The Challenge of Immanence

Charles Altieri's important book on postmodern poetry Enlarging the Temple presents a conundrum for the uninitiated. In this case...that's me. He insists that the poetry following modernism (which must inevitably be called "postmodernism") is marked by a shift away from symbolism and toward varieties of immanence. What makes this difficult is the very term "immanence." I've been throwing it around quite a bit, mainly because I've been trying to engage with Altieri's text. But the more time that goes by, the less sure I am that I have even a basic understanding of the word.

When I look up "immanence" (on that most trusted of resources: Wikipedia), I find the idea that the divine is manifested in the material world. I get the "material world" part; what I don't find in Altieri's description is a sense of the divine. Altieri seems to be only interested in the idea that things, including human beings, are in the world. At the risk of employing a Heideggerian term I don't understand, Altieri seems interested in being-in-the-world. He writes that "the proper mode of activity for the creative self is not the creation or interpretation of values but the labor of disclosure" (22). This disclosure involves reporting the experience of being-in-the-world. But whither divinity? Does disclosure avail one's self of some spiritual meaning?

These two questions hint at the crux of my problem. Immanence is typically contrasted with transcendence as its binary opposite. Transcendence is readily understood as spiritual, but how does immanence square the banal fact-ness of the world with a sense of divinity. In other words, I cannot help but smuggle in transcendence with immanence...if I want to hold to the definition I've been given. It seems I would be more comfortable jettisoning the "divinity" part of the definition in the same way that Altieri seems to.

But here, then, is the challenge. How can I overcome this desire to discard divinity from my understanding of mundane reality? That is, how can I conceive of reality as not mundane but divine? And what accounts for this resistence? Does my general lack of religious feeling cause me to bracket spirituality off in some transcendent realm while the immanent realm is merely a cold and scientific landscape? This is a super big problem. It is problematic especially because the poets in whom I am interested (Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell) seem to conceive of the world as inherently dangerous. Bishop, for instance, repeats the phrase "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear," and this clinical and barren sort of world of objects can drain the self of feeling (rather than offer a sort of spiritual transformation on its own). The poem attends to the objects of the world in that uniquely Bishopian way, carefully descriptive, but moving at the end to the pain involved with the real world:

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

If the postmodern poets that Altieri treats in Enlarging the Temple experience and disclose the fact of their immanence, Bishop surely does not. While hers is not a pessimistic poetry, neither is it a poetry satisfied by being a record of the world's presence.