ZEN & THE ART OF ALLUSION

We were talking about references and allusions in poetry, how poetry today is uncomfortable with its earlier role of the similarly-educated speaking in a private language to the similarly-educated, and how allusions have sometimes been stripped, but have more often been democratized, diversified, and unhitched from a one-to-one correspondence of knowledge leading to understanding.

The poem in question was from Nathaniel Mackey's Splay Anthem, "Glenn on Monk's Mountain: 'mu' twenty-fourth part." In his introduction Mackey explains some of his background, something of ringing:

Emblematic of an outside seriality wishes to reach, ringing is sonic resurfacing, a step up as well as out. It invites echo, reverberation, overtone, undertone, resonance and repetition. In seriality, rasp is recursive form, a net of echoes; it catches. One hears this in the music of Glenn Spearman, a San Francisco Bay Area tenor saxophonist to whom four of the poems herein, published in 2002 as a chapbook entitled Four for Glenn, are dedicated, poems in which rung is bouth noun and verb, in which climb, we're reminded, rhymes with chime. (xii)

And with that hint we're supposed to know that Glenn is Glenn Spearman, and Monk is Thelonious Monk, but just as rung can be both noun and verb, these allusions can point beyond the field of Mackey's likely knowledge. Monk can be monk, and at the end of the poem we have a kind of transcendence in a union of opposites:

Pads and keys cried out for

climb, clamor, something yet

................................................to arrive

we called rung. Rickety wood, split

reed, sprung ladder. More splinters

the more steps we took... Rung

was a bough made of air, an

unlikely plank suddenly under our

..........................................................feet we

floated up from, rung was a loquat

limb, runaway ladder, bent miraculous

branch, thetic step... Flesh beginning

to go like wax, we sat like Buddha,

.....................................................breath

an abiding chime, chimeless,

...........................................bells

had we been................................

rung ......................................................

In the eighth century, Wang Wei 王維, one of the most prized poets of his day and after, wrote a poem about his search for a temple amidst the misty mountains:

過香積寺 Passing Fragrance Gathering Temple

不知香積寺 Where is. . . . Fragrance Gathering Temple?
數里入雲峰 How many miles . . . .into the cloudy peaks?

古木無人徑 Ancient trees . . . .with no path for men
深山何處鐘 Deep in the mountains . . . .and where is that bell?

泉聲咽危石 The sound of the spring. . . coughs on the slippery stones
日色冷青松 The color of the sun . . . .cold on the green pines

薄暮空潭曲 In thin dusk. . . . by the curve of the empty pool
安禪制毒龍 I meditate . . . .and curb the poison dragons

I have no reason to believe that Nathaniel Mackey has ever read this poem, let alone internalized it enough to recreate it through something as different in shape and referent as "Glenn on Monk's Mountain." But somehow, with knowledge of Wang Wei's poem, Mackey's allusions begin to shift, and the Monk, the Mountain, its "crosslegged, lotusheaded," its bells, its chimes, its rung ringing, down to "Flesh beginning / to go like wax, we sat like Buddha," are not so much jazz as a curbing of poison dragons, the desires of the flesh that jazz might otherwise indulge.

And this is the democratization, the diversification of references. 條條大路通羅馬 All roads lead to Rome, as they say in Chinese, and in poetry today we no longer need to know (if we ever did) exactly what each referent means to decipher the code; rather, the play of referents is its own composition by field, its own game wherein yours and mine, jazz and medieval Chinese Buddhism, melt into one.