Ivan Arguelles provided an introductory essay and Jim Leftwich an interview of Jake Berry dealing with the interpretation of this second in a series of epic poems. Both the manuscript of this poem and its first part are held by the Sackner Archive.Jack Foley on Alsop Review web site provided the following review: From virtually all perspective, early Greek philosopher to twentieth-century specialist, there is agreement that artistic creativity and inspiration involve, indeed require, a dipping into rational or irrational sources while maintaining ongoing contact with reality and "life at the surface." The degree to which individuals can, or desire to, "summon up the depths" is among the more fascinating individual differences. Many highly creative and accomplished writers, composers, and artists function essentially within the rational world, without losing access to their psychic "underground." Others, the subject of this book, are likewise privy to their unconscious streams of thought, but they must contend with unusually tumultuous and unpredictable emotions as well. The integration of these deeper, truly irrational sources with more logical processes can be a tortuous task, but, if successful, the resulting work often bears a unique stamp, a "touch of fire," for what it has been through. "” Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire (1993). Brambu Drezi: Book Two is the latest installment in an ongoing master poem. It is one of the most fascinating, beautiful, dense, and original poems of the twentieth century. It is also one of the darkest and strangest poems of the century, resembling very little outside itself. Book One was published by the Runaway Spoon Press in 1993. Book Two has just appeared in a particularly handsome edition from Pantograph Press. This book boasts an introduction by Pantograph publisher Ivan Arguelles and an interesting essay/interview with Berry by Jim Leftwich. In a letter to me Berry described the origin of the title phrase: because BRAMBU DREZI seems so natural and earthy"” like a totemic word or something"” it feels more and more like my word, or maybe I'm its poet. Or both. I was wondering, have you ever heard the word or words before, BRAMBU DREZI "” I don't actually know where it came from, it came out one day when I was playing with my cat "” I always make up words when I'm talking to him"”when these words came out it was like words of power"”resonating in the spin"”but it almost seems there is actually something called BRAMBU DREZI, but I don't know what, other than my poem.... "BRAMBU," Berry told me, referring to the poem as a whole, "is not projected but merely occurs"” I don't drive it or shape it, I allow it." This statement parallels others Berry has made: the opening words of his first book, The Pandemonium Spirit, are, "In these writings and collages some other,' th"rawspirit,' does the speaking." BRAMBU DREZI is not so much a planned poem as it is an event in Berry's life something which seems to have some kind of "objective" status, which seems to be issuing from a place outside himself: "it almost seems there is actually something called BRAMBU DREZI, but I don't know what, other than my poem.... The Kabbalah and the Tibetan Book of the Dead are basic texts for understanding Jake Berry's work. Here, in Gershom Scholem's translation, is the beginning of the Zohar ("The Book of Splendor"): In the beginning, when the will of the King began to take effect, he engraved signs into the divine aura. A dark flame sprang forth from the innermost recess of the mystery of the Infinite, Sof, like a fog which forms out of the formless, enclosed in the ring of this aura, neither white nor black, neither red nor green, and of no color whatever. But when this flame began to assume size and extension it produced radiant colors. For in the innermost center of the flame a well sprang forth from which flames poured upon everything below, hidden in the mysterious secrets of E-Sof. The well broke through and yet did not entirely break through, the ethereal aura which surrounded it. It was entirely unrecognizable until under the impact of its through a hidden supernal point shone forth. Beyond this point nothing may be known or understood, and therefore it is called Reshith, that is "Beginning," the first word of creation. Berry's head was an attempt to utter the first word of creation; it is his "Beginning." Berry is attempting to create not only a book of poetry but a book of scripture: he is attempting, at various levels, to name the "holy." If BRAMBU DREZI Book One was generated by the title phrase, BRAMBU DREZI Book Two is generated by still another mysterious word "” in this instance a word spoken not by Berry but by the poet Charles Olson: in the vision Charles Olson, luminous and large, stood over my bed relaying the message, "UMGATHAMA" Berry glosses the passage in a footnote: I have no concrete idea of [the meaning of "UMGATHAMA"]. I am not sure one is intended or necessary. The word arrived as a result of hypnogogic vision. As I lay on my bed one evening Charles Olson stood over me repeating the word "UMGATHAMA" with great force, but