Another poem re Eyerack by Kent Johnson over at Skanky Possum (posted Feb. 17). Reminiscent of poem by Cesar Vallejo (from "Himno a los Voluntarios de la Republica"):

Pedro Rojas, asi, despues de muerto,
se levanto, beso su catafalco ensangrentado,
lloro por Espana
y volvio a escribir con el dedo en el aire:
"!Viban los companeros! Pedro Rojas."
Su cadaver estaba lleno de mundo.

[Pedro Rojas, thus, after being dead,
got up, kissed his bloodsmeared casket,
cried for Spain
and again wrote with his finger in the air:
"Long live all the combanions! Pedro Rojas."
His corpse was full of world.

- trans. by Clayton Eshleman]

Ron Silliman's give and take with Rodney Koeneke on the question of the unconscious & religion in contemporary poetry. Some thoughts from me on this can be found in the interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket.

Joe Duemer has another response to my recent comments on Iraq. We are all in the midst of one of those dramatic prologues to decision, when everybody's position sounds simplistic because no one can characterize the total complexity of the situation. Joe's comments are similar to some made previously by Anastasios - a suspicion about the imperialist, expansionist motives of the hawks in the Administration.

All I can say at this point is, I hope both of them are mistaken. I understand the logic of resisting the spiral of war & violence for as long as possible. But I also recognize the logic of Colin Powell's argument. In response to the French position - "why war now? Why not let the inspections process continue?" - the argument can be made that, given that Saddam has produced and failed to account for huge amounts of chemical & biological weapons in the last 10 years, and given the context of what happened on 9/11, containment has NOT worked, and will not work, without a willingness to cooperate on Saddam's part. & the record of that willingness or unwillingness over the last 3 months is plain to see. It will grow even plainer in the next 2 weeks.

The complexity of the situation - this is the real work cut out for poets. Poets writing : evoking, describing, understanding, penetrating. The heart of the situation & the mind of the situation & the realities of the situation. For that, see Kent Johnson's poem posted Saturday (2/15) over at Pantaloons.

Today hundreds of thousands of people, including many of the poets I admire & whose work I enjoy, are joining to march against war. While I think it is always right to protest against war in principle, I also think that sometimes, and as they say "as a last resort", we have to fight for what is right. As I read this total situation, Saddam Hussein is in defiance of a UN resolution insisting that he cooperate, reveal & dismantle his weapons of mass destruction. The choice facing the UN is whether to force his compliance, or accept some arrangement which allows him to remain in violation. The French, Germans & Russians are proposing a middle path, which involves increasing the pressure of inspections with the hope of gradually forcing Saddam either to cooperate or leave power. This might possibly work, if the UN is forthright in sticking to this position, rather than assuming that by simply allowing inspections - even more strict inspections - Saddam is complying. That would be a mistaken assumption. Saddam can comply only by revealing what happened to the stockpiles already in existence. Unfortunately the divide betwen the US & these other Security Council members could give Saddam the notion that his strategy of evasion is working. Hopefully in the next couple weeks the UN & the US will achieve some compromise that will allow them to stand firm for full compliance backed up by force.

There are those thousands opposing war under any circumstances. But the counsel for appeasement out of fear of a war against extreme Islam is an argument for the status quo, and the status quo is one in which these same millions of civilians are held hostage by terrorist extremism, abetted by a dictator who has excelled in producing the tools they need & who has shown a readiness to use them. If war comes, because Saddam Hussein has persisted in defying the will of the UN, then Saddam will also bear responsibility for the suffering that war brings.

I think we are reaching a profound turning point in the way in which individual nations & the world deal with militarism, violence, weapons of mass destruction, & terrorism. Clearly the Bush strategy of US military hegemony plus willingness to intervene may have both negative & positive consequences for global maintenance of peace & security, but taken as a whole it is insufficient grounds for global order. The UN remains the only hope for a lasting mechanism for resolving international crises & injustices. Hopefully the intense strain of the give-&-take between the US & the UN over this issue will act as a kind of learning process, rather than a signal of breakdown & beginning of a new round of disorder & tension. Hopefully, if war comes, the US will go to war with the sanction of the UN. If not, we will all witness just how limited in efficacy are military solutions alone. On the other hand, I think that if Saddam will not relent, & the US with the UN goes to disarm him by force, the outcome may give the lie to those who are counseling peace at any price.

NY Times today says Monarch butterflies making a comeback from terrible freeze-out in Mexico a year or so ago.

St. Valentine wrote love letters from the prison where he was eventually martyred. Tomb/chrysalis. La condition humaine. Time flowers.

The year I wrote Stubborn Grew, my father's birthday (4.12) fell on Easter Sunday. This is from the 1st sequel (Grassblade Light), toward the center of the book (a chapter called "Ghost Dance"):

30


Spring scent in the nostrils, and in the eyes
a fan of tender buds over the branches. Happy
birthday in the ancient garden. A voice searches
me out, whispers reedy Magdalen. She says:

I spotted a jay guarding the door of the sheep
in a meadow where time does not run and
a crow flies with a knife sharper than
a blade of noon sunlight across the deep

prairie grass. The jay doubled over and wheeled
in a circle like a flowering M or tall amaryllis
or bold forsythia - and soaring toward the apex
of the sky, plummeted - a kingfisher, anchored

in a mirrored lake. Rose then - vermillion-
sheep-clothed - spread both wings wide -
and - for an instant - a pied, rainbow-hued,
flared tepee floated - when with a sudden

reversal of his feathery coat, the quetzal - all
coated and colored over now in earthen clays -
spread her wings again: and monarch butterflies
and grey doves stream from that wide coracle while. . .

I listened as the woman in the garden gradually
marrigated her seedgreen purplescaled hypotenuse
(happily numbering) while my soul rode Blackstone's
white bull slowly toward Oxford on my father's birthday.


4.12.99

[p.s. note for advanced bloggertationists: for riding the bull slowly toward Oxford you should see the closing Finn-Wakean section of Stubborn, where "Akhtemydovie" Akhmatova makes sort of a spring procession toward Oxford (where she received an award in her old age) surrounded by Gould-Herefordshire farmfolk - & then recall that the symmetrical close of book 3 ends on March 5th, as explained below. . .]

A response from Anastasios (of Ineluctable fame) to my comments about Iraq made here earlier today:

Henry--

I completely hear what you are asking in terms of all these questions. The only reason I cannot entertain the thoughts you are allowing yourself to entertain is because I have absolutely no trust in the US government's improving the suffering's plight . The suffering Kurds and Iraqis, in my opinion, mean absolutely nothing to Team Bush. If international pressure increases and if the inspectors were given some teeth along with some intelligence, there might be an opportunity to rid the Iraqis of Saddam while also improving everyone's lot on the Arabian peninsula. However, I don't think a million bombs and an additional loss of lives will improve the situation over there. It could well turn into WWIII. Hell of a lot of good we've done Afghanistan. Karzai is propped up by US henchmen, the Taliban are re-entrenching, and people are just waiting to assassinate him.

Ultimately, I cannot, do not and will not trust Bush and his lot of criminals (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Negroponte, Condoleeza, Pointdexter, et al).

I pray things don't get worse.

Valentine's Day & DATES. More about birthdays & dying days. More dissertation fodder for the 900 pp. poem Forth of July follows.

The poem ("Forth. . .") puns on the "birthday" of the USA.

Each of the 3 large books took close to 9 months to write. Gestation.

The poem's form & themes were sprung or triggered by a short elegy written for my maternal uncle James Ravlin which appears in the opening pages of Stubborn Grew. The section immediately following is a short elegy for my cousin Juliet Ravlin who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge on her father's birthday in 1972. Juliet becomes one of the Orphic figures : in a sense the poem is a "coming-forth of Julie".

Stubborn Grew ends on 4.10 - Good Friday. The short central section of the entire poem (#28 in Book 2 - Grassblade Light) was written on 4.10.

Grassblade Light is made up of seven chapters: each chapter (save the central one) containing 28 parts plus a central part; the central chapter is a double chapter with 2 halves of 28 parts each, centered (as noted above) on #28 of the 4th section. The 6th chapter, titled "Giants in the Earth", is kind of a microcosm/"underworld journey" of the entire book 2, and was written on 5.28.

5.28 is the date of the death of both William Blackstone & the knight/monk/ancestor St. Guillem de Gellone (discussed earlier in this blog). 5.29 is my birthday & also "Black Wednesday", the date of the fall of Byzantium. The "Russian theme" in the poem can be read in some ways as revisiting of Byzantium/Orthodoxy via Mandelstam, E. Shvarts, et al.

The entire poem (Forth of July or Stubborn Grew/The Rose) was finished on 5.28.

Book 3 (July) begins on 7.15 (St. Henry's Day; St. Swithin's Day). One of the themes running through this book is death/resurrection, empire/Jubilee. 7.15.1099 the Crusaders after taking Jerusalem visited the Holy Sepulchre for the 1st time. "July" (the month) named for Julius Caesar; the poem moves toward & alludes to both 3.15 and 4.15 - Ides of March (Caesar's death) and the Good Friday on which both Lincoln & Vallejo died. This transformation is thematized as a kind of chrysalis (empire/Jubilee : Julius/Juliet). July was actually completed on 3.5 - date of death of both Stalin & Akhmatova (Julius/Juliet).

The poem as a whole begins with the words "Time flowers". The first stanza runs:

Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay.
A spring breeze flows through the branches on the terrace.
The city below flutters and flaps, roars
and drones like a resurrected bumblebee.

You could say that the birth/death/rebirth themes are encapsulated here. What is the meaning of this 900-pp muttering toward a birthday (5.28 to 5.29), while visiting dozens of other "holidays" along the way? In Stubborn Grew, the 2nd chapter, called "Ancient Light", serves as yet another miniature model of the entire poem (the title & the plot of this chapter revolve around a chance visit I made to a lovely Greek Orthodox church in London, where there was an old paint-chipped sign posted mysteriously high up on its wall : "Ancient Light"). It begins with a Breugel Epiphany scene & African wise man Balthasar (should be Melchior) offering his green-golden nef or toy boat as a birthday present to baby J. It ends with a christmas carol scene in a small London church shaped like a boat.

The poem is about moving from the vessel of the womb to the ark of Jubilee: the nef or star or angelic UFO which re-winds reality & intervenes in historical time (so that "time flowers"). It's a very American poem about timespace flight (July ends with these words: "come fly. . ." The entire poem ends with these words:

the nef rows, rows. . .
palms, heartbeats, light.

5.28.2000)

(p.s. one theory for the etymology of "Russia" is that "Rus" comes from the name given to the Vikings who founded the Kievan empire: they were sailors, "rowers")

I'm writing my own bloggertation. . .

[p.p.s. click here to see a picture of Julie & my sister Cara (on trike) & me, Gull Lake, MN, ca. 1968 or 69]

A poem from another Valentine's Day (from "My Byzantium", in Way Stations):


7

On Valentine's Day on my lunch break
I walked down the hill to the School of Design
to see the Crucifixion with Two Thieves
by the Master of the Providence Crucifixion (Dutch, circa 1450).

After 500 years the colors still bright as a dream.
Jerusalem in the background, strange towers of mauve, beige,
violet, the high walls flecked with scrawny trees
(no goldfinch near), the line of horsemen
in blue Martian armor (or Flemish 1400's) appearing
out of a crevice in the pale
green, springlike fields
and surrounding the crosses,
crowding the stage, the gray horses, their necks
like tensile steel with unknowing beast grins,
the fop soldiers and gawking onlookers, the boy
(or dwarf?) reining in the horses for the lords
staring in gratified excitement
at the three hung men, a swordsman
(realistic touch) ready to hack at the calves
of the thief on the left - the three men
of exactly the same build, only
Jesus more deathly pale, calm, as if asleep.

In the foreground Mary faints, weeping
(like the women outside the execution arena
in Afghanistan today, NY Times 2.14.96),
her arms hollowing, ready to become
a bronze Pietà; two of the soldiers
peer sidelong out of the picture frame,
but John and the Magdalen look you in the eye
out of hell, still, out of 1450.

Beside the Crucifixion a little gilded wooden niche-
relic, even older (Italian, 1250 or so, hand
of Lippo Memmi) - a blonde in a red cloak,
sky-blue undergarment, holds a little casket
(myrrh-box? urn?) and gazes with almond eyes
from under her hood at me,
the blush on her cheeks still faintly there,
her look still veiled and distant, yet looking, still

B
M I N E

(A little further down the hill below the museum
you in the yellow t-shirt under a black sweatshirt
circle the gargantuan monolithic pile of the Supreme
Courthouse in a banged-up Falcon only
to look through the corner window
behind the iron bars hoping
to catch a glimpse
of a certain Irish cop
- like a goldfinch
tethered to the law.)

Snow is falling today on Providence,
it comes down gradually from cloud to ground;
soon Mardi Gras, then Lent, a drop of ash
on seared forehead; and through the
mirror of a dusky glance I see
one green-eyed almond Magdalen -
a chalice in her hands, she holds
this dying light in pale green fields,
while snow falls slowly over Providence.

2.14.96

More disjointed thoughts about the world crisis.

Consensus coming apart. The US has a strategy of global "peacekeeping" which involves pre-emptive military attacks on other nations. The rest of the world repudiates this more strongly every day, which increasingly isolates the US. Asymmetry of perspectives.

The strange shadow-symmetry between Bush & bin Laden. Oil boys who need each other's aggression to justify their own. Useful to each other. We go to war (against the wrong guy) & get color-coded threat warnings.

