I S S U E  8

The Mask and the Making of Poetry

Gregory Leadbetter writes about the mask in poetry and the work of fictive truth

To propose an analogy between the poem and the mask—as I do here—may at first feel uncomfortable, because to ‘mask’ is commonly understood as to conceal or disguise, whereas poetry, with reason, is now most often associated with honesty, disclosure, and the very opposite of falsehood: truth. One of my aims in what follows is to contend for the ‘mask’—in the sense that I describe it—as a medium of such truth, and to frame this in relation to poetry. I do so to tease out, and contend for, a particular matrix of poetic and aesthetic principle, and hence to articulate a way of reading and conceiving of poetry that is not, in my experience, widely recognised at present—despite involving questions that seem to me fundamental to the significance of poetry as an art. I draw on the history of the mask in theatre and ritual, where the mask acts as an organ of becoming, seeing, and uncertain knowing—embodying and enabling an altered state, both in its wearer and its witnesses—to illustrate the effects, qualities, and possibilities of poetry that I have in mind.

Long before I ever wrote a poem, I was an actor. We all are, as children: imagining, making things up and acting them out in play is as natural to the human species as breathing. Some of us take it on stage. At primary school I played all sorts of roles, from Robin Hood to a witch doctor—I remember the weight of the huge horned head-dress I was given to wear for that—and I’ve performed in quite a few plays as an adult, too: mostly Shakespeare at the Crescent Theatre in Birmingham (though I played Dracula at Oldbury Rep). Imaginative play, playing a role, and the play of poetry are radically entwined, not just in my life, but in their essentially active, dynamic, experiential character. Each is a making, a happening, a seeing, in real time. What they enact is fictive, but actual—and as such, their fictions enter the living fabric of our being, and inform our ongoing making of the world. The inherent non-naturalism of the mask simply brings this relationship into vivid focus and draws attention to the way something made can assume life and become a living presence in and for our own.

To acknowledge the reality of the fictive and to cultivate its power is not antithetical to a healthy scepticism. Indeed, it nourishes critical discrimination, because to recognise, from within, ways in which human reality is made as well as given is a riposte to passive literal-mindedness and the damage it inflicts upon us. Claiming something demonstrably false to be true, or dismissing something demonstrably correct as ‘fake news’, is not fiction, but falsehood, not only because it is qualitatively different in context and intention, but also because its claims are literal and absolute. The literalist cannot read in the multi-planar ways that literary and artistic thinking necessarily involves, which interfuse the fabulist and the sceptical, and feed their common roots. Marianne Moore, in ‘Poetry’, famously wrote that poets should be ‘literalists of the imagination’, and her readers should not ignore the fact that this phrase is presented on the page in quotation marks—drawing attention not only to its origin in a complaint by Yeats that Blake was ‘a too literal realist of imagination’, but also to its provisional, essayistic, contentious status. Poetry is not identical to prose statement: every aspect of its content is conditioned by the performative, self-organising patterns that it presents. The entirety of that patterning—semantic, aural, figurative, and so on—constitutes its mask: not as a disguise, but as the very character of its presence as a poem.

When Moore goes on, in the same poem, to require that poets produce ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’—another phrase, teasingly, in quotation marks, but this time not an adaptation of another text, as far as we know—she is modelling with beautiful precision the paradox of fictive truth: a reality produced by fictive powers. Moore was tangling with an ancient problem taken up with new energy and urgency in Romantic poetics, as it ran up against the limitations of the conventional critical vocabulary in English: ‘It is among the miseries of the present age that it recognizes no medium between Literal and Metaphorical’, wrote Coleridge in 1816. He coined the term ‘tautegorical’ to describe this unnamed medium: in contrast to allegory, the signification of which lies outside itself (x = y), tautegory is self-signifying and self-declaring (x = x). Tautegory is its own evidence and cannot be paraphrased and remain the same in character or effect: its form is one and the same with its productive power. In this sense, tautegory is a presence, not merely descriptive but constitutive of reality. Applied to art—and hence to poetry—the word describes well its peculiar status in human experience and recognises the operative reality of imaginal form. The realism of the poem, the mask, or other artwork—its presence as form and fact—is not necessarily ‘realist’ or ‘realistic’, and indeed will tend to unsettle received notions of the ‘real’ in that sense.

When these conditions have been created, poetry—like a masked figure—breaks open, and holds open, a heightened form of attention in active, in-the-moment experience, cutting through ingrained habits of uninquiring acceptance and what Coleridge called ‘the film of familiarity’, reawakening the organs of experience, and hence re-enabling, in the theatre of the poem, a kind of primal contact between our being and its habitat. It acts as a germinal power on the roots and springs of our life and growth—our feeling and thinking, our empathy and our agency—our capacity to communicate with, and act in concert with, the astonishing fabric of our own existence: a fabric continuous with the greater life that we inhabit, in all its mystery, visible and invisible, unactual but active. The mask of the poem steps through and beyond those everyday circumstances and distractions that threaten to drown out the more subtle signals of our imaginative, intuitive, inward life, tapping into realities of thought and feeling that might otherwise elude consciousness, experience, and articulation. As Jeanette Winterson has said of poetry: ‘It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place’. Moore’s toads are messengers and familiars. The ‘honesty’ of art and poetry lies in disclosing what could not otherwise be disclosed, which is, tautegorically, itself. The mask of the poem is an enabling differentiation—an irruption of space-time that brings with it the possibility of a transformative psychic event.

My book Maskwork was published in autumn 2020, during the pandemic in its pre-vaccination phase, and although many of us were wearing a certain kind of mask or ‘face covering’ in public at the time, I didn’t name the collection for that: I had decided on the title the year before. The mask of Maskwork is the work of fictive truth: the elusive subject of this essay. A book of poems is the mask of its poetics—at once the product and the productive agency, the active and activating presence—and in this sense embodies an implicit creed, or even manifesto, in the art. Of course, my title nevertheless found itself in a curious alignment, from which—among all the horrors and deprivations of the pandemic—some oddly pertinent findings emerged, including research that found that masks covering part of the face, below the eyes or indeed the left or right half of the face, tend to make us more attractive. Cognitive scientists have speculated that masking of this kind draws attention to our eyes and hair—and besides this, introduces mystery into the reading of the face, accentuating in the onlooker the spontaneous, involuntary desire to know, when faced with what is hidden or, upon encounter, psychically arresting. This latter sense leads back to the larger aesthetic principle that I am sketching, of a presence that disrupts and alters the ordinary pattern of familiar expectation, that might exert a peculiar fascination and create a charged atmosphere of its own.

