animalize, vegetablize, and mineralize

Unlike most of his prominent-poet peers, Roethke sought a kind of salvation and surrender of the individual self in the physical world. While the others were agonizing over their social status, Roethke was attempting to "animalize, vegetablize, and mineralize" himself-to borrow a phrase from a Galway Kinnell elegy to James Wright-and hurl himself headlong, on the momentum of his poems, from agony to ecstasy. There was something truly atavistic and primal in his impulse, because "going back to nature" wasn't quite yet the thing to do.

Hence the Wound

Edvard Munch, #32

The word became flesh--
Isn't Christ--
a spark of the Ur-light
the Ur-warmth the electricity
--the divinity--
--power of the word
--Hasn't a mighty
spark, mighty spark
from the kingdom--the
pealing crystallizations
struck down into Christ's
soul--hence the wound
of divinity--the power
was concentration
in time
like a concentrated
discharge his word brought
vibrations
in the airwaves--
peal in the air--
which in the course of
2,000 years have spread
themselves over
the planet earth

Things Decompose

Edvard Munch, #29 (partial)

One doesn't paint
after nature--
one takes from it
or scoops out of its
rich vat

--Things decompose
in nature in order to
take shape later--

Harbinger

Edvard Munch, # 30

Spring's writer's
herald
spring writer's
birth
the birth of death
harbinger-
death is entry into
life

Hidden Powers

Edvard Munch, #19

I intend to collect these
journal entries into one. These are in part
experiences, in part fabrications. I do not
intend just to give my
experiences. It will
intimately search out the hidden
powers and bring them forth--
to give them imaginative life
to turn them into poetry
reinforce them in order to body forth
these powers most clearly in the
machinery which is called
human life and its conflicts with
other human life. When I finally
gather these they will bear
the mark of my
present psychic standpoint.

Matthew Arnold thought that only art could address his society's widespread loss of confidence in religion, fostered by the rise of modern science. Humankind needed art and especially poetry "to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us."

And Slept Soundly

From the diary of Edvard Munch:

One evening I came to have a discussion with my father on the subject of how long unbelievers are tormented in Hell. I maintained that no sinner could be so guilty that God would let him suffer longer than a thousand years. Father said that they would suffer for a thousand times a thousand years. We would not give up the argument. I became so irritated that I finally left the house, slamming the door behind me. After I had walked the streets a bit my anger subsided and I returned home to make my peace with him. He had gone to bed so I quietly opened his bedroom door. He was on his knees in front of the bed, praying...I closed the door and went to my own room but I could not get to sleep; all I could do was toss and turn. Eventually I took out my drawing block and started to draw. I drew my father kneeling by his bed, with the light from the bedside lamp casting a yellow glow over his nightshirt. I fetched my paint box and coloured it in. Finally I achieved the right pictorial effect, and I was able to go to bed happy and slept soundly.

The Everlasting No

Tersteeg ... would always say, “It is not saleable and saleability must come first now.”

Personally I think he means in plainer terms, “You are a mediocrity and you are arrogant because you don't give in and you make mediocre little things: you are making yourself ridiculous with your so-called seeking, and you do not work.” That is the real meaning of what Tersteeg said to me the year before last, and last year; and he still means it.

I am afraid Tersteeg will always be for me “the everlasting no.”

That is what not only I, but almost everyone who seeks his own way, has behind or beside him as an everlasting discourager. Sometimes one is depressed by it and feels miserable and almost stunned.

But I repeat, it is the everlasting no; in the cases of men of character, on the contrary, one finds an everlasting yes, and discovers in them “la foi du charbonnier.”

--Vincent van Gogh

Art and Meaning: Munch

Munch was chiefly concerned with his own existential drama: 'My art', he declared, 'is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are? Why was there a curse on my cradle? Why did I come into the world without any choice?', adding 'My art gives meaning to my life'. Thus he considered his entire work as a single entity: The Frieze of Life. The frieze was manifestly an expression of anxiety (for example, in The Scream) but also of tender pathos: of the 'dance of life.'

Of Hopeless Material

Edvard Munch wrote: I felt like a boat built of hopeless material, of old rotton wood, launched by the shipbuilder onto the stormy sea of life with the words: "If you sink it'll be your own fault, and you'll burn in hell for your failure, burn forever in the eternal flames."

From Roethke's notebooks

It’s the poet’s business to be more, not less, than a man.

A poet: someone who is never satisfied with saying one thing at a
time.

Poetry: a sense of the doubleness in life.

Poet: a constant selectivity; a refusal to elucidate with a mass of
detail.

A poet must be a good reporter; but he must be something a
good deal more.

Literalness is the devil’s weapon.

The eye, of course, is not enough. But the outer eye serves the
inner, that’s the point.

For there is a God.

For there is a God, and He’s here, immediate, accessible. I don’t
hold with those thinkers who believe in this time He is farther away
—that in the Middle Ages, for instance, He was closer. He is equally
accessible now, not only in works of art or in the glories of a particular
religious service, or in the light, the aftermath that follows
the dark night of the soul, but in the lowest forms of life, He moves
and has His being. --Theodore Roethke

...think of a poem as a three-act play, where you
move from one impulse to the next, and then there is a final breath,
which is the summation of the action of the whole. He [Roethke] had picked up that wonderful phrase from Sir John Davies which he used in a
poem: “She taught me turn, and counter-turn, and stand.” Which
is the essence of dramatic structure. It’s what a long poem has to do.
It doesn’t require physical action, but there has to be some mental
or emotional action that carries through in the poem. (Kizer)

Poem Excerpt (Eli Siegel)

The world is waiting to be known;
Earth, what it has in it! The past is in it;
All words, feelings, movements, words, bodies, clothes, girls,
trees, stones, things of beauty, books, desires are in it;
and all are to be known;
Afternoons have to do with the whole world;
And the beauty of mind, feeling knowingly the world!

Sanctuary

"As a boy I would hide in the closet when the older brothers and sisters came with their families to mama's apartment for the Sunday afternoon dinner visit. I felt safe. Hearing their talk about illnesses, marriages, and the problems of making a living, I felt my remoteness in the closet with the single light bulb. I read and drew in this private box. Some Sundays I even painted. I had given my dear Mama passionate instructions to lie.... 'Where is Philip?' I could hear them.... 'Oh, he is away, with friends'....I was happy in my sanctuary. After a lifetime, I still have never been able to escape....It is still a struggle to be hidden and feel strange--my favorite mood." --Philip Guston

Making one of opposites

PHILIP GUSTON: THE MAN, HIS LIFE, AND HIS WORK
by Dorothy Koppelman

I have been greatly affected by the work of Philip Guston and I think his drawings, his paintings, and what he says about himself can be a means of understanding some of the largest questions artists, and all people have about ourselves. As I look at the complexity, the changes, and to me, the most moving late works I see how true Aesthetic Realism is about the searching man, Philip Guston, and the depth of what he was after in his work; both are explained by the great principle, stated by the founder of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."

Longing After Death, by Novalis

Into the bosom of the earth!
Out of the Light's dominions!
Death's pains are but the bursting forth
Of glad Departure's pinions!
Swift in the narrow little boat,
Swift to the heavenly shore we float!

Agee at 25

...I am in the most possible kinds of pain, mental and spiritual, that is...and the trouble revolves chiefly around the simple-sounding problem of how to become what I wish I could when I can't. --James Agee