I wrote too much here yesterday.

Thank you, Jordan. Me & Ceravolo! I was reading him with joy in 1970. I too believe in the resurrection as imminent historical event : I just think it might feel like a good reading experience (say, Finnegans Wake or Pale Fire).

Let's say the shadow of secularism is mechanism - materialist, amoral, in a mechanical void. The shadow of theism is totalitarianism - cult of personality combined with mind-control (sounds a lot like a war between them, in the vicinity of Ur of the Chaldees). Let's say the light of secularism is humanism, out of Athens : the notion of the divine as a principle of balance, about which no individual mortal or group can claim to formulate anything absolutely authoritative. Origins of democracy. Let's say the light of theism is a covenantal God of Love, out of Jerusalem : a kind of antithetical trickster-Yahweh, patched together out of Abraham's familial daemon & Moses' slave-liberator God - antithetical because a critical mirror-image of the authoritarian sacred kingship of the Middle East.

Both Greek humanism & Hebrew theism, then, can be said to integrate strictly human power & capability with an intervening divine principle (balance, Nature, justice, on the one hand; creator-Yahweh on the other). Greek tragedy images the choral nature of humanism : not a single voice, but many, in a wheel of nature. Hebrew prophets exemplify the poetic response - the lyric formulation - of the human relationship with divine justice.

If we think of divinity as an unaccountable conjunction of opposing forces - the Person & the Principle, maybe we can begin to grasp this notion of mediation that so fascinated Simone Weil. The Logos-Word-Person mediates between binaries, the many & the one. Weil (& Plato) calls this mediator "Love".

Think of democracy as a means of establishing the principle of balance among opposing interests (demos & oligarchy, private & public) - in other words, as a practical response to crisis, stasis ("conflict" to the Greeks), the dis-ordering of authority. Then think of the Christian Passion narrative in political terms : the crucifixion of a mock-king of Israel between an incited mob, a self-interested oligarchy, and an imperial power. This is a theatrical presentation of the collapse, or carnivalization almost, of political authority. Then think again of the characterization of Hebrew religion as a lyric-prophetic voicing of the human/divine relation ("covenant") : sacred song, song-authority. Then think of some earlier posts in this blog, back in the archives, where I was pondering the psychological impulse behind lyric poetry - as maybe originating in the crisis of late adolescence - the gap between the time of childhood (under parental authority) & adulthood - the time of "hieros gamos", sexuality, marriage. Of poetry as breakdown, epileptic fit, charismatic reaction to the shift of authority. Then think that the ordering principles of both "polis" & "theos" were formulated & systematized by men. Then think of the women - Mary, the Magdalen, Beatrice - waiting in the wings. Then think of the trickster-Yahweh & his Word as the iconoclastic knife-line between collective formulations of justice (words, icons, images) - formulated by men - in love with his equally-unaccountable Bride. Think again of the conjunction of opposites (many & one, image & imageless, male & female, yin & yang, law & liberty, demos & individual, private & public). Then go read a little Nicholas Cusanus (Of Learned Ignorance). Keep thinking.

I guess my poem "Lousanna" (blogged here on Friday) ends with a little Picardy 3rd.

"Picardy Third" : when a composition in a minor key ends with a shift to a major chord.

The minister yesterday talking about how the Gospel of Mark ends starkly with three women fleeing from the empty tomb, "for they were afraid." Later a more upbeat epilogue was tacked on, with the disciples meeting Jesus in Galilee (as the "young man in white" at the empty tomb predicts they would, earlier in Mark). Said this epilogue acts as a sort of "Picardy Third".

The earlier, very stark & abrupt ending (after the "young man" promises they'd find him in Galilee) sends the reader back to the beginning of that Gospel, to Jesus' origins in Galilee. So in a sense the sharpness of the ending is a literary maneuver, encouraging the reader to re-read : a "circular text" phenomenon.

As I was listening to the sermon I was reminded of John Irwin's Mystery to a Solution (a wonderful book), which discusses how Borges & Poe got around the problem of the ephemeral nature of mystery tales, ie. how do you get people to RE-read a tale that works somewhat mechanically to solve a puzzle? Why would a reader re-read a mystery if they already know the meaning of the "clues"? Very Borgesian, the idea of a circling text, endlessly re-read.

Was also thinking as he spoke of the article in Saturday NY Times by Edward Rothstein, about current interest among some theologians (including the new Archbishop of Canterbury) in the "productive ambiguity" of the resurrection texts. The Big Mystery : where's the Body? "Where the body lies, there the eagles (or vultures) will gather."

That the earliest gospel might work as a "circular" text would seem to be of special interest to writers. If the empty tomb scene is not one of triumphalism but of fear & trembling, & while sending the disciples back to a literal Galilee, sends the reader back to the beginning of the narrative, to a literary Galilee - this would seem to appeal to a certain sense that writers have, of the interpenetration of text & "life". That is, writers would find, or re-discover, the "Resurrected Life" particularly in the written record, the recounting, the news of that life's beginning actions.

But this sense of "re-reading" reality has consequences for our notions of time & history, immanence & transcendence. Eternity & transcendence & resurrection might interpenetrate time & mortality & history in a way analogous to the way we "read" reality in texts : as though everything is there, in front of us, but hidden, until we're able to "read" it right. Reading as perception (listening).

Here's a poem from around 1978. This is the only poem I can recall writing in my sleep. It was coming to me as I was just waking up, & I grabbed some nearby writing utensils (I was on a futon on the floor at the time) & got it down. It's based on fact: around '77 or '78, due to some kind of issue with the Police Dept, city officials in New Orleans were considering cancelling Mardi Gras celebrations.


LOUSANNA


Indignant policemen arrest
a stalled Mardi Gras -
spring rolls in, a carnival
in a private shadow
of the vast land of sleep.

Tuesday is fat. This
is a display of weakness -
certain necks turn red.
Honorable generals
arrange a state funeral.

Lent comes too fast.
The democratic party's over.
Texas bouncers, cold
as metal, rusted Romans,
prepare the sacrifice:

let us honor the thin blade,
the man-made clock,
the traditional feast,
the secret society, and
also the undertaker's guild.