The cover of a book is itself a kind of mask, and the cover of Maskwork features an object that has fascinated me since I first saw it, as a teenage student of archaeology. It is one of the best examples of the many red deer antler masks or frontlets found at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr in North Yorkshire, and around 11,000 years old. Its mystery will never be solved or explained away, but comparative work by archaeologists suggests that its use is likely to have been shamanic in character. In and of itself—long detached from its original context—it still possesses an ineffable iconic power: you read the mask, and the mask reads you. Through my own imaginative relationship to this mesmerising artefact, the Star Carr antler-mask became emblematic of the animating poetics of Maskwork.

My argument on behalf of the mask as a figure and analogue for a poetic principle does not, of course, do away with its inherent ambivalence. It is no mere coincidence that Dionysos, a god of illusion (among his many other attributes) became established as the god of the theatre in ancient Greek culture, from the sixth century BCE. As the enigmatic philosopher Heraclitus said, however, ‘The way up and the way down are the same’. The mercurial qualities of the mask carry both its danger and its power—a valency and volatility it shares with language itself: as Angela Carter put it, ‘language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation’. The possibility of its abuse, in deceit, was vividly illustrated in a special issue of Magma poetry magazine in 2012, which featured ‘Putting on the Mask’ as its theme: one of the poems published there in good faith was later found to be plagiarised (details are on Magma’s website). The plagiarist, who became briefly notorious, evidently took the topic rather literally. It should be clear that the mask with which I am concerned in this essay does not support lying—nor vacuous posturing that conceals an emptiness, nor wilful obscurantism. I am interested in the capacity of the mask to embody the very opposite of falsehood: the qualities of truth in its artfulness. The ambivalence of our medium as poets—the mask of language—and the difficulty of isolating those qualities call upon the responsibility of the poet, the critic, and the reader to know better what they are dealing with. The fine-tuning of our powers of attention, discrimination, and imagination gives us, as it were, a third, divinatory eye. Our best guard against the dangers of language—which include the dangers of literalism—is to educate ourselves in ways of being, seeing, and reading that amplify both our critical and imaginative sensitivity to its effects. This is a never-ending task, in which all those who choose to be are perpetual students: how to be, how to see, and how to read the mask.

In the enormous variety of their manifestation, mask and masquerade are as universal as poetry, and—while the contexts of masking can be very different from each other—there is, as in poetry, a kinship in the cultural life of the mask: a level on which patterns and affinities can be read as shared throughout our species. The expanded perspective that a sympathetic knowledge of mask traditions brings runs counter to exoticising or appropriative practices, and should encourage and inform cross-cultural empathy, understanding, and respect. The mask is not ‘primitivist’ in any pejorative sense, and to regard mask as somehow inherently beneath the norms of human dignity is to reproduce condescending attitudes and naïve, self-congratulatory forms of rationalism common to colonial-era thinking—and indeed (the two are linked) to belittle or dismiss imaginative life and its manifestation in play, performance, and theatre. Mask implies other forms of thinking and knowing—often historically marginalised or demonised—which are participatory and implicate in character, rather than analytical and observational, and as such challenge established critical vocabularies. As Dana Gioia remarks in his essay ‘Poetry as Enchantment’, while the ‘non-conceptual forms of knowledge’ fundamental to poetry and literature may be difficult to describe, ‘their resistance to conceptual paraphrase reflects the limitations of criticism not the limits of art’. Nevertheless, the effort to articulate the dynamics of these other forms of knowing and thinking—stimulated, let’s remember, by the artforms themselves—nourishes the analytical and critical powers together with the capacity for imaginative apprehension, in the mutually inductive relationship to which I have already referred. In embodying other orders of thinking, knowing, and being, the mask stands not for the anti-rational, but the supra-rational: arousing and directing the participation of our bodies and minds in the biological deep time at once ancient and active within us, the supra-human ground of our physiology and psychology.

Whatever its form, the mask is essentially incarnational in character—a quality it shares with poetry. It assumes a body in performative relationship to another, and in this both mask and poem are also essentially theatrical. Throughout its many contexts and purposes—from the shamanic use of horned masks in prehistoric Europe to modern day carnival, the Kukeri of Bulgaria to Yup’ik seers in Western Alaska—the mask both presents and effects an altered state of some kind. This may entail a particular quality of being, as in certain plays of the Noh theatre of Japan, where the masks should evoke ‘yugen’, an ineffable atmosphere (as Gregory Irvine writes) involving ‘grace, darkness and mystery’, which can be known only by direct experience, and not in the abstract: the late fourteenth-century poet-priest Shotetsu said its quality ‘may be suggested by the veil of a cloud over the moon or by the mists of autumn on the mountainside’. Looking elsewhere, I’m told that in thirteenth-century Venice, where masks were worn daily to move through the public spaces of the city, Venetians would greet each other not by their given name, but as ‘Maschera’ (‘Mask’): an acknowledgement that the mask became, for that moment, both the vehicle and the veil of its wearer’s identity. The ‘masque’, as a distinct form of poetry-theatre, developed from masked aristocratic entertainments in mediaeval Italy, but it took on particular popularity from the fifteenth century in England, where it drew heavily upon the vigorous vernacular life of mumming, playing, and masking, and drew on characters from seasonal festivals, literary romance, and European mythology. The mummings of John Lydgate and the masques of Ben Jonson were known in Latin as ‘ludi’ (singular ‘ludus’): a word that includes ‘game’, ‘sport’, ‘training’, and ‘play’ among its meanings. The Old Provençal word ‘joglar’, meaning performer, player, or troubadour, and etymologically connected with the Juggler, or Magus, of tarot, presents a similarly suggestive alignment; the etymology of ‘troubadour’ itself combines ‘to sing’ and ‘to find’, and derives from the ancient Greek root ‘tropos’, meaning ‘turn, way, form, figure, manner’—each gesturing to the performative, theatrical manipulation of being that is the very pith of poetry. The mask, like the poem, is a mark and medium of transformation—and in this they share with theatre magico-ritual roots.