Yet still I can hear the weird optimism coming from the hawk planners : bringing down Saddam will make things better, safer. We will liberate Iraq. & strangest of all (to me) - I'm not yet ready to deny they might be at least partially right!!

I hear what Jordan & Anastasios & so many everywhere are saying - about the consequences, the pure immorality of aggressive war, the ordinary people who will suffer & die for the sake of these "plans". But then I also think of the Marsh Arabs, the Kurds, the people in Iraqi prisons & torture cells - the people who have been suffering from Saddam's killer regime since he installed it (via murder of his associates) decades ago. & of the nature of the Saddam regime : its sick focus on torture, repression, experimentation with WMDs. . .

So I am still not the one with the firm voice to say NO to Bush; not the one with the clear vision of a post-militarist world in balance. Have I lost my own morality? Am I become a "good German"? These are the thoughts that oppress me.

my brother Bill's birthday today. the roll-call:

Bill - Lincoln
me - JFK
Cara - Constitution Day
Grandma - 4 July 1900


from my own Cornell box (July):


5

With fog in rearview mirror end
of the span ahead lost in blast
of X-ray light (darkness visible? M.
Purrly's frwcks greenhorde lunge-dragn

tales?) Mississippian suppositories are
homing devices I will triangulate
some December with a Florentine
grandmother and a Negus-ancestral

mother of millenniums MOM grand
on the far side of blindness at the head
of the dinner table in the ancient
apartment off River Rd (or Niger?)

swirl of communal clay chert
deciphered only dimly and a little
child at the table with Lafayette
dancing in the painting in the country

of his father looking on after a late war
D.A.R. Florence Ainsworth 7.4.1900
cardinal pts of a maternal Negus
feeder reddening unraveling on

the other other side (these variable
sublimitations mean I need a M.A.P.
(relief if possible) or Nazca poem
(excellent, Ray!) visible over the Iowa barn)

raison d'état and Inca terraces (mirth-
impervious) in foiled embossments of
rain-porous Thursday's stunned pain's
cup of sorrow (vale JVL you're through)

and it's Marian Anderson Peru out of your
flaming dream from Indiana to the tall
Andes from musical tomahawk to capitol
steps up to the microphone and I am a poor. . .

1.21.2000

Looking at a book about Joseph Cornell at lunchtime.

"Those who live by the sword. . ."

"Do not return evil for evil but overcome evil with good. . ."

Listening to the poets on NPR last night in the supermarket parking lot. Whitman poem: "Are these what they call statesmen? Is this a President?" (or something like that.) Even if they happened to be wrong in this case, it's good to hear poems against war in principle.

I return to the idea that unless the hatred & bitterness & misunderstanding & alienation are overcome, "jihad" will remain after Saddam, after bin Laden. So something must be done on an entirely different level. Something to encourage the re-thinking of religion. Perhaps a shattering of mythological thinking rooted in all three of the Peoples of the Book. A historical re-interpretation & revaluation of events, beginning with Abraham in Ur. Not necessarily a secularization - but perhaps a kind of enlightenment (?). A re-reading : for the good & the evil, the wisdom & the folly, the knowing & the unknowing in "scripture" & all that followed.

There will be calls to action now, and people will be encouraged to get in line or shut up. Like a weak mirror of Bush policy.

I learned to play devil's advocate on the Buffalo Poetics List. Now it's no longer a game, but I'm still playing.

Ron's measured & sensible rationale (but see Joe's) against war:
the parallels - Vietnam, Nazi Germany;
the warnings - roiling Middle East, Fortress America;
the dismissals - UN resolutions, evidence of terrorist collaboration;
the evaluation - "spreading democracy" through US invasion is foolhardy. . .

the Bush admin. viewpoint:
we are already at war (viz. 9/11);
the goal is to isolate & defang global terrorism;
the strategy is to confront states that sponsor terrorism, to liberate Iraq & thereby isolate Iran, Syria & al Qaeda.

contra Ron, this MIGHT actually work. But too bad it's a war strategy rather than a peace strategy (if the Prez were Jimmy Carter we would be defanging al Qaeda by making peace between Israel & Palestinians).

Excerpts from an article in this week's Science section, NY Times:

For Astronomers, Big Bang Confirmation

February 12, 2003
By DENNIS OVERBYE

The most detailed and precise map yet produced of the
universe just after its birth confirms the Big Bang theory
in triumphant detail and opens new chapters in the early
history of the cosmos, astronomers said yesterday.

It reveals the emergence of the first stars in the cosmos,
only 200 million years after the Big Bang, some half a
billion years earlier than theorists had thought, and gives
a first tantalizing hint at the physics of the "dynamite"
behind the Big Bang.

Astronomers said the map results lent impressive support to
the strange picture that has emerged recently: the universe
is expanding at an ever-faster rate, pushed apart by a
mysterious "dark energy."
. . .

In a nutshell, the universe is 13.7 billion years old, plus
or minus one percent; a recent previous estimate had a
margin of error three times as much. By weight it is 4
percent atoms, 23 percent dark matter - presumably
undiscovered elementary particles left over from the Big
Bang - and 73 percent dark energy. And it is geometrically
"flat," meaning that parallel lines will not meet over
cosmic scales.
. . .

The map, compiled by a satellite called the Wilkinson
Microwave Anisotropy Probe, shows the slight temperature
variations in a haze of radio microwaves believed to be the
remains of the fires of the Big Bang. Cosmologists said the
map would serve as the basis for studying the universe for
the rest of the decade.

"We have laid the cornerstone of a unified coherent theory
of the cosmos," said Dr. Charles L. Bennett, an astronomer
at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who
led an international team that built the satellite and
analyzed the results.
. . .

Dr. David N. Spergel, a Princeton astrophysicist and member
of the WMAP team, said: "We've answered the set of
questions that have driven the field of cosmology for the
last two decades. How many atoms in the universe? How old
is the universe?"
[end quote]

It's nice to see the cosmologists are finally catching up with my poem (see blog entry for 2/5 on the "W map"). Henry & Bluejay start their journey from the Doyle Observatory, a cute little galactic dome (built in the early 1900s, still in use) at the summit of Hope St. in Providence.

"Donshu know you zigshaggin', Henrah? Zigshaggin yo own black rizebury W" (or something like that).

Just another quick response to Jonathan. He writes:

"There is no set of cultural references presumed to be shared by all educated readers.
Eliot's notes to the Waste Land already posit the end of a common Victorian culture of
reading. Pound takes this a step further. So I don't think that Henry Gould can say that
there is a common, mainstream Eliotic tradition that we ignore at our peril."

But if I think of "tradition" specific to poetry, I don't think of the set of cultural references. I think of poetry as a characteristic, unique activity. & I think there are traits of poetry-making which are pretty timeless & global. "Poetry is avant-garde because it doesn't change much." (quoting himself) & I try as many have before me to get at that peculiar activity in some places on this blog ("metaform", "event", etc).

The healthy thing about Eliot's awareness of tradition - whether we agree or not with the specific qualities he chooses to emphasize - is that it counters the parochial, polemical mirror-world of oppositional poetics, where claims & counter-claims for value or importance are always made in the context of opposing some OTHER poet or poem or style. . .

I'm happy to see someone's reading the archives. Jonathan Mayhew writes:

"So I don't think that Henry Gould can say that there is a common, mainstream
Eliotic tradition that we ignore at our peril."

. . . but I don't think I said that, exactly. Or if I did I didn't explain myself properly (this is back in the early weeks of this blog).

Firstly it's important to distinguish between the "Eliot tradition" (which is NOT what I mean) and Eliot's notion of "tradition" (which is something like what I mean). Secondly, I did not say that poets ignore tradition at their peril. I think I said that the various oppositional streams in US poetry emerged in conscious or unconscious differentiation from the tradition (in a large expansive sense of that term). In other words, poets DON'T ignore this tradition - they play off against it.

Finally I think in various postings, esp. regarding the idea of metaform, I tried to get at the idea of poetry as immediacy, event, "nowness" - that there's a way of looking at poetry in sort of a worldwide sense as a distinctive activity, in which "tradition" is always new, always emerging "now" - this is of the essence of poetry.

I admit that this idea of a category or frame which includes US poetry is unsubstantiated & controversial. But it does also seem to me that there is also a lot of evidence that, at least in its more polemical manifestations, different styles of US poetry have emerged in very clear dialectical contrast with whatever is considered traditional or establishment or mainstream or passe style.

Here is one of the stranger segments in Grassblade Light (from a chapter called "The Lost Notebooks").

18


No time. The double movement of a gyroscope,
or Gneiss binoculars: the target sharpens
or the flame leaps out. Anonymous children
of Baghdad tonight - too small, too large -

all out of shape. While William holds his temples
in his hands, and makes a leaf-pile out of
windy mutterings. A graven treasure trove.
Tinder and carbon. These are examples. . .

Are they? When a stone fell from heaven
and penetrated the earth. . . and your heart
(which was a stone) became flesh. . . what craft
of Solomon was this? The word moved among men

like a Samaritan, wandering now here, now there;
and dust blew from the north, and turned round
to the south; and missiles threaded the ground
with a zigzag, morris pattern, purple. . . back to Ur.

Everywhere the holy returns to these rings of Ezekiel.
And the promulgated ordinances solidify as iron
above clay. 29 times the walls must tumble down,
and the petrified heart melt, and the scars heal:

because the temple that will not fall is Babylon,
and the heart that will not break is Nineveh.
And I saw the high walls of Constantinople,
I saw the ornate temples of the Pope, London

bowing down to Henry's iron horseshoe, Boston
measuring the earth with a poor translation -
and I saw the heart of William Blackstone
blaze in the night above those unknown children.


12.17.98

[Wm. Blackstone, as you may recall - Anglican scholar-hermit, first European settler in Rhode Island. The "Lost Notebooks" refer to his own books & papers, destroyed when his property was burned to the ground the day after his death (5.28. circa 1675), during King Philip's War.]

Joseph Duemer at his (scintillating) blog Reading & Writing has some comments on my war thoughts.

I share his reservations about the Bush administration's foreign & domestic policy, as put out in the strategic defense plan (transcendent military superiority from now to eternity), in the dismissive attitude toward international consensus on many global problems, & what appears to be the ancient political device of using war to clamp down on civil liberties & social justice at home.

Setting aside (if possible) the question of the morality of pre-emptive military attack, or the morality of modern war in general, it remains to be seen whether the risky game being played with Saddam will result in the strengthening & furthering of the administration's plans, or their defeat & undoing.

In any case, it seems to me that, as I mentioned before, WHETHER OR NOT there is a new battle in Iraq, the disconnect & dissonance between the worldviews of Islamic revolutionaries/religious conservatives, on the one hand, and the worldviews of the West (& the US as a special case), will continue to exacerbate conflict & confusion for at least another generation, unless some attempts to mediate that dissonance take place.

I note Joe's interest in philosophy as exhibited on his blog. & I wonder again if some kind of philosophical dialogue across cultures & disciplines could be instigated, and whether this would have any practical meaning. I'm not very knowledgeable about Islam; what strikes me about it, as an ignorant Western observer, is the way it seems to assert the authority of a transcendent divinity - but at the same time a special kind of divinity, INSTALLED at the political/legal/cultural nexus of civilization. In conservative Islam, there seems to be no separation of religion & state. The question to be put to Islam, then, is how it proposes to live at peace with the non-Muslim, the non-believer, the secular aspects of the world?

Turning to the worldview of the West (& specifically the US): one would want to ask the Bush administration in particular: what morality or authority sanctions the world military hegemony you seek? And how in turn would such a strategy be implemented without actually disturbing the peaceful co-existence of various peoples & nations?

It seems to me that PERHAPS there is an area of discussion which might provide some kind of mediating function. That sphere would be the discourse around the notion of "freedom". Freedom, democracy, or popular sovereignty might, MIGHT, be the social force which is capable of limiting the utopian/dystopian/utilitarian extremism of the US administration's dream of hegemony; it MIGHT also be the social force which provides a contemporary analogue to the "separation of church & state", which the Islamic world has not experienced in the same way the West has. So it might be interesting to pursue a cross-cultural public dialogue around the global question of freedom & human rights, as a way of clarifying basic norms. . .

. . . but then I think again. Of the dying & suffering. Of the permanent residue of pain & illness & bitterness.

Of the disconnect between the culture & mentality of the hawks, and the lessons they should have learned from the 20th century. Not only the lesson of "standing up to evildoers" : the lesson of the desolation & madness of war & militarism.

I see the logic of preventive action. But I see the greater logic of never being the aggressor. That's why the case for preventive action would have to be very strong and crystal-clear. Which is why it would be better to accept the European proposal of steadily increased inspection pressure.

I wish I could see more clearly. I see both sides, unlike many of my fellow poets, & I'm wavering.

Yes, as the Platypus of Doom, I find myself increasingly alienated from the poets who circulate in blogworld, so secure in their antiwar sentiments, so certain that they have seen through the conspiracy of Tex & Rummy et al. I want to agree with them, I want to think we are fighting the Vietnam War all over again against the American War Machine...

but then I look at all the facts I can gather & it seems to me a legitimate case can be made that the current Iraqi dictatorship does not deserve to have these mass-killer weapons, and if they are not willing to give them up, they should be removed by force. The arguments from fear are very powerful ("the Middle East is a tinderbox. . .
they will come & take revenge on us. . ." etc), but we should be moved by reason & not by fear. If Islamic extremists decided to massacre thousands of Americans because they were angry that we were taking away Saddam's WMDs - well, are we going to let them dictate the agenda? Because that is what it would amount to if we gave in to them.

