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From the "Posie Soiree" series. Short essays incited by the French Poise Soiree held monthly at the Cranford TeaSpot in Cranford, NJ with my careful co-host Carrie Pedersen Hudak.
The courage and freedom to imagine one’s society contains within it the capacity to re-imagine it. This is the deep seed of all revolutions. A renewal or re-imagining of conscience is what every change in the social order requires. The industrial revolution came upon Europe in Hugo’s era, calling forth the equally large energies of individual artistic innovation. Reality was changing–the imagination needed to change as well.
Hugo invented the “realistic” or “naturalistic” novel–a form of artistic expression as broad and multifarious as the new industrial reality confronting the France of his day. And this form, being reflective of reality (a mimesis, as the ancient Greeks would say) could keep pace with the breakneck changes of his Victorian era. Indeed, so effective was Hugo’s artistic solution to confronting his contemporary reality that a whole school of naturalistic novelists grew up in Hugo’s gargantuan shadow.
But it is Hugo’s poetry, acclaimed in his day by a poetry-hungry audience, that shows the fire of his spirit and the philosophical feeling that impelled his will to contribute to his society through literature. In his poetry, besides heroic and harrowing story-poems, we get some extended philosophical “meditations.” I wouldn’t put them anywhere other than in the category of “meditations” because it is the subjective feelings aroused by his philosophical conjectures that are the real focus of the poems.
Hugo imagines his individual mentality adrift in an infinite abyss of space–making his self infinitely tiny and insignificant in comparison. This is a philosophical correspondence with the religious notion of humility before the awful throne of God. And yet, at the same time, Hugo imagines–feels–that all the threads of thought and feeling that go zinging about in this infinite abyss actually meet at the crossroads of his heart and his head. Hugo is the humble egoist of infinite space!
In human terms, Hugo is a nothing–just like the rest of humanity before the infinite–and, therefore, he can use his private philosophical feelings as a basis to create universal art. His ambition springs from his humility before the vast, new, roiling experience of Life with a capital L. Hugo is nothing–but, we all are nothing–therefore Hugo can speak for all of us! This is a paradox made clearest in his philosophical poetry.
How much more marvelous a solution to the overwhelming dilemma of the Industrial Age. Instead of becoming an inward-looking miniaturist of his private feelings, Hugo leverages our shared insignificance before the infinite to create some of the largest, broadest, most weepingly human art since Shakespeare.
Gregg Glory
06/05/2012
A Frost-like emanation of mixed emotion.
We had walked some way beyond the ways We knew, where undeciphered trees half-sway Grey upon an unfamiliar hill. Out beyond scenic view and common rill We came upon a household ruin-- An abandoned cottage litter-strewn, Ensconced in wood and weed that noon Dappled shafts of noon-beams through; The shadow-teepee that slanted gables threw Shone dark in undisturbed dews. Rain-new porcelain glimmered through netted vines, Dim among the blackened kitchen pine And dirty plates laid out for four Half-visible through a crooked door.... What had startled birds, and inverted nest Where wildered briars now braid and twist? Had the ratchet-grip of slow foreclosure Or some more innocent departure Shuttered a home once loud with life? No one living who knows is left. We paused--our picnic hamper Swinging silent--to view a place that lamp And laughter had long conspired to warm. We exchanged a look as if warned. Those who dwelt here must have wandered,-- By easy brook and tall hillside sauntered Even as we ourselves, undaunted. We held our hands a moment tighter (As if we'd glimpsed Life's dark and light), Then turned away from wood and cottage To scenes of less somber wattage.
Gregg Glory
5/10/2012
a prose square from the upcoming "Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God," a Cali Travel Journal in the spirit of Basho
The park is filled with facts and figures. El Capitaine is so many yards, feet, and inches tall. There are so many species of bird, buck, and squirrel ransacking the foliage. How many and how shushing quiet are the various lean thin needles of the pines, oak-digger, yellow, sugar-pine, whose branches take to the sky with all the varying stratagems of sunbathers angling for the perfect tan. This year the volume of waterflow down Yosemite Falls is greater than the past fifty springs have seen. Whole generations of park tourists--and even expert guides and the denizens of wood and cliff--have not seen the strength of spray that greets my face this lucky year. Rainbows leap from domes of snow in rare display. This land of stone is softened by a film of wet, a woman's touch, a something that, however counted, however added up, remains measureless.
How shall I measure my time spent loving you, dear Earth? Is it the length and weight of my coffin? Expellations of breath per hour, the number of days enlivened by thee, or the number of days I will be denied? Sweat softens my brow as I manage another tricky, slidey slurrying step down the long walk from the Falls.
Gregg Glory
8/01/2011
a short novel inspired by the life of Chas Baudelaire
I have spent an anoyingly, alarmingly long time on revising and fluffing this treacherous text. A few words of revisionary advice from Dan Weeks set me on a path to create the perfect "Artist's Bible." Chock-full of homilies and horrors, the stances tried out by this Charles Baudelaire range from the irenic to the ironic--and done at a galloper's pace. No punk, no slammer, is more up-to-date than this man dead 150 years. He invented the poete maudit that became the cliche of critics, rock-stars, and poets "too pure" to participate in the hoary haggle of the marketplace--of ideas, that is!
Complete current edition.
Gregg Glory
7/27/2011
Collected Poems, free PDF
Complete text of current edition.
Gregg Glory
7/27/2010
The Ghosts and Princes manifesto is back! An original Defense of Poesy by Lord Dermond and Gregg Glory! Can you handle the truth?
Ghosts and Princes *revised edition 2003
This is a set of links to stripped-down presentations of all the poems I've got in my central database so far. Poetry database.