Joe Rosenblatt has been writing poetry since the early sixties. He is the author of over a dozen volumes of poetry and received The Govenor-General's award for poetry in 1976 for Top Soil (Press Porcepic) and The B.C. Book Prize in 1986 for Poetry Hotel, Selected Poems 1963-1985 (McClelland and Stewart). His poems have been translated into Italian by Prof. Alfredo Rizzardi of the University of Bologna in two bilingual volumes, Gridi nel buio (Piovan Editore, 1990) and Madre Tentacolare (Piovan Editore, 1995).
Italian critic and essayist, Ada Donati, has recently published a book of translations of Rosenblatt's poems from Poetry Hotel titled Dal Subliminale Al Sublime (Schifanoia Editore, 2001). Ms. Donati has also written several essays dealing with the mythopoetic in his poetry for Italian publications on Canadian writing. The following essay is a continuation of her ruminations on the poetry of Joe Rosenblatt focusing on his archetypes, his obsession with the divine mysteries related to predatory fish and the transcendal symbolism of bees and their psychic interactions with the consciousness of human society.
A line from Hart Crane's The Bridge has always appealed to me as a kind of viaticum for an extraordinary adventure. The line is: "New thresholds, new anatomies!"ùa wish he expressed in declarative form, a miracle Rosenblatt worked out by actually trespassing over to other worlds and becoming a sort of runaway from all orders of things, a wayward unpredictable mutant, a stray electron. His habitatùmainly the sea; his alter-egoùmainly fishes. The reader can but surrender to the sortilFge and join him in the plunge: "I have become a Bathysphere traversing/raging pastures in the gloomà"
Rosenblatt's beckoning sounds like a much more exciting trip than that Eliot invites us to: "Comeàand I will show you something different from either/your shadow at morning striding behind you/or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust" (Burial of the dead). No, thanks, we certainly prefer to be shipwrecked with Rosenblatt, and embark on a different kind of adventure, a voyage a rebours as in an experiment in regressive hypnosis, when the analyst drives the patient's mind as far back as the moment of birth, and even farther back into a pre-natal time. There, "Soul throbsàigniting enraptured glee clubs for a nocturneà/wriggling through carpets of redemptive mud/abandoned, I reach inside and touch the darkness/the spirit swimsàthis seed is youàthis seed meà" It's the moment of conception, in "another time-zone", when the body will be "smaller than a microsecond." Time and Space are compressed into a single unit, our mind is pushed into a black hole, but soon after it dilates in a systole-diastole rhythm, when the poet unlocks another dimensionùthe immense watery expanse where life starts, in the ocean or in the primal broth, amnioplasm or "mammal blood", carried by an "umbilical current". The sea is the "happy belly".
The plunge is into the chasm of the unconscious mind as well, where the lustral bath in the communal source liberates the self, "the Ego surrenders", "the skin slips off". It is the same act of liberation D.H. Lawrence recorded in his poems: Ego-Bound and Song of a Man who has come through.
Rosenblatt æinterfaces', so to say, ocean and mind deeps, the pulsing and throbbing of elemental life in the oceans and the hidden elementary drives of our subconscious: sex, predation, survival and self-protection. This sublime subliminal sub-marine trickster performs his magic in a sort of water circus, after leaving terra firma. What lives on the surface is banished, "The whole Academy explodes" and with it all conventions, known rituals and codified reality. Only vestiges remain, scattered on the oceanfloor, like quotations from an original text gone missing. Stars, there, are but "visiting guests", the sky but a reflection on a trout's speckled skin. Pied beauty of a secularized Hopkins. The world above may occasionally flash in a ludicrous, grotesque sort of videoclip: "I'm swept past a glaze of white buffoon faces/worn by mobs adorned in exploding bathing caps."
In that context, the alien is not the extra-terrestrial, but the extra-marine, an intruder, a voyeur who ogles and leers, the "beast on the surface."
The ocean floor is the stage for the most stunning happenings: the mineral-animal-vegetable kingdom dividing lines fade away. What Joyce could suggest through verbal trickeryùthink for example of the surprising coining of the phrase æsubstrance of streams becoming'ùRosenblatt achieves through his bewildering, cinematic-mimetic imagism. Mimesis, empathy, transformism, sympathetic magic orchestrate the sarabanda. The poet seems to hold distorting mirrors up to nature thus obtaining surrealistic effects. The quality of some images bring to my mind, again, Lawrence's visionary passages in Women in Love: the pond reflects "the bright moon, leaping and swaying all distorted. It seemed to shoot out arms of fire like a cuttle-fish; like a luminous polyp, palpitating strongly."