The mask has found some prominent champions in modern European theatre. In his memoir The Shifting Point, Peter Brook contemplates the peculiarly liberating effects of studying and working with mask traditions, and their capacity to release energies that conventional European theatre often neglects. He writes that ‘the true mask is the expression of somebody unmasked’—a life-enhancing revelatory presence. The mask as a form of ‘soul-portrait’, as he calls it, with which a skilled actor can work, gives it a special place in what for Brook is theatre’s fundamental role: to offer ‘a burning and fleeting taste of another world, in which our present world is integrated and transformed’. In his book Impro, Keith Johnstone describes remarkable experiences based on his work training actors at the Royal Court Theatre in the use of the mask—far too many to recount here. ‘A Mask is a device for driving the personality out of the body and allowing a spirit to take possession of it’, he writes, only partly metaphorically. The mask enables other orders of perception, alertness, and attention to take hold: it accentuates the principle implicit in theatre work, that acting is a form of becoming, seeing, and knowing—and amplifies both the effects and the possibilities of that acting. Johnstone quotes Charlie Chaplin’s account of how he derived his most famous character, the Tramp, from the process of putting on what would become his instantly recognisable costume and make-up: the character emerged in and from the mask. Chaplin himself said that ‘with the clothes on I felt that he was a reality, a living person. In fact he ignited all sorts of crazy ideas that I would never have dreamt of until I was dressed and made-up as the Tramp’. The mask had become the source and the medium of new being and new insight. Johnstone describes a similar experience of the ‘Mask state’ recounted by Stanislavski: the mask—devised by experimenting with make-up—revealed and assumed in the actor an apparently independent life. The same process occurs in the poem: the thing made assumes the power of making and yields, to poet and reader, its knowing.

Johnstone connects the mask to the nature of trance: an ecstatic, supra-personal state, often of enhanced, more immediate apprehension, intuiting rather than choosing how to proceed—and this too is analogous to widely attested experience in poetry. Robert Graves wrote of the ‘necessary trance’ of poetic composition—his phrase for the subtle form of wakefulness conducive to the sensitivity and activity of our spontaneous powers—and part of each poet’s discipline involves honouring and cultivating their relationship to the poetic trance, in whatever form it assumes for them, and educating the wellsprings of their own spontaneity. In the terms that I am using, this trance state is the mask state: a mode and medium of creative, epistemic agency. (It is akin to the ‘flow state’ described by contemporary psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura.) Again, this does not entail a total relinquishment of control or discernment; on the contrary, it involves a higher order of control: an enabling will at once active and passive, watchful and permissive. In The White Goddess, Graves alludes to the ‘ancient Hebrew distinction between legitimate and illegitimate prophecy—“prophecy” meaning inspired poetry’:

If a prophet went into a trance and was afterwards unconscious of what he had been babbling, that was illegitimate; but if he remained in possession of his critical faculties throughout the trance and afterwards, that was legitimate. His powers were heightened by the ‘spirit of prophecy’, so that his words crystallized immense experience into a single poetic jewel; but he was, by the grace of God, the sturdy author and regulator of this achievement.

The mask state of poetic trance (the ‘spirit of prophecy’) is both the afflatus and the ordering law of its making.

The role of discipline, control, and context is worth emphasising. In traditional maskwork, the mask is deployed in a distinct context that has grown up alongside the development of the mask, so that the two are organically interlinked. The contexts and disciplines of poetry, both a spoken and a written art, are enormously various, but it nevertheless has them. This becomes clearer in the case of theatre: the word derives from the ancient Greek for ‘seeing-place’, implying a framing form, a dedicated space or temenos. The charismatic rites of Dionysos—once known as Lusios, the ‘Liberator’, whose cult was rooted in ecstatic experience—promise the new freedoms of fresh insight, but as I have said, and as the ancients well knew, the energies released are volatile: the Bacchic ‘furor’, or ‘madness’, could be destructive. The temenos of the theatre, as of the poem, creates a dedicated space and context for its ‘seeing’, and—paradoxically, but truly—this ostensible restriction, this form, in fact becomes liberating and enabling. As Brook puts it: ‘because you are in safety, you can go into danger. It is very strange, but all theatre is based on that’. This finds a clear analogy in poetry’s intimate concern with form in language, in the broadest sense of the word, not just in the sense of ‘poetic forms’ like the sonnet, ghazal, or pantoum (though I recall here Adrienne Rich’s remark on form in poetry: ‘like asbestos gloves, it allowed me to handle materials I couldn’t pick up barehanded’). The wild power of the mask, of poetry, of theatre—the radiance and charisma of its unsettling presence—is coeval with its enabling form, context, and culture: ‘a fellow-growth from the Same Life’, in Coleridge’s words, ‘even as the Bark is to the Tree’.

The radical life of tradition lies in its self-invention, and the mask remains a focus of folk culture and related arts that reimagine and rewild—for contemporary culture—its historical forms. You need only look, for example, at May Day or Beltane celebrations in Britain today to see that—demotic and self-regulating—mask cultures arise, are passed on, and flourish independently of external sanction, whether religious or official. As in Bakhtin’s reading of the ‘carnivalesque’, both the history and the ongoing invention of mask tradition challenges and subverts, as well as iterates, patterns of social and cultural hierarchy. Chaplin’s Tramp—with his endless comic transgressions—shows how the mask in performance enables us to escape, alter, invert, or otherwise transcend received social norms and expectations of behaviour: to travel beyond and be someone different from the everyday, transactional ego with which we typically identify (Goethe gives some memorable accounts of the masked saturnalia and ‘fooling’ during carnival at Rome in his Travels in Italy). Think too of Nina Conti’s brilliant use of ventriloquy, mask, and puppetry in her comedy—the effects of which are exhilarating and hilarious for participants and audience alike. We should not forget the subversive power of ‘mere’ entertainment. The mask can be sobering in its effects, but it is not sober. Play, fun, and humour are very often involved in the mask, because they too show that other perspectives, other worlds, are possible: they are forms of seeing, and carry their own kind of insight. In its liberating power to loosen and remake social bonds and roles, the mask and its players possess inherently radical political potential. Its existential valency is its virtue.

