Form: Odal Orientations

John Keats Odal Cycle, as I call his five major odes, is not warped by an excess of dichotomous energy, where poetic formality is concerned. There are slight variations, but the form the five Keats’ Odes take is similar (and unique onto itself). My own five odes, which may or may not constitute an authentic cycle, have the problem of a kind of formal “lumpiness”— four of the odes are formal, and employ Keats’ own odal form; while one is informal, “jazzy” not just because it's an Ode On Jazz, but because it employs high level poetic musicality in a way which attempts to translate something about jazz music, and its approach to formality, into serious poetry. Keats’ formal innovations could align him with (if we want to attempt to make precise translations) Bach or Beethoven; so that, by employing his forms, I also attempt that sort of classical, classicized musicality. That’s the formal backbone of On Exile and the rest. Having my five-ode sequence waver between “jazz” and “classical” orientations creates, to bring things back to square one, the sort of dichotomous energy which some readers may find confusing, and certainly less an orderly procession than the march through Keats’ odes.

Where the narrative-thematic is concerned, Keats odes stick to the transcendental— imaginative landscapes, immersion in mythologies, meta and/or ekphrastic poems which take works of art as their starting place, raw nature, including sexuality, in chiasmus with the human brain (his extension of Wordsworthian dynamics). The world Keats inhabits, here, resonates and shudders; it is a living world, animated by the vivacity of an imagination which Keats “fancies” has its own reality, against the merely tactile. Keats demonstrates for us, with no holds barred, exactly what Modern and post-modern literature blood sacrificed; the sense that the world we live in is alive, and does, in fact, resonate and shudder with life. The nihilism of Modern and post-modern literature naively dismisses Romanticism as naïve, and creates, consolidates, and maintains a world skewered towards obsolescence, deadness, and human impotence in the face of attempting to achieve transcendental states of consciousness. 

If Modernism and post-modernism are naïve in the face of Romanticism, it is for the simple reason that scientific fact points the human brain towards the realization that the world around us really does resonate, and shudder, and that mysteries inhere in nature which can lead our minds permanently upwards. The jejune Modern/post-modern sense of world-weariness and effete skepticism have less basis in scientific fact then Romanticism does, try though Modernists and post-modernists might to invert their efforts into a talisman against naivete which is secretly experientially sound. My odes are somewhere in the middle of this— not as transcendental as Keats, more about individuals, human landscapes and relationships, intimacies which inhere on these levels, and also pain before corruption and coercion, where human collectives are concerned.

The fall of 2002 is when I wrote Ode On Jazz, as I was gorging myself on jazz at that time, and I had a sense of spiritual harmony about my life, both because of the marriage I had going then and because the feeling in the streets in Aughts Philadelphia was exactly what I had been searching for since I began writing seriously. Philadelphia in the Aughts, like Keats’ woods, mountains, trees, and lakes, resonated and shuddered the right way, had a strange life of its own. It couldn’t be that Ode On Jazz was not written from a transcendental place, even as it also an attempt at translation. The “classical” odes in my cycle are a split, in an odd, backwards/sideways fashion, between heaven and hell, like our attempted sense of chiasmus or communion with nature. As I develop my thoughts about the two odal cycles (I am calling my five odes a cycle out of convenience, up to a point; we’ll see later if the shoe fits this particular foot), the jazz/classical dichotomy is one I want to develop, as a critical translation— what the implications are, how far they take us out into a possible twenty-first century. Especially as we achieve the two hundredth anniversary of the first official release of this odal form, via John Keats, into the world at large.