Then this masquerade
for an illusory season,
martial feast, flimsy
holiday on ice, is lost
in chords of Easter guitars.

What I've written here about Island Road applies equally if not more so to Stubborn Grew. In this poem, fictional Berryman's "Henry" carnivalizes epic poetry, underlines its immediacy (the narrative revolves around itself, is "personalized", on a table in a coffeeshop in Fox Point). The final 25-pp section - the "end" of "Henry" (a summa or Viconian ricorso of the previous sections, the entire book translated into FinneWakean) - was finished in the early hours of Good Friday, 1999. ie. "Henry" absorbs/resurrects Finnegan on the cardinal "last day". Thus poetry records presence - grafts a literary Eternal to a particular date & time, a "now":

Stub born
grew the
rose.

OK David, I will try to spell it out, since I'm not making myself clear. I will try to be concise & not repeat earlier bloggings too much.

You write, "No more speaking for us." By this I suppose you mean, making general statements about poetry. But making general statements is not inherently wrong; & I can't "speak for us" unless my general statements are accepted as true to some degree. It's perhaps unusual to make general statements; but a main element of my "poetics" is the claim that making poetry is a distinctive activity, distinctive from "writing", distinctive from prose, distinctive from other kinds of discourse. & I'm claiming that this distinctive activity is characteristic of poetry in general.

OK. The root distinction between poetry & other language usage is that poetry originates and remains inalienable from SONG. The core of poetry is the fusion of sound & sense, each of them given equal value (where as in prose, sound is made a transparent vehicle for sense. I'm speaking of the prose function & the poetic function : I'm not denying that some prose has poetic qualities & vice versa). This fusion of sound & sense stems from song itself.

But what is music, what is song, what is the "fusion of sound & sense"? They are incomprehensible without a particular sense of time : that is, time in its immediacy, in its PRESENCE, in its now. In prose of all kinds we project our thoughts & responses into the otherness of a conceptual or fictional elsewhere. Even the poetic evocation of a reality, experienced in the "now" of our reading of a novel, is the experience of another time and place. Not so in poetry - even if these "prose" aspects are part of it (say in epic or narrative or even lyric reminiscence) : poetry is a recitation, a performance, which has an immediacy, an embodied presence lacking in other genres. Even as we read a poetic text from a long-dead poet, this immediacy is implied (it is a score for oral recitation).

Finally, what I'm saying is that this modal, generic quality, this distinctive effect of poetry, spills over into its techniques, themes, subject-matter, and colors all of them. Which brings me back to the general statement I started with : poetry-making has the effect of bringing time past and future into Now, into contemporaneity. & this in turn is an effect of its descent from song. Poetry embodies & incarnates Presence, insofar as we experience presence in verbal art (there are other ways to experience it, of course).

& I think these general qualities have consequences for more particular aspects of style, worldview, and so on. Because for me anyway, "presence" implies the presence of a person, of an individual. & this implication runs contrary to massive intellectual/artistic forces of the last few decades. Person, personality : critics elide them with an "ism" (individualism). But this elision loses. . . me. & as I tried to show in earlier post, Island Road exemplifies this whole process in a particular way. In Island Road, Shakespeare is now, dead Berryman's dead fictional "Henry" is now, again. It's a kind of literary resurrection into NOW. & this "presence" is a parodic, burlesque parable, "through a glass darkly", of the divine Imago, the Person, in the eternal Now.

Yet more dismissive comments from David Hess:

"No more Henry, no more of these explanations that mean not much.

"Poetry tries to present a special kind of immediacy, or contemporaneity, which
absorbs the past into the Now."

No more please, no more speaking for us.

Poetry as the "Special Kind." Then make it so."

David, I don't think you are interested, so why comment? If you want to know more about what I'm trying to describe, take a look at the posts from around 1/24 and previous, where I talk about the difference between prose fiction & poetry. How fictions thematize this Now, which poetry, on the other hand, performs or enacts (the classic example: Proust's enormous novel built around the re-absorption of a timeless forgotten moment into Now. Fiction memorializes the moment of poetry.)

My advice, David : just ignore me. This is what seems to work for the "Now" of most of the edgy avant-garde. p.s.: I'm not speaking for "us" - you're welcome to speak for yourself. I'm speaking for myself, to anyone interested.

The experience of making Island Road was, for me anyway, a demonstration of this concept of tradition/"Nowness". Writing this sonnet sequence had its roots over 20 years before, in a "strange encounter" I had with Shakespeare's Sonnets - a sense of the author's "presence" which precipitated sort of a nervous breakdown. (I've written about this in an essay in the Edwin Honig festschrift, A Glass of Green Tea.)

Part of what I was doing was asking myself, how would one write a sonnet sequence today? Every poet who tries, finds their own answer to this. In my case, I wanted to re-experience Shakespeare's sonnets - re-write them. At the same time, I had more contemporary models to hand - Ted Berrigan's, John Berryman's (he wrote a set of sonnets before the Dream Songs) were the ones that intrigued me. I tried to apply Berrigan's jumpy, scattered syntax; I also developed sort of a Berryman's "Henry" (from the Dream Songs) to frame an indirect narrative, a journey through winter darkness to spring, to an encounter with both Shakespeare & the "dark lady". In the penultimate section, "To the Green Constellation", I implicated or imbricated allusions to individual Shakespeare sonnets in a systematic way, based on a study of the calendrical-numerical architecture of the Sonnets by Alastair Fowler (Silent Poetry) : Shakespeare's "day" becomes my "year". The numerical design is noted in the prose opening to this section:

"61 Henry's Dream

In my dream, Everywoman was an icon. We were at a conference on the malaria epidemic. Urban locale--refined, old European (Siberia?). We walked past the coffeeshop at 99 19th Street, around the block, past the museum at 145 10th Avenue, & entered the Birch Tree Grotto (126 Verde Triangle)."

These numbers refer to specific sonnets, which are markers in the pyramidal design Fowler describes.

So what is the point of all these compositional details? I'm showing how the poetry-making process is an activity of producing Now out of time & tradition. My attempt to fuse Shakespeare with a "Henry-redivivus" - a fictional character out of a dead poet's oeuvre - is a process of making Now anew.