I have said that language itself is a mask and shares this valency. When we use the verb ‘to be’ (in any language) we intervene in reality in radical ways, not least because language itself, whether spoken or written, is a source of experience, and a form of life—not just a neutral, passive, unmediating record. Language is story, and story is mask: an active presence, a making. In this sense, the work of the writer is maskwork. Ted Hughes, in a letter to his daughter Frieda regarding her own early poetry, advised her that the ‘emotions of a real situation are shy, but if they can find a mask they are shameless exhibitionists. So—look for the right masks’. He probably knew that he was echoing Oscar Wilde, who is brilliantly succinct on the matter: ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.’ Here, the ‘person’ corresponds to what Johnstone calls the ‘public-relations department for the real mind’—while the mask is the prophetic medium that releases the gift of its truth.

Poets and writers have often courted this principle, or something akin to it. Assuming another voice, for example, is fundamental to the literary arts. This is explicit in (say) the dramatic monologues of Browning—and perhaps my favourite modern example of the form, Richard Wilbur’s ‘The Mind-Reader’, to which the poet adds the teasing epigraph, ‘Lui parla’: ‘He speaks’. Kurt Vonnegut—contemplating again how the art of assumption is hazardous precisely because it is so powerful—observed that ‘We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be’. (The actor Archibald Leach—better known as Cary Grant—said ‘I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me’.) The long history of literary noms de plume is itself richly suggestive. Patrick McGuinness, writing as his fictional poet Liviu Campanu, composes poems that he could or would not ordinarily do writing in his ‘own’ voice: a different sphere of sensibility becomes available. Fernando Pessoa, perhaps the most intense heteronymist of them all, produced Wildean aphorisms encapsulating his practice: ‘To pretend is to know oneself’: ‘Imaginary figures have more depth and truth than real ones’: ‘I subsist as a kind of medium of myself’. He was wholly reconciled to the labyrinthine quality of the truth that he practised, as his syntax can show: in his sonnet ‘How many masks wear we, and undermasks’, he writes that ‘The true mask feels no inside to the mask / But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes’, and ‘when a thought would unmask our soul’s masking, / Itself goes not unmasked to the unmasking’. Entende? Pessoa at once insists upon the existential productivity of the mask and the made-ness of our being; ‘try as I might I couldn’t recall / The signature that I’d been born with’, Michael Donaghy writes in ‘“Smith”’, one of his own playful meditations on the theme. ‘No more masks!’ cries the voice in Muriel Rukeyser’s enigmatic ‘The Poem as Mask’, only for the Orphic magic of the mask—the voice the speaker seems to reject—to find and realise its power, redeem her ‘exile from myself’, and recompose the scattered fragments of both the god and the speaker’s ‘torn life’. Re-writing her own earlier engagement with the myth of Orpheus’s rending serves as a cipher for the poet’s self-revising experience: a new mask is born from another. As Octavio Paz put it: ‘We are inseparable from our fictions—and features. We are all condemned to invent a mask and, later, to discover that this mask is our true face’.

Paz’s remark resonates with Yeats’s sustained attention to the idea of the mask, a form of which he integrated into his philosophical poetics. For Yeats, the attempt to assume a ‘second self’—‘theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask’—had an ethical imperative, as it demonstrated the responsibility of the self for itself, as opposed to ‘the passive acceptance of a code’, and therefore signified the possibility and rewards of self-discipline. This in turn was inseparable, for Yeats, from an aesthetic imperative: the purposive, dedicated attempt to realise in art a medium of self-transforming knowledge. First in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, and later in A Vision, the mask became a symbol of that process and its realisation. The poet, Yeats observed, is ‘never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete’. This ideal was not easily achieved, and Yeatsian poetics are marked by their acknowledgement of struggle. ‘I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life’, he wrote, ‘on a re-birth as something not one’s self, something created in a moment and perpetually renewed’: but correlative to this, he adds that the poet ‘finds and makes his mask in disappointment’. Yeats said that we make poetry out of ‘the quarrel with ourselves’, and he refined that experience into the principle of an ‘antithetical’ self—the self realised in art—which he identified with the mask, and which exists in dialectical relationship to the ‘smiling public man’: the transactional personality that it transcends. Yeats’s later writing on the mask in A Vision is more laboriously schematic: there, the ‘Mask’ is conceived as one of four ‘Faculties’ (the others being ‘Will’, ‘Creative Mind’ and ‘Body of Fate’) whose interactions can compose or undermine the ‘Daimon’—again, a kind of anti-self Yeats associates with ‘Destiny’, the coming into being of a freedom and potential that the dominance of the mundane, more socially conditioned self can hinder. While it has its moments, the toiling abstractions of A Vision, bordering on dogmatic reification, present the Yeats that many readers find off-putting, and it’s refreshing—and clarifying—to go back to the poetry. ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ reveals what he is after in the mask of art: the ‘Magical shapes’ that will summon ‘my double, / And prove of all imaginable things / The most unlike, being my anti-self’, who shall nevertheless ‘disclose / All that I seek’.

For the poet, the entanglement of art and self at the centre of Yeats’s thinking necessarily raises the question of the poet’s relation to their poetry—and the relation of poetry to its readers once free of the poet. In Yeats’s words (in ‘Among School Children’): ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ This points further into the mystery with which I’m concerned: the work of the poet in language as maskwork—and the poem, the mask, as a life and a presence in the spell of its making. 

For Keats, the ‘camelion Poet’ is ‘continually informing and filling some other Body’: all self and no self, the poet is ‘every thing and nothing’. In those terms, that ‘nothing’ is peculiarly active: a creative agency in which the voice of the poet becomes (to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens) ‘the nothing that is’. Keats, as ever, had been contemplating Shakespeare, who in A Midsummer Night’s Dream identifies the activity of poetry with a ‘nothing’ given life, being, and substance:

               as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

The body, shape, habitation, and name—at once incarnating and animating the ‘forms of things unknown’—constitute a mask, a realised presence. Shakespeare’s famous formulation of poetic agency reads like a microcosmic figure of the Ayin of Cabbala—the supra-divine Nothingness, the all-enabling ground of reality, beyond comprehension, out of which even the divine is spun and spins. Coleridge said that Shakespeare possessed a ‘Proteus Essence’: he is at once everywhere and nowhere in his poetry, ‘all Shakespeare, & nothing Shakespeare’. But, Coleridge insists, the poet is there in that nothingness: the organising intelligence in the ‘airy nothing’ that now moves and speaks. The paradox in this principle is both clarified and accentuated by how little we know of Shakespeare the man, except in and through the mask of his poetry: his proximity to anonymity gives us room to see the poetics, and the poetry, more vividly. The poet teases us from behind the mask: ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’, says Touchstone in As You Like It. We can see here, and throughout his work, a poet wryly self-conscious of his art—but, like the bird in Wordsworth’s ‘To the Cuckoo’, Shakespeare also remains ‘an invisible Thing, / A voice, a mystery’.

