Lanthanum 9.15

15
i.m. M.A.G.

Sunset, walking home up Hope tonight –
a kind of smelter’s glow out of Van Gogh.
A glassblown alloy spun round that rose-
gold eye – sapphire, emerald, set in a tight

brown casket (earthshade). Evening mirror
from a brow just north of Angell Street.
Slim susurrus over the mansion (Italianate,
clad in dark wine) where oak leaves linger –

& you would pine for your conjectured J (vale,
valentine). Imago... my Psyche. So we project
an extended forecast, in familial yokel dialect –
just as you were your brother’s summer double

in that Twin Cities’ dovecote (over the wrinkling
winking river). A part of song (appoggiatura,
grace note) paired with his major delta D –
sprightly, bittersweet, solitaire (a twinkling

clarinet, Octavia). We carry the gilt icon
too close for care : such compatible leanings
as dreams are multicolored coatings, filling
hollers with excess 8th-notes (Pygmalion’s

pig-latin). Hunky dory was the children’s ark
until the last dog bark – a curial star, a rose
of Charon. Then we mourn our double (her ruse
our loss). Under that April horn a’plenty (mark

the date, Sylvester) – by tentative frail tents
of Providence, yearlings of clay. Our moon,
cast in an antique shell (death-mask... pontoon...
fish-fly). Granddad’s bronze bugle. Frankincense.

2.14.12

Lanthanum 9.14

14
i.m. John H. ("Jack") Birss

After much falsework – skittering expenses
in a waste of swaying bucks – Marwan (cinnamon
cat with greenfire eyes) will arch his tendons
through the cunning rug. All’s in play (fearless)

at last. While Diego hunches up the cloudy steps
with shifting temblor on his back – an al fresco
infancy. Fat babies, mild-eyed povero...
Guadalupe-sombrero... so homeliest precepts

prove most beautiful (what’s mine is yours).
But not from nowhere, their swift circular –
great was the public company self-anchored
there, on hinge pipe beam, deadmen, girders

2047 feet from shore to shore (saddled
with sacrificial sections of weakened steel).
It was 28 young braves, lifting centripetal
lightbeams – a pendant, bending self-addled

streams toward soldered reunion (unseen
yet feathered silver, with a yellow crown).
& a 29th bather in ark of oak – unknown
& apostolic turtledove’s ecumenical grain –

her sea-salt shanty’s banked in a riverbed.
Come with me then, down to the water’s edge
where shells glissade from willow-branches
& drafty lyres are granaries (seven-tiered

with light). Where fathers yodel in Mendelssohn
& a 5th of Sibelius, in stately waltz, swings low
her catenary iron ribs. Where birchbark rows
into aurora borealis... (harp-wrung Magdalen).

2.7.12

Essays in Critical Flame

New review essay floats Ben Mazer and John Beer on the sea of Ashbery and TS Eliot :
Jerusalem & Albion; or, Maze & Barleycorn

This is the 2nd essay of mine there. Also wrote one about Gabriel Gudding a while back :
Reading Gabriel Gudding

The epic drive

Knowledge, taken in the abstract - say, by the vulnerable ephebe just starting out in college - displays a frightening visage : abyssal, disorienting, nightmarish. Knowledge, in its authorized, authoritative forms, is demanding (all those martinet-professors, those requirements, those deadlines & examinations), impersonal... fundamentally inscrutable. Say our tenderfoot student is curious about History. The question is, where to begin? If all "facts"are equal... & if the historians, each with their particular perspective and expertise, number in the thousands upon thousands... Indeed, there is a specific demon of angst which persecutes the undergraduate - whose malicious intent is to induce a painful, extremely self-conscious (to the point of paranoia) sense of being lost . What do I know, in the midst of all this formidable universe of chilly and alienated learning? How can I know anything? How can I trust my own feeble capacity to find meaning, to understand?

It is just here (as has often been pointed out) that the arts attempt a rescue mission. Art is synthesis, not analysis; its aim is not to detach elements of experience by means of abstraction in order to re-align them into codes of information, hierarchies of data. Art does not truck with the supposed "objectivity" of formalized knowledge; rather, Art produces holistic representations of experience - images which we need not learn, because we already recognize them. We do not "acquire" these representations - we immediately identify with them. And in these identifications our inward sense of personal understanding is encouraged, fortified, strengthened, and above all, expanded. (Perhaps the paradigmatic expression of this commonality of experience is John Donne's famous passage from Meditation 17 : "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.")