David Hess, in a controversial mood, writ:
"I don't think what you said was that foolish but, like I said, these struggles for the
definition of poetry give me a belly-ache. Sometimes they are necessary, but more
often seem superfluous to any engagement with historical context -- what Josh is
partly interested in -- and the complexity of the art."

David, it wasn't exactly a definition I was looking for. I was trying to characterize the distinctive process or activity of making poetry, and how it synthesizes the pre-verbal & the verbal. Earlier back in Jan. or Feb. on this blog I wrote a lot more about this. My notion of "tradition" is bound up with the idea that poetry-making is a distinct activity which not only has not changed much, essentially, over the centuries - moreover, it's an activity with a special relationship to time itself : that is, poetry tries to present a special kind of immediacy, or contemporaneity, which absorbs the past into the Now. This aspect actually changes how you "define" Tradition : ie., if poetry-making is a special attachment to Nowness, as well as a somewhat perennial, unchanging, distinctive activity, then, in some sense, Tradition must be Now, or it's not Tradition, either.

p.s. to below: I think Stevens' exact words (one of his "Adagia") are: "A poem is a pheasant."

Joe Duemer responding to my grumpy snarls, as if they were aimed at him. Joe, I never think of you in relation to "easy rhetoric". You create dialogue through articulate thoughtfulness, a philosophical approach.

David, OK, I'm laughing. . . but I'm probably much bigger than you so be careful around the Rock.

I recognize that, as you say, Josh is pretty much responsible for setting the words/imagination dichotomy in motion. But you wuz so busy beLITTLing me that you wuz unwilling to take an interest in the particular description of the imagination/words relation I was providing. Maybe there is a big foolishness in saying what "poetry is. . .", but how do my attempts differ from Stevens's, except in being too prolix (which I admit is a gigantic difference)? Stevens said "Poetry is a pheasant." That's good enough for me.

You wrote:
" Okay, since you seem to want to argue this point further, let's take a look at the
history of this edgy debate. Josh Corey was responding to a post in which I wrote:

"I've always admired this phrase from Stevens -- 'the morality of the right
sensation' -- with which he ended a talk on poetry. I don't think there's anything
by Stevens I've read that I didn't like, even when it bored me.

Any writer who honors the imagination, the sensuality of the mind and perception,
as much as him -- Wilde, Lorca, Williams, Benjamin, some Stein, Nietzsche, Jimi
Hendrix, to shout out some names -- has my undying devotion.

Why I find the continual emphasis on language, the politics of language,
narrow-minded."

I do not see any definitions in that post, except the one implied by Stevens'
words*. From this Josh extrapolates that I believe that all poetry -- and notice
that I mention not only a few writers who mostly wrote prose but also a musician
-- comes from the imagination. I don't know where it comes from and maybe, like
Jennifer Moxley, don't care or would rather not know. I am merely stating my love
for poets and artists of a certain type -- not a definition of what poetry is or isn't.
Hence my anger over Josh's practice of "talking past," in this case, me, as he likes
to put it.

Notice also, please, the 'for us'. Last year of living for us, whoever that may be. It
will be many people. As usual.

Laugh, Henry, or I will hunt you down in the caverns of the Rockefeller and the
Hay and calmly kill you.

* These words I heard on a cassette I have of Stevens reading (can't find it right
now), in either '54 or '55 right before his death -- reading his poems and speaking
on his belief in poetry. I don't recall him staking any universalizing claims for what
poetry is or is made of in order to counter other claims. 'A morality of the right
sensation' accurately evokes his own style. Stevens produced pages of aphoristic
and essayistic definitions of poetry. It's clear that poetics, as an activity, was for
him also a work of imagination and not reducible to any discourse."
posted by David at 3:53 PM

I take back what I said in previous post. I don't care what other poets or celebrities do, they can protest all they like, all power to them.

If I protest, it will be as a citizen, not as a poet. Poetry will go where it will - maybe to protest too; but it's on its own.

Equanimity. Whereas many of the poets seem to feel their job is to express their political position these days. . . aren't a lot of these positions sort of like cultural habits? I mean you're on the "left" or the "right" since you were in diapers, you express "where you come from" etc. Parochialism. What if the job instead is to penetrate into a complex reality, without taking sides so much as to illuminate the dynamics? Not only a political reality but a purely poetic reality at the same time. I feel like a lot of the easy rhetoric actually does a disservice to poetry, all these poets against the war, it's like celebrities against the war, riding on something that doesn't belong to them. Not that they're not citizens : it's that they take their ART for granted, their artist status. Meanwhile poetry has gone off somewhere else.

David the Ess writes:

"Just laughing, not putting you down, my man. Anyone who attempts to define
poetry once and for all makes me laugh. Okay, with Josh I got pissed when I
should've laughed.

Thank you, you say many intelligent things. I'm sure something has been resolved
-- did I really make a dichotomy on your floor, I'm sorry (wagging tail) -- but I'd
rather laugh, for as Gabe and Mysterious Author Man reminded us a few days ago
this is the last year of living for us."

OK, perhaps I was being ponderous, as per. But you & Josh were also in the definition business, all over your own floor. So I hope you can laugh at yourself too, while you clean up.

Why is this the last year of living? Edgy is boring, there's too much everywhere. Calm, serene, confident - wouldn't that be nice.

I knew I was taking a chance getting into a conversation with put-down prince David Hess. But what else is there to do, now that Jordan's out of town.

Go ahead and act dismissive, shmaht boy. You & Josh were verbalizing on an old & probably illusory dichotomy; what I posted is the resolution, simple as it may be.

I don't know what's wrong with your media player, Dave - sorry you can't hear. It's not wicked or dangerous; just Clint Eastwood trying to read something characteristic, & some old music.

Responding to David & Josh : is poetry "words" or "imagination"? I think people get caught in such debates because poetry is a unique amalgam, a fusion, a monstrous birth.

First of all, poetry begins, not as words, but as "speech". Speech, language, as Wilhelm von Humboldt argued back in the 19th century, is made of sentence-streams, not individual words. It's essentially MOTIVATED, impulsive - motivated by sense-experience, visions, desires-impulses which are pre-verbal or meta-verbal.