not anger. The urgency in his voice suggested he was bringing a message, but one from a poetic realm and therefore a word of power, an address of the holy, which is how it continues to arise throughout BRAMBU DREZI. The presence of Olson is important since it suggests the literary tradition of Berry's work: BRAMBU DREZI is, among other things, a mode of projective verse. One remembers too that, just as Olson appeared in a dream to Berry, Ezra Pound appeared in a dream to Olson, who recorded the event in his poem, "ABCs": what we do not know of ourselves - of who they are who lie - coiled or unflown - one said: of rhythm is image - of image is knowing - of knowing there is - a construct. Like much of Olson's finest work"” Maximus IV V VI, for example "” BRAMBU DREZI communicates before it is, strictly speaking, "understood." Berry's poem has plenty of meanings, references, allusions, etc., and they are important. But it is the work's powerful "confusion," its deep "chaos," its transe-like character that carries us into it and through it, and which accounts for its genuine significance. Like Olson's work"” and like some of Yeats'"” BRAMBU DREZI is deliberately and programmatically "obscure": it is precisely the poem's obscurity, its "darkness," that propels us towards the darkness of divinity. In his commentary on The Cloud of Unknowing, Ira Progoff writes, And "when I speak of darkness," the author...says, it is not "the kind of darkness that is in your house at night when the candle is out." It is a darkness of a quite different kind. "I am referring," he says, "to a lack of knowing. It is a lack of knowing that includes everything you do not know or else that you have forgotten, whatever is altogether dark for you because you do not see it with your spiritual eye. And for this reason it is not called a cloud of the air, but rather a cloud of unknowing that is between you and your God." Even more relevant is this passage from Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism: Unquestionably this language, with its constant reference to a "still desert," a "vast sea," an "unplumbed abyss" in which the psychological experience. It is not merely the convention of a school. These descriptions, incoherent as they are, have a strange note of certainty, a stranger note of passion, an odd realism of their own: which mean, wherever we meet them, that experience not tradition is their source...We know instinctively and irrefutably that they tell true; and they rouse in us a passionate nostalgia, a bitter sense of exile and of loss.One and all, these explorers of the Infinite fly to language expressive of great and boundless spaces. In their withdrawal from the busy, fretful sensory world they have sunk down to the "ground" of the soul and of the apparent universe: Being, the unity with which the perceiving self is merged... "The great wastes to be found in this divine ground," says [Tauler], "have neither image nor form nor conditon, for they are neither here nor there. They are like unto a fathomless Abyss, bottomless and floating in itself. Even as water ebbs and flows, up and down, now sinking into a hollow, so that it looks as if there were no water there, and then again in a little while rushing forth as if it would engulf everything, so does it come to pass in this Abyss. This, truly, is much more God's Dwellplace than heaven or man. A man who verily desires to enter will surely find God here, and himself simply in God; for God never separates Himself from this ground. God will be present with him, and he will find and enjoy Eternity here. There is no past nor present here, and no created light can reach unto or shine into this divine Ground; for here only is the dark place of God and His sanctuary. "Now this Divine Abyss can be fathomed by no creatures; it can be filled by none, and it satisfies none; God only can fill it in His Infinity. For this abyss belongs only to the Divine Abyss, of which it is written: Abyssus abyssum invocat..." Many other mystics have written to the same effect: have described with splendour the ineffable joys and terrors of the Abyss of Being "where man existed in God from all Eternity," the soul's adventures when, "stripped of its very life," it "sails the wild billows of the sea divine." BRAMBU DREZI is trying to give us, not as "theme" but as experience. Some of the Underhill passage sounds as though it might be a description of the poem. In one of the notes to BRAMBU DREZI Berry writes, Cygnus is important in mythology, but also here because it is the "house" of a peculiar source that is now generally accepted to be a black hole. The incredible gravity of black holes makes them primary "dislocators" in the univese, an interjection of chaos. Also, as they are impossibly dense and dark one thinks of the dark, hellish fires in Boehme, Blake, Gnosticism, and Hebrew mysticism. It could be said that the swan bears in her body a dark attractor beyond which "event horizon" nothing can be know . Note the parallel between the "black hole" and Tauber's phrase: no created light can reach unto or shine into this divine Ground. Note as well Berry's own insistence