Ascend Ascend. Janaka Stucky

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      For who hasn’t longed, on some fleeting occasions at least, to let go of oneself entirely? To merge with the grand Whatever It Is that makes this world so difficult and bright? Certainly the ecstatic poets that Stucky is a successor of all express this very sentiment. One can’t help but think of the “ancestors of ancestors speaking with centuries / Upon centuries of mouths” with whom he is in dialogue: Hafiz, Blake, Yeats, Doolittle, and di Prima, to name but a few. So often, their poems are about surrendering to some sanctified source, and then melting away into it. Rumi wrote “Let the caller and the called disappear; be lost in the Call.” And per Kabir: “I’ll keep uttering / The name / And lose myself / In it.”

      But rather than give over to its thrall, poets instead take on the impossible task of trying to pin the wings of the ineffable with words. In doing so, they grant the reader a bit of flight as well. Ascend Ascend touches upon this paradox, for it is also a poem about language. Alphabets, intonations, and supernatural syllables are referenced throughout the work. Stucky is engaging in “adamic / Choreography,” putting names to things with the elated mania of first man. I thought about this, too, as I finished reading it to the woods, and then found myself looking around stupefied. Adam’s own name comes from adamah, meaning “earth,” and in stringing the world with words, he created it anew, before being swallowed up by it once more.