But in the process of becoming poetry, this speech-impulse does indeed become ALL WORDS : poetry has a fundamental ordering or aesthetic motor which rounds out or includes or shapes all these impulses into a coherent, finished work of art. The finished product, like Keats' urn or Eliot's chinese vase, is a magical verbal container for the initial impulse(s). Maybe it could be conceived as a kind of energy-transfer packet.

The langpos mocked the "uncritical" speech-motivation of mainstream poetics, with their technique of isolating the verbal texture from any clear motivation. But this scrambling was obviously symbiotic/parasitical with that which it criticized; elliptical langpo was folded, doubled over "straight" poetics. Moreover, langpo's impulse to discourse was just as "motivated" as the ordinary poetic impulse - though it was an impulse of reaction or negation or separation or alienation or distinction : it's just that the speech-impulse was programmatically scrambled.

In my view individual words themselves are bundles of potential motivation, potential energy. The imagination is a kind of binding capability, inherent in the mind - creating vision, order, coherence, awareness, clarity, observation, etc. When the receptive faculties of the imagination are motivated to respond, to articulate, to give back - then we have the poetic impulse.

Mandelstam, in his theoretical writings, talked about poetry as the intertwining of two strands : the verbal material and the impulse. I think a poetics ought to keep both in mind, & recognize how the impulse creates verbal coherences or contained "light", in the finished work. Ultimately this dual sense of poetry, it seems to me anyway, has more relevance for the social-political role of poetry in a culture at large, than a dialectical spin on the verbal material alone (as in langpo).

Language poetry shouldn't be singled out in isolation, though. There's a much broader stream running from Pound through Williams & the Objectivists & others which tries to avoid the "lyric subject" through inclusion of chance items, found objects, documentary material, reportage. Elizabeth Willis's essay on Lorine Niedecker (linked here a few days ago) deals interestingly with this.

audblog audio post - the harmonica part.

audblog audio post Another old rough n'ready HG musical experience. The subtext for this song, titled "Go Little Sparrow", is the story told (in the Venerable Bede, I think) of the first conversion to Christianity of the British king. The king said to the missionary, "Our life is as when, on a cold winter night, a sparrow flits through a window into the warm feast hall, and then out again. If your God can give me confidence in what comes after, I will believe." [or something like that]

Once again the 2-min. limit means I've had to split the song proper & the harmonica coda into 2 separate posts.

Island Road moves slowly, zigzaggedly, from autumn to spring, from despair to hope, from cynicism to love. When I listened to the recording of my awkward Reaganesque/Clint-Eastwoodian whisper through the whole 99 "sonnets", I re-experienced, recognized again the EFFORT that is part of giving birth to a new poem. It's an "incarnational" poetics - & perhaps hearing these mutterings, while reading along, is one consequence. "Entering" the form of the sonnet (I almost wrote sinnet), answering Shakespeare & Berrigan & Berryman - it was a physical, embodied encounter, represented by the "muse" figure - the figure of Spring or Persephone or Dark Lady - right from the beginning, in sonnet # 1. It felt like an encounter, a MEETING - and indeed it was.

Whether the awkwardness is finally a sign of artistic defeat - well, I hope not. Listening to the whole thing felt like listening to some big untidy Cantos getting underway. I wish someone else, some smooth actor, could read it FOR me : but it's better this way.

audblog audio post Island Road # 9 and 10.

Bear with me, dear listener-reader: it was a painful labor. "In flawed words and stubborn sounds." [Stevens]

audblog audio post Island Road # 8.

audblog audio post Island Road # 7.

I haven't read much George Oppen. But on the radio I heard Harvey Shapiro read a war poem by Oppen, from his (Shapiro's) anthology of WW 2 poetry. It was good - simple, understated, a little off to one side.

audblog audio post Island Road # 5 and 6.

audblog audio post Island Road # 3 and 4.

Island Road begins gloomy & melancholy. But the poem is seasonal: it lurches toward spring.

Another old poem for my father. Can be interpreted for at least a fewfold allegory. Too simple for the avant-garde.

HIEROGLYPH

Papa was always working on the house,
his long shadow bent across the sill
like a letter in an unknown alphabet,
his hoe or hammer making their steady
marks across the vagabond afternoons,
the deep summer water we lived through
holding our breath, our lungs tight
with promises, danger, laughing gas.

And when we grew older, more serious
and dangerous, Papa was always working
late at the office. For all we knew
he was a drone of the dread Pharaoh,
one of the caretakers of the Sphinx,
late into the night composing riddles,
subtle passwords and husky undertones
which opened the secret granary doors.

And it was only later, as we watched
his dry wooden boat slip underground,
that we understood the clean framing
of intention, the straight crossbeams
of its execution, that house of his
a kind of sounding board for praise.
Working across the tightrope of the
roofline was his way of walking on air.

audblog audio post : Island Road, # 1 and 2.

I am going to try to post audio blogs of Island Road in serial fashion, a few each week. If you'd like to listen & read along, just follow the links. (Actually I'm not sure if this can be done simultaneously, but if so, it would be kind of a neat new way to read poetry.)

Island Road is my attempt at a contemporary sonnet sequence. There's a little more of an intro to it, in the Author's Note at Mudlark (Island Road is issue #6).

audblog audio post

Oh, this is fun! Soon you'll be able to read along the entire 99-sonnet Island Road, with that annoying Minnesota mosquito twang in the background! But while you wait, here's another old tune of mine.

Hey, I can hear myself! Sounds like I need to blow my nose. Anyway, here's the transcription:

MORRIS DANCE

Every morning my father followed
the dusty freeway rings - a welter
of iron circles, a maze of wheels
dodging beneath the vertical
shelter of the concrete law.

And he jousted with the cold
steel cables of the elevators;
he stood before the judges,
spearing a wet dollar each day
in the rockbound pool of possession.

Somewhere between the inventive silence
of the shop, and the hollow hunger
of the labyrinth, he traveled out
with a ball of legal twine, ready
for turbid blades in the gripping dream -

and at the end of December,
the two of us, the rusty brothers,
trailing those roads again
in your rattling clunker,
remembering the dance steps

of the breakdowns, the power,
the glory, for ever and ever.
A mystery man goes on ahead of us,
on through the green light,
into the lake-blue sky -

(and there's a charitable shadow
in the norway spruce tonight, a star
already hidden in the thunderhead;
there's all the peaceful sleep
we never knew, winging over the highway).

audblog audio post

My father turns 76 tomorrow. Born 4/12/27, in Minneapolis, near the Mississippi River. He lives a couple blocks from there today.