Byron is keenly aware of poetic voice, not as any one manner that renders it ‘poetic’, but as a medium of ‘mobility’, which—as he writes in Don Juan, itself a vast performance of the principle—should not be read as a ‘want of heart’, or insincerity, but a creative motility and valency: a performative way of thinking that enables the poet to do what he would not otherwise be able to do. Again, this stretches the relation between the poet and his poetry and exposes the peculiar character of its productivity. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron presents a potent affirmation:

’Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.
What am I? Nothing; but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth,
Invisible but gazing, as I glow
Mixed with thy spirit, blended with thy birth

The alliterative stress-pattern, lineation, run-on, rhyme, and syntax invoke and embody the wish they describe: to give life and form to our imagining is to gain life, to create and live ‘A being more intense’. The shift to the present tense (‘even as I do now’) draws attention to the Promethean act in progress. In a paradox that echoes Keats and Coleridge, the poet and his ‘I’ both evanesce and survive in the poet’s art. The living form, endowed by the poet, is the mask and its operative magic: its language is a form of life, that itself possesses a quickening power.

Faith in the nothing-substance of poetry, and its mask as a focus of life and survival, is thrown into moving relief by two poets killed in the Second World War. In ‘Simplify Me When I’m Dead’, Keith Douglas calls upon the test of his own posterity: ‘Through that lens see if I seem / substance or nothing’. His pairing of ‘substance’ and ‘nothing’ is not just oppositional but carries the irony of simultaneity. Poetry carries on where the ‘I’ steps off. Sidney Keyes, killed the year before Douglas, wrote in a letter: ‘I am not a man but a voice’. The transfer of agency between the person and the poetry—not lightly ventured, nor easily won—recalls Auden’s well-known lines from ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’: ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, he writes, but ‘It survives, / A way of happening, a mouth’. Auden is riding the same paradox, and his poetic syntax betrays a mercurial twist: in her book On Form Angela Leighton makes the nice point that the metrical stress on the first syllable of ‘happen’ turns ‘nothing’ into a subject; ‘nothing’ happens. The ‘nothing’ of poetry is the substance of its ‘happening’. We are back with Keats, Coleridge and Byron. Its ‘mouth’—defamiliarised in its figurative detachment, by Auden, from the human face, and hence amplified as such—is the mask that moves and lives and performs far beyond the poet’s person. As Byron writes in Don Juan, ‘words are things, and a small drop of ink, / Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces / That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think’.

The mask, then, presents its own answers to the question of the ‘impersonality’ of poetry, which has been a focus of debate, controversy, and confusion since Eliot remarked that poetry ‘is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’, and that the ‘progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’. The mask, in the sense that I have described it, swerves Eliot’s deliberately provocative dichotomising—itself a rhetorical performance—to arrive at something more interesting. The oracular head of Orpheus in Alice Oswald’s ‘Severed Head Floating Downriver’ utters something fundamental to the way that poetry lives when it says (it has surely become an ‘it’, something other than a person), ‘the water wears my mask’: ‘I call   I call / lying under its lashes like a glance’, ‘my voice being water / which holds me together and also carries me away’. The paradox of simultaneous realisation and evanescence is one of the secrets of the maskwork of poetry. Maurice Riordan has described the relation between a poet’s life and their poetry as ‘umbilical’: to become poetry, the poem ‘enters the autonomous realm of fiction’. I would add that the art is also umbilical to the life: poetry acts in and upon human life, just as human life acts in and upon poetry. This is another clue to the virtue and value of the mask. The fictions of poetry are constituent forms of the fabric of fact.

A poet’s poetry is not identical to the social character you meet when you meet them, intimately as the poetry is of the poet, and constitutes, on a certain level, the poet’s quintessential signature. (Nearly twenty years ago now, Stephen Knight told me that I was much more cheerful in person than my poems might suggest; I happily conceded the point.) When Les Murray said ‘I am my poems. That’s where you’ll find me’, he gestured, like several of the poets that I have discussed, to the mask of art as a realisation of forms and qualities unique to his work; but the idea of the mask allows for a difference—and an important one, for both versions of him—between the Les Murray of the poems and the Les Murray I once met when he visited the Midlands. ‘Who is the self in language?’ Elizabeth Alexander asks: ‘And what is the revelatory and unguarded and surprising self in language? That’s what makes somebody else pay attention. When you start turning that into art, that’s what making poems is about’. The poet’s attention to language—the focus of their ‘turning’—reaches both into and beyond their own self, to create something in and through the medium itself. This self-surpassing quality of attention is one of the attributes that makes poetry, as Clive Sansom put it, ‘an act of love’. For Rosamond Harding, ‘He who wishes to express himself is on the wrong track: his aim should be to express beyond himself’. The intensity of attention that the poet devotes to language in composing transcends the transactional self—and it is from this supra-personal quality in the poem, its impersonality, that the poet can learn from their own poetry. It allows the poet to encounter and experience their own imagination as an other, speaking back to them in their own voice, which is also the voice of an other. As in poetic trance, the realisation of this independent life—which is a form of mask—does not mark the absence or abdication of the poet’s will: the poetic will is an enabling rather than determinative act. In this way, a poem both recognises and achieves what Anne Stevenson calls ‘the independent nature of the imagined’.

It is the mask of the poem that must speak, or not speak as a poem at all. It is, in this sense, the essential anonymity of the poem—its force as a form of language—by which it travels and survives in space and time, especially once shed of the biographical footage of the poet’s circumstances. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Pearl are no less valuable for their anonymity and acquire a certain romance at having come down to us, in the remarkable survival of a single manuscript, without any trace of their author except in the language itself. Indeed, as David Constantine, Jonathan Davidson, and others have observed, it’s worthwhile, when presenting a poem to a group for close reading, to withhold the name of the poet and the date of composition until the poem has been read and discussed: this prevents assumptions or partial information from interfering with the encounter with language and its supra-personal signals. The mask of the poem—its form and body in language—is the operative fact of the poem. It is the mask of the poem that must perform, and in which we, as readers and audience, participate. Even in live performance by the poet, the poem must have a life of its own to engage the audience, if it is to engage them as poetry and not on some other basis. Once the poet-as-speaker is gone, the poem must do its own work (even though others, not the poet, may speak it). The poem’s ‘honesty’ and ‘sincerity’ must be vested in the mask or not at all.

