MP Review:
Joseph Olsen, Affixed To Heartbeat 
Reviewed by Stephanie Pope
Affixed To Heartbeat: New and Selected Poems
Infinity Publishing.com
ISBN 0-7414-2475-4 $14.95

"Affixed To Heartbeat": A Song of Innocence

The vi’lets from her lap and lilies fall:
She misses ‘em poor heart! And
Makes new moan; her lilies, ah!
Are lost her vi’lets gone

                            -Ovid, Metamorphoses [i]

One mode for appreciating poetry is mythic. Since I am both a poet and a cultural mythologist in the act of appreciating a book of poetry while attempting to write a book review, I shall like to review, Affixed To Heartbeat by Joseph Olsen from a mythopoetic mode of contemplation. This means I am looking for where the psyche of the poetic language in the book opens to the mythic inheritance it attempts to (re)story.

It is to the book’s title I now turn. From what ‘heartbeat’ shall we suppose these poems attend? To what psyche are we, as reader and knower, to become ‘affixed’? The author tells us in the preface these poems are not ordered by chronology. That is, they do not appear arranged by corollary of any conscious linear logic. Rather, these poems appear by way of likeness. Somehow, to grasp the ‘heartbeat’ of this poetry, we must apprehend the symbolic reference that manifests via its metaphors of likeness another sphere, a poetic and imaginal topos or soul-logical landscape. To accomplish this task we must suspend belief in the merely literal sense of words and look for the image or likeness they in-tend. This kind of ‘heartbeat’ we seek is mythic. It is a telling or relating the poetic psyche-in-the-making attempts to story.

In his book, Creative Mythology from “the Masks of God” series, Joseph Campbell makes a reference to the mythogenic zone of any work of art. [ii] If you locate this mythic place in this poetry book, you can begin to regard from a depth sense what these poems might offer and also begin to appreciate the way they will chalk, in soul-logical likeness, a story throughout the work.

I began this book review with a quote from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It displays a specific likeness or image made with words. This particular ‘image in words’ is a mythic symbol and is the hallmark of Persephone. Ovid seems very specific about the flowers, even though earlier versions of the myth suggest the flower as a narcissus. The following quote is from Olsen’s Something Lost. (164) It is where, I believe, when comparing the two strophe, we will see the myth of Persephone is the myth that best attends the pulse and heartbeat of Olsen’s book of poems.

Oh fruitful mother of thee
I may have lost longevity
I feel I’m being
                      Pulled
                               Down
Fresh under an old ground

Like Persephone’s pull into the chthonic realm or underworld, the poetic voice in Olsen’s poem proclaims a similar ‘innocence’ in how its subjectivity has been suddenly taken under. This soul-logical expression gains ‘weightiness’ and stories the need for this dis in appearance through an other-sense of losing. This ‘other’ suffers. It struggles. It lets fall or lets go to express a ‘downess in it.’ But, the innocence here will not die, it simply and abruptly, vanishes, receding fresh under ‘old ground.’ Persephone’s expression of Death via loss never grows into something old. Her eros remains young (as Eros always is) and even predicts its reappearance out of Penia (need) and Chaos in Care To Bury the Past.

 

…Care to bury the past?
The dead are of my flesh
And of gods breath
Seed in man
Man in seed
We are the virgin sea
Here in this horny universe
Of a conscious tomorrow…

I take a breath
Filling my lungs with the unborn
The secret child is within me…

Care to bury the past?
One star shall fall
            And never again
But another of a different degree
Shall fall
             Fall,
                  Into the future…

I can readily see by comparing Ovid’s likeness with Olsen’s image, this ‘old ground’ is the ground of something mythic. If you call this rubbish, you do so in vein proclaims the poetic voice. (Call This Rubbish). This movement into darkness, where nothing seems graspable, carries seed!

I may now consider from an imaginal perspective the something lost in this myth begins with Persephone’s play in the field of flowers, and this play is like the program ‘playing’ or replicating or pointing toward the older and mythic soul-logical archetypal structure at work throughout the book. This is the one the voice describes as scribbles in the back of my head. (Scribbles II)  Further, I now suggest this entire set of poems can be regarded as (e)X-pressing into subjective reality an unknown, yet nonetheless metaphorical, “Song of Innocence.” Its life, its tribulation and its soul-journey are undertaken because it has been taken under precisely to dislodge itself from the image of itself as such.
It’s a love story of sorts. And, like all stories of relation, this psyche’s relatedness to itself will be what changes color. The soul-life has gained too much flesh, become too materialized. Its reality in being-so is an image so fixed in flesh it will be torn in violet and white as the poetic flowerings undergo a love-struggle that transforms the image it re-imagines in its language through a proper burial. The flowering eros-factor does not allow the image of relatedness to remain only virginal and white. The violet passion wills what its psyche wants. This psyche wants to honor its dead by turning over this (old) ground of likeness freshly. 