I wrote this poem with him in mind, several years ago. (published in Way Stations.)

Across my desk, published in Providence:

Turneresque, by Elizabeth Willis
(Burning Deck Press, 2003)

beautiful poems, funny prose poems.
here's one of her essays -

Bloggers: ignore all that personal stuff in previous post. It's mere special pleading. Go back to your book.

Jordan feeling feisty this morning.

I have the best of both worlds: make real arguments, experience eerie silence.

I see different critical talents, here & there in blogworld. Ability to characterize with precision & understanding, sometimes. Articulate. Not so partisan, clubbish; not so ready to spray cliches & beery nostrums from the political Bladder. Readers with real ears.

This split between mainstream & oppositional bugs me. Too many abstract counters, categories, pigeonholes. Seems to short-circuit synthetic energies necessary for solid critical perception; thus it stymies reception to some extent. Why not just fageddabaddit, & read the things on their own terms, & respond to them on your own terms, personally, as if you picked them up in a 2nd-hand bkstore in Tashkent.

So I create this imaginary St. Petersburg, where Gumilev & Akhmatova & Mandelstam & Tsvetaeva & Pasternak discover how to make past poetries their own (individual craft); speak about their traditions (education); engage in polemics while recognizing talent in the other's camp (culture). Russian ark.

& I can empathize with Mandelstam's notion that we write for an imaginary interlocutor from the future. (In fact I must say I sometimes I feel like a figment of his imagination in that sense.) Have I reduced a great Russian poet to the status of a reverse image of my own "professional" nonentity, by removing him from his proper context (his contemporary Russian audience)? So that he serves as sort of an icon/imaginary friend on the mantle for Everyman-Nobodypoet? That's part of it, I suppose. My context is this small city in Rhode Island, where I live & screw up & leave behind a sort of hodge-podge of inscriptions stored in the John Hay Library archives. When I'm underground over there in the 132 acres of North Main Cemetery, my poems will assume a different tincture, as the paper dries & the ink fades.

I want to write more topical report poems, up-to-the-minute Audenesque, & have them published in the New Yorker & in the paper of record in St. Petersburg, Florida.

& of course I could always read more poetry myself. . .

audblog audio post

& here's the harmonica part at the end. Hope it all sounds OK.

audblog audio post

OK, here's the same song, in its entirety. Only I've had to divide it into 2 segments, as this audblog only allows 2-minute takes. This is the 1st part, up to the harmonica close.

audblog audio post

I decided to attempt the one-minute free trial audio blog. So this is only a slice of a short song by Henry Hankovitch, con guitar & harmonica. This was played directly into my telephone from a boom box on top of the fridge, so I hope it sounds ok (I haven't figured out how to listen to sound on my computer yet). I may sign on, so I can relay the song in its euphonious entirety. Recorded almost 10 yrs ago in my kitchen.

Shakespeare out of mystery plays performed on carts from village to village. Ethos. Poet & power : Westminster & Globe Theatre. (West Wig)

David, Bathsheba & the prophet's curse.

Stalin & Mandelstam :

("His decrees like horseshoes
flung at the head & the neck"

or something like that - the poem that got him sent to Siberia)

Greek epics & Bible radiate ethos (communal values).

Tragedy, Iliad, Odyssey - hubris & selfishness are actions/consequences which are transparent, in a certain sense : like forces of nature to the disinterested observer.

Solon translates ethos into democratic politics.

Ethos = mutual aid = balance = sobornost = peace & prosperity.

(Athens/Jerusalem) - ancient symbol of psychic wholeness. (AlephoeBooks : name of my "publishing house" : after the kids, Alex & Phoebe.) Human/divine coordination.

Article in Times about bombing of supposed Hussein meeting place in Mansour neighborhood. Military expressing satisfaction in bombing only 45 min. after receipt of intelligence. Mother of girl dismembered in the blast weeping in the rubble, vomiting.

Jon Anderson article in New Yorker about Baghdad wounded. Meeting with sheiks from NE Iraq who had arrived to receive payment from Hussein regime in return for their support. Saying they would chop up any US & Brit soldiers & feed them to their animals.

Tie up the beast.

The garden of Eden was in Iraq[?].

Very interesting comments on pastoral & utopia by Josh Corey here.

"Mammon Lujius", in FW: MMLJ, Matthew Mark Luke John. "Lujius" an inversion (as is rhyme-scheme in Forth of July a.k.a. Stubborn Grew/The Rose book 3, July) - an inversion of "Julius". July begins on 7/15 - St. Henry's Day or St. Swithins' - the date on which in 1099 the crusaders entered the Holy Sepulchre. 33 years later (age of Christ): 1132, Joyce's motif date in FW : birthdate of Joachim of Fiore, theorist of the Age of the Holy Spirit. Christ-Finnegan wakes from the sepulchre (time-age reversal) after 33 years (1132). July plays verbally & thematically with inversion of Caesar & Caesarism throughout - going from July 15 toward Ides of March & April 15 (death of CESAR Vallejo & Abraham Lincoln on Good Friday). Julius to Jewel-eye to (trickster) jew-lie to J-muse. Recapitulation/inversion of western history.

(note recurrent motif of "132" in Stubborn & sequels: 1-3-2, the waltz-step. Number of rooms in the white house. Number of acres in North Main Cemetery (Providence). Square footage of Grace Church (center of downtown Providence). Number of Beethoven's greatest string quartet. Address of Francesca Tagliabue. a-one and a. . . )

& speaking of modern epics, look at the dazzling, astonishing re-creation of Roman-Christian-early Britain-Wales historical reality in the work of David Jones. Not to mention his great war prose poem[?] In Parenthesis. Finnegan re-wakes indeed.

The past is not even past. [see FW: 1132-556-(Silent.)-556-1132.] In Stubborn Grew I "apply" Joyce to surround Pound/Olson et al. (it's a military maneuver) & sink epic into the microcosm of Everyman (HCE). Then he pops up again chasing Julie in The Rose (of Rhode Island). Forth of Julie, jewel-eye; reversal of Julius Sieger. (I talked about this earlier in hgpoetics.)

