A Quantum Poet ( Dos Madres Press)
A review of Tiny Kites by
Lucien Zell
Reviewed by Aidan Andrew Dun
Reviewed by Aidan Andrew Dun
I flew home—
then I flew from home—
having found my home is flight.
Translocating Plato's cave of shadows
to the modern world we find its exact analogue in a movie-house. Here
self-incarcerated prisoners are installed in a large darkened room in which
pseudo-images flicker on screens of consciousness. Here is the domain of
relative reality. But outside the darkened room is the absolutely real. We,
however, have forgotten about its existence. We sit in the 'cinema' of the
world with palms sweating and heart racing almost completely submerged in the
relatively real. We edge forward in our seats with hands clenched in response
to artificial images, utterly engrossed in false appearances, completely
involved in ‘preloved’ emotions. In some dim corner of consciousness we know
there is a world outside the movie-house but - while a good film lasts - we
willingly conspire with illusion.
Visionary poetry engages with the
absolutely real and yet this artform must find its resources in the relatively
real, in the concrete images of this limited world. Music, as a more abstract
artform, does not have this bimetallic quality. Yet no matter how much
literature may concern itself with shadowlands, with endlessly interesting
juxtapositions of dualities, with shiftings of perspective and persona, with
self-referential exercises, with conditioned responses, the greatest poets are
all metaphysicians of the absolute. Relative reality may be a
highly-combustible fuel but the fire itself is of another dimension. I believe
Picasso was closer to the truth than Leonardo when he said: The artist does not
seek, he finds. (Da Vinci had famously - and erroneously - stated In order to
love we must know.) In all visionary artforms a mystical state of unknowing and
non-seeking should precede any given process of expression. Visionary artforms
are the by-product of an inclusiveness so vast that it annihilates all
difference.
Lucien Zell is a visionary poet working
inside gnostic and cabalistic traditions. He is a maker of verses which entrain
a metaphysical approach to poetics. Yet he conceals his seriousness behind
images both playful and sensuous, making the coded word accessible. A large
number of modern poets concern themselves with encrypting subjective formulas
in shrouded language incapable of conveying universality. Zell skillfully
avoids this pitfall and offers us significant concepts in simple language. But
his simplicity should not be mistaken for a lack of sophistication. After all,
Racine constructed his literary universe using a stripped-down vocabulary of
only a few thousand words, always heeding Aristotle's dictum: Too brilliant
diction frustrates its own object. To be moved by a poem is much more important
than to be impressed by literary pyrotechnics, and Zell often moves us in this,
his first American collection, Tiny Kites, published by Dos Madres.
Take the double helix of a poem like
Wind to Wind. Here is the literary equivalent of a Moebius strip where one
easily negotiates interior and exterior dimensions without any sense of
transitioning between the two. Zell transports his reader from the elemental to
the emotional and back again in the space of two elegant and breathtaking
stanzas. This piece represents unity deconstructed and resynthesized, and as
the opening statement of Tiny Kites, pilots us confidently into the skies of
theopoetics.
The same theme of interchangeability
pervades many of Zell's verses.
To be so grateful for poems
that you honor both the cracks in the
poet's heart
- from which they've emerged -
and the cracks in your own heart
through which they've entered.
Once again, with a quick half-twist
which echoes the structure of our own DNA, Zell has introduced his reader to
the never-ending surface of a unity which escapes perception. He is commenting
on that equivalence also expressed in an ancient Maori greeting which says I am
in truth another yourself.
Another poem, Involved in Autumn, is concerned
with the alignment of fate's windows. Here, acceptance of existential loss
is framed in a classic autumnal trope. But the poem kaleidoscopes towards a
Blakean fourfold construct in which the seasons are superimposed on a map of
consciousness, a mandalic diagram of poetic ordering. These are the colors true
to so many of the sun's wishes of the first stanza. A problem faced by esoteric
verse is that formulas may seem didactic, but any such tone is avoided as
Involved in Autumn builds to its climax since while the poet attributes birth
to spring, life to summer and death to autumn he leaves winter's attribution
blank:
as a mysterious country
anyone can visit when they want to
forget time.
If art is an attempt to inoculate all
people with spiritual disenchantment, then quatrain XXXVI - in a sequence of
quatrains - is true to that objective. In four lines the coordinates and
certainties of the relatively real are capsized. A measurement of things
invisible is being attempted here.
The ghosts! The ghosts!...
We seem to be counting the sum total of
the dead of all time. Some kind of census of astral multitudes is being taken.
Are we numbering the aggregate of the deceased of all possible worlds? The poem
goes on:
The ghosts! The ghosts!
We think that they're our guests
while the truth is
they're our hosts.
