Mark Chandos

Mantra Rain is a collection of the lyric poems that were created in the Epic, Chandos Ring. Every large poem creates many lyric moments of poetry. Mantra Rain is the lyric samples from that project of producing an epic poem. The book is divided into several distinct sections" Philosophy, love poems, future prophesy, gods, human survival, etc.

While Mantra Rain is a lyric selection from America's only epic poem, it is also a work that stands alone as a monument to lyric achievement in verse. Usually this is an achievement enough for any book. Taken in its totality Mantra Rain is an advance advertisement for the Epic poem cycle, Chandos Ring.

The project reintroduces the uses of the sublime - without the ill effects of a self-conscious effort of language to sustain it. In our focus on the "unknown quantity" of language we seek a chance felicity of sharp expression - idiomatic in the language and forever untranslatable - rather than a more studied imitation of known perfections.


Change of book: Change of Person

Mantra Rain attempts to restate the central problems of modern poetry. It builds upon my first presentation in Greatest Living Poet. I no longer need the mask of the "Greatest Living Poet" to make my points clear. Mantra Rain presents a very clear and healing answer to how we write modern poetry - and shows how each poem represents a break with the past. The poetry of the last 50 years sought to solve the problem of poetic language in the modern world by resorting to newspaper prose. Mantra Rain defines the method of poetic composition as near to the craft of "incantation", allowing the power of the perfect magical expression to coexist seamlessly with colloquial speech.

I said in my first book that the origin of all poetry came from incantation, and this phenomenon can be easily investigated in many original sources and ancient cultures, such as The Book of the Dead, the Bible or the Dead Sea Scrolls. I have suggested in many forums that there is currently a very small public market for contemporary "prose as poetry". And rather than make the deduction that the genre of poetry no longer is relevant in our culture - I show that it has merely been poorly written.

I believe the statement the market has made is correct. Poetry as it is written today in the West is actually a form of prose, wearing the costume of poetry. And people do not respond to this unless they have an agenda of politics, serve a particular interest group, or need to fill an academic resume. Poetry is a social phenomenon, but the lack of market participation has created a poetics alienated from vital social dynamics. I believe that by 2001 there was little social consensus about poetry's core competency, which persons may be considered poets, and what constitutes memorable speech in the modern world.

If specific and achievable distinctions cannot be made under these criteria, then we must follow the market and no longer recognize poetry as separate and honored genre. The good news (if you have studied this book) is that poetry is still a nation's greatest cultural prize. Our age, like all human ages, will be represented to future generations in one or two lines, or if the future is generous, it may give us ten lines to explain ourselves. We have the choice to be represented by politicians, self-indulgent rock stars, or poets. I hope the question remains rhetorical.


The Architecture of Mantra Rain

As with so many seminal works that were ignored in their original editions, Baudelaire complained to a friend that not only could contemporary France not understand his achievement of language, they could not even appreciate the book's "architecture". Victor Hugo, to whom Les Fleurs du Mal was dedicated, refused to say Baudelaire's work, at the least, increased the felicity of the French language. I am not sure that he hoped even 500 of his fellow citizens had closely read his great achievement before his death. Mantra Rain has a very deliberate architecture expressed in several leitmotifs that reoccur throughout the book.

The reader will quickly perceive that key words as "stitch", "cut", "tailor", "builder", "blade", etc., have key roles that tie the progression of my message to a "final" clarity. Each represent the key expression of our metaphysical relationship to the universe as it may actually exist - and reveal the secrets of making it "straight through the machine" (temporary life on earth). I do not wish to present so much an alternate world view as I wish to inform the background of the poet's thought - necessary to better explain the poem's functioning dynamic and message. Some lines may more rarely be repeated in more than one differing context - both to explore the double meanings of an incantation and to tie the same leitmotif with previous poems that developed meaning on another level. Nothing is accident or whimsy in Mantra Rain. Twenty years of work are not casually but deliberately presented. I have teased the fabric of American language until it lies flat and tight around the curve of my thought. I may be accused of poor skill or judgment, not that I did not make an honest attempt - or did not strive to present a well thought out architecture to support my thesis.

The thesis of Mantra Rain, as with all my work, is 1) how we fail to correctly see how the universe is constructed (and thus man's purpose on earth) and 2) how we have failed to write poetry as incantation to correctly represent man's "unaccountable" facilities. Even a minor correction to the current Western affluent perspective of our relationship with the earth decides how we write poetry that more accurately reflects the human condition.