Reading: Agon, Logos, Polis : the Greek achievement and its aftermath, ed. by Johann Arnason (Steiner, 2001).

In ancient Greece, for reasons people are still trying to figure out, the oikos or household sense of communal responsibility got translated into democracy : the idea that within the small island or mountain polis everyone (male, anyway!), both rich & poor, baron & farmhand (excepting slaves!) had a SAY in the common good. The ethos of Homer Hesiod & the tragedies showed how individual hubris & greed brought on oppression, revolution, civil wars & destruction, by a kind of natural law of selfishness & irresponsibility. Solon was inspired to codify this ethos & establish political well-being on the "middle way" of the common good, the equanimity of barons & plebs both. Interestingly at the core of his lawmaking was the concept of release from debt - the same notion that underlies the Hebrew institution of Jubilee.

All around Greek democracy lay the authoritarian monoliths - divine kingship, monotheisms. History developed into a confrontation between Asian tyranny & Western democracy; this development overtaken by the Roman synthesis of Republican values & imperial ambition; this development overtaken in turn by the confrontation between Rome & Jerusalem, imperial authority confronting divine authority. Hebrew culture can be considered another kind of synthesis, of monothestic, Middle Eastern authority with the unaccountable, trickster-like behavior of Yahweh - a kind of anti-Emperor, intent on liberation from slavery & a government of Law rather than divine monarchy.
The Christian development of a new kind of oikos, the Church, dedicated to counter-imperial values (love of neighbor, servanthood, dignity of poverty), a religious-cultural development which changed Roman imperialism even as it was synthesized with it in turn (Constantine; Roman Papal authority).

These specifically political developments & historical turns are still with us: "the past is not even past". With respect to poetry, witness the epic variations of Pound, Zukofsky, Williams, & Olson (with his intense focus - not always egalitarian by any means - on polis & localism). With respect to contemporary conditions, just look at the debate over America's role in the world. I think the critics of Bush policy should begin to look at the threads connecting both authoritarian & opportunist strains in the administration to decisions made about post-war governance in Iraq. Is there collusion, among advisers to a President brought to power in a flawed election, to benefit from connections with the regime to be installed in custody of Iraq? How will Iraqis themselves decide who governs them?

How do we as poets in our cities re-invent & apply the "core values" we have inherited? How do we express them in our poetry? This need not simply echo Olson's tendencies. Auden is just as interesting as a political poet. Olson made a fascinating opening around these issues at the beginning of Maximus, but perhaps he got consequently lost in a mytho-ego-poetics. Perhaps my "epic" efforts exhibit some of the same problems & tendencies: Stubborn Grew does try to present a sort of time- & space- crosscutting of poet & "polis" : then it takes a deep & obscure dive into inner-orphic space, riding William Blackstone's bull into the green constellation. Maybe if such is ever to find a place among the American makings, I will have to work my way back to the "polis" myself.

Gotta run : going to see movie "Russian Ark" tonight !

[p.s. note to previous post/link: Green Constellation was a basic model Sears typewriter; Francesca Tagliabue gave me hers, it's next to my desk here.]

And for me, beneath all the archaeology & romance-disaster & sedimentation of Providence, lies another layer altogether, much deeper, sadder, distant, out in the midwest.

Blogging along for the past three months, I've been able to reflect back along the trail that began around 1965. I'm writing this from a place other blogriders will probably recognize, a tiny dusty cluttered corner room, with a big bulletin board, a 2-drawer file cabinet with a postcard of Ezra Pound's "Poet out of a Job" want-ad, ceiling-high books. I cleaned out the file cabinet a little this morning, a task which provides a special perspective on the tip-of-the-iceberg nature of a writer's public (me, public?) persona : all those old half-baked derivative sleepy weak poems, rejection notes, news clippings, records of little forays projects & endeavors, charming old letters, children's art work. . . the sweet derelicta of others' gestures, which I never acknowledged or loved enough, mixed in with my own.

It's been nice to mingle poems & precepts & so on, kind of a correlation of unrealized efforts; things I haven't mentioned, but might sometime, like what it meant to edit a micro-magazine (Nedge), or work on the Poetry Mission; the effervescence of the Green Tea project, with Susan & Tom (a high point : my son the 12-yr old composer, setting a poem of Edwin's to music, & then being able to perform it with the Grace Church children's choir at the book party, & publish the score); the abiding presence of Edwin Honig, and in a very different way my children's grandfather, John Tagliabue.

Shem the Penman makes a fuzzy, feeble scratch, a Hen-scratch in the spring mud-midden. I'd like to bury him in the midst of his fritterations, the proven dunce in his local Providence, between the cluttered study & the job at the library: 1132, 132, 11 Fisher. . . following

the signs that mock me as I go

This section of Stubborn was written in 1998. Henry & his "spirit buddy" Bluejay are sitting in the backyard behind Shakespeare's Head, a historic building in Providence.

5

There was silence in the starlit backyard.
Far below the spine of the ridge, the bawling
of worn-out Rovers, Jeep Harpooneers, trawling
the iron highway. The white noise of the herd.

The moon shed a parched light, through the beech
trees and the maples, down onto Bluejay's arm.
Henry squinted. Images began to form
before his eyes or in the back of his head - each

indentation whorling, interlacing, a curlicue
of narrow formations, a lake of clay-coated
muscle-shored black sailor's pearl-moted talki-
talkitalki cueduetlicueduetli dumbshowlodrumsolo

strung minarets. The red tongue silent,
the palms aswaying, the stars askew.
Henry stared down tattoo avenue, until
the whole of Shakespeare's backyard bent

into a dusty parallax (black, white, gray).
Sudden - Olympian thunder rent the airwaves.
A missing Tailcat lunged into the grooves
of ice - Witch Country swells the day -

Dust Bowl football suddenly Game to Play!
Smart missiles artifically enhanced
for endless penetration danced
toward Dad's golf bags - hip houris

scuttled for shelter (squired under the square
air-raid shelters screwed shut by sultry sheiks)
just in time before the pool cue speared the steaks
- and I ran (unfertile myself) into the queer

crescent, deserted by storm, rapped on the head
by a load of unbending luscious Grecian pillars
ironed by a missing Nelson in Trafalgar's
wasteland (protected by a titanium toolshed).