The proto-fascism & extremism emanating from Islamic reactionaries must be opposed. So must the injustices of fundamentalist Israeli zealots & extremists.
So must the complacent imperialist logic which allows might rather than diplomacy to manage policy. So must the Karl Roves of the world, who think they can spin international crises into dividends for their faction & its plutocrat supporters.

I am very ambivalent about the situation. Maybe only poetry can express the ambiguities with sufficient exactitude & irony. I'm think of Marvell's ambivalence & his Horation Ode. Someone could take the descriptive satirical powers of prose & make a real poem out of this impasse, from the sands of Texas to the sands of Ur. The trouble is most of the poets are pleased to express cardboard opinions & make febrile tinny sounds. I suppose I'm one of them.

Responding to Jordan's comment today:

There's rationality, and there's self-interest. Everybody has to integrate them both. But there's something else too: fellow-feeling, altruism, self-sacrifice for the greater good.

Isn't rationality, or enlightened self-interest, the ability to work beneficially for others as well as ourselves?

The past few weeks I've really begun to question my own capacity to think rationally, because I find myself tempted to take stands on the Iraq crisis which amaze me, which I can't believe I believe in, which I don't completely believe. That is, I'm tempted to argue FOR war (and marshall those arguments on my blog). Why?

1. For the hell of it. For the curiosity of it. Because Saddam has it coming.
2. Because all the poets seem to be marching lockstep, of one mind. I have a reflexive need to differ (learned in the Poetry Wars). I question some of the self-righteousness of those who are always ready to impugn the motives of the ones they disagree with (ie. perhaps it's not just "oil profiteering by Bush & Co.").
3. Because over the years, without even being aware of it, I've become complacent or conformist - I simply don't want to believe what's happening to my government & my country, I close my eyes.
4. Because I can't completely discount the arguments for attacking Saddam either. In the post-9/11 world, I can entertain serious justifications for a pre-emptive strike, if the claims being made about Saddam's aims & capabilities are really true.
5. Because I'm having a failure of imagination : failing to consider the real alternatives to attack; failing to reckon the carnage & suffering war will bring; being naive about the mentality of those promoting this war.

I'm having difficulty with this. . .

I am still struggling to understand what is happening with the Iraq crisis, & how to respond; I haven't come to conclusions yet. But I want to speculate & think out loud a little here tonight, in Providence, where 8 inches of snow fell this afternoon, & my wife & I shoveled the sidewalk around the Church of the Redeemer (across the street).

I'm beginning to think that perhaps what we are witnessing in government councils & at the U.N. is not the working of international relations, but something approaching, perhaps reaching, their breakdown. & I can't simply assign blame - like some of the self-righteous moralists on the left & in the peace movement do; like some of the self-righteous moralists among the fundamentalist Islamists do; like some of the self-righteous moralists in the Bush Administration & its supporters do.

Perhaps it is a breakdown impelled in part by the failure of incommensurate discourses - ways of thinking - to connect, to communicate. & perhaps one of the causes of this failure to communicate is an inability to articulate. & perhaps one of the root causes of this failure to articulate is that the parties on both sides have unacknowledged mixed motives, which result in uncontrollable mixed messages.

What are these mixed motives? On both sides - on the side of Western, secular democracy & its enforcing power, the US - as well as on the side of conservative, fundamentalist Islam, its allies, supporters, & soldiers - there is a blending of the ideal & the real. The ideal, for both, is characterized in different languages & different constellations of value, which rarely connect; the real, for both, includes a basic struggle for power, domination, prestige, victory - a rivalry, an agon between the two. Thus the US insists it is the world's peacemaker, applying "overwhelming force" to police & protect the civilized world; yet this overwhelming force is also, inevitably, convenient for the achievement of more narrow, selfish interests; and just as inevitably, the idealistic claims of the US are suspected of hypocrisy by the rest of the world. Thus the Islamic fundamentalist claims access to transcendent, absolute, divine value : which absolutism happens, conveniently, to be his most powerful weapon - because it allows him everything in the way of strategies & tactics against the infidel - there are no limits to the carnage he can inflict, there are no limits to his fantasies of the Caliphate & its dominion, because his faith is the ultimate weapon - the ultimate sanction for his will to power. On the side of the secular world of nations, the undertone is realpolitik; on the side of the religious world of Islamic fundamentalism, the overtone is - realpolitik. Yet the language of their ideals - a global Caliphate ruled by Islamic law on the one hand, a global association of free happy co-operating nations on the other - these languages are utterly different.

Is there a solution to this dilemma - which is pressing us all toward the breakdown of international relations & violence on a massive scale? I think that somehow, some of us must step back - step to one side - engage both sides from a position of analysis & mediation. Rather than instantly politicizing & aggravating the situation further by strident ideological condemnations, perhaps we need to try to analyze dispassionately - treat both sides as, in a sense, SICK rather than EVIL. We need to engage the parties as patients rather than allies or enemies. (I admit this sounds like a fantasy as well!)

Whether or not the US goes to war against Iraq, this dilemma of conflicting & incommensurate discourses & goals will remain. Police action & military force alone will never uproot Islamic fundamentalism; nor will American global military supremacy bring about the freedom & equality it claims as its ideals. By the same token, terrorism will never achieve the global Caliphate, nor will the ideals of Islamic law & tradition justify the massacre of infidels & the denial of freedom.

What might bring peace to these warring rivals is a mediating discourse which sets limits to the absolutism underlying both sides - the doctrinaire tendencies which act as a counterweight to the hidden & unacknowledged contradictions - the hypocrisies of ideologies, driven as they are by their claims both to absolute, ideal value on the one hand, & to secular power, efficacy & hegemony, on the other. This is perhaps the essence of absolutism: to claim to join ideal & real, heaven & earth - to the distinct advantage of the claimant.

This would have to be a discourse - a dialogue, a conversation - about the nature of the Good. For Americans, it would have to consider how it would be possible to achieve a world community of nations without domination, hegemony, empire, self-interested power, realpolitik, inequality, injustice, fear, & militarism. This is a very necessary conversation, because it is clear that the means & methods given priority by the current Administration - ie., overwhelming military might - are insufficient & often counter-productive to achieving this goal. For Islamists, it would have to consider how one justifies a theology & theogony which allows for absolutism, authoritarianism, rigid theocratic legalism, and the massacre of "infidels". How are these practices in any way a reflection of a divine nature or reality? Isn't a theology - or ideology - which justifies such practices merely the flimsy disguise of a ruthless hunger for power & prestige - perhaps even an envy of the power & prestige flaunted by the representative infidel nation?

What then is the Good, and how in this imperfect mortal world are we to aim for it? This is the conversation which free people need to undertake, in order to drown out the rabid absolutisms, the will to power, the disregard for human life, the narrow realpolitic of power & self-interest - all those behaviors which are all too often displayed by secular nations & religious collectives alike. By using such a term as "the Good" I don't mean to allude to any particular philosophical method or tradition; I am simply speculating, at this point, that such a term or something like it might serve as a focus for the examination I have outlined. I am thinking about an international conversation, across the borders of nations & faiths. I don't think it begins with those who are quick to condemn either the Bush administration for seeking to create peace & security through military & political dominion, or, on the other hand, those who are quick to discount the discourse of religious tradition, which seeks to restore some sense of wholeness, dignity & self-determination to a region & a culture. (This is in no way meant as a justification of authoritarian fundamentalism, terrorism, or aggressive, militaristic realpolitik; nor is it an attempt to equate, morally or in any other way, the main antagonists. It is an attempt to emphasize the incommensurability of their language & goals, and the necessity to address that disjunction with means other than force, violence & war. Nor are these speculations an attempt to pass implicit judgement on the immediate details of the crisis at hand, which, as I said at the beginning of this, I don't feel at this point I am capable of doing.)

Then again, am I just being gulled due to an inability to accept the truth about this country? Are the longtime hawks like Perle, Rumsfeld & Cheney EVER to be believed? Are war, violence & killing going to improve anything? Are the underlying motives of the US (control of the oil & the region) using the war on terror as a smokescreen?

There are aggressive networks of terror fanatics who are actively preparing to attack the US again. There is evidence of Iraqi collaboration with those networks, along with evidence of Saddam's obsession with WMDs. But starting a huge new "battle" in this war will have huge consequences in turn. Before I am completely won over to the hawkish view I will have to find an answer to the questions above.

I guess the answers are easy for all those marching poets for peace out there. They always seem to know right away who the bad guys are.

Over at Equanimity, Jordan provides a link to a book by John Mearscheimer, Can Saddam Hussein be Contained?. The link includes a lengthy abstract.

It's a reasonable argument, but Mearscheimer downplays a few things:

1. there probably are operational ties between Saddam & some of the international terrorist networks. The assassination of diplomat Foley in Jordan has been directly linked to a high-up al Qaeda operative based in Iraq.
2. the impact of the "success" of the 9/11 strikes, as an incitement for further action by the international terror networks. This has serious implications in gauging the danger posed by Saddam's activities.
3. the current existence of a major WMD production program in Iraq. Mearscheimer tries to portray Saddam as a logical actor in world politics, which in my view is pretty untenable, given the obsessions & policy priorities of this extremely brutal Stalinist-type regime. This is why the UN limits on those activities & priorities were imposed in the first place.

Mearscheimer tries to make the argument that containment rather than preventive action can work with Saddam. But containment was precisely the policy instated by the UN after the Gulf War. Colin Powell made a pretty forceful argument at the UN that containment is NOT working.

While I'm still trying to figure out where I stand in this tumultuous situation, to my great surprise I seem to be finding myself swayed, if not yet completely convinced, by the hawks' arguments. The big question mark - aside from the almost guaranteed attacks from al Qaeda which will follow any attack on Iraq - aside from the impact of a war on civilians - is how the Middle East & the Islamic world as a whole will respond to an American invasion. Bush's whole strategy in the war on terrorism seems to be, that the best defense is a good offense. But does this apply across the board, in all situations?

More sidelights on the "W" theme, for anyone still following these obscure trails: from Grassblade Light, a chapter titled "Of W.B." (referring to William Blackstone, the Anglican pioneer-hermit who set up a library/orchard ("Study Hill") in Cumberland, north of Providence; credited with producing the first American apple (the Yellow Sweeting). [once again some spacing between words is lost in this format, unfortunately]

19


A downy W
star ached over
the lakeside beehive-
city buried in melody

where flighty
figures and green
clover-lovers ran
to the puppet-play:

here comes Federico
the toreador weighted
down with sword and
finery here comes Gago

the Golden Calf bell-
withered vain swung
on a chain of long
green Jealousy and now

the bull strikes Federico
on his head! He falls
the strings are broken
a slow tear wells

in Boca Reina's eye
ay me
ay me
woe am I

she falls cries See!
as the whole bee-
town lifts the bier
of solid air into the sea


5.22.99


21


Fallen pollen
yellow me this
mellow day must
to your mini-donjon

in the prairie my
Stephen's Gate Ist
ein bully byzbyz nest!
halloos St. Giddy-

up doubleyoudoubleyou
galloping into his leafy
micro-chasm take me too
far down above and up below

my dove
my sistrum
my harp-hum
of struck piano-

voluminous black hills of
Sheba milky w-veined gold
- a mass of canonical rolled
skyland red cardinal suet hove-

ring within a tiny Armenian X-
cathedra chrysalis above Turkish
trucker's gardens of Magda-Kurdish
Yahweh-wayout zebra-flipped King lex-

acorns. Inside a Blackstone.
Where was Abraham most-urlieste-
mourning-doveliest lovecake-teste-
calculate-continous-crow Jack Robinson.


5.22.99

Here is a post by Anselm Berrigan, sent to the Buffalo Poetics List. In putting this on my blog, I in no way mean to suggest that Anselm Berrigan agrees with MY position on Iraq (which I haven't completely figured out yet). Only that I found his post interesting.


Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2003 17:10:17 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group
From: Anslem Berrigan
Subject: Re: war
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"


Is it not important to point out that we are already at war? I believe we are
meant to take the War on Terrorism as literal fact, since the government
does, and certainly the soldiers in Afghanistan have no choice but to do so.
Invading Iraq would be an expansion of the current war, though it requires,
ostensibly, a new resolution from the UN. The protests against invading Iraq
are often publicly spoken of without the context of the War on Terrorism
being applied, and anyone who is willing to protest this expansion is, for
the most part, well aware that war is already upon us. In this vein, the
movement to oppose invading Iraq is not merely crying "war bad, peace good",
but attempting to exert public will (consciousness) upon the way the ongoing
war is being framed. The President believes his cause to be a moral one, and
the opposition to invading Iraq largely believes that pre-emptive invasion an
extremely immoral action. Of course, anyone might disagree with this,
particularly those who do not wish to see any of this described in moral
terms. But that's the tag and collar Bush has on the situation, and what he's
crushing his opposition with.