To conceive of poetry as mask in this way is not to dehumanise poetry, but its very opposite. This mask still ‘coherently expresses the presence of a human creature’, as Glyn Maxwell (rightly) says a poem should. The poem that achieves the charisma of the mask is not a cold, dead object, but warm and alive with the authentic imaginative investment of its origination and the conductive power of its medium. A physical mask is a kind of face, however stylised or non-naturalistic: it is fitted (in some way) to the dimensions of the human head, however outsized the mask may be, and as a face we are always, naturally and compulsively, trying to read it, reaching for story—however fugitive or elliptical—in our imaginative response to its form and mystery. The poem, in the analogy I am drawing, resembles the mask in these respects: however strange, it is fitted to the human creature. The mask also stands here for the political significance inherent to the making of art for its own sake, as a mark and signal of our humanity and our being in the world: a rejection of and resistance to the totalitarian tendencies of bureaucracy, and a reminder, as Auden said—to any regime, ideology or media that would treat us otherwise—that we are ‘people with faces, not anonymous numbers’. The mask, as an artform, does not obscure, but affirms that vital fact—even, and perhaps especially, when that mask (in the words of Lady Macbeth) is ‘a book where men / May read strange matters’.

If the impersonality of the mask and of the poem is, in these ways, a realisation of personality in self-transcending form, then this must also intervene in—and modify—the idea of lyric poetry (another locus of contention and confusion, both historical and contemporary). It shouldn’t still need saying that the ‘lyric “I”’ has never been, and never can be, a simple matter either of identification with the poet as a person, nor the projection of a universalised identity. It is necessarily slippery, motile, and relational, performative and provisional, simply by virtue of being language, which necessarily rides on the language of being, the power and valency of is. Whatever the form of its copula (the way it constructs relations between its constituent terms), language absorbs and invests in reality a sense of story. Language is fictive—and this in no way vitiates its value. The lyric does not, of course, need an ‘I’ at all. The ‘I’ of the poet is transfigured and suffused within the dynamic, organising, patterning fabric—the poiesis, the making—of the poem: its character, in the fullest sense of that word. This character is not so much an ‘I’ as a music and a dance. The psychotropic interest and power of the poem as poetry vests in that character: its mask, which is one and the same with itself (tautegorical). It is this mask that the reader must trust, or not at all.

Theodor Adorno defended the counter-totalitarian force of lyric poetry on something like the basis of this synthesis. The poet’s creative participation in the medium of language reconciles the ‘objective’ life of society and the ‘subjective’ life of the individual in dialectical relationship: ‘language itself acquires a voice’, he writes—the ‘voice’ here being the animating imprint and living signature of the poet’s subjectivity, which acts in and upon a medium larger than itself (language and its social context), thereby further realising the life of that medium. ‘When the “I” becomes oblivious to itself in language’, he continues, echoing Coleridge’s remarks on Shakespeare, ‘it is fully present nevertheless’. Marina Tsvetaeva called this peculiar manifestation of identity a ‘language-self’, ‘awakened by inspired speech and realised only in that speech’: it subsists in the poet’s devotion to the ‘secret source—not of his will, but of his whole nature’; it embodies the ‘law of his idiosyncrasy’, and reveals ‘something that had been hidden, obscured, even quite stifled, something the person hadn’t known was in him, and would never have recognised had it not been for poetry’. Impersonality becomes an imaginative function of personality. The mask is in us, as both our product and our power. In lyric poetry, for both Tsvetaeva and Adorno, the ‘I’ passes beyond itself, at once assuming and bestowing new life in new form. This too describes the maskwork of the poem.

In what Carmela Ciuraru has described as the ‘“look at me” era’ in which we live, to recognise the mask in poetry is also to discern a remedy, if not quite a cure, for some besetting ills of that era: pressures to adopt, project, and be defined by a particular identity; to perform and sustain that identity across multiple platforms, mass-manipulated by algorithms; to reify and commodify selfhood, with the implicitly reductive and essentialising tendencies that entails; to embrace branding over true individuality; to cash in (cheaply) the freedoms of privacy; and to conform to the naturalisation of these ideas and behaviours—as if they were necessary facts of selfhood—and so foster more of the same. These pressures afflict our day-to-day selves and, of course, can and do manifest in poetry. If a poem does not achieve maskhood, it may remain locked within the transactional self, at sea in these troubles, unable to realise the ‘language-self’ and its promise of discovery.

Any discussion of poetry, art, and mask necessarily involves the matter of ‘form’, and while this has been more or less explicit throughout, it’s worth returning for a moment to the principles in play in this regard. In the poem, as in the mask, ‘form’ and ‘content’ are tautegorical: its form of words is inseparable from its being, its character, as a poem. The form is the mask is the poem: the poetry in the poetry, the language in the language. The end is in the means. The ghost of Friedrich Schiller looms behind Frost’s folksy line, ‘all the fun’s in how you say a thing’: for Schiller, as for Walter Pater after him, ‘form’ is at once the agent and substance of art, its sine qua non. Poems are like the Maenads in Michael Donaghy’s ‘The Bacchae’: ‘the how they move is the what they are’. As Anne Stevenson says, continuing the line back to Schiller: ‘The sound, rhythms, pitch, and intensity of the lines ARE the poem. Every poem IS its form’. To this I would add, within the compass of ‘form’, the semantic valency of the words, both denotative and connotative, as well as the supra-semantic patterning in the language that communicates on a wider sensuous and imaginative spectrum: in other words, both sense (in the familiar understanding of this term) and the supra-sense that animates, orders, and activates that sense in relation to the living sensorium of the whole human creature. Like the human face, the mask and the poem send signals that something in us reads faster than conscious thought can arrive—and those signals continue to speak even after it has. It is through its form, conceived in this way—the mask, the psychoactive presence, of the poem—that, as Eliot remarked (following Coleridge, in fact), ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’.

