Corbin & Poetry - #6 in a series - Updated Version

Pierre Joris, prolific poet, essayist, translator and anthologist (here on wikipedia) has this to say on ta'wil & Henry Corbin:

"I believe I first heard the word in the late sixties, reading a Charles Olson essay (&/or Robert Duncan material — can't remember what came first). Then a fine use of the concept in terms of poetics was made in the early 70's by Robert Kelly in a dialogue with George Quasha & Chuck Stein for the "Vort" magazine Kelly issue [Vol 2, #2, 1974]. At which moment I was able to get my hands on the Corbin book (in London) & then several of his volumes in French which I took with me when I moved to Algeria in 1976. Kelly's notion of the (process of the) poem as a "ta'wil of the first line" has been important for me. I have used / cited the term & its poetological implications on a number of occasions — inside of poems but also when using it as the name of my off&on small press venture)."

A ready example can be found in a recent post by Jerome Rothenberg of an excerpt from Notes Towards a Nomadics Manifesto. Joris writes:

"We will keep Robert Kelly's notion of "ta'wil of the first line," the poem as nomadic/ rhizomatic extension of some given or found beginning, but a ta'wil reduced to immanence, to a "writing through." As he tells it otherwise in A MY NAME [in The Convections, 1978]: "This chant was my first news of the Great Trade Route along which scarce and isolate merchant-poet-nomads carried goods from tribe to tribe, over the mountains and under the sun, bringing the only news."

I asked Joris about his idea of a ta'wil reduced to immanence, and he replied with this:

"Yes, I know that Corbin would frown as transcendence is core to his thinking. My sense of "immanence" (& my insistence on it, rather than on a vertical theophany & the baggage such verticalities & hierarchies carry with them in religio-political terms throughout the history of our monotheisms) comes in good part via an early reading of Spinoza — prolonged later on by deep involvement in Gilles Deleuze's thinking about Spinoza, but any number of other matters too. If I were to put it in relation to Islamic mysticism, I would probably go to the term BARZAKH, as that "inbetween" place, — the original meaning of which is "curtain, barrier," but thus also "connecting link," "isthmus" between two spheres of existence,  as in its Koranic sense as "Bardo" realm between life and death etc — and of which Ibn Arabi, who speaks of it often and deeply, says somewhere that finally it is the only place there is, i.e. that there is nothing that is not in the barzakh."

And I am very grateful to Joris for sending along a scan of portions of the extremely important and fascinating VORT issue which I make available here:
VORT 5 (Vol2, No2) Robert Kelly Issue - Excerpts

 

Michael Maier - Atalanta Fugiens, Emblem XXXVI

UPDATE:

In the first versions of this post I referred to the "VORT Interview" with Kelly. As any reader will see, the piece is hardly an interview, but something rather more interesting. Upon seeing the piece posted here, George Quasha wrote that both he and Charles Stein would prefer that

"it would be referred to not as an interview, which it really was not (as it says itself), but as a dialogue or more particularly as an act of dialogical criticism in alignment with the ta'wil project itself. It was laboriously edited and shaped as a particular critical act that was an embodiment of its own principle -- and in that respect it is a work that we created together, with its foundations in Olson and Duncan as well as Corbin, and moving to a new approach to engaging these issues; therefore an act of poetics. It's obviously indebted to RK but not in the sense that an "interview" implies. I don't know other things that have this co-performative poetics so much in evidence. In fact, it's the real beginning (and we did a number of these dialogues with poets, called DiaLogos at the time, including Ted Enslin and Jonathan Williams) of the long process of co-performative and dialogical work that Chuck and I have continued and which is expressed in An Art of Limina. In making this distinction I'm not carping but speaking to the heart of a long-developing and intricate project. In the present context of poetics the special qualities of our approach to the co-performative are easily missed and obscured or simply not noticed. That's why we hope to preserve certain distinctions when the opportunity arises."

In keeping with these concerns and this request I will post the dialogue in its entirety in this space when I have access to the full text. - TC