Here is another, in the same vein, from near the end of Forth of July (unfortunately the formatting at this blog doesn't seem to allow for the extra spacing between some words, which is in the original):

IV.2

The crane bone flute of Omegal
Two-One-Zero in the zero zone of
Cassiopeia drifted off
the ink path (Andean, original

and vernal victory for the rusted
oarsmen-thieves out of Kiev
composting filtered hive-
head of scythe-grass-thundered

crust of prairie) a black-white
ms. up Nile and down a Pappy
Rus man lost at (nightmare) sea
a-mingling trans-plutonian planet

with a Sophie light fallen
Julian year's allowable error
into wheat your collimator
of quasi-uniform time meridian

transit dark-muttering and
eruptive star with secular stability
a photometric standard Mira Ceti
early type Trapezium guide star end-

running now a high velocity shooting
star P Cygni growing orange from Umbriel
meniscus transit's photographic zenith well
or true noon Triton tropopause a nautical ping-

twilight out of Blackstone comes
a retrograde vernier worm-wheeling line
wing a mourning J Septimanian Venusian
fluted steep sleep to deep life-forms (foaming

5.22.2000

Then again the outline of the W is also Henry/Bluejay/Orpheus re-tracing of the track of the W-man (Eurydice, Beatrice, Julie, July, "J"). Will, Williams (Roger; Lincoln Penii-Penelope). Into the river-water, into the Womb (see the Mississippian "nekuia" into the Gulf, in July).

The poet Gabriel Gudding emailed me about my book Stubborn Grew, & I replied with some info on its design. I emailed back to say that the story formed a "W": a sort of double W, in that while following the protagonists (Henry & Bluejay) on a geographical zigzag W across a hillside in Providence (mapping a W), the structural or numerical design formed a textual "W" : that is, the center of Book 2 (the asterisk on p. 137) forms the apex of the center of a narrative-numerical W (zigzagging from optimism/pessimism, happy/sad, etc. - the "nadir" of the 1st descending (tragic, pessimistic) stroke of the W on p. 133, written on 4/4/98 (anniversary of MLK assassination: "44" Chinese number of death) - from which nadir it begins to ascent toward the apex (p, 137) & then descend again. . .

But what is this "W"? Is it a burning Bush? (see section 5 on p. 49, written in Feb. 1998). I wrote to Gabriel about how the narrative follows "Henry's" search for a lost black CAT (Pushkin) kidnapped on Halloween, into a CATabasis (journey to the Underworld) with Blue J. The "W" is many things: for example, it's the reflection in moonlight of a heavenly "M" inscribed on the landscape (Dante's M of the eagle of Justice, Mandelstam's M). Combine an M & a W and you get a pair of cat's eyes. A "W" is also the outline of a CATamaran (combining 2 V's: Venus, Virgo: becoming a constellation: Cassiopeia, with its Ethiopian (Pushkinian, Bluejayan, MLK) themes.
& Cassiopeia/Ethiopia/Blue J/MLK-Melchior leads back to the Ark of the Covenant, or the ship-shape of a CATamaran.

The "W" inscribed on the landscape in Stubborn casts a shadow in the structure of the larger poem. That is, see pp. 137, the center of Bk 2 of Stubborn: the last words are: "Thy will." This unfinished sentence is only completed in the 3rd book of sequels (July), in a symmetrical mirror-image at the center of its 1st section, the last words of which are: "Be done." These nodes form the nadirs of the larger "W" design of the entire poem. The exact numerical center is found at the center of Book 2 (Grassblade Light), in a single isolated line (referring to a star).

These mappings are summarized in Book 4, the shorter "coda" to the entire poem ("Blackstone's Day-Book", found in the vols. Island Road & The Rose). They circle around many motifs, including MLK, Ethiopia, the Ark, the ship. . . Melville's American-prophetic underside. Here is a sample of what I'm getting at (from Blackstone's Day-Book, toward the very end of the long poem):

IV.1

We are coming to the end of Henry
Navigator's long voyage, Elena -
circling around an elephant ear (Abul
Abaz, or Barnum's Jumbo) - see

how everything grows simpler,
more harsh, more true. Still
the well is always there (and will
be) - like the man standing here

beside it in the dark courtyard
(strange blooming out-of-season
almond branch). A stone,
a star, a well. A cup of water

from a rainbarrel (or Tartar
wine). A circling dragon-boat
or scrap of origami writ
folded to float so lightly. . . there.

You fold Andromeda into a W,
a mountain range back into M.
You cup them in your palm
to make a diamond, or double-

diamond - cat's eyes, Pushkinian.
Delicate Blue Morpho wings
woven with microscopic strings
of quipu thread (gentian-

gentle, violet and red). A knit
crossroad, then - red, white -
streams into Cassiopeia's
mother-night (at last).

5.22.2000


The focus on the catamaran-ark is a focus on Jubilee (Bluejay-inversion), or the coming of justice & redemption & the kingdom of heaven. The angelic reality requires a vessel of some kind (shelter or modus operandi, womb or Grail). I realize this sounds a bit wacky & obscure.

I read many of the poetry blogs every day, some of which are listed to the left.

The trip in fall 2000 to Tuscany with Sarah, Beth & Caroline (from Norwich CT), & Arnold (from Amersfoort). I was walking around in Florence, in the district with all the plaques commemorating Dante's early life - was across the street from the little church (at that time enveloped in construction) where for the 1st time he beheld Beatrice. Suddenly a young woman in a white bridal dress came around the corner, walking toward a young man, followed by a small crowd - they embraced in front of the church doors - a wedding in progress.

Vita Nuova. I have posted many an old poem on hgpoetics: here is a recent poem (written today, actually). Part of a woik in pwogwess titled Time Flowers: an effort to tie together unfinished strands in the long poem Forth of July. Some background might help here. Last Saturday morning I went to the Met to see the big exhibit of Leonardo da Vinci sketches. I left about 12:15; learned that evening that Elena Shvarts (see previous blog entries) had come to see the same show around noon (see her poem "Leonardo" in her Paradise (publ. by Bloodaxe Press). Anyway, the phrase "there (in Tuscany)" is an echo of Mandelstam's Voronezh poem, the last stanza of which (trans. by James Greene):

I'm ready to wander where I shall have more sky.
But that bright longing cannot release me now
From the still-young hills of Voronezh
To the bright, all-human ones of Tuscany.

(I still prefer the David McDuff versions, but these are pretty good. M's Voronezh ('raven-knife") a mirror image of Ojibwa midwest)

Now you have to refer back to blog of a couple days ago where I talked about the humanizing of reality through the microcosm (the Whitman-world, the Proust-world) and you have to understand that the impulse of the following section of Time Flowers (from a chapter called "At the Sign of Shakespeare's Head") was that I was pondering this idea of the Person humanizing with human warmth & idiosyncrasy the wholeness of reality - epitomized by Leonardo's immaculate, obsessive, open-minded SKETCHING, observation, handiwork.

I was also remembering Elena's comments at dinner about her "mapping" poem (The Cardinal Points) & the shock of the Challenger crash, & quoting Maria Brodsky's quoting of Inferno xxvi, and Montale's repeated motif of the LP record of time & reality (see Arrowsmith notes to translation of Storm & Other Things on this) & the notion of angelic time as a continuous eternal re-enactment or re-viving in a different dimension, & Anastasios' comment about the isometric relation between Nacogdoches & Tigris/Euphrates. . .

from TIME FLOWERS

II - At the Sign of Shakespeare's Head

11

to E.S.

Left-handed Leonardo improvises,
a palimpsest of ink-scratches and quotes,
unfinished sketches. From those notes
(from lean-bent angel-Byzant faces)

virgin hills triangulate in flesh
inimitable features, there (in Tuscany).
From incommensurate to harmony
(estranged will and strangled wish,

ugly mug and evanescence)
eye and hand combine - unite;
so we imagine a distant star might
blossom like a planet's orbit (Venus) -

so we might hear a planet whisper,
or a dear star (empalmed in your ear).

*

All we needed, already seeded in Eden:
consider, foolish counselors - what then?

The tarada Columbia flares overhead,
seven burning souls (who left their mark
shaped like a tiger or a ewe) embark
to ineffable nether time (veiled, mangered) -

slight white scratch in the long LP
over the delta of the Nacogdoches,
microgroove in a nest of destinies,
children of immersions, buoyancy

not born for brutality, but virtue,
not fear, but trust and fortitude -
a bright star-seed (both goal and goad)
near farm in angel-time (come true).

2.3.03


further notes: "a planet's orbit": see bird's eye view of orbit of Venus in Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton's Principles, by James Ferguson (1799). the track of Venus' orbit looks like a flower blossom. "Tarada" is a kind of long canoe formerly used by the so-called "Swamp Arabs" at the delta of Tigris & Euphrates. "Foolish counselors": cf. the judgement on Ulysses (Inferno xxvi). Unable to do the accent grave over estranged & empalmed. Last line of 1st section should be read as "or a DEAR STAR" (affects rhythm). cf. again for the meaning of this poem Elena Shvarts' comment about her poem & the "only direction left" (up): in relation to the notion of angelic time as an actual time-warp in which angels reconstitute, recapitulate, resurrect, & relive human time, in some kind of continuum we don't yet understand. Fare forward, voyagers. "poetry is news".

Strong statement on poetry & politics by Eliot Weinberger in talk at Poetry Project in NY, forwarded by Kent Johnson to Poetryetc. list on February 3 (see February poetryetc archive under posting titled "Poetry is News"). Not sure his either/or argument about the last 30 years (which goes something like: either you have direct political speech & political engagement or you have pseudo-engagement & obscure wind-baggage over academicized issues of race/class/gender(basically a right-wing argument itself); and we've had the latter, while the Right has been dismantling rights & justice) - not sure either/or is that simple, but it's certainly a challenging polemic to those on the left. (Is it also sour grapes over the criticism of his anthology of 20th-cent poetry as too exclusively white & male?) But his comments about 3 typical approaches that poets have taken to political engagement are interesting & maybe useful.

As I see it, poetry can have a very substantial political character, while remaining poetic language (see for example the pervasive & deep political context of Montale's poetry of the 30s & 40s - often damned by ideological Italian critics as politically neutral or irrelevant); yet at the same time poetic language is just about as far from "political speech" as you can get, and the 2 should not be confused. . . but with poetry there are always the stunning exceptions. . .yes. "poetry is news".

Just for the sake of contrast, here are 2 very early HG poems.



IF YOU COULD SEE THAT PORCH

If there is something blue
between a cloud and a painting
the full sense of a silent moment
appears suddenly like rain.
It goes over the land
it sings a tune you learned too
standing on the wet porch.
Little clowns in yellow raincoats
the laugh of a hidden yard
a girl in blue goes by
the big world raining
beyond the porch
in those yellow raincoats,
the things you always forget
because morning is full of birds.



WAILING WALL

"Build a wall of wisdom
for my fair daughter,
build an ark of gopherwood
upon the shimmering water.

"Fair as April sunlight
upon a dappled field,
she is my only pure delight,
wherein my heart is healed.

"Let the harp sing gladly,
let my voice be heard;
warrior kings of olden time
once hearkened to the word.

"Come out upon the meadow,
come, taste my only joy;
but do not touch my singing bird
or both of us shall die."

Walls wept for the tune;
a woman slept in the grave;
the sea cast up the gopherwood
upon a returning wave.

Jonathan, Kasey & Mike have been talking about meter & rhythm. Recommend an interesting study:

The Strict Metrical Tradition, by David Keppel-Jones. The author attributes the amazing success of iambic pentameter to just a few technical innovations: basically, by maintaining a strict syllable count (with the exception of feminine endings & elided syllables), and combining that with 3 "radical variations" (as opposed to the simple substitution of a weak for a strong syllable (pyrrhic) or the substitution of a strong for a weak (spondee)) - these being, first, the inversion of an iambic foot (/~ instead of ~/) - but used in specific, controlled places in the line - and the 2nd and 3rd what he terms the "minor ionic" & the "second epitrite" respectively. These two are measured in sections of 4 syllables: ~~// (minor ionic) and /~// (2nd epitrite) - and are also located in specific places on the line (usually at the beginnings of lines). Most of the book is taken up in explaining the rhythmic implications of these innovations & a detailed historical survey running from Spenser & Sidney to the Victorians.

One of the general lessons to be drawn from this kind of study is the symbiosis between "strict order" & "radical variation" - the variations are effective because we are, necessarily due to the meter, attuned to very slight stress emphases.

On Saturday, thanks to Tom Epstein, I was able to get a ticket for the 2nd night of Russian poetry at Alice Tully, in the Rose reading room (a beautiful auditorium at night - 2 walls of windows, low lighting on stage, high ceilings - you felt like you were in a planetarium or outside).

Had dinner at Poona on 72nd St beforehand with Tom & Elena Shvarts. Telling them about the lecture on Russian "underground" poetry of 70s-90s given earlier in the day by Mikhaill Iampolski. Very clear well-organized presentation; he talked about the Petersburg poets, the Moscow poets; the "keepers of the (high culture poetry) flame" and the egalitarian, anti-tradition, anti-"art" postmodernist conceptualists, the "idiot school" of poetry. Very interesting, & he confessed his bias toward the latter end of the spectrum.

Told Elena what he had said about her reading Fri. night (which I missed) & her poem "Cardinal Points", where she maps out the cosmos on/through her body. She said (all in Russian, Tom patiently translating) that she had a new understanding of that poem while she read it Friday. Said something about how in this life we are destined to be torn to pieces in the "4 directions" leaving only one direction of access, straight up...
which was strange, since none of us at the point had heard about the Challenger crash - we went from dinner to the reading, & Joseph Brodsky's widow (Maria Brodsky) opened the program with a brief eulogy - quoted some apropos lines from Dante (Inferno XXVI l. 112):

Brothers, I said, o you who having crossed
a hundred thousand dangers, reach the west,
to this brief waking-time that still is left
unto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled.
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.

During the reading they played recordings of Pasternak, mandelstam & Tsvetaeva (? or a reader) reciting. Never heard Mandelstam's voice before. Like a brave piping little bird - sort of a comic-brave intonation - Chaplinesque, it seemed! But similar to Pasternak in that the grid of meter & rhyme like a cage for this really wild musical recitation - inherent in the language but so different from the flat intonation of American poets - more like old recordings I've heard of Pound & yeats, but more varied pitch.

