populations are ruined.

“Drum Henry out, called some” begins the poem, with an overtone of the kind of paranoia we’ve seen before. Why drum him out? “—He tore the precincts down, cried the vicious first. / Learned & stealthy he attacked & cursed / our whole art of arms, holy, dim.” I’m pretty certain the “art of arms” is a metaphor for “literature,” the tradition of which B. is figuratively attacking, or deconstructing. So he’s being accused of destroying the structures of an artistic tradition which support him. There’s probably some justification for this, as he often seems a Picassoesque kind of artist to me, if you see (as I do) Picasso as having been engaged in an extended campaign of tearing down and reassembling in pieces the artistic perception of the Western tradition, drawing especially on African and other indigenous visions and traditions to accomplish it. That oversimplifies Picasso, probably, but I think one can at least argue that his brand of cubism has a latent violence in it. “Worse still, he won praise overseas by this,” and then the worst transgression of all, “affording himself his own rules.” Do that, and someone will knock you down or at least try. Human beings are a bit herd-oriented, or more to the point, often demand that we live with them in hierarchical, bureaucratic systems—like an army. Disobey orders and you get drummed out dishonorably, or worse, shot for treason. Well, for B., this strikes me as largely a bullshit fantasy, with his Pulitzer Prize and all, but then it is true that plenty of people didn’t (don’t) like his work, and that was all it took for him to declare them enemies. They were on the same side, of course, all in the same army as it were, so he’s saying he is being regarded as something of a loose cannon, tearing up what his comrades had all so patiently built. Like Picasso, and like Miguel de Unamuno, the Basque modernist whose work is regarded as having helped in deconstructing barriers between literary genres. I don’t see B. on his own as having been big enough to wreck anything, though he was certainly one more figure in the modernist insurrection that was challenging the “military art” establishment. He doesn’t get responsibility for the wreckage because the art army ultimately takes its orders from the societal Commander in Chief. Art doesn’t create anything out of a vacuum. Artists are members of society—if they’re creative or visionary, it’s only because they’re the antennae.

The last two lines of this poem have a ferocity to them that is in keeping with the violence/destruction/military metaphor of the whole poem, though it switches to the attack of a predator on a mouse. From the owl’s point of view, that scene is all in day’s work, pretty standard meal-acquisition, but for the mouse, an owl is an ultimate catastrophe, the silent sneak attack out of the darkness that instantly destroys all his mousy plans and strivings. My reading of this final image is of B. characterizing himself as the owl/poet careerist, and there is an undoubted ferocity in his treatment of much of what he touches—his body, and the approach he takes to his work, his career, and his reputation. The particulars of his addicted, wounded psyche, in the addicted, wounded twentieth century, turn him into this paragon of the New Age twerp/warrior. No wonder old-style literary heroes might despise him. But his flight was silent and his talons were sharp, so he needed to be reckoned with, and he knew it. Portraying himself a bullied victim, like he does here and so often does, was merely a case of him sharpening his weapons. This poem in the end is about attack, even if he paradoxically engaged in his battles out of the state of victimhood. Whether one finds that clever or despicable depends on one’s investment in the ongoing stolidity of the army.