The English words ‘person’, ‘persona’, and ‘personality’ derive from the Latin ‘persona’—meaning both a human being and a character in a drama, both ‘face’ and ‘mask’ (the Etruscan ‘phersu’ also meant ‘mask’)—and etymology yields further keys to the poetics that I’m pursuing. Besides these confirmed attributions, lexicographers have also read the origins of ‘persona’ in relation to the Latin verb ‘personare’, ‘to sound through’—the mask as the medium of voice—which marries nicely to the ancient Greek etymological relative, ‘prosopon’, also signifying face, mask, and visage, which literally means ‘set before the eye’. The mask is both seen and heard: it presents a seeing and a sounding. What’s more, the mask is also a kind of ‘person’: it is its character, in the full sense of that word (to which I’ve already alluded). The word ‘mask’ itself had entered English by the early sixteenth century, from Old Italian ‘maschera’, which derived from Mediaeval Latin ‘masca’. ‘Masca’ not only meant ‘mask’, but also ‘spectre’ and ‘nightmare’. This in turn is related to the Occitan ‘mascara’, meaning ‘to darken, blacken’—a sense thought to be pre-Indo-European in origin, and which perhaps informs the Old Occitan word ‘masco’, meaning ‘witch’. Once again, the way leads back to the imaginal, the preternatural, and the magical. In 1619, the young Descartes compared his position to that of an actor about to take the stage; ‘Larvatus prodeo’, he wrote, meaning ‘I advance masked’—which employs another ancient Latin word for ‘mask’: ‘larva’. As with ‘masca’, ‘larva’ not only meant ‘mask’, but also ‘ghost’, ‘spectre’, ‘spirit of the dead’ or ‘daemon’—and ‘larvatus’, besides ‘masked’, could also mean ‘bewitched’. It is in this preternatural and magical sense that the word ‘larva’ entered the English language in the late sixteenth century; its zoological use by Linnaeus, to describe the immature animal forms that ‘mask’ the adult, dates to the late eighteenth century.

The mask, then, brings together performance, theatre, (im)personhood, preternatural forms, the practice of magic, self-altering states, and the drama of becoming. This nexus illuminates and identifies more secrets of the mask and its making, the poetics of its psychoactive power. It opens, as it were, the adytum at the centre of the labyrinth through which I’ve been winding.

The mask is a transnatural form. As a larva, at once transforming and transformative, it incarnates a self-quickening ghost. Its is-ness is doubled: it is both one thing and another at the same time, a becoming and the catalyst of becoming. The etymology of ‘transnatural’ itself implies a crossing, even transgression, of being from one state to another. Poetry, too, is a transnatural form: a transnatural language—language that alters its own nature and the natures that it touches—and in its self-forming dynamics lives its magical double life of sense and supra-sense. The poet, as Philip Sidney wrote, generates ‘another nature’, and in this nature-making—as the ‘larval’ mask—poetry acts as a form of life, an animating presence, conjuring the verbal and supra-verbal life of our being. As a medium of this ongoing power of origination, an agent of nascence and renascence, poetry—like the mask in cultures all over the planet—assumes an initiatory function and character, mediating between the known world and its latent mystery, ‘this world’ and what Coleridge calls ‘this now and yet other World’: an ‘otherworld’ realised and made present for us by the alteration in ourselves that the poem invokes. The experience of the poem acts upon the self—the human ground of experience—and as such modifies the quality of our further experience. Both the knower and the known, the perceiving agent and the perception, are altered.

In these ways, the poem and the mask fuse and figure the continuous, mutual intra-action of the natural and the imaginal, and the human and the more-than-human. Just as our participatory experience of the living world stimulates both our response and our responsiveness, so the mask of the poem, acting as a living form, excites both the senses and the sensorium. As an artform, neither the mask nor the poem is limited to ‘naturalistic’ representation, and this too is continuous with their transnatural quality. In poetry and mask, the imaginal form becomes no less real than the natural. In and through the transnatural form, the imaginal acts with the force of nature, and the human acts with more-than-human force.

I have said that the poem, like the mask, presents its own identity—as an artform—to be read and to become a medium of interaction, and as such presents a kind of face. A more revealing word here, though, for the face of the poem or the mask is visage. Again, etymology smuggles through an ancient connection between the ‘vis’ of ‘visage’ and the ‘wis’ of ‘wisdom’: a common root that blends seeing and knowing, the Latin ‘videre’, ‘to see’, with the Old English ‘witan’, ‘to know’, and the latter’s relation to ‘wit’ in its most pregnant sense. Other connections include the Sanskrit ‘veda’ and the Avestan ‘vaeda’ (both meaning ‘I know’), and these ramify through many Eurasian languages; the Proto-Indo-European root reconstructed by linguists is *weid-, ‘to see’ and ‘to know’ (in linguistics, the asterisk signifies its hypothetical status). Sight meets insight, and ‘seeing’ here implies forming an image or idea: an inward, intelligential seeing, not limited to eyesight. The visage presented by the poem and the mask is not necessarily a human face, though it is human-made: its imaginal form may not exist in nature, though it will nevertheless act as a real form. Its visage is a form of seeing and knowing at once performative and participatory. The seeing of it, the knowing of it, exerts an operative force. This knowing may in fact awaken a state of unknowing—consciousness adapting to mystery in a productive alertness: ‘“No explanation”’, as Angela Leighton says in On Form, ‘just that hair-raising wakefulness’. Its self-altering magic might linger beyond utterance, like the sight of Geraldine’s body in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’: ‘A sight to dream of, not to tell!’ The ‘knowledge’ that poetry and mask embody is not static or propositional, but active and experiential: a transfiguring agency.