The polyp, the octopus, the giant squid, the luminiscent protozoa, the myriads of silvery minnows move in the neverending roundabout of wooing, chasing, coupling, prowling, devouring.
The life cycle that Eliot summarizes in the line "Birth, copulation and death"ùas heavy as a slabùbecomes in Rosenblatt's poems a phantasmagoria of incredible liveliness, even when death appears as part of the process. Prey and predator exchange roles, tentacles can clasp in deadly grips or they may be, instead, loving arms clasped in a long, passionate adieu: "troubled couples in the moistened darkness / longitudinally adhere for a passionate farewell."
But nothing really dies here in this universe of constantly renewed beginnings and metamorphosis. Everything transmutes via stomach, Nature's survival workshop. Digestive chemistry has the same perpetuating function once proper to art. Even the poetry of the brain's "unique lobe fruit", is edible stuff. In this connection, one of the funniest figurative embodiments of the process is the Extraterrestrial Bumblebee, the busy lab technician, a sort of Universal metabolic enzyme. He wears a pilot helmet and "drives in th' ocean highways of th' sun with his pollen lunchpails," scattering "religious golden pollen, th' Midas bread." In the reader's mind, space missions and ancient fertility rites combine, producing, out of the unlikely combination, a sort of metaphysical shockùa strategy Rosenblatt is master of. However the empathy he can create is so strong, rituals so involving, the language so convincing that we are seduced to a ætemporary suspension of disbelief', barely conscious of the lie, were it not for the poet's reminding hint: "àwhat is important is the lie,/& the motion that follows the footsteps into the water."
Yes, the water is the element where everything comes true because it effaces all differences, just like the sky, where all forms become possible. All the universe is animated by a kind of neverending circulating energy, and it seems as if the poet had been able to connect with that vital current by inserting a magic plug. The bumblebee is its buzzing voice and he transmits his humming Creation hymn everywhere: it enters our ears and our eyes, too, owing to the graphic way it is rendered on the page. The connection ignites a psychedelic festival, a cosmic roundabout where all sense-perceptions interchange. Boundaries are crossed over and an immense wave of liberation floods the mind.
Rosenblatt's poetry is first of all a festival of the senses, even though the temptation to yield to a symbolical reading is strong. As with all poetry that deals with myths, the symbol is indeed the main vehicle of meaningsùit links (sim-bollein means, in fact, to bring together) all the poems that deal with mythical animals. They are like a vast theophanic zoo. Besides primary emblematic figures: the Sun, the Moon, Mother figures, phallic symbols, images conveying the destruction-creation cycle, there are other less obvious metaphors like the decapitated egg on the lawn, the ominous spider, the bird with a broken wing, and many, many others.
An interpretive approach of this kind would be made easier if one examined also the poet's drawings. They are different but are still as meaningful as his writing. They are characterized by intricate lines, criss-crossing, zig-zagging intersecting segments, a crowd of intertwined little figures, minisymbols of huge traumas, æsea-saw' traitsùan apt coin given the marine contextùangular sharp contours, almost hysterical convolutions. They seem the seismograph's record of an earthquake Magnitude 9, Richter scale, or the graph of the brain's activity during the REM phase. Indeed, the approach I found most rewarding on first opening any of Rosenblatt's collected poemsùTop Soil, Virgins and Vampires, The Sleeping Lady, Brides of the Stream, Tentacled Motherùwas total surrender to sense impressions. My suggestion to readers is to allow them to flow freely through perception's revolving doors. Let the senses serve as instruments for reading the poet's ichthyo-biography and tasting the æphysicality' of his language.
It's a lush pleasure one shouldn't miss, so I recommend that one relishes verbs like flutter, splutter, drift, drag, stir, glide, slide, spiral, wriggle and enjoys their rich sound effectsùwatch the bibulous mouths sucking, lipping, nibblingà What a grand host Rosenblatt is, and what radiant aspic joy his guests are invited to! ò