The quality of the poems - I mean the three old recordings - you understand M's notion that poetry is a visceral healing force - what Whitman must have sounded like sometimes. Hard to explain : it's the voice of poetry HUMANIZING reality - through shared/transcended suffering & happiness - turning it into song & art. The notion that a person personalizes reality - a Proust-world, a Whitman-world, an Akhmatova-world - & this personal cosmos comes through in the voice - but as it becomes Everyperson, universal - not one or the other but both.

This universalizing of the poetry image or statement must have a name - Aristotle I guess thought it was what differentiated poetry from history - the universal in the particular. But it's not an abstract thing - it's the universal through the personal human voice achieving a particular poetic statment like a victory against inimical forces. & people understand it immediately, share it as an experience known. It is an EVENT, not chit-chat; it is selfless experience, or an emptying, not "motivated". Dante's notion that poetry is renunciation.

The distance necessary to evoke/imagine/invent/be inspired this kind of special speech. Silence & inwardness.

Talking & thinking are not the same. Poetry & club talk are 2 different things. It was good to go to Russia for an evening.

Heading to NYC this afternoon to see Elena Shvarts et al. at the Russian poetry festival, Lincoln Center. I hear it's sold out & I don't have a ticket. Hope I can get in.

Pasternak (very roughly): "Poetry - our ticket to the good seats."

Mandelstam was angered by that poem - he read it as complacent, considering the times & the conditions (Stalin). "The apartment is quiet as paper. . ."

so, until we blog again. . .

Hybrid form. The plot of Proust's supreme prose work is riveted to a poetic notion: the return of past time (via an unaccountable, involuntary impulse) to a receptive, responsive Now.

I guess the metaform of this blog is similar: the re-emergence of old poems in a retrospective context. Recapitulation. Mandelstam's "incarnational" take on biology (quoting Darwin or Lamarck, I suppose): "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny".

Recapitulation, ontology, teleology. Acmeism's "nostalgia for world culture", the "gold coins of the global humanism of the future": founded on the notion of the Person as microcosm, telos.

There is a "Biblical" way of thinking about this poetic notion: fulfillment of the Scriptures. "Before Abraham was, I am." One theory about why Jesus was said to be from Nazareth or a "Nazarene", holds that he was a "nazir", or nasr - which could mean both a member of a special sect set aside for holiness (called the nazirites), or a poet, a singer. "The Kingdom of Heaven is in your midst"; "the Kingdom of Heaven has come upon you" - what a Blakean-poetic way of speaking! The Now. I don't want to reduce or exalt Jesus to poet-status though - that would be a big mistake. Only to say perhaps that there is a teleology inherent in poetic language use, tending toward immediacy, the event now, the living presence, the embodied word.

I have played around with this in my poetry, both in Stubborn Grew and its sequels, & in the sonnet sequence Island Road: the notion of "making" the literary name of "Henry," in various places (Shakespeare, Dante, & esp. John Berryman). The notion of embodying, fulfilling the "Henry" scriptures.

I sent a post this morning to the Poetryetc. discussion list, in which I said that what distinguishes poetry from prose, basically, is that in poetry language becomes an event, whereas prose language points toward another event. Poetry heightens language, prose subdues it, makes it transparent. The relationship is subtle and symbiotic, not black & white.

Does this heightening have a telos or goal or meaning beyond itself? One such goal, anyway, is to bring both the poet and the audience or reader into the "presence" (in both senses) of the event. Whitman: "this is no book, but a man". One of the elements of Mandelstam's Acmeism was the somewhat Nietszchean idea of the simultaneity-return of past poetry - "I want the living breathing Ovid," he wrote (or something to that effect).

Another little poem from long ago (found in Way Stations).


Vines tremble in the night
around the house's wooden doors,
rustling in the soft breeze, whispering.

Otherwise, not a sound. The high
moon stands over the hurrying clouds,

motionless in the central dark;

the wind tries everywhere for a resting
place, vainly turning over leaves;

and someone stands there in the shadows
looking out at the dry garden, listening
to vine-limbs creak in the night air.

Mandelstam in one of his essays talks about poetry as the crossing of two strands: the verbal material & the impulse. Or sound & sense, to simplify. (Elena Corrigan's interesting book "Mandelshtam's Poetics" goes in depth into this concept.)

Achieved or received lyric forms add a third level, since these forms create signals of their own, another semiotic dimension. S.K. Heninger (in "Proportion Poetical") describes how the early sonnet form was designed as a replica or microcosm of cosmic creation (the 7 days in 14 lines). The coils of the sestina supply an undertone or overtone to the verbal statements.

So these received forms can act as invitations to send complex messages. For the most part, though, in late 20th-cent. US poetry, the invitation has been turned down. The motivations have been varied. For one thing, the modernist practices of Pound, Marianne Moore, WC Williams, ee cummings extended technical innovation far beyond the limits of these medieval and Renaissance forms. The populist impulse of free verse gave them an outmoded image. And the multiple alienations and "makings-strange" of postmodernist poetry made illegal, so to speak, the communicative contract of the traditional forms; they represented a fallacious, naive harmony, just as did the uncomplicated egocentrism of "mainstream" free verse.

In the 80s & 90s I was on a different track. As described earlier in this blog, I was in the process of absorbing & integrating a religious/Hebraic/incarnational worldview with making poetry; in the effort Mandelstam & Acmeism were serving as models & guides. At the same time I was getting interested in the long poem, as a way of formulating some kind of comprehensive vision/message. For me the problems were not the one posed by postmodernist anti-metaphysics or the stylistic differentiations & alienations of the New Americans. For me the problems were simpler, in a way: the means toward the conceptualization & articulation of a message which energized me. Direction, not indirection, was the aim.

So for a while, before I could manage long poems, or as a way of taking a break from that issue, I played with some of the received lyric forms. What I liked to do was "cross" them with other strands. So for example in a series of sort of autobiographical poems called "Midwest Elegies", I interwove allusions to early anglo-saxon forms. I was crossing my personal origins with the origins of poetry in English. I wrote a dream-vision ("Grain Elevator": see archive for Jan. 9); I put down a subtext of a.-s. laments & elegies into some of my own; & I wrote this little poem, crossing Hart Crane with a particular a.-s. riddle, along with the Song of Songs:



RUSTY EXIT RAMP


How many spears, frozen in phalanxes,
how many iron hills circled the fathers'
hope - chained waters of enmity,
cars harnessed for a pathway through the sea -

when, with a jesting wave, philosophies
of unsettled pyramids the fluted palm
of your promise whispers toward autumn
beneath twin-risen towers, O City of Cities!



This is a poem about Crane & New York; it's also about the displacement of hatred & despair by some kind of metaphysical/poetic intervention. It has a strange sound to me after 9/11.

To reiterate: at the time I was interested in "crossing" the lyric received forms with opposing material. By sending a fairly direct, simple message, via the traditional over-determined envelope of received forms, I was really doing the opposite of the encrypted, hermetic, disjunctive approaches of the contemporary postmodernist poets. For example, I wrote the following sestina in the mid-80s, when mass homelessness was still a shocking anomaly, before we had become so inured to & complicit with this social evil. I wanted to cross a very sophisticated literary form with a very unsophisticated message. The closing stanza, however, can be interpreted in several different ways.


DOWNTOWN SESTINA

Downtown is gleaming, a nest of glass
scant refuge for the homeless and the poor
who trudge along under looming towers
hungry, frazzled, begging small change
and subject to the better sort of people
whose eyes reflect the glitter of the city

And so many circles animate the city
captured in the high gloss of the glass
what's taken for the playground of the people
erases every doorstep of the poor
in sprawling ellipses of loose change
under the stolid mystery of these towers

Under the bright conundrum of these towers
these measuring rods allotting every city
gyroscopes adjusting every change
by whirling speculation in the glass
the downward spirals of the ornery poor
set stirring turbid shadows in the people

And shuttling promotions of the people
forecast by divination in the towers
(who's growing rich and who remaining poor)
start dancing fevers in the chattering city
and snarl the artist in her broken glass
frail craft undone by overmastering change

When fortune is the favored end of change
suburbia the limbo of the people
and tender conscience faints before the glass
rocketing skyward in pretentious towers:
to serve the sleek imaginary city
or swell the sullen rancor of the poor

Meanwhile the rhetoricians of the poor
in campus pockets rummaging for change
inscribe the true authoritative city
and mint sterling mementos of the people
studies wherein the mind serenely towers
over safe specimens tacked up under glass

So let's raise a glass to the dizzy city -
a toast to towers, and all red-faced people!
And drink for a change among the homespun poor.

3.16.86


Again, after 9/11, the poem has a strange feel.

Providence very pretty this morning, walking in to work. Dusting of new snow & luminosity, pastel Easter-egg sky. How I imagine St. Petersburg on a good day.

Here is a poem in a form (the "nocturne"), circa mid 90s.




NOCTURNE

in Pawtuxet, with the "pioneers"


The night air is soft, the trees hold their places,
the meeting's adjourned, we emerge from the loft.
The streetlight illuminates (diverted faces).
The night air is soft.

Words, words, tarred with a treacherous weft. . .
heart's treason, scars. Posthumous traces
you'll replicate later - when no one's left.

Soul. . . death will bear your disgraces.
Friend. . . let this river be - raft.
Soon, soon - the deep gulf will displace us. And
the night air is soft.




("the pioneers" refers to a little group called the Poetry Mission, who were setting up some readings & an archive at the Hall Public Library in Cranston, down the road from Ted Berrigan's childhood home. Speaking of whom. . . in another form. . .)

I know, Socky: "you won't see anything with your eyes closed."

Some helpful "rants" from Jonathan today on formalism. I like what he says about Pound's metronome. "The sequence of the musical phrase" would mean a rhythm & tempo not dominated by the fixity of the metronome.

But a more sophisticated use of traditional form & metrics must be represented by poets outside the camps of "early" New Formalism! I just don't know where they are.

& O critics, O reviewers: show me the wheels within wheels!!

The Wheel of (Virgilian) Form: how the innate primal perennial poetic IMPULSE emerges as lyric receptivity; didactic forthright argument; epic vision.

The Wheel of Metaform: how the impulse circles around, from ephebic formal imitation, to mature absorption of experience, to the recapitulation of these experiential metaforms in original, inward form.

"Sounds really German to me, von Heinrich", quoth Socrates.

Well, Socky, I'm looking for a paradigm. I'm weary of the promos for pomo innovative elliptics; I'm weary of threadbare surfing attention to traditional means. Bring your reviews to the table & we will evaluate them in Russian translation.

This week's NYorker has a brief review of Marsden Hartley show in Hartford. "the master of Dogtown is having his day". Did Charles Olson notice? Hartley did a lot of painting in Dogtown.

"the middle voice". not elliptical. where on the Virgilian wheel is the impulse? see, simplify, speak. meter-making argument. sound & sense & pressure of experience. he paints a blue mountain.

My kids' mother Francesca born & raised in Lewiston, Hartley's home town.

"By the fragrant Androscoggin,
clogged with noise & smoke. . .
Lewiston High School. . ."

Numerological symbolism in his painting for Hart Crane ("Eight bells"). Eight bells means noon, time he jumped off the ship. 2, 9, 33.

Crane the other side of the coin from Eliot's alloy of traditional/modernist. the flip side.

Hartley & Max Beckmann. Painting in Minneapolis Art Institute ("The Departure").

& speaking of Eliot. . . here's the concluding section of my endless poem, "Forth of July":


8

Old men should be explorers.


I lay on the tattered sofa
near Lucky. Her little clay
fisherman tested the Secchi
depth with a black-white O.

Feathered black in Voronezh,
an arrow flew from Muskovy
with a grain in its beak
like sun along a knife-edge.

*

In a garden of huge routes
I found a spear pivoting near
the ides of April. This is where
St. George pinned up the involuted

pattern: star to star,
Janus to July (your hand
plunged into the red wound
with clover, pennyroyal, myrrh).

*

I’ll be in Indiana
living in a shanty
shanty (grainy
boxcar–Hiawatha)

with a cloverleaf
for mercy seat–
red, white, violet
(el Bluejay’s nef ).

*

Fire licked the Rome
of your smile, indivisible
Petrogram–where RW
touches Jerusalem

and threads knot
above Las Cruces.
The nef rows, rows. . .
palms, heartbeats, light.


5.28.2000

So I will try to address again these two points & answer Socky at the same time; I have the feeling that if I can carefully define the idea of "metaform" it might deal with both issues.

Originally I proposed this notion of metaform as a critique of New Formalism - against the assumption that "forms" are all there is. But my point refers really to any emphasis on technique in isolation, whether by the formalism of traditionalists or the anti-formal formalism of innovators.

Form is the building design. Metaform is the actual building, in the open air, in its environment. Moshe Safdie on a hilltop seeing his 10 or 15 structures scattered around Jerusalem.

But poetry persists in a different kind of environment, differently social, conceptual, performative. Its atmosphere includes the intellectual & cultural context, the surrounding climate of its time. Thus for example part of the "metaform" of Wordsworth includes the climate he helped instigate - a new focus on "ordinary speech", folk music & balladry, "romance" in the medieval sense, and, most importantly, a spiritual doubt & questing around the foundations of received religion & 18th-century Enlightenment received ideas.

