"... words are so inadequate to express the emotions we feel," a poet told an audience in Saratoga Springs, NY.
  If that is true then perhaps we are wasting our time. I think it not to be true at all and find that poems surprisingly often express just what we are experiencing. I have flipped open the Paris Review to find the perfect poem for situations in everyday life at the precise moment of powerful coinciding emotions. It is not the words that are lacking; it is the people lacking the words.
  When very strong emotions become overwhelming and impossible to "pinpoint," the writer may choose to be somewhat obtuse. I concede this example may be somewhat self-serving and I apologize for this: Perhaps I am alone all night waiting for someone who has prompted me to do some self-searching. A person who has had some impact on my life. Someone who I know won't be hanging around for long. As a poet I am prone to dealing with these emotions, which are puzzling as well as potent, by doing some research. By learning a bit more about myth, about identity, etc. If I really do my homework, I find the poets who have preceded me in this kind of search.
  This is why I am a poet, after all: To find a way to find words to express what "cannot" be said in words. Therefore I can easily avoid any cliches! Instead of writing something prosy or talking about fevers or cold sweat, an aching heart or a sinking despair or an anticipation marked by glances toward the silly clock, I write something like

    God drives a golden taxi all night in the rain.

  Sure this is "brave" in the sense that not everyone will get it and a few will even be offended:Out of context this line seems opaque; as poetry it is a way of saying I am waiting for someone very important (God is the drive, after all) but I don't know quite why (hence the line is somewhat mysterious). Is the color of the taxi significant? Probably. Perhaps it refers to its passenger being a Sagittarian. The poem is indeed called, "Sagittarius."
  There are some other things: Rain could suggest melancholy; the waiting is long but the end inevitable ("all night"). Such language, obtuse as it seems, utilizes symbols to express that powerful emotions are wrapped up in the myth of identity.
  Consider something straightforward and earthy as Richard Brautigan feeling "like an early spring mud puddle at an off angle. Words can express complex, almost intangible, feelings (it is Brautigan's precisionthat makes this line interesting. Of course we are not getting a replicationof emotion but creating something new -- and since that is our highest aspiration (according to our artist's take on the Bible, (i>In the beginning, God created ...) words are hardly inadequate but, rather, the main thing.
  Peter O'Leary's poetry reflects faith in words, a conviction that poetry is somehow important, if not the very key to the mysteries of the universe, to eternal life. That "brave" approach has taken us out through the "in" door. It is a progression from an approach to poetry -- especially in light of all the psychology of art/women's studies examinations of H.D.
  Consider as an antecedent not a poem, but a tune from the 1960s, Incredible String Band's "A Very Cellular Song," which one might associate with Scientology or another of the approaches (as Freud with H.D.) to mental "blocks" (writer's block certainly being most relevant). A true postmodern, O'Leary doesn't delve into psychology after the fact, but right in the poetry.
  Furthermore it is a post-Freudian psychology that directly addresses the language of the clinical psychiatrist (not to be confused with the "fast-food" approach, as in, "Here's a pill") in order to access universal pathways to the spirit. Rather than posing an in-your-face rejection of precedents, O'Leary builds on some of the more interesting ideas that emerged -- some of these being very old ideas -- in Modernism. He lays the ideas out as if to serve as both H.D. and Freud at the same time. That sounds very neat and very Postmodern. It is neither.
  This is an overwhelming task ... much easier to simply subvert. The result is a language that, at times, seems challenging and inelegant; the reward is probably commensurate, which would probably have pleased Laura Riding, had she always "stuck to her guns."
  Poetry is a suffering path; the true practice of poetry, painfully and with great hardship, lays a path where there is none. That is why poetry is a dark conceit taking form among the unknown and the unknowable. The beasts of this Earth do not deal with the unknown and unknowable. Rather than suffusing the poem with "ideas, burying them in symbolic language, O'Leary states them flat out, in a manner that could be called Postmodern, detached.
  Crypto-angelic conceptions clearly states the modality of the poem, "To Suffer to Pass Through,"which appeared in The Spoon River Poetry Review Summer/Fall 2005. This clue gives us the idea that we'll be taking in corollaries between the material world and its physics, neuroscience, botany and basic biology and the metaphysical< realm.
  Speech processes the God-signal, O'Leary writes. This expresses the view of poets who are moved to write out of a strong sense of the importance of language (at least they think it's the reason they write) almost to the point of being offended by a poet (and one selling a book, at that!) declaring that "words are so inadequate."
  As poetry is a dark conceit,the theme is uniquely appropriate. Life is best described by its latencies: The dormant state of flowers (there is more than one reference to flowers (this is sort of Lawrencean, but we're stretching things a bit). The poem begins with a flower opening ... flowers chlorophyll converts to life from light ... but this is no pastoral scene. The language is quite contemporary: glided on modulated radiowaves ... buzzes electrons in a telepathic, copper-like wire etc. One of our family jokes was that we were still mystified at how radio works when television came along. Here, an irony is that O'Leary describes God's creation in the language of energy transmission (the language of ... TV!). This creates some fascinating juxtapositions in terms of language. O'Leary allows these juxtapositions to occur:

    Antennae, God's silver-structured syllabary ... a
    collective we know as angels radiate the field at light's speed.

  Consider, Dormancy's intimate coding.He also makes this process transparent:


    Theologians named this field the Anunciation.
    Evangelicals named it Pentecost.
    Physicists named it luminiferous
    aether.
    The gardener calls it sunlight.

  The poem's third section explodes into language which could be called neurosynthetic:


    its corrugated membrane slickened with intuition-plasmas grips
    the airs
    & spins a pyrogenic heat

and

    its genetic
    instructions ... Freud's dream composition ...into
    your hypnic mind
    recruiting its enzymes.