on "darkness." (The opening words of the poem are "And darkness opened.") BRAMBU DREZI is itself a "primarydislocator,'" "an interjection of chaos," a "dark attractor." While it fully understands itself to be a poem which is why Olson appears in it"” it understands poetry to be the realm in which mystical perception, "the dark, hellish fires in Boehme, Blake, Gnosticism, and Hebrew mysticism," remains possible. Olson brings Berry a "message...from a poetic realm." It is thus "a word of power, an address of the holy." "I don't want to be just another god-drone," Berry says in Leftwich's interview, "Therefore poetry. It has been so utterly disregarded by the establishment that it can regain its original power, uncluttered by the detritus of a culture consuming itself. Something close to the Dionysian mysteries is possible again...The best way poets can participate in these ancient traditions is foremost to have the knowledge of visionary states through direct experience and healing on one level or another." "Esoteric discipline as it applies to my work," he goes on, "might be similar to what was happening in any group in the last 5000 years that defied the orthodoxy. I think of the Greek mystery schools, the medieval kabbalists, the caretaking of polytheism through the centuries by small groups of practitioners, the gnostic groups in the middle east. More recently the development of romanticism, Dada, surrealism, all of which bubble to the surface in homogenized form, but which are fundamentally the contrary of the dominant paradigm." Like Book One, BRAMBU DREZI Book Two treats the page as a visual field in which various things are scattered synchronistically. Like Book One, Book Two features Berry's enigmatic drawings, which recall the scratchings one might find on the surfaces of ancient caves as well as the magical emblems one might find in a grimoire. At times the drawings connect pieces of text with one another; at other times they function as a commentary on text or an interruption of it. They are always mysterious"” another consciousness intruding into the verbal"”and always a reminder that writing is a visual art. Text itself at times appears upside down or sideways"”becomes, in effect, a graphic. The emphasis on Vodou seems to me new"”unless I missed something in Book One"” as is the thrust towards "oblivion," a major theme of this book: oblivion be my redeemer - oblivion my shelter - oblivion the message of my blood - oblivion is the name of the Lord - oblivion my redeemer - oblivion my stallion - oblivion the message of my blood - oblivion is the name of the Lord." The poem is also energized by a number of interesting, enigmatic stories and by some wonderful bits of Southern speech: "hey sis, will ya draw the curtain? they done stole my pants," "whaddya mean let them dogs hunt'? seen Acteon lately?" It has "brambu language""”words which exist in no known language ("AHG PRIMINCIA SABAYI meniso SABAYI isosyn")"” as well as neologisms: "emancipadancer." There are moments of horror (Berry is quite serious when he uses the word "hellish") but also moments of extraordinary beauty. The gorgeous "Coda" seems to me to be Berry's equivalent to the conclusion of Stevens' "Sunday Morning." The entire poem ends with a petition to Papa Legba: down at the crossroads, down at the crossroads - they say he comes smelling of graves. - hey Papa, please let me pass - see, I bring sweet tobacco - and doves for stew - bury her heart beneath the roses - her eyes beneath the Oak - and she will rise again someday - he wrote until dawn and received the third baptism of Spirit, - he clutched the adversary's thigh, and refused to - release his hold, - for a name, for a deal in blood, - to bear the mark - to bear the mark - out of nothing - a fire. The "mark" is of course the mark of Cain, the mark of the devil. For Berry it is also the mark of the poet. For Berry as for Blake the "true poet" is "of the Devil's party"” the contrary of the dominant paradigm." His vision is neither monistic nor dualistic. Like the Kabbalah to which it aspires, BRAMBU DREZI is profoundly rooted in revolutionary impulses. "The question of meaning becomes paramount," writes Gershom Scholem in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism: "The mystic transforms the holy text, the crux of this metamorphosis being that the hard, clear, unmistakable word of revelation is filled with infinite meaning. The word which claims the highest authority is opened up, as it were, to receive the mystic's experience. It clears the way to an infinite inwardness, where ever new layers of meaning are disclosed...The holiness of the texts resides precisely in their capacity for such metamorphosis." Scholem might be describing BRAMBU DREZI in such passages or when he writes, "Authority no longer resides in a single unmistakable "meaning' of the divine communication, but in its infinite capacity for taking on new forms...[E]ven where the religious authority of the...sacred book is recognized, a revolutionary attitude is inevitable once the mystic invalidates the literal meaning. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.