The Sublime? Because Humans Can

But why is lyric poetry still written in the West? Surely we do not write poetry because it was executed with prestige in the past. If this is the only reason, let's reconsider. Nor is it sufficient to make minor tailoring adjustments to an old bolt of cloth. Since Tottle's Miscellany (1560s) poets in the English language were given the idea that there was a potential readership for lyric poems beyond the small circle of a writer's personal friends. Since this time it has been merely assumed by moderns that such an assumption still existed. I do not think such a presupposition has been recently proven in our own day. Granted, after the success of Shakespeare (Earl of Oxford), it has never been doubted that English language poetry could represent a culture's highest artistic achievement. And today as never before English is the only world language. What an opportunity exists here for a master poet in English. But today there are more poets wishing to be read than there are readers wishing to buy and honor modern poetry. So we should either have a poetry that has prestige, valued by its society - or we should let poetry disappear into nursery rhymes and bad prose. This was the message of my project in 2001.

In Mantra Rain the world is newly created. You will never see the world presented again as it appears in Mantra Rain. It presents an argument as worthy as any other theory of being. We live in a world where the only reality is the competition of ideas. That's why each generation makes the world look different. In Mantra Rain the earth is presented for the first time in a new set of colors, perhaps the way it really is. And how we see ourselves colors our speech and our visions in human societies. And this will make all the difference for the way poetry is written in the 21st century.

Why should I not aim to create a poetic as vital and as powerful in our culture as popular music and film? The basic claims of poetry remain unchanged. Poetry is Ground Zero of a nation's cultural wisdom and treasure. The poet exists as the supreme master of the transition from the natural to the supernatural; from the soul in matter to the soul that is infinite and unmovable. It is the image and representation of our metaphysical condition, superior in merit and power to all other art forms in Western culture. That poetry is not a force to be reckoned with in today's cultural landscape is due to failure of human personality; and it will return to vitality with human personality - as symbol and icon in the human imagination. It requires, in fact, some healthy pretension.

I wish to correct the defects of the current ideas of modern poetry, and by talent - and talented grandstanding - place my idea of modern poetry before the Western world. Not a very modest project. A poet in this school will be valued for the power he creates from our language - not for any new technique you can admire; for the "unknown quantity" of associated ideas - not for any craft you can understand and imitate. But when you see it you will know it.


Concluding Statements

If the reader has closely read Mantra Rain he will have gained a sense for the "unknown quantity" of the language I seek. This type of language is appropriate since man himself remains the greatest and first unknown quantity. The Greatest Living Poet Project is the result of a profound dissatisfaction with current poetics and current poetic style. The project believes that it has found a better representation of the modern world and the people living in the world. I find no contradiction between the necessity for the sublime in art and the necessities of modern life. My goal is a sublime that is achievable and consistent with modern English usage, never using an artificial or an "elevated" language. Since the sublime - or the "unknown quantity" - eludes all rational analysis, our poetics are identified with a mental alchemy, which makes the poet a creator analogous to a god. It is no coincidence that in art, man has been likened with godlike qualities.

In practical terms Mantra Rain insists upon actively re-engaging an interactive public. The means of gathering a public is through pleasure, not by finely teased argument. The poetic presented in this school can instantly be recognized by its emphasis on the power of individual line and phrase. In our poetic, each poem must contain lines that implant memory, set up tents in the human imagination, and make camps in our daily lives. First lines always signal the power of this school. The first line may as well be the entire poem - so strategic is that moment in the relationship with the reader. But in practice, if honest, the same can be said about all other lines as well. They all are equal trouble.

Mantra Rain is a power in the universe - not a self-indulgent rehearsal of prosaic sentiments, political polemics, or MFAs in search of more competitive resumes. I do not care if I ever see another list of small press awards and small press credits. In our projects there are no more workshops for people to learn how to write better poetry. There is no workbook for our poems. My books are not written to keep academics employed and moving up the tenure ladder. Our words are incantations and charms. So long as we have academic poets who list credits of 12 books published and still remain unknown to the public, American poetry is in crisis. This illustrates my thesis more than any other phenomenon. Poetry should have a living and vibrant audience. Poems should be Monads: the world - and our experience of the world - represented and compressed into one symbol, one line, six or seven words, embedded in the texture, implanted in the brain. The only task for a poet is to master the unaccountable. The market will follow.

As I have an interest only in the "unknown quantity" of miraculous language, my work is sustained by a faith that the entire universe is a living being containing within it a living soul. The universe is a living creature, with direction and purpose: Love. This is a dynamic that gives vitality to art - not using rational, minimalist prose in place of charged language. I think we want only so much rationality to keep us secure and fed, then we want to return to the "unknown quantity" of magic worlds. This is the only communication the universe soul understands. The ultimate realities of the human condition are nurtured by this active, living conversation between the images of this living spirit and our daily lives. People are told they seek happiness, but I know they seek the "unknown quantity" of life. We want magic, not solvency. We want authority germane to our precise condition as powerful as god - not sentiment, not opinion. Any contemporary may present opinion against me, but few can match the authority of incantation in Mantra Rain.

Mantra Rain seeks to deepen and expand the American idiom. And I rest my argument on this wish.