Indeed, if you call this rubbish you do so in vein for our mythic symbols (the poetic pun reminds) are always turning our words for things over into likenesses. This kind of remaking or ‘burial’ of meanings behind words as metaphoric nudges, nudges on and pressures both our ‘I’s’ sense and our eyes sense for the primacy of reality as speaking only in a literal, material and physical causation. This kind of poetic task at hand is psyche’s way of turning away from the ‘fixedness’. It is a loosening of psychic ground and not an unbinding to organic heartbeat.

The poetic task, in turning away, also turns toward something. Where life changes, support structures dissolve, loved ones die, etc. poetic reality re-turns through a mythic and metaphoric and psychic phrase what immanence grows from, behind, beneath or beyond the visual and vocalized, bounded event-horizon. Persephone is pulled under to be-come and the myth of Persephone promises this outcome still. Persephone returns (and re-turns) the myth says. So Persephone re-turns through this body’s language of mythopoetry and reveals throughout these poems its own particular nature and soul.

Persephone’s underworld is a realm of myth and symbol rather than a realm of direct expression in meaning a specific something per say. Ultimately, what any set of mythic symbols attempt to express is what psyche itself insists upon. Psyche is a world unto itself and what it insists upon sharing expresses the in-visible reality of itself. When you bury the past, the poetic voice insists, everything lost ‘has no color’. (146) These poems go on in sharing that even ‘forever’ is white like this. Forever is now. Now, too, becomes white like this. (167) Further, we know the colorless and lost soul-likenesses (plural because there is a sense of fragmentation here) are ‘white horses of sensation’ (173). What psyche wants now is not to deaden but to loosen, and thereby, lighten up this bluing mood. So the flowering must next ascend ‘like messages in air.’ These messages remake us: we are blue afternoons…we are writers…we are pens. (158) (We are pens with a blue ink in our veins no doubt!) Violet transforms ‘out of the blue’ in what still lives in laughter among the dead, leaving as is what still is…The rose is red because love is dead, my son. (161)

One mytheme holding fascinans is watching how the poetic exposé, sore in love, takes on its star-spangled manner in shades of red white and blue. Russell Lockhart provides the sense we need to see the new picture by showing how the eros-factor in poetic language expresses and X-presses the unknown content from the unseen eros into the scene. The unbound libido reformulates the love-bond under-standing the mythic and flowering unknown ‘field’. He writes

Our English word love comes from the Latin words lubere and libere, which have the literal meaning, ‘to please’. From this also derive such words as libido meaning ‘desire,’ ‘passion,’ ‘lust’; libere meaning ‘free,’ ‘unrestrained,’ ‘unshackled’; libertas meaning ‘freedom,’ ‘liberty.’ Liber is also the Latin name for Father Liber, the wine god, with connections to Bacchus and Dionysus. Libera is the Latin goddess, whose name in Greek is Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld. There is also Libertina, the Latin goddess of corpses. [iii]

Thanatos and Eros, Death and Love, are brothers after all.

In I Have Lost All That I Have Left Behind, the poet’s voice shares he has a love he’d like to mention and she is the reason for this twilight, a certain kiss (perhaps, this very one toward Death) and his own weak reach toward a longevity sleeping among the free. (Page One) Thrown together here as one image are Hypnos (Sleep), Thanatos (Death), and an Eros-factor (Love). Eros in language speaks toward new tellings or retellings that make new again by bringing unseen elements to light “fresh from under old ground.” Further, this image complex reveals Persephone’s realm as beyond old age and death. It is where the white shades/ghosts/souls set free. I am reminded of the lowing angel in Something Lost by noticing a lamentation there to Persephone that hails, “I have lost thy angel!”

Finally, this loss of ‘certain centering’ be-comes, in vanishing, a new organic center holding these many tensions together in be-longing here and now to this work at work. Trailing loss, the poetic voice echoes,

Summer is easily falling
Dressing nature
We are somehow connected
We are nowhere

                - Laughter Among the Dead

It may just be that the work at work shaping this volume of poetry has to do with a shift in centering. Not only is great Eros born of Penia, need, want or hunger, but Eros, Hesiod stories, is first-born of Chaos. Eros’ realm extends, as C.G. Jung says, from endless heavens to the darkest abyss and is the principle that brings together in union those realms that otherwise remain apart. [iv] One can now readily see what holds together this lovely poetry also hangs together like a patchwork quilt in a ‘holy tension of diversity.’ [v] Such expression of beauty in-tends what I think is the most profound poetic statement this collection of poems offers …
 

Because this is where
                        We ought to be
Forever is just beginning
Forever is free

                        -Page One