Coleridge’s own poetics, developed in dialectical relationship with Wordsworth, imply a fundamental connection between poetry and the supernatural. Recalling their poetic project of 1797–99 in Biographia Literaria, Coleridge says that his task was to invest the supernatural with the semblance of reality—‘to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’—while Wordsworth was ‘to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom’. Both methods would purge our perception of the ‘film of familiarity’, reopening the ground of insight and wonder, both in relation to ourselves and our universe. Poetry would act as if a supernatural presence, irradiating the known world with unknowing. Its defamiliarisation—the ostranenie of Victor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists, a ‘making strange’—acts as an experiential awakening. Conceived this way, the poem’s holistic interfusion of sense and supra-sense, through the reconstitutive power of the poetic imagination, ‘that fixing unfixes’ (in Coleridge’s words), integrates and activates the sensuous and the numinous in one and the same moment. The uncanny quality in the transnatural form of poetry—like the weirdness of the mask—produces an ontological quickening.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly writes of ‘The ghosts of the heart—whose / Hunger is a dress for my song’ (‘Blacklegs’): lines that evoke the supra-personal energies at work within the personal work of art. The poetic will—directive and enabling, rather than determinative—conducts and gives form to these energies without wholly controlling them. The curiously independent life that a poem possesses, as a form of language, reflects this, which constitutes another aspect of the poetic impersonality present in both poetry and mask. In many mask cultures, the mask is held to house and embody a spirit of ‘this now and yet other World’—often a spirit of the dead—that, in and through the mask, subsists as a form of life and power. ‘Spirit’—like its Greek and Hebrew equivalents, ‘pneuma’ and ‘ruach’—derives from the word for ‘breath’. As a voice that lives and moves in its form of words, the poem too houses a ‘spirit’, a life of its own. A poem is the animating breath of itself: it is the form and character—the ghost in the mask—inextricable from its transnatural agency. In both the composition and the operative power of its language, the human and the more-than-human act in concert: the poem involves, as Tsvetaeva writes, ‘forces which are unknown to the one who acts’. The poet can cultivate their sensitivity to these forces, however, together with the poetic tact with which to create a mask in language that invokes, shapes, and directs those unwilled realities active within us, blending their energies with the poet’s own creative agency. Shakespeare, Coleridge said, wrote as ‘a Nature humanized, a genial Understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper than Consciousness’—like ‘mysterious Pan’, also in Coleridge’s description, embodying an ‘intelligence blended with a darker power, deeper, mightier, and more universal than the conscious intellect of man’. Coleridge’s Shakespearean ideal articulates one of the ways in which a poem is endowed with life and, in assuming this life of its own, becomes a bringer of life. If it lives at all, the ‘genius’ of poetry lives in the poem itself—the animating valency of the created form—and is not external to the poem. It lives—and when the poem speaks, it educates us in ways we could not otherwise be educated. It assumes an existential force. The character of the poem, we could say (adapting another saying of Heraclitus), is its ‘daemon’—the vivifying organ of its transnatural power—and in creating a poem, the poet creates its daemon.

The daemon of poetry—like the spirit of the mask—acts through a form of fascination. It acts (as I have said) as a presence that, by its effects, makes possible new orders of thought, feeling, and imagining. The power to fascinate—in its Latin root, ‘to bring under a spell’, or ‘enchant’—draws upon the productive ambivalence inherent both to the mask and to language, to which I have alluded, and therefore calls upon the same ethical and artistic tact in its development. Poetic fascination arouses, awakens, and enlivens the powers of the person, the wellsprings of their own being and the capacities of their own freedom. This is what makes poetry educative, as opposed to merely instructional; it is the very opposite and counter-spell, therefore, to work intended to deceive, subdue, or merely indoctrinate. It does not obliterate the reader’s will but calls to it—invoking not a passive state, but a state of active fascination. This paradox of an awakening entrancement—the counter-hypnotic power to induce a perceptual, epistemic, and affective wakefulness—I’ve ventured to call egregnosis (from the ancient Greek ‘egregoros’, wakeful, and ‘gnosis’, knowing). The panoply of poetic effect that constitutes its form and character, as a poem—all the irruptive patterns and self-altering modulations, at once somatic and psychoactive—creates an ecstatic space-time that opens up for the reader what Frost called ‘the wonder of unexpected supply’. The poem-mask constitutes and communicates another language within the language, which conducts its psychophysiological charge. A further paradox at work within this egregnostic fascination, however, is that part of its ‘unexpected supply’ is also a withholding. The presence of the mask incorporates an absence; the poem activates a silence. Something else is there, hidden in revelation, and revealed in hiding. This withholding is fundamental to the force and allure of the mask. It signals both the fact of its being and its contingency: by implicitly figuring an otherness within itself, it amplifies a sense of the potential at work within the actual. The poem-mask is (to borrow from Les Murray) at once ‘inexhaustible and complete’ and involves ‘a law against its closure’ (‘Poetry and Religion’). The presence of its withholding—quintessential to the mask—is again a productive unknowing, its boon an awakened apprehension.

These qualities are fundamental to how the mask of the poem makes us see and know. Its stimulus freshens and renews our powers. Its altered and self-altering states ‘deautomatise’ our attention (in Reuven Tsur’s term), manipulating experience and therefore generating experience. The participatory form of the poem acts, as William Davenant put it, ‘by effects continually alive’—an ‘operative’, rather than propositional, truth. The continuous present produced by its effects is the ecstatic space-time of its making. The ends of poetry are in its means. Poetic fascination produces, in Coleridge’s phrase, that state of ‘Poetic Faith before which our common notions of philosophy give way’. That moment at once contains and makes possible a refiguring of reality.

In this lies the secret of its metaphysical potency. The mask of the poem acts as a form of life: a presence with a quickening touch. Its animating magic is at once unsettling and inceptive, an origin of ongoing origination. It is a theatre, a seeing-place, of being and becoming. Its mythopoetic fictions in their lyric dance reconstitute the seminative powers by which we apprehend and interact with the mystery we inhabit. Its transnatural touch is that of a primary power, at its root indivisible from the archipoetic self-kindling spark within human consciousness by which it becomes its own prime mover: storying, ordering, knowing, creating. This may sound vatic, but—though we may not often think on it—the strangeness of the mask is inherent and ordinary to us, as human beings, and should be recognised as such. Even a poetry focused upon the ‘ordinary’—in its aesthetic or its theme—defines that focus by a vivifying act of heightened attention, which both frames and intervenes in the relation of the reader to the subject: the ‘ordinary’ is itself a mask that presents and realises a way of seeing and knowing. To disown or deny the mask in poetry is to disown or deny something vital to our humanity. The mask that I have described serves as a holophrastic figure for principles at the living stem of poetry: the weirding, transnaturing sway of its art.

Maskwork

To teach the mask I make
to tell the truth, I wear it
as my own: feel its weight tilt
when it sees the first earthly thing
it loves suffer in its infant being:
one mask passes to another
the face that it has learned.
Still it makes no sound, even as
its senses sow their trance
where what would be its language grows.
Only when my life has done its work
and the mask knows more than I could say 
without its visage—then
I take it off. It wears my voice:
the mask speaks.

—Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, 2020)