  By tapping into this neurosynthetic vocabulary O'Leary shows how language that describes very tangible processes can appear quasi-mystical to laymen; perhaps that's just the point. Without total command of language, perhaps, we are more likely to become victimized, caught in time, so to speak, by failing to understand how myths operate. Certainly that's how writer's block works!

    ... Myths
    live in latencies our thoughts actively occlude
    in rational sentences we expose to dream viruses.

  What are dream-viruses? Freud gave terms to certain events ... traumas, in general. These, O'Leary writes, kill dreams (keeping us sane). Their ghosts, however, go one through us. Freud observed that patients with severe psychiatric disorders went about in a dream-state; the "death" of dreams is a survival mechanism, perhaps.
  Now O'Leary gets into some really difficult language in this poem, language that doesn't sound very much like what we know and love as poetry although he always comes back to that sort of music. It's the second section, though, which is written in a self-consciously Biblical idiom, an abrupt departure from the longer sections around it, that is perhaps most challenging from a thematic standpoint. It represents such a break that one finds it strange, at first, but the meaning becomes quite clear.
 In its description of Elijah passing on the role of prophet to Elisha, the passage shows that myth itself is mythical ... that is to say, the Old Testament shows us that myth replicates, myth being a myth describing viral replication of ... myth.
  The spiritualists (some have termed H.D. an "occultist" writer, or at least asked "if") at some point in life realize that they have somehow "sleepwalked" into personal versions of very old myths. Sometimes this discovery happens late in life, in so-called "middle age." For example, if, in middle age, I start studying H.D., reading about her as well as reading her works, reading about her and Freud and reading her thoughts on Freud -- and then I start corresponding with someone on that topic -- I may find myself replicating the H.D./Freud experience, vicariously experiencing H.D. or doing some role-reversal to see my own issues with art and with relationships.
  If I also happen to be one of those people who see that Ezra Pound's (pre-World War I) views of American politics as hopelessly corrupt and doomed and its people as Philistine were essentially correct, then I am in even deeper trouble.
  The phenomenon of "synchronicity" as Jung described provides more amusing everyday examples. One evening I am telling an Omega Institute volunteer vacationing locally that working nights at a particular motel is "almost like working a suicide hotline -- but with problem drinkers." He asks if there is a lot of drinking in the neighborhood.
  "Yes and a great deal of synchronicity at this particular spot, my partner and I have noticed," I say. These are strange words to say at any time but just as they're uttered, here comes a very drunken woman who has fallen, scraping her knee, and now staggers up to us to ask for a ride home. Furthermore I have only, within hours, picked up an Omega Institute catalog so I know what that's about, to be able to identify the young man's T-shirt and have a conversation starter at all ... ah, we notice these things all the time, connectedness seems very real ... but the young man has never seen "synchronicity" emerge in a discussion of "synchronicity." To put it plainly he is "freaked out." It is the "catastrophic unanticipated reproduction of the myth" that O'Leary describes.
  It becomes apparent, I think, where myths, suffused with dreams, or as O'Leary describes,

    dreams, whose
    helices thread into myths wound like fuse-wire around a spool

  Fuse-wire, not just any wire, that phrase which clinches it, because the active realization that dreams, myths, are inextricably woven into our waking experience, our selves, that is indeed explosive ...

    catastrophic unanticipated reproduction of the myth.

  Here is a very terrible thought: To practice poetry, which involves a great deal of work for rewards that, by our own Philistine social standards, are nearly exclusively intangible, is itself wrapped up in catastrophic, unanticipated reproduction of the myth.
  It certainly may be viewed as such for poetry can be very isolating outside of some very small circles ... so small that the co-editor of a very leading literary magazine responded to a very positive note on an important poem his magazine published by writing, "I'll pass this on to my poetry people." My poetry people, indeed!
  The correspondent alluded to earlier in connection with H.D. claims to almost never dream, which leaves me with the sick feeling that this poe which illustrates God-consciousness, may be lost on most readers and that, too, explodes into my conscious mind: A dark, self-doubting chaos.
  However, I think it is clear that what myth does for us is to make every human being a little bit like the next one; that is to say, myth unites us as a species, possibly ensuring our survival. Dreams ... that function serves memory, individuality. We do need one wound 'round the other, as Leary describes the situation, although there is some confusion and possibly it is my own:

    caution: mythic is lyctic

  O'Leary probably means lytic? If so, that lytic process as I understand it, is quite different, though not quite the opposite of the lysogenic cycle he describes.
  Never mind. The most potent metaphor in "To Suffer to Pass Through" ...

    ... usually a psychic
    trauma ... causes the lysogenic cycle
    to begin with the rapid
    catastrophic
    unanticipated
    reproduction
    of the myth

... describes the suffering and breakdown associated with apparent isolation (loss, separation, etc.) and curiously, it is that suffering and breakdown which ultimately "unites" us with the rest of the human race.
  What is clear and remarkable about "To Suffer to Pass Through" is an unflagging determination to make the unseen or Divine clear, in the most precise manner possible, to use scientific language (rather than the old "poetic") out of necessity in demonstrating that reality is a process, a process beginning with a Divine presence or "unseen" as a kind of "signal."
  As I read and re-read this compelling, earthy and straightforward description of the human condition, one quite distinct from my own attempts to handle the same theme, I cannot help but think of the poet decrying the "inadequacy" of words to express the emotions we experience. Ther is a nagging concern that, given our over-reliance on medication in lieu of the kind of understanding O'Leary presents, it will soon be that the emotions we feel will be inadequate, rather than the words to express them.