However, if we left it there, we would not be talking about poetry, but about the "form" of social & intellectual history in general. As I tried to point out earlier in this blog with reference to Mandelstam: metaform, in the context of poetry, has to do with a process of internalizing & creative re-making - the transmutation of cultural metaform into the inimitable aesthetic form of a new poetry.

We could think of metaform in terms of a process of a poet's development. It could be seen as a kind of oscillation or circle: first, the beginning poet practices & becomes practiced at received forms (in the technical sense of form - free verse, sonnet, etc.). After gaining a certain confidence, she or he applies this talent & newfound technique - seeks to engage with the culture at large through creating interesting, relevant works & offering them to the public. This is indeed a period of trial, as any poet knows who looks back at rejected poems of a long time ago or just yesterday: all those poems that fall short, either from lack of energy or shape, or from trying too hard to "sound like" poetry - and ending up sounding inauthentic: it's not really THEM speaking, it's an unconfident imitator of something already done before. If the poet persists, however - and through luck or effort or destiny discovers originality - the process of interiorizing the cultural metaform(s) of her time & place begins: the inimitable poems are made which exhibit an aesthetic, intellectual & human integrity. Often the late poems, at the end of this struggle, are the most beautiful. Occasionally the Rimbaud will arise whose originality short-circuits the whole process. But this originality is the cultural metaform, reflected in & transmuted into poetry.

OK, how does this relate to the 2nd issue - the assertion that "oppositional" poetics exists in a sort of dialectical or symbiotic relation to a larger tradition?

American ingenuity, starting with Whitman, Dickinson & Poe, valorized originally by Emerson & Thoreau, set in motion a certain cultural landscape or metaform. American poetry would be absolutely original, experimental & new in relation to the poetries of old. This idea was not developed in isolation, but in the context of more traditional poetics of Longfellow, Tennyson & others - it instigated a creative tension. It exploded into view with the Modernists of the first 2 decades of the 20th century. However, it was (fortunately) never "resolved". Both Eliot & Pound, for example, but primarily Eliot, revealed a Janus-faced approach to innovation, and as time went on, the traditionalist Eliot came to the fore - pressing the notion of a single European Christian culture and a poetics aligned with the Renaissance & Dante. Eliot had tremendous influence on the critical & pedagogical developments represented by New Criticism & the southern poets, Ransom, Tate & others. Their influence, in turn, was so strong that when Lowell broke with them in the 50s and began writing confessional free verse, it seemed to mark a sea-change in American poetry. But that was only the beginning. The 50s & 60s brought on a multifaceted expansion/revolt in US poetry activity. The revolt was aimed against both cultural and aesthetic norms. "Aesthetic norms" - when crystallized in prescriptive or traditionalist poetics & pedagogy - seemed like an oxymoron, when the essence of lyric poetry seemed to involve spontaneity, openness, a rejection of social controls, and dream-work or surrealism.

So, by the 1970s and 80s, the US had produced a smorgasbord of different approaches to poetry-making, along with an academic "creative writing" industry. At this late date, in this conflicted environment, how can one possibly suggest that there is a "tradition-at-large"?

During the same period, of course, there was an effort through translation & anthology-making to expand the vistas of tradition & possible models. But their is a difference between translating or anthologizing on the one hand, and creating a new poem or work of poetry on the other. The cultural metaform - whatever shapes & boundaries it may exhibit - must be interiorized and recapitulated in new aesthetic forms & works. In the Middle Ages, poetic mastery was represented in the model of the "wheel of Virgil": the poet's movement from lyric contingency, to didactic purpose (the Georgics), to epic vision - in the process producing a world-image or culture-image - a reflection of the culture as an entirety.

Lyric contingency (or receptivity, openness), didactic conscience or purpose, epic or religious vision - these impulses perhaps underlie the application of the whole variety of technical approaches, specific forms & genres, etc. The US context or heritage is marked by a conjunction of extremes: the extremity of Emerson, Whitman & Dickinson's revolt against British norms; the extremity of Eliot's reassertion of traditionalism. Extremity lends itself to "scene-making": young poets are influenced by the notion that a particular technical approach, idiom, or cultural attitude is a momentous commitment. In a sense, it is: but the decision to follow a particular model is only the beginning of the process of making original poetry - the process leading from form to metaform & on to new form which I outlined above. This is a fact which is often lost to view.

If we take into consideration something like the underlying impulses behind the Virgilian wheel - and add to it a consideration of the developmental process (form/metaform/originality) - we may begin to recognize the outlines of a "tradition-at-large": the character of poetic making as experienced at all times & places. This perennial character might serve to set the US experience of extremes in a new context. Within this context, perhaps we can approach what's been done and is being done - as readers and critics - with an eye not only toward the influence of idioms & scene-makers, but toward how individual poets have interiorized & re-presented both the materials of poetry per se, and the "metaforms" of the surrounding culture. Keeping the underlying impulses in mind, we might be more ready to recognize new lyric poetry, new didactic poetry - and eventually the challenges of poetic & social vision implied by epic.

I have been doing this blog for almost a month. Looking back, often embarrassed by the incoherence & obscurity of some of my pronouncements on poetics (especially in the last few days).

Current emanations from some of the blogs listed to your left point up the ambivalence, ambiguity, controversy at the borderline of poetry & politics, poems & "scenes".

Two things that have recurred in my comments: 1. search for a way of thinking about "form" (form & "metaform", etc.); 2. the assertion that "oppositional" poetics has to be seen in relation to a sometimes invisible tradition-at-large.

Am I making this up? I can hear Socrates or some other interlocutor immediately challenge me : "To the contrary, sir: Tradition is a construct - its definition will vary depending on the motivations of interested groups & individuals. Tradition is the embattled prize of divisive culture(s). So your version of T-at-large is likewise an interest-driven imaginary construct, no more valid than any other."

I have to go for the moment but maybe can figure this out later.

Eric Staiger (Basic Concepts of Poetics) on the essential unpredictability & uncontrollability of lyric, proceeding as it does from a receptive state, the instantaneous verbalization of a dominating mood or a dream. His theory of genre based not on pigeonholing of formal properties or stylistic analysis, but on clearly differentiated impulses - lyric, epic, dramatic. Mandelstam's notion that future scholars would focus on the "impulse" of the text.

Beneath the worldviews that have become ideologies and normative language practices - the strata of the poetic "impulse".

[Another short poem from many years ago.]


OLD TIME ELEGY



Lord, we will write and write.
Your August ripens.
A radio keeps the beat.

The writing is what happens,
while merged with the wheat
a single strand of hair stays hidden.

Monday, always a good time to backtrack. I can't "prove" a poetics. Moreover, there will always be an oscillation between the "out there" & the "made thing", even if you can idealize Reality with a capital R as inherently singable. Somehow the poetics has to include the completely useless.

In a way that's what I started with on this blog, when I wrote about the babble of the SOUND of poetry, as reflexive, turned back on itself - the source, perhaps, of Plato's suspicion. I think, though, that my general tendency in these polemics is to protest against the self-reflexive as a system: what I've seen in postmodern poetry as a denial of the relationship between the poem & an "out there", or, a similar position, the attitude that reality is always more chaotic & meaningless than the artificial structures, the imaginary worlds, of art.

I guess I feel in sympathy with the general attitude of the Objectivists & neo-objectivists (Anastasios pointed out to me in a backchannel their affinities with the Russian Acmeists): the view that poetry is in relationship with an actual "out there" which can't be dismissed as either meaningless, chaotic, or simply presented as the stasis of cliche. It's a relationship in which both art & reality signal & gesture toward one another, and poetry exhibits an innate harmoniousness that it discovers in both. Such "realism" is, for me, one of the avenues connecting present-day poetry to all the poetries of the past; acknowledging the simple, direct & mimetic in speech and representation, without insisting on some prescriptive, necessary or a priori version of them. & if we go from there to these interesting ideas from Anastasios about nature in poetry, the "aural analogue" (or the beautiful sound & its analogy in "inscape"), maybe we can see how, in a preliminary sketchy way, such a perspective begins to show the outlines of a consistent poetics (& by that I mean not a technique but an understanding of what poetry is & can be). Moshe Safdie again, on architecture & the natural/cultural landscape (see recent NYorker article).

OK enough of these wearisome abstractions. . . it is Monday after all. . .

The extra, the surplus = the halo (see blog entry for Jan. 2, quote from quote from McCaffery book).

APHORISMS

Wallace Stevens jotted down some notes about the equation poetry = life. Figure it out, Sore Bun.

I HATE SPEECH (Grenier) appears to come straight out of Derrida. What is a salience? A salience is an excrescence. A surplus, an extra. The extra special something in the way you dress that appeals to me. The text as surplus, divagation (Ashbery & Bernstein alike). Sparky light. Different.

I wish I could quote S.K. Heninger Jr.'s entire book (Proportion Poetical : the subtext of form in the English Renaissance). He's read them carefully (the philosophy, the philology). Today's NY TImes on the new science of Networks: look at Heninger. He shows the line of descent from the Renaissance: from the new scientific empiricism, through enlightenment deism, to Romantic ego-sublime, to Modern angst, to postmodern deconstruction. From Saussure through New Critics to Derrida. But he shows what they left out from Saussure: the local networks of meanings which limit the arbitrariness of differential signs. "Brown" is ONLY arbitrary (or differential - ie. according to Saussure, "brown" only means "what is not red, blue or the other colors") within the sub-class COLORS. & how Derrida tried to erase late Saussure on the consistent "human nature" (which assigns meaning to local categories or classes of things), by relegating it to an "absent trace" which is self-contradictory (by the same token the image of his own logical slippage).

Why is this important or anything?

I'm going to prove how the sub-networks of US poetry (Olsonian, NY Schoolian, langpo) WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT, are positive contributors to a more comprehensive theory of poetry which transcends the postmodern condition. Poetry = life, because Ashbery's evasion, Grenier's denial, Olson's psycho-mytho are built on a dialectical feint around Stevens's equation, which parallels the Renaissance/Modern/Postmodern dialectical feint around the ancient/medieval Logos of nature.

The lighthouse is not a mode of differance. The foghorn likewise. Simple indication of rocks nearby. "Human nature" establishes local pointers via speech.

I started this blog writing about the special symbiosis of sound + sense which is poetry. Dialectic of "musical form" (metrics, song) + meaning: a semiotics of sensual or mathematical form alternating with a semiotics of language. The harmonic coherences which arise from this doubleness set poetry apart from prose. THERE IS NO NEED FOR AN ADDITIONAL DISTINCTION (the differances, the evasions, the myths). These additional distinctions are built upon merely partial & polemical philosophical foundations.

Poetry is the sign of the inherent harmonic nature of reality (a Stevensian notion). Philosophical systems built upon denial (post-Renaissance) are only half of the dialectic, and as such they distort the embodiments of language, poetry's material.

Poetry is not a New Critical "material" built on an autonomous system of differences ("language"). Both language & poetry are human harmonic gestures toward either real things or real imaginary fables.

The sound of your singing bears

"Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were a part."

Gary Sullivan's (Elsewhere) musical explorations. I feel like I'm back in the time of the Crusades, but there are peripatetic monks passing ms. around in Toledo or Edessa. The snob & the obsessive are not far apart ("crank" is the wrong word here). I like African electric guitar too. Out of the thumb piano tradition. There was a jazz underground in Mpls late 60s - Jeff Greenspoon & friends. Jeff gave me guitar & thumb piano lessons. I learned harmonica from a goofball named Eugene.

In SF at the Fillmore I was knocked to the ground by a huge fat Hell's Angel from NYC outside a Dead concert (circa 1974). One straight arm ringed with metal to the back of the head. They were having their national convention & had just stolen my $50. guitar for the offer to get me into the concert (I had no money). I was trying to give them a hard time. They did get me into the concert. I danced onstage (my high school friends Al Franken & Tom Davis - later comedians on SNL - had tickets). Asked Jerry Garcia during break if he could help me get the guitar back - he said "sorry, there's nothing I can do". He was covered with sweat but very gentlemanly about it.

O how boring, America! This is the journalism. How about Angel, the Puerto Rican orphan I met on the street, who could hardly speak english? Our hungry hitchhike from SF to Denver (almost killed by car thieves who picked us up in the mountains - our discussion about Jesus that got us off the hook?) The campfire in the cold in the desert outside Reno - "Henry, you are good, I hope you never turn bad." My flight from Denver - Angel's crusade TO FIND SASQUATCH???

Oh, music. . .

Socrates: Well, Hankovitch, once again you seem to be running sorta fast & furious. Liable to leave people behind with all your airy abstractions. Lemme see if I can help you outa this mess.

Henry: Please do, Socky. I was over at Jordan Davis' blog, where he was talking about Kenneth K. saying "we were the last to create a world", & the heavy burden of all the prescriptive baggage of being handed an ambition for Unity, & how perhaps writing about what's in front of you, the limits make it authentic as "world"... anyway he said it better in his own inimitable way, & I thought he was responding to some things on this blog & over at Anastasios', and then I noticed I had inadvertently gone into the archive & was reading stuff he had written 3 months ago, late October. . .

Socrates: You ARE confused. Somehow, methinks, we have to speak more simply & clearly about these matters. Poetry is for others, not for just endlessly recycling our own aquaculture.

Henry: I guess.

Socrates: Well, let me see if I read you right. You say there's something called para-form. Well, let's call it meta-form for now, it's more Greek to me. & it sounds like a word for the design or tendency of a poet's overall style, as opposed to "form" in an abstract, generic or strictly technical sense. Is that right?

Henry: well, I guess so.

