mP Review
Phil Cousineau, The Blue Museum
reviewed by Stephanie Pope
The Blue Museum
Sisyphus Press, ©2004
ISBN # 0 9626548 2 5    $12.00

The Blue Museum: The Hydrous Reverie In Matter And Imagination

I propose to begin my review of Phil Cousineau’s, The Blue Museum in Gaston Bachelard’s reverie on the material imagination and, mostly, because Bachelard suggests for a material imagination to be alive and at work in how the poetries of imagination work to shape the real that shapes and shades inner and outer life, it must bring to bear a primeval impression to substances.

Actually, Bachelard distinguishes two different sort of imaginations; a formal imagination or images of form, fleeting, changing and as varied and unexpected as each spring to springtime, and a more stable and slower, material imagination, one that has weight and constitutes a heart. Both kinds are at work in all creative poetries. And, as Bachelard says, it is not even possible to separate them completely.

But it is toward the material imagination I want to tend because this poet’s achievement is a deeply intimate soul-making that refuses to neither desert a dark bloom in the depths nor ignore its deep sweetness. “In the depths of matter,” Bachelard notes, “there grows obscure vegetation; black flowers bloom in matter’s darkness”.1  

Whereas Cousineau asks us to consider imagination as a skin-diver, this very word changes before our eyes the notion of meaning what it now means in lieu of Bachelard’s eye for images.

In The Blue Museum, the kind of imagining we are to perform is, in this same material and weighted kind of space, an individuality in depth, and we are to keep in mind as we (a)mend our nets of mattering treasures, poetic images always have their matter.

How do you make mute stone speak?

Consider the skin-diver hovering in the turbid depths…
The riddle he’s asked to solve is unfathomable—           -Sphinx

Bachelard indicates matter attains value in two ways. Matter becomes valuable (and maybe, too, ‘a valuable’) by deepening or by elevating. Where elevated, the ‘matter’ seems almost like an inexhaustible force. Where deepened, the image seems unfathomable like a mystery. I mention this to accent how the kinds of images we will encounter in The Blue Museum are images of depth. We are in a vale of soul-making. In a moment we will cast our net back into a particular poem, “The Blue Museum”, found on p39 and haul in together some of the “fathoms” caught in the poet’s fine-spun way of telling things with images…

And with these torqued-up dreams comes the vision
that “the coming years will be a lovely blue.”
the poet’s promise of a deeper hue…   -After a Phrase Abandoned by Neruda

Bachelard also thinks the imagination ordinarily works where there is joy produced either by forms, colors, variety and metamorphosis or by what surfaces become. Imagination holds the power of a fascinans…

I remember being beguiled by a single blue note long ago.
It slowly rose from the silty bottom of the world,
then broke through the rippling surface of my life
like a sudden rapture.                       – The Music In The Wood

The three poems I’ve quoted from consecutively are the first three poems in this poetry volume. Consider now these lines from the fourth poem, “Footprints”…

For sudden joys, like griefs,
Confound at first

Now it is true that I’ve specifically selected certain lines from these first four poems. This is because I want to expose an older order of poetic practice I believe I experience throughout this lovely poetic work as I methodically move from page to page. There is another kind of experience of order happening to me, a kind of logical “natural” order in image-ideas being presented. Such “presentation” be/comes a storying similar to the composition of Homeric poetry.

Bachelard’s image for the imagination within matter itself, the watery black flower, has reminded me of another seminal poetic thinker, Charles Olson, in his poetic practice. In a skillfully rendered exposé of influences, Charles Stein’s, The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum, tumbles what Olson sees as the poet’s task in culture with his career as a writer and also with the poetic technique he devises to project archetypal force onto language, an idea Olson borrows from Jung. These Stein tumbles with (as does Olson in his career and poetic techne) the frictive oppositions in language and thought juicing through the ancestral times of Plato and Homer.

For there is an intellectual revolution inaugurated just then, invented by the fifth century Greeks, one whose means of expression Olson believed, caused certain losses to the kosmos of discourse, and this, to create (and privilege) the philosopher’s discourse on discourse.  And, though not entirely in error, Olson believed the older mneme in language something to be treasured and, as treasure something now the task of today’s poet to restore.2

3.
I gaze out over the neptune-blue waters,
listening intently to the lullaby
sung by the wave-washed shore,
trying to fathom the world of submerged galleries
filled with mysterious riches found in Neolithic dugout canoes,
the lost treasure of storm-sunk cargo boats,

I find this a skillful turning of lines and ideas, a poetic par excellence (even the shape of the formal lines mirror where we are!) As words take on concrete forms and lines take on the Earthshaker’s shape, we enter, too, into the imagination of matter itself, whose elemental form Bachelard tells us, is water.

One may say of The Blue Museum, it is a hydrous reverie in its formal expression. Poseidon claims both the depth intonations and his celestial role within the Olympian drama. Just as Jove in the clouds has his inhuman birth in the blue, clear day, Poseidon will re-seed the primal concepts of Neptunian psychology through grey-eyes in storms and fogs of think-making like a hidden water in skies. It is Poseidon, Homer notes, who is always willing to pay the brideprice of restoration that amends the net among the gods in the tear and the torn condition under the skin.3

The older loss of mneme can once more be thought of as what the old fisherman in the poem is pulling from the poem in the sea, the blue museum. As well, the treasure pulled from the see-ing along one side of things lost at sea, the Platonic side that banished the poet’s paratactic practice long ago, has taken on value once more. The pull of the see-ing back, Olson notes, is something emphasized in concretistic linguistic theories that emphasize a primal relation of sound to words in image-action. It is a kind of vehicular language. The poetic parataxis as a symbol making function looks, in one way, (there are other kinds in this very poem) like this…

“…the sea, she is full of treasure from ships that—“

The fisherman of Mithyrum, having cast their nets into the sea, drew them in and discovered a head carved from the wood of an olive tree… -Pausanius, second century

I.
There on the briny shores of Naxos,
on the edge of the ultramarine sea,

And now driving one-handed, I listen
for the reassuring sound of sleep, remember
the moment I held him for the first time