John Keats Odal Cycle, as I call his five major odes, is not
warped by an excess of dichotomous energy, where poetic formality is concerned.
There are slight variations, but the form the five Keats’ Odes take is similar
(and unique onto itself). My own five odes, which may or may not constitute an
authentic cycle, have the problem of a kind of
formal “lumpiness”— four of the odes are formal, and employ Keats’ own odal
form; while one is informal, “jazzy” not just because it's an Ode On Jazz, but because it employs high level poetic musicality in a way which attempts to
translate something about jazz music, and its approach to formality, into
serious poetry. Keats’ formal innovations could
align him with (if we want to attempt to make precise translations) Bach or
Beethoven; so that, by employing his forms, I also attempt that sort of
classical, classicized musicality. That’s the formal backbone of On Exile and the rest. Having my five-ode sequence waver between “jazz” and
“classical” orientations creates, to bring things back to square one, the sort
of dichotomous energy which some readers may find confusing, and certainly less
an orderly procession than the march through Keats’ odes.
Where the narrative-thematic is concerned, Keats odes stick
to the transcendental— imaginative landscapes, immersion in mythologies, meta
and/or ekphrastic poems which take works of art as their starting place, raw
nature, including sexuality, in chiasmus with the human brain (his extension of Wordsworthian
dynamics). The world Keats inhabits, here, resonates and shudders; it is a
living world, animated by the vivacity of an imagination which Keats “fancies”
has its own reality, against the merely tactile. Keats demonstrates for us,
with no holds barred, exactly what Modern and post-modern literature blood
sacrificed; the sense that the world we live in is alive, and does, in fact,
resonate and shudder with life. The nihilism of Modern and post-modern
literature naively dismisses Romanticism as naïve, and creates, consolidates,
and maintains a world skewered towards obsolescence, deadness, and human
impotence in the face of attempting to achieve transcendental states of
consciousness.
If Modernism and post-modernism are naïve in the face of
Romanticism, it is for the simple reason that scientific fact points the human
brain towards the realization that the world around us really does resonate,
and shudder, and that mysteries inhere in nature which can lead our minds
permanently upwards. The jejune Modern/post-modern sense of world-weariness and
effete skepticism have less basis in scientific fact then Romanticism does, try
though Modernists and post-modernists might to invert their efforts into a
talisman against naivete which is secretly experientially sound. My odes are
somewhere in the middle of this— not as transcendental as Keats, more about
individuals, human landscapes and relationships, intimacies which inhere on
these levels, and also pain before corruption and coercion, where human
collectives are concerned.
The fall of 2002 is when I wrote Ode
On Jazz, as I was gorging myself on jazz at that time, and I had a sense of
spiritual harmony about my life, both because of the marriage I had going then
and because the feeling in the streets in Aughts Philadelphia was exactly what
I had been searching for since I began writing seriously. Philadelphia in the Aughts, like Keats’
woods, mountains, trees, and lakes, resonated and shuddered the right way, had
a strange life of its own. It couldn’t be that Ode On Jazz was not written from
a transcendental place, even as it also an attempt at translation. The “classical” odes in my cycle are a
split, in an odd, backwards/sideways fashion, between heaven and hell, like our attempted sense of chiasmus or communion with nature. As I develop my thoughts about the two odal cycles (I am
calling my five odes a cycle out of convenience, up to a point; we’ll see later
if the shoe fits this particular foot), the jazz/classical dichotomy is one I
want to develop, as a critical translation— what the implications are, how far
they take us out into a possible twenty-first century. Especially as we
achieve the two hundredth anniversary of the first official release of this
odal form, via John Keats, into the world at large.
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