Stubborn Grew is, among other things, a populist poem with quite a bit of direct political commentary. Kent Johnson, Ron Silliman, Eliot Weinberger, et al. are busy burbling about the political content of post-langpo blah blah blah.

My book has never been reviewed (nada, Nada).

Jordan, you are right, of course.

The barons are still in charge.

Maybe the difference is that I think social justice through democracy is possible.

Maybe you think so, too.

I am tired of pessimism that is too close to complacency; of conspiracy theories that are just lazy thinking; of resentments based on ignorance; of self-righteousness rooted in abstract utopianism.

The cultural divide in this country might be addressed by means of some hopeful self-criticism, rather than by self-pity & despair. That is, coasters on the left might share the goal of social justice with "Middle America", if they look beyond their own bogeymen (rabid fundamentalists & scheming plutocrats).

179] To the right worll the Governor Council & Assistants and the rest of
the generall Court now assembled (8) 7.1640.

The humble peticion of ZACHEUS GOULD of Lynne husbandman in behalfe of
himselfe and all other husbandmen of the Country

Showeth that whereas husbandry and tillage much concerne the good of this
Commonwealth and yor peticioners have undertaken the managing & tillage of
divers ffarmes in the Country & sowing of English corne their servants are
oftentimes drawne from their worke to trayne in seed time hay tyme &
harvest to the great discouragement & dammage of yor peticioner the said
Zacheus Gould for himself saith that for one days trayning this yeare he
was much damnnfyed in his hay. And fforsmuch as fishermen upon just
grounds are exempted from trayning because their trade is also for the
Common wealth, Yor peticioners humbly pray that this Court will be pleased
to take the premises into their grave Consideration and thereupon to give
order for the incouragement of yor peticioners who are husbandmen imployed
about English graine that they & their servants may be exempted from
ordinary traynings in seed time hay tyme & harvest And yor peticioners
shall as their duty bynds them pray &c.

No Jordan, you give ME an alternative analysis !

OK, democracy, this democracy, is nowhere near perfect.

So your alternative is to say : it doesn't matter, everyone will sink back into apathy anyway?

this is what I call cynicism. & your interpretation of it strikes me as standard left : the treadmill is created by repressive elites.

OK. it's not standard left. . .then what is it? If the alternative is not collective state control of the economy, what is your alternative?

how do you propose human beings live together? how should they establish government, if at all?

I, for my part, am in favor of Business; I'm in favor of Government; I'm in favor of Popular Sovereignty & the rule of enlightened public opinion (note the word enlightened); I'm in favor of protecting property rights as a cushion against tyranny, but not as an absolute right trumping the common good.

call it boring, OK. But your pessimism & cynicism have political consequences too. You run down the way things are, but when challenged, you get "bored".

All right I am done for today.

C'mon Jordan, I'm responding to what you said. & you were responding to me. When I said, in the context of talking about democracy, popular sovereignty, that I was interested in how Iraqis would judge the overthrow of Saddam,
you responded that they would feel like most people, falling back into treadmill of apathy (but maybe less of a treadmill than here in the US, because there "there isn't as much at stake to keep them controlled".)

I said that was too cynical, an example of jaundiced left thinking, which can't distinguish between government systems (or perhaps has an interest in blurring such distinctions). Yes, the left wants you to think that it's all capitalist repression & conspiracy coercion, because they have an interest in attacking private property as a right of the individual (see Papal encyclicals); the logical outcome is statism ala Stalin, Saddam's idol.

That's the "Jordan" I was responding to.

There's a treadmill. It's called life. But if it's across cultures, then the U.S. didn't create it.

Are you saying, Jordan, that because there's a general happiness/unhappiness curve, there's no difference between systems of government? I'd rather not live in North Korea right now, thanks. I'll take South.

The jaundiced left goes back to the Cold War. & to the Great Depression before that. Maybe we need to go back to the Progressive Era. Go visit Hull House in Chicago, & take heart.

re: the treadmill : you are too cynical, Jordan. there is a difference between a free society & a tyranny. this seems like the essence of what the jaundiced left does not comprehend.

No Jordan, I don't think democracy is a shell game for elites. We see what we want to see, & what strikes me now is just how much the left wants to see "bad".

As for democracy in this situation, I will be very interested to see how the majority of the Iraqi people feel about the overthrow of Saddam in a year or so.

Nor is domestic & global policy a completely seamless web of conspiracy, no matter how much this war is convenient for Bush, no matter how much I hate Bush domestic policy. This war was a gamble. Bush's "show your cards" remark was exactly appropriate to the current situation. US, Europe, Saddam, Middle East, Al Qaeda - all are being forced to show their hand. & this is a good thing in my opinion.

In the long span of time, US domination will be seen as a historical blip. The tragedy is the death of innocents, innocent civilians, innocent soldiers, anonymous small blips inside a horror. They will loom larger in the hearts of their families than any passing historico-political phenomena. But I hold Saddam accountable for this war. This war is the grand finale of his choices throughout his political career, beginning with the murder of his associates & relatives. & I believe that the political atmosphere after it's over will be far better for the Iraqi people - even if it begins with much bitterness toward the US.

from Grassblade Light:


31

Those flowerets burst forth and sheathe the axle
of the cherry tree. My gnomon-body spun
like a humming halcyon in a Sperry-
gyro wind to pinnacle - can Henry write it?

Only puffed and drifting, down toward the couch
of clay, shrouded, in April rain. Downward,
fluted. . . a rivulet, a sod
ocarina faucet, a floating pouch

full of raven-chalk. Staring into the blue
toward the far-off buzz - a copper ovenbird
or piepan violin - some Nahua brouhaha -
hovered and soared where time came through

a gap in the mountain - teeth bucked
down a ravine at a red moonlit sundog
- mirage shimmering deep - haggard
crux or suffering middle C caw caw

way way the wake of your black line looped
across both wings down the divide (Michal-
Melchizedek) as a melancholy, milky
melody for two palms groped

toward an octave - then contracted to
arpeggio one trilling escapade and
so solder together the broken
glittering continuum once more

where a black round stone springs open
and squares the garden with a living
Lazarus grassblade, quivering
in the cold. Thighbones, my darling

leached from the Santa Rosa Canyon
after 13,000 years - a J-cub's angle
written all over the chest of Guadalupe
lifted from the axis of the earth to say: the sun.