Eliding ghosts into guests the poetic
experiment in cosmology shifts into phase two, referencing standard
anthropocentric myopia. (Dostoyevsky says somewhere that ghosts are shreds and
fragments of other worlds, the beginning of them and of course apparitions play
an important role in the redemptive experience of Raskolnikov, catalysing his
conscience when nothing else will.) The use of hosts in the final line is
interesting since the word has both biblical and military resonance. It implies
that a superior force is laying long siege to hearts and minds. The assumption
has always been that human-beings are in charge but the territory actually
belongs to a secret army. This understanding leads in turn to the idea of
ghosts as guerillas, an underground organization fighting unconventional
warfare, triggering psychological explosions at subconscious levels, awakening
obscure truths (as with Hamlet) stirring up self-analysis (as with
Raskolnikov).
She danced me to the edge of the cliff
Broke my heart into a thousand birds
Then leaping off without a word
She taught them to fly.
In the sequence called Threshold Poems (Threshold is the poet's name for
the city of Prague where he is based) poem VI betrays the bitterness of the
unpublished poรจte maudit. In the
context of Zell's powerful present collection perhaps this voicing of distress
might have been omitted so as to avoid any atmosphere of self-commiseration.
But any such mood is quickly exorcised by an adjacent poem which discusses a
friend's solitary confinement, and where the closing couplet runs:
Are there wings we can't lift
till we drop our hands?
A chain of haikus finalizes Tiny Kites.
These are small-scale poems which say a great deal without wasting breath. (The
kites are only tiny because they fly so high!) In fact this form was invented
by Buddhist poet-monks who wanted to democratize an artform reserved for those
who could afford paper and pen, aristocrats with the luxury of time on their
hands. Who can forget that the affluent Lord Byron told the working-class Keats
to go back to his metier as a chemist because the writing of verses was only
for gentlemen?
reading in the rain
a good book is destroyed
by how good it is.
If rain here means adversity and
reading signifies experience refined into art then the formula implies that
acts of literary creation are transcended at some point. To illustrate: if one
looks at the work of Rabindranath Tagore - the laureate of Bengal - and
compares his poetry with that of his lifelong friend, the enlightened master
Paramahansa Yogananda, one immediately detects a significant difference. Of
course Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi is a great masterpiece but the
beautiful poems of the realized saint are quite bland compared to the vivid
utterances of Tagore. So Zell seems to be saying that with the complete
acceptance of suffering comes the state of having nothing more to say. Another
great renunciate - Arthur Rimbaud - in a sense took a vow of silence and
'destroyed the book' at the age of seventeen. But his case is mysterious and
unique.
once showing her her
a mirror cracked in moving
shows the street the street.
Now we return to the Moebius strip,
tracing a crack which runs through many dimensions, binding all in a brokenness
which is irreparable until difficult inclusiveness is acknowledged. In the
third line of this plangent haiku the ability of the street to look at itself
is a charming invention, highlighting the sentience of the dust we describe as
inanimate. But deeper layers of meaning emerge with further reflection. If the
mirror cracked in moving signifies a broken relationship, now the sense of the
final statement alters accordingly. To show the street the street is to reveal
the episodic nature of the relatively real. Where bewildering change entrains
further confusion the street is symbolic of the human condition. Here is a
lovely gem of poetic compression.
An initiation rite in ancient Tibet
apparently involved loading a large box-kite with monks and flying it from a
mountain directly into a thundercloud. The experience would confer
enlightenment on those who survived electrocution or simply hung on for dear
life. Tiny Kites is replete with gold won from grim times, with auras of hard
roads, with electricity harnessed from dark places. The essential signature of
Zell's first collection is something like reverence in a setting of timeless
melancholy. Reverence for this universe and all it contains cannot belong only
to quantum physicists (though such feelings may have been abandoned by
post-modernists). Such reverence belongs also to quantum poets. And Zell is
one.
AAD, January 2020
Aidan
Andrew Dun made his debut on the literary scene in 1995, when his
publisher, Goldmark, decided to launch his epic poem, Vale Royal, at
the Royal Albert Hall. Allen Ginsberg was invited over from New York to
participate in the launch, and sadly this was one of the great American poet's
very last readings. Vale Royal (which took twenty-three years to
write and is concerned with the psychogeography of Kings Cross) has been
acclaimed by Derek Walcott, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and many others.
AAD has gone on to publish five more
volumes of poetry with Mike Goldmark, one of the most visionary publishers in
the world today. Their collaboration continues, though Dun has also published
with Skyscraper, who put out Unholyland (in 2014) a verse
novel in 1,000 sonnets set in the Middle East and surveying the rap-culture of
the region.
In 2012 a triad by AAD was carved in
granite along one side of London's newest open space, Granary Square. The poem
runs 70 feet in length under a grove of miniature lime trees in front of the University
of the Arts, the largest arts faculty on the planet.
