I have spoken about how, as a teenager, I carried my first transistor radio out into the fields once or twice, when I lived on the farm, and how I felt foolish doing it finally, even with the ear-plug. Nature is the gift of silence. The birds in the morning, now - in this late April dawnlight that could define the word 'ambience' - address the world out of silence. Their song is the first song of the world. When the drying wheat sheaves crash together in the wind - an audible whisper, a choral oceanic chiming, as if of suspended droplets of living glass - in the heat of late June or early July, nothing existed before it. It is the pure fulness of the season.
            Rippling water is the silence. When the mania still drove my life and the uncontrollable forces scattered whatever graspable fragments I thought I had gathered, I would go out to the farm and find some riffles in the stream - a stream rarely more than three feet wide - and the slight sound was sufficient to reopen the center, to reestablish a core of silence.

            Because my love of language began with the poetry, and with the first legitimate poetry of nature - the Romantics - there has never been a time when I did not refuse the uninterrupted discursive prose of the post-war urban novelists. What bothers me about Mailer, Roth or Bellows is that the language never touches ground, as far as I'm concerned.
            The ground is silence.

            Now, of course, living in the city - as small as it is - I am surrounded by the boom-boom mania of a people who apparently dread silence, who need to leave their cars double-parked, running, with the sound systems cranked up while they run into the houses of their friends, who presumably also have their systems cranked up and their televisions turned on.
            I'm not going to go up and pull the book out, but at some point in Be Here Now Ram Dass quotes Gurdjieff to the effect that he discovered, as a kind of revelation, how profoundly most people fear silence.
            Silence is where we actually live. I can only assume that this endless chatter, this endless need for chattering appliances that fill our lives with a distraction of the senses is a form of self-loathing, perhaps because silence is the death we are all pretending we will never have to confront. In which case, of course, it's the paradox of addiction, the self-destructive pattern we engage from a primal and irrefutable reflex in order to avoid considering the possible destruction of the self.

            But I would not have felt an obligation to focus on this peculiar turn in prose - from the silence-grounded prose of a Hemingway or a Fitzgerald, or even a Wolfe, to the relentless discursive turbidity of Bellows, Roth, Mailer and others - if it had not also appeared equally in 'modern' poetry. At first, I had wanted to say 'spilled over' into poetry. But prose is not at fault. And to assign it to the 'modern' in modern poetry is also inappropriate. As much as Pound, for instance, felt obliged to 'make noise' in his poetry, to fragment, deflect, overturn and dislocate, to posit grunt language against the mellifluous, and so on and so forth, his poetry remains grounded in silence. Eliot's poetry triangulates the silence. Even Cummings, as much as I hold most of his poetry to be anecdotal, nevertheless referenced the silence.
            In reality, silence is the necessary ground of poetry. Only the silence can sustain and counterpoise the artifice.

            But it seems that the 'poetry' of today, like the prose, is precisely 'anti-silence'. Prose can get away with it, perhaps; although I suspect that the reduction to a relentless, obligatory run-on discursiveness is the undefined reason that technical plot has become the oversoul of the contemporary novel. I try to read the novels praised for language - whether the critical adjective is 'dense' or 'lyrical' - and commonly my adjective would be 'contrived'. Theodore Dreiser slammed his words together to get from point A to point B. But one could hear the base silence of the journalist. As much as journalism is a set-piece, its prescribed configuration is based in the categorical of the wholeness of intent - 'who, what, why, when, where and sometimes how' - which is tantamount to silence. Silence is not different from whole purpose. The power of the first bird at first light is the wholeness of expression.
            When the critic tells me that the density or lyricism is poetic, what I hear is extraneous motion to produce an effect. Only silence produces poetry out of intent - just the inverse of what is taught in our mfa programs. A friend once said about handwriting: 'Do they teach you to write with style? Or do they just teach you to write?' You learn to write, and your handwriting is unique by nature. But the mfa programs force you to write from a point outside your intent. The 'crit' is the sure sign. Only a master can criticize in a way that is internally enhancing. Whether a classmate is a graduate or an undergraduate, their criticism, however 'accurate', is still destructive. Only you can know your intent. And even you can only find your intent in silence.
            But the 'objective' intent has become the modus. The consequence is a language that is aurally dead. And no amount of window dressing - of arbitrary lyricism or density - can repair the basic fault, the original sin.

            In its full arc, language has clearly moved from the notational - and hence the relatively static - to the discursive.
            I have danced with Greek, over the years, but I am still a rank novice. However, at one point, I had a Greek text for Plato; and I was surprised at how many sentences lacked a verb. I may be wrong, but apparently the 'particles' - tiny syllables, in many cases paired - could define the relationship between the two members of the sentence, what we would call 'subject' and 'predicate', but which, in the Greek, were apparently more like the members of a formula. The equality was presumed. The difference was defined peripherally, and not through a verb. One had the sense of standing still and turning from left to right and back again, rather than moving forward through a text.
            However, I cannot presume or conclude that this progression, historically and anthropologically, toward the discursive, appropriately ends in a discursive which denies the silence.

            But I do hold 'modernism' responsible for this final debacle of the poetic. Look at what we are doing. Real art refuses prior restraint. Anyone with a brush in their hand who declares that a given color is ugly is unlikely ever to be an artist. That would be akin to saying that the letter A, or a certain pronunciation of it, is 'ugly'. But, in effect, we have done this with language in the name of 'poetry'. An iambic pentameter line is a no-no; that is, unless I can make it disappear as iambic pentameter. In other words, my only alternative is to render it as 'speech'. The fact that 'written speech' is an artifice of the highest order is neither here nor there. Or, rather, just the reverse, the artifice is not other than 'postmodernism' in poetry. That is, the cumulative force of 'modernism' in poetry is to generate a specific mode of prosody that is the 'accepted' artifice for 'speech' as 'poetry'.
            I have said that poetry by nature is artifice. But I have also placed that against the silence, which is not only not an artifice, it is the vital core of poetry - what makes the artifice of the artifice work as vital, and not 'abstract' in the pejorative sense. What the 'modernist' vector has achieved in 'postmodernism' is the intentionality of the pejorative abstract. We drive ourselves under the rock and then, like the night creature in some bad science fiction movie, we try to make luminous eyes that express a living entity.
            The other day, I was trying to weigh the German words 'finster' and 'dunkel', words for 'darkness', and the word 'gloaming' jumped to mind. Name the contemporary poet who could use the word 'gloaming' with full force, without irony or facetiousness. And yet the whole spectrum, the whole history of the language is there for the use of a real poet. What is it that we have, then?