Is this the happy end of story, then? Art comes to the rescue, trouncing adolescent despair? Well, yes, perhaps. But for the artist the picture may be more complex. How, say, in poetry, are these holistic representations - these charmed and charming narratives, capable of evoking sympathetic understanding and identification - to be successfully created? The endless debates within the various guilds of poets over issues of subjectivity/objectivity, personality/impersonality, individuality/commonality, point toward unresolved difficulties, internal contradictions. How does the poet achieve a balance between self-indulgent, anecdotal subjectivity on the one hand, and a bloodless, abstract objectivity on the other? How few are the poems which succeed in integrating these polarities - in presenting "concrete universals": those characteristic particulars which are nevertheless capable of global relevance.

Works of the past called "great" are just these poems which have achieved a kind of wholeness and universality. The Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare... these are some of the familiar benchmarks - narratives which fuse representative, characteristic individuals, with a shared history - Pound's "tale of the tribe" - the many and the one.

We could call this the "epic" drive in poetry : the struggle to present multiplicity in the form of holistic order. Northrop Frye described this totalizing impulse as the defining characteristic of the epic mode. The works which achieve such encyclopedic synthesis become foundational texts, paradigmatic narratives of peoples and cultures. They construct a kind of aegis or rooftop of mutual understanding - or, to use another image, a sort of network of vital pathways, which encourage individuals to emerge from isolation into the ethos of a shared tradition.

The path toward such epic achievements involves the most intense struggle : because no imagery of wholeness will be accepted as authentic unless it has been earned. It would be impossible for an audience to assent to epic pretensions, if the work itself did not display an indwelling awareness, a comprehension, of actual, lived experience in its heights and depths. The achievement of an epic narrative is thus a kind of celebratory moment - when individual artistic making is matched with the real existence of the whole society.

- to be continued, maybe... -

Lanthanum 9.13

13
for Chris Kraemer

That bridge in your old photo, Chris (beehive
of hexagonal girders, poised in a mirror-
agon of contrastive weight – taut Piranesi-
pattern)... a quick sliver of dove-

wings flits through those ribs. Flotsam
of memory asway below, sheathed
in snakeskin of crusted limestone (teeth,
bone, shells)... only the river seethes, I Am

& only Time will bind these liquidaceous scars
in one eddying canyon-volume : synthesis
or wave-continuum : the hand-or-eye’s
own natural rest note (a fulcrum-focus).

At Prospect Terrace, the statue of young Roger
steps a stilled foot into the bow of his canoe.
Silence marks his brow there too, at prow
of Providence (lips close upon their origin).

What might ye behold there, by glinting granite
glance – through whisper-facets of the river?
On rungs of welded iron, raindrops shiver
in jointed deltoids, whose spinal height

arcs up to Union (forged from a million
bolts of eyebright)... reaches their hands
(mirrored, multiplex) into those wounds
(ineluctable, irreducible – your own). &

shadows of a Piranesi-body (dove-borne,
Pentecostal) rise from the rails of
sunken Soo Line (sun-thorn, whale-
horn)... eyelash of Beatrice-Magdalen.

1.24.12

Poet Buried under Rock Emerges!!

Here's a new way to find a lot of my poetry - free pdf. versions, linked at the Brown University Library catalog. (On each page, just go to "click on the following"....)

Chapel Hill
Dove Street
Forth of July
In RI
Island Road
Lanthanum 1-8
Rest Note
Stubborn Grew
Way Stations

Lanthanum 9.12

12
for Karen Donovan (who noticed them)

Here’s a photo – a flock of ducks in the river
swathed in steam-shimmer, lithe silver & gold.
The day itself was overcast, crepuscular; an old
sepia print of Providence (unknown engraver).

Those ducks for certain make a joyful noise
though for us it’s only a tacit Jubilee. &
snow was just a sketch, a promissory
morning sprinkle : 7 wavy scimitars

of moon-flakes, traipsing their descent
to elemental winter ground. It was a sign
for manna from the summer sun – the Son
of Man (intuitive angel of untold ascent,

centripetal within each ice-bound tear)
flutes in the market as predicted – yet
that handish cloud overhead is implicate
with wing-tip folds; yon leafy paramour

Jessie O’Balm’s forming up up there
a demonstration (maybe very gentle rain
later today). Sleep on it, Berryman; let
splay of almond palm undo the nightmare

(this is my prayer). You had an answer in
your own, when rondure of an unkempt heart
spun back upon her yearning path (O startling
Ind). The sprite who knelt beside you there

came dropping slow (like Chesley by shoreline,
shielding struts with ingrained, unaccountable
care). Benign, compounded with the fallible...
infallible & secret element (a sign, cosine).

1.17.12