Socrates: OK, & it seems you are arguing that "form" isn't too important, doesn't even make much sense, without this surround, this metacontext - where the poet's style fuses with the sense of nature, beauty, time, truth, as these are evolving in the culture she or he's in. & some poets, like you said Yeats, Goethe, Ashbery even maybe, Mandelstam in "Flint Ode", Bleguin Sansterre - these poets are conscious of that unitary meta-context, that surround - & their response to it gives their work a kind of coherence or address. That's the meta-form.

Henry: Well, I didn't say that, but maybe it's a nice follow-up. Maybe a poet's deepest impulse, their drive, is to respond holistically to the whole dilemma or wheeling variety around them - & that holism or unitary drive produces. . . coherences, stylistic & thematic saliences.

Socrates: Whew! "saliences" - is that Greek?

Henry: let me get back to you on that. btw, who's Bleguin Sansterre?

Socrates: I'lll call you on the cell about that. Later. In the meantime, you came along with another blast of verbiage today, about MUSIC vs PAINTING & poetry vs prose fiction. . . what the heck was that all about?

Henry: Duh. . .

Socrates: All right, I'll cover it for you. I am Socrates, after all.

Henry: I am Socrates. I am a Man. Therefore. . .

Socrates: Oh shut that door. As I was saying, you was trying to differentiate in a very sushpect way, poetry & the poet from prose & the novelist. The poet, according to Hen, is the representative, the visible sign of Song. Whereas, in prose fiction, the word is a transparent vehicle for a fable - a visualization, a painted scene - in poetry, the musicality inherent in the microstructure of language EMBODIES (sings) its meaning, its referent. It's the difference between the eye & the ear, perhaps.

Henry: I guess that's pretty close to what i was trying to say. [snuffle] Excuse me, I have to blow my nose.

Socrates: So Hen, you are asserting this difference or opposition between poetry & fiction, & the role of the poet & the role of the prose writer. & you were suggesting that just as meta-form rules over microform (& all the USA turf divisions & polemics that involves), so too the musical imperative, the song imperative of poetry rules over the more local turbulence of styles & techniques; because poets in all their variety are still more alike to one another (as & when they make poetry) than they are like (in their methods) those making prose.

Henry: I would also just point out the interesting comments on Anastasios' list about nature poetry - Hopkins & Niedecker & Bunting; & how he connects Hopkins' concept of the unity of natural forms ("inscape") with the "aural analogue", or the onomatopeia of poetic language. We may be seeing sort of a related set of concepts here, related to my notes about metaform (as you call it) & the pursuit of a holistic response to the surroundings (natural, cultural), by way of the inherent musicality. Also curious what Jonathan Mayhew had to say recently about Niedecker & "lightness", the lack of baggage - seems like sort of another name for clarity - the ability to express in such a way that we feel an instant, natural kinship or joyful apprehension - is this a giddiness?

Socrates: None a your bidness. You're attemptin yr usual transumptive warp-wraparound, & getting vaguer by the min. It creates a bland unity, ends up as a blockade.

Henry: Well, maybe not, Socky, maybe not. Listen to this quotation from Plutarch, commentating on you, Socky, yourself: "Fiction, being a verbal fabrication, very readily follows a roundabout route, and turns aside from the painful to what is more pleasant. . . For not metre nor figure of speech nor loftiness of diction nor aptness of metaphor nor unity of composition has so much allurement and charm, as a clever interweaving of fabulous narrative."

Socrates: Somethin the Publishing Industry has been aware of fer some time.

Henry: Think back to what I said earlier about Mandelstam's "Flint Ode" - how, as Omry Ronen has described, the poem's theme is a meditation on the nature of poetry (it is an Ode, after all). And the PLOT of that story is one that distinguishes the poet, somewhat prophet-like, from the "sleepy" fictions of the mass culture-mind. It's a sort of many-sided individuation process - not for the sake of that individual so much - but through the poetry the culture-mind itself comes to consciousness. Now imbricate that with Plutarch's contrast of traditional poetic form with the pleasures of fiction. The poet, as opposed to the fictioneer, because of an ineluctable vow to the inherent quality of verbal song, is the bearer of what truth there is, in song.

Socrates: But Hen!!!!!! How is this relevant to the newsletters of the poetry clubs of TODAY!!!!! They want to prove themselves!! They want to be poets today & tomorrow! They want to grow in their art! They want to live in their art! They want to make themselves at home in their art! As somebody told you once, "Don't tell us what to do!!!"

Henry: My two or three meta-imperatives here are not prescriptive, Socky. They are really not. In fact I was thinking today that it would be bestest for me & perhaps bestest for us all to stop thinking in the old ways of the USA around here about this stuff. It's not a coffee clatch for the Hatfields & McCoys. We might think toward the larger world & wider publics & ordinary unknown readers. We might think of Poetry as a vast vague meta-imperative which we are free to explore. The tools are basic & primal: 1. the song in words (the poetic imperative); 2. the beautiful & mysterious holistic inscape they encapsulate (the imperative of metaform); 3. the Mandelstamian-Celanian truth imperative (which finds differing modes of expression in poetry & fiction) (Celan's "Walk in the Mountains" story is a meditation on these issues).

Socrates: But Hen, how can something so imperative not be prescriptive?

Henry: Imperative is the wrong word, maybe. I'm talking about the conceptual/creative order that shapes the overall character of poetry. Song, metaformal beauty, and the individuating-epiphanic process of truth's undertone - the sound of the pedal - emerging beneath fable & sleep. These are the larger constellations that overshadow our more parochial concerns.

Socrates: Can I have some of that cookie?

(& cf. Anastasios' comments on natural form & sound values of words in GM Hopkins & unity of being & English tradition over at Ineluctable.)

Formalism some more. Another angle on "para-form" (& I recommend in the regard a book by S. K. Heninger titled "Proportion Poetical").

The polemical fracturings between supposed formalists & supposed innovators disguise the fact that both fall together on one side of a deeper fissure - between poets & prose fiction writers. I know that even to admit the difference is highly controversial. But - & the Heninger book is very helpful here - the divide goes back to Plato vs. Aristotle on the nature of poetry. Is the poet, per Aristotle, primarily a maker of fictional imitations of a real or idealized reality - ie. primarily allied to PAINTING - so that verse & metrics are incidental? Or is the poet, ala Plato, the inspired (drunken) vessel of divine fury, possessed by a dithyrhamb, primarily allied to MUSIC? Does the poet require & insist on music in order to be able to invent the appropriate mimesis of the ideal harmony of the spheres? Or is versification less important than realistic description & plot?

The debate since Pound & modernism has intensified, with the different crosscurrents very obvious in Pound: he needed free verse both in order to be properly "musical" AND in order to include a more accurate representation of "contemporary reality". But the musicality of Symbolism was to some degree predicated on a rejection of prose, everyday speech, "journalism"; while on the other hand the metrical traditionalism of someone like Frost served as a kind of grid or framework to HIGHLIGHT or intensify "ordinary speech", the Wordsworthian poet speaking the language of everyperson - and so avoiding the symbolist distancing effect.

But as I say underlying this internal debate, it seems to me, is what makes formalist & anti-formalist close kin : their allegiance to poetry as opposed to prose. Poet means "maker"; fiction means "made thing" - yet the poet is signed by a vow to primitive SONG, while the novelist is devoted to "ut pictura" through the rhetorical drone or equilibrium of prose description - a very different endeavor.

This poetic allegiance to the immediacy & presence of song can be seen to have consequences for the poet's role in culture, on the one hand (the implications for "para-form"), and consequences for the poet's technical development (the implications for form: how does the poet balance the "music" & the "painting"?)

First thing I do this morning: process "V.Imp." & "Million Poems Journal" for the Harris Collection (maybe the biggest collection of American poetry in the world). Be nice to poor old uncle, he's archiving the future for the present.

[& yet another wee olde poem from long ago.]


from a cave

Such a small voice,
I would not stop to hear;
the sun was going down, and
there were no houses near.

Such a strange voice,
whispering out of the ground -
familiar, though it seemed
unearthly, utterly profound.

Such a sweet voice,
twining my cavern ear;
a vine for water jars, when
all the wedding guests are here.

John Berryman had come up in discussion on the New Poetry list, & I promised to post this poem today. The scene takes place along the Mississippi, down the block from Berryman's fatal bridge. [Unfortunately I'm having trouble with the template here - 3 lines should be deeply indented ("maybe you'd be by the upstairs"; "and Dad will get up"; "ROOSEVELT SPEAKS TONIGHT"]:


THE FRONT


When the front rolls in from the southwest,
Spreading a wide fan of shadows and rain
Over the prairie, the towns anchored
Under the bulbs of the water tanks
And waiting for the downpour
To soak the fields, rinse
The machinery -
maybe you'd be by the upstairs
Window, looking out through the big black
Bars of the oak tree toward the gash
Of the river, moving there, hidden
Between the steep slopes, the skies
Quickly lowering.
And Dad will get up
And put down the paper
(ROOSEVELT SPEAKS TONIGHT)
Take off the hearing aid, and close
The south windows downstairs (near where
The piano music curls on the bench) -

And when the storm finally breaks
He'll watch for a while too, leaning
Against the mantle, thinking
Of Kanesville (swollen
Creek, fragile apple trees )-
While the rain storms down in sheets
On the grass, a silver wall
Between the river banks, and thunder
Rattles the blue chinaware, and Grandma
Lights the dinner candles,
And evening hustles out the day.

From the upstairs window
Maybe you'd see the strange
Incandescence, the last
Light burning through
Beneath the storm,
And your face like a
Smaller star, leaning there
Against the clear pane -

Socrates: Hen, you AWFUL good at glurping out them shimmery concept-bubbles which unfortunately tend to pop before they drop. This gander about "para-form" fits the genre to a T. Sound sushpicioushly like a dead end again.

Henry: Well, I know, Socky. The special temptation to verbalize from the preconscious cortex afflicts us daily.

Socrates: the question I have for you is, ain't "conceptual" form been done about 30 yrs ago, with a lot of boring art anyway?

Henry: Likely so. But maybe the deal with poetry is somewhat different, since the verbal & the conceptual are such close cousins. & often poetic expression tries to put into words the pre- or nonverbal aesthetic/conceptual apprehensions which are also represented in music & painting.

Socrates: And?

Henry: Well, in the essay on Form which I put into this blog a couple weeks ago (Jan 6), and in the interview in Jacket with Kent Johnson, I was trying to get at this idea a little more. The Form essay draws on Rifatterre's study of poetics, which emphasizes the close relation between aesthetic form in poetry (poetics), and semeiosis. The poem is a signal of wavering or variant meaning(s) - not hermetic, but not disclosed in a fixed form either. I would like to build on that notion of the poem as an allusive object of multivalent meaning (simultaneously self- and other-referential, self-sufficient & symbiotic), by adding to it the meta-role of the poet in culture & history. The role I have in mind is a figure (one among others) for the role of the artist in general.

Socrates: & ?

Henry: Think of Yeats, for example. Engelberg's great monograph on him, "Vast Design", brings out the depth and variousness of Yeats' interactions with other arts, particularly painting & drama, and theorizes a "European" concept of all-round culture (he compares Yeats with Goethe in this respect). (Hey, OK, think of Ashbery too if you want.) A unity of being toward which Yeats yearned.

Socrates: Et?

Henry: Et in consequendum heh-heh. The formalities of what US poets have come to think of as formalism languish like chunks of grid-architecture tossed by the side of the highway if they are not integrated into some more natural/traditional sense of aesthetic form - beauty, if you will. In this respect maybe I'm close to the perspective of the US/Israeli architect Moshe Safdie (featured in a recent NYorker article). Beauty that is "functional" in a cultural, aesthetic, intellectual, ethical, and spiritual way all at once. & in a social sense this is perhaps the "unity of effect" for which the utterances of the poet correlate local formalisms informalisms & semiotic signals. The telos of technique. Para-form.

Formalism. For a while I tried to run through all the forms in Lewis Turco's Book of Forms. But I've come to believe that the unique & particular worldview of the individual poet - as it interacts with the "cultural thinking" of the society as a mass - and as translated into aesthetic choices - creates a sort of para-form or conceptual armature within the poet's oeuvre. Maybe I can try to explore that further at some point. Omry Ronen argues that this parallel between the poet's role and the "sleepy" social group-mind is a major theme of Mandelstam's "Flint Ode" (see Ronen's book Approach to Mandelstam).

Anyway, here's one of my formal efforts. My wife & I bought a print, produced by a special technique of wiping the ink-covered plate (I forget the name for this). At the time we met the artist, Sylvia Petrie. Eventually I wrote the following poem, & sent her a copy. She wrote back to tell me that the image was not actually from nature, but from an etching in an old edition of "Piers Plowman". The poem uses a Portuguese form called the "glose" which I think is interesting in its own right.



ON AN UNTITLED PRINT

for Sylvia Petrie


The work is finished in the dark.
The world's invisible, unknown.
A night of snowfall leaves its mark.
It will remain, when we are gone.

Inside the silver picture frame
frozen winter night has come.
An image like a negative.
Black ink feathered off, by hand,
imprints a landscape (winter gloom).
The traces of your handiwork
are what gives light - the glowing land
flows down (from hills to scattered sand)
in random touches. . . flick and fleck.
The work is finished in the dark.

This labor scatters into day
like Monday mornings - who can say
what these wayward shapes contrive?
Triangular, amid uncertainties,
one tiny house (snowbound, lonely)
gleams (nestled, shrunken)
between the looming cedar trees
and those unclear interstices
which could be universe - or none.
The world's invisible, unknown.

The picture hangs against a wall
where afternoon light sometimes falls,
and sometimes (strangely) time will give
instead of take. . . and I can see
what you were doing, after all.
Through curving space, look
back. . . into reclusive memory.
This house, this hill, this endless sea
were yours. Engravèd. Cold and stark.
A night of snowfall leaves its mark.

We grow away from home forever.
Epitaphs for each survivor
elevate the long perspective.
Parallels we harvested
return. As in a childhood fever
everything we once disowned
(what seemed frivolous, detested
chaos) now coheres. Nested
on a hillside, sloping down. . .
it will remain, when we are gone.

3.23.97

A couple of old midwestern poems, for all you sophistercated urbanites out there in blogland.






RADIAL

Seen once in the distance
behind closed eyelids -
an old country town,
afloat in the depths
of heavy black earth.

Speechless seeing,
the child's eye
obedient, peaceful,
nursing in the blood
such slow harmonies:

the rustling elms,
and houses ripening
in the summer light -
tentative longing
rising from the streams.

What equilibrium
shall we embrace?
And formulate what
loving circumference,
what fateful gift?







MIDWEST ELEGY


On infinite plains,
Among seedy barns leaning
On edges of small groves of oaks
Just off the quiet roads, there
Everyone knows, serious life
Is elsewhere. War simmers
On the east coast, Dream
Shimmers on the west, the rites
Were unbelievably successful -
We fell in love with Marilyn
And Jack before their time,
They gave their lives, articulate
In the labyrinth - a consummation.

The storm comes later,
Up from the south out of
The shifting void of the sea,
When the words are lost
In a tumble of low tides,
The glittering mirage left
Drying among the fishbones
On the shore. Out of thirst,
Out of the dry salt and dust
Of unforgiveness, the storm
Gathers into itself -
Listen: dark silver sound,
Against a screen of long-
Abandoned, broken summer doors.

And what was I doing there,
Riding my father's car
Over the dirt roads toward
Sundown, dumbly tracing the
Scent of your skin and hair
In empty loops around the careful
Plots of the abyss, my fears,
The sad compass of mothers,
Fathers - this useless, neverending
Unemployment, this adolescence,
My slow heart beating, gathering
Desire and fright to approach
Your ramparts glittering on high. . .

An angel with flaming sword
Turning every way stands guard.
I remember our walk down the
Narrowing point into the swamp,
Behind the derelict drive-in
Movie lot - two young adults -
And finding the torn-up porno
Magazine at the edge of the water.
I remember fifteen years before
The fat kid in the back seat,
Under the ghostly drive-in screen,
And the distant lights of Minneapolis,
Kneeling long ago in the graveyard grass.

The recent NY Times feature on Anthony Hecht produced an interesting confluence of responses (see these blogs: Lime Tree, Ineluctable Maps, Mike Snider's, and the discussion on form & avant-garde on the Poetryetc. list).

Hecht's question, "what makes it a poem?" - as he sits hieratically in his white-columned library in Washington DC with the mausoleum-like inscription from one of his own funereal poems written in gold around the walls - comes like the sphinx or the voice from the crypt, asking the style question that no one has been able to answer for the last 50 years or so. "I thought of a butterfly. . ."

For the New American Poets & their inheritors, the question to some degree has already been answered. Poetry has been ineluctably democratized. See Ron Silliman's blog entry for today: the exciting question is not "what makes it a poem?", but, "How will the irrevocable advance made by the New Americans grow and diversify?" This is a rather sanguine, untroubled outlook - avoiding the issue I raised earlier on this blog, that the various "oppositional" styles in US poetry tend toward fracture and balkanization, because they are predicated on denying the existence of a central, major tradition in poetry in English. Stevens: "How to confront the mickey mockers. . . What wine does one drink, what bread does one eat?" (I don't have the book handy - hope I have those lines correct.)

I don't have the answer to any of these questions. But this morning my thoughts are ambling toward a recognition that each poet's work, each poet's poetics, represents a way of apprehending and responding to the world. Often the surface tensions & trumpetings of group developments seem to provide the fascination, the critical handle on "progress in the arts"; but maybe we could look at these matters through a slightly different lens. Say, for example, we took what we consider the elements of style & form & various poetry traditions, and instead of looking at them in some sort of comparative, historical context, looked more closely at how individual poets were able to apply particular formal elements to achieve their own individual ends.

Thus, instead of looking at Hecht, just for one example, as a role-model or exemplar of a particular style-force in poetics - what if we examined very specific formal approaches & techniques used by poets like Hecht, and then looked at how they were used by other, very different poets, poets who do not represent the para-political aspects of New Formalism. I think we would find that there are poets out there who would fall into the "progressive, experimental" pigeonholes, who are nevertheless able to apply traditional techniques (rhyme, meter, stanzas, modal forms, allusion/imitation, and so on). The nonce forms developed by "experimentalists" might not be to the taste of the nostalgic conservatives like Hecht, yet the actual techniques used by both may not be that far apart.

Kasey Mohammad emphasizes how Hecht's biases seem to stem from an inability to imagine or respond, in poetry, outside the traditional & sanctioned forms of old. It's an "archival" approach. Yet I think we have to recognize our own limits in turn. The old geezers have a background in metrics & oral presentation, coming in large part from poets like Yeats & Hardy, through Auden, Merrill et al., which if they could respond to the world-view, might teach the younger generation a number of things about the unity of relations between style, rhetoric, subject-matter, and presentation. Somewhere in that unity of effect, it seems to me, lies the direction of the central, major tradition - not the much-maligned "mainstream" - which the representatives of oppositional poetics too often complacently dismiss.

Ultimately, the arena of the new lies paradoxically with the individual - the individual poet's ability to synthesize many impulses, techniques and verbal capacities, to correlate them all in the service of a worldview and an inimitable expressive force.

Jonathan Mayhew on jazz.

Favorite trumpeters:
Chet Baker
Booker Little
Miles Davis
Tom Harrell

certain pieces of music put me regularly in a hypnotic trance, sort of sinking into chair.

My funny Valentine (Baker version) & another ballad he does
Beethoven quartet op. 132, 3rd movement
Wanda Landowska playing Mozart piano solos
some of Bach's little piano works for kids

[another old poem. When the coffin of Roger Williams was exhumed in the 18th century they found a strange tree-root inside. Michael Harper has written about this too.]


ORIENTATION

This particular tree had pushed one of
its ramifying roots downward in a nearly straight
course in the direction of the precise spot where
Roger Williams' head had rested in quiet peace.
There the root took a definitely circular turn. . .
- Old Stone Bank History of RI

Everything dark in the fables
and shifting from face to face
like the walls of the earth
and the two elusive luminous
horizons. Gradually drawing
back shadows from beginning
to end the stories murmur
and catch together mingling.

When Eve gave apples to Adam
in the dream where only serpent
and God were wise and a harsh
sun beat down like a dull voice
on parched embraces leaving
clay to comb with heavy rakes -
no one remembers when it was.
Vines branch together and sway,
seeding the years with dizziness.

But like muttering and panting sweat
and the light of the earth's own
burning through bird and child
into the dark constellations.
Out of a murmuring planet a solid
apple-root in the shape of a man.

"Race" - sort of a vague shibboleth-word, shorthand for the most interesting stories, shorthand for the most painful, infuriating, hopeless, hopeful stories in the history of the USA. Happy Birthday, MLK (Melchior, Melchizedek, Milky Way). I have many, many of those stories too.

Here's something from the sonnet sequence Island Road for today.

I few decades ago I wrote this little poem:


IMPERIUM

The Roman guards
cast lots for your clothing,
the way time and fortune
throw bones for kings' crowns;
you left them the shreds
of the Lord's farewell gift,
awaiting the shroud and the
spices of paralyzed women.

Your voice remains hidden
beneath the black mirrors,
diffracted, diffused by the
cold bones, the cold bones.


Then a few years later, I wrote this more ambitious poem (as I mentioned somewhere in the archive, during the early 1990s I was searching for a rhetorical level of address, mostly unsuccessfully, as here I guess). This poem tries to combine a Russian ode-form (used by Mandelstam in "Flint Ode" & "January 1") with American material. MLK dies on April 4. 4/4: the Chinese number for death. On April 5 my parents and I walked around the very circular Lake Calhoun, and on through the city & the neighborhoods in Minneapolis, in memory of Dr. King. I remember it was raining & gray. We went with my best friend Tom Fleming & his parents. Tom later died of AIDS in his late 30s. The last lines came along & felt curious, as if Milton were suddenly walking next to me (see "Lycidas").


BLACK MIRROR


I have a dream. . .


Amid the confused rustling, creaking of summer nights,
the stars' unspoken audience -
builders of kingdoms share out their blood-light
with cries, with a slow radiance.
As when a star, tearing, burning the ripened sky,
plummets behind mid-May lilacs. . .
- afoot by the shore, the sea's troubled reply:
apples - golden; mirrors - black.

Your hand grips a golden orb, the serious apple;
your voice, uttering sleepy cries,
moves like droning August through the people -
but star crumbles. Man dies. . .
and the sea, unraveling your voice between two shadows,
wears out the green glass,
and rubs in waves of salt across the light windows
this black sandpaper loss.

Buzzing of years, growls of unremembered kings,
breakers heaving curt answers -
we are cast out among detritus of things.
Under the white moon's pincers,
a green star quivers in the cloudy dome,
the black sail's insignia;
your voice in the mirror, piercing the dire foam -
one kingdom's echoing regalia.

I will walk as we walked twenty years ago in the rain
arm in arm through the cinders,
around those hopeful lakes again, and once again.
Friendship. Memory. Dry tinder.
Oh to seal finally the dismal eyelids of the age
will a perilous, windy spiral;
to take a child's first step across the clean page,
eyes lit with incandescent coral!

Along a bright trail ringing the grass mountain
voices, feet striking sparks;
at the hillside's foot - celandine, plantain.
Some ghostly shoulder, framing an ark's
limber keel - ebony plumbline over the scattering falls
of cloudy speech; sparkling rain,
curved limbs muscle and horn below the walls,
until your trumpet levels the plain.

And the wind tears the grass, and the wavering shore
herds the sand back and forth,
while reverence of glass and silver blows no more
emblems over doorway, hearth. . .
green pools of broken mirror suffer the long junkyard
years, glinting along the path
of your river-song - Memphis blues, Nile shard
still afloat, on a matrix of wrath.

To remember - day of rest, word singing out of sleep,
limbs rocking, a tender song.
Tall cradling hills of stone, rugged and steep,
fossilize the hopeless wrong,
inscribe in flint and tumbling falls your memory.
Monuments, marble chariots,
swirling of broken veins, of unknown infantry -
such things of time appropriate -

like this unruly amulet raked from the ocean,
a whispered Sunday in the sand,
where a wind-cut lilac spirals in slow motion,
and a cloud, like a heavy hand,
surges with shady blessing toward the disputed slopes -
shouldering aside the idols
and drawing taut the circular tent-ropes
over the offered animals.

Young lambs leap from the stalls there, near the sea;
old men and the dodging kids
fortify the streets with Saturday glee,
while in the shade, trembling eyelids
close in silence. On the graveyard hillside, blossoms
of cherry and apple crowd the blue
crown of your garden - this prism of Jerusalems,
these meadows pacing shepherds knew.

5.18.88

"Nef" is a word for boat with no "r" in it. (I also like barkentine.) A nef was also a technical term for a miniature boat which was placed in the center of the medieval king's or queen's table to hold napkins & such. In Breugel's great Epiphany painting, Melchior, the African wise man, is handing baby Jesus a green jewel-nef, with a tiny monkey peeking out of the cabin. Almost all the goofy onlookers are staring, not at Jesus, but at the nef.

OSIP MANDELSTAM

The priest, with melting intonation,
bridal sighs, deep shade
of bays, abandoned recesses -

the beardless one, the son
lifts high the censer, scans
the exacting responsorial.

And the difficult - the impossible
sweetness is born once more -
harmony's arrow touches home -

O to be lifted forever
in the resonant ark,
your salt-stung aria!

6.24.89




WAY STATIONS

The child honoring you in dreams,
embrasure of innocence, tender shoots
of early radiance - your figure
landscape, unfamiliar town, scent
of May lilacs along a worn road.

Not to be known yet,
only a heavy cloud pregnant
with summer rain
(iron mortality, rust
of decline not yet to be);

gathering up your skirts
you find your way, slow path
beyond the jealous decorations,
fever of scorn, offended pride,
dry branches crackling - a bonfire.




[& one very old poem:]


SUMMER

The child knows clouds,
and lies in the green yards
as they fill the empty sky,
make it round, looming down,
shying away, or drifting off.

There are no mountains.
On the porch a sleeping cat
rolls over, into the sunlight.
Flies buzz. Around noon
he looks in a window,

a piano leans against a wall
of the blue-green room.

[A few little old poems.]


at noon

Orpheus sings alone,
his lyre left in the wind
moaning in elliptical harmony.

Persephone sleeps, her head
hidden in her arms, and shadows
of clouds passing over her hair.

And John, in his prison, hears
dance music in the rooms above,
and the sound of an axe on stone.

Eric Dolphy is probably my # 1 saxophonist (see J. Mayhew's jazz/poetry diary). Not that I'm an expert. "Feathers" & "Booker's Waltz".

Beethoven's quartet #132, 3rd movement.

"Feathers" : squawks & arpeggios. dissonance & resolution. Baroque display (peacock feathers).

Heard "Louie Bluie", the 93-yr-old blues violinist on NYr's Eve. switch to mandolin after heart attack. Said he had outlived all his doctors by 20 years.