4.15.99

Have been reading lengthy entries on Islam in my old Enc. Britannica.

Curious analogies drifting through on coffee break. Poets up in arms over war. Muhammad (founder of Islam) like the ultimate "acknowledged legislator". Surahs of Q'uran came to him from Allah transmitted by angel Gabriel while he was in a sweat-trance. Analogy (very distant) to previous speculations here about poetry as epileptic response to crisis - main crisis being transition from adolescence to adulthood ("mystical wedding").

Analogies between Muhammad & David (poet-warrior) & prophets (bearers of God's Word) & Messiah. "a sword issued from his mouth". Islam emerging out of, & distinguishing itself from, Judaism & Christianity.

Monotheism as opposed to pagan polytheism. Like a lens in the desert coming into focus. How it becomes (in the prophetic word) a governing principle or gyroscopic mechanism. Governance of crisis & charismatic poetic "ejaculation". Governance. Mandelstam & Akhmatova on the counter-authority of poetry. Akhmatova & Stalin die on the same day (March 5th). (Dostoevsky both epileptic & prophetic.)

Epilepsy or charismatic possession. Power transferred to or emanating from divinity, rather than humanity. Religio = "binding". Black Stone of Mecca; black stone in Jerusalem where Abraham bound Isaac & where Muhammad ascended into heaven (leaving his footprint).

Meteoric stone carried in small covered "ark" on the back of a camel in pre-Islamic Arabia. Possible origin of tablets of the law in Ark of the Covenant. Theme of William Blackstone & the pebble-boomerang in Forth of July.

Henry & Bluejay in the garden behind Shakespeare's Head. Images of Gulf War & Presidency in Stubborn Grew.

Mandelstam:

"The poem is a stone fallen from heaven.
No one will judge it."

Adolescence and paternal authority. Song & Dionysius & panic. in the "bull's eye". (Blackstone & his white bull.)

Islam faced questions about human reason & autonomy from the beginning. The Sunni emphasis on peaceful consensus was in part a reaction against earlier developments; & the Wahhabite radical purism (akin to Qutb & Al Qaeda ideology) had its precursors from very early on. Dynamics internal to Islam.

William Blackstone, upon leaving his Boston home & going into Rhode Island: "I left England to get from under the power of the Lord Bishops, & here I am fallen into the hands of the ministers."

Roger Williams & "soul liberty".

. . . as the poems of Joe Ceravolo being one poem, being "Joe Ceravolo", the poem itself a variation on "Joe Ceravolo" standing still, being Joe Ceravolo, listening, the poem essentially a variation, or turn/trope/conceit, that is, of Joe Ceravolo turns a poem out of "Joe Ceravolo", which will always be Joe Ceravolo being always, a million years old, like stars in the sky, the complete Joe Ceravolo.

or Emily D. or Wally S. or Ariosto, so.

or Louise at the bakery.

duende.

the feeling you have sometimes of being a million years old.

fossil layers of memory in the limestone.

reading: Eric Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy
Sayyid Qtub, Milestones
(stopped reading Kwinter also)

thinking of novel to be called Chronicle of Jehan.

Thinking there must be more to be thought about origin of poetry at the threshold of adulthood, when childhood is already a memory, & fictions are subject to disenchantment. Moment of premonition. intimations of (im)mortality.

sense that the artist has one song, subject to endless variation. inimitable. not so much a style as a moment of stillness, awareness, premonition. not mechanical surrealism ("fancy"), but still off the edge because emerging from so far down in the brain or heart. hobo song. duende.

song as swelling of the heart & premonition of death. feeling of fate. amor fatum(?) nothing to be done, only celebrate what you sense to the end. Auden's inner landscape that every poet carries around.

ultimate disenchantment. time only a moment & every person a world. the singer standing there singing, while fictions crumble & dissolve.

Robert Frost (today his birthday) prophesies rap music in 1959, over at Laurable.

previous post reminded me of this old hg poem:


OLD SONG


"I want to stay -"
he cries, the willows
rattle and play and the voice
is carried far away downstream.

Downstream, in autumn,
the bums are coughing, and smoke
for the wisps that rise
and cool; they stay awhile.

They lie and cough,
the willows play, the sun
is red - rattle rattle
go away, go away.

The story is for winter
to forget, when woods are dark
and snow is lightest in the darkness
- and that light is deep.

Anastasios, I agree with you that there are powerful cultural & political forces on the Right in the US that employ, both consciously & unconsciously, forms of mythological thinking that overlap a kind of literal-magical sense of scriptural Christianity, with obedience to the state (in this case right-wing Republicans who manipulate those very mythologies).

On the other hand I don't agree with you that these forces simply "run" America, nor that they are uniform & merely simplistic in their attitudes themselves (I mean the fundamentalists). In a real sense the left-academic worldview is out of touch with religious AND political culture in the US, & suffers from mythologies of its own.

One of them being that Bush et al. (because they are capitalist fundamentalists) MUST have an evil plan for world domination, that we are simply repeating the Vietnam War in Iraq, that all the anti-war propaganda is the moral high ground, etc.etc.

It's a hopeless task trying to formulate the perfect political position, because perfection is actually getting away from it all, perfection is going into the mountains & fleeing the beehive & the anthill, perfection is becoming a hobo, perfection is returning to childhood, when you understood instinctively the surrounding nest & neighborhood, & the outside world (mediated by tales of adventure & images of rough reality) was only a dream you imagined, before you grew up & walked eyes closed toward your image of adventure.

My sense of poetry, I think, comes from this experience of a happy & boring & too-secure suburban childhood, which, while you still inhabited it, instilled in you (through fleeting images & fiction & stories) a thirst & a desire to go out into the rougher, wilder, more real world : and then your discovery a little later that fictions & representations were artificial creations too, that the "real world" was rougher & more chaotic & painful than those images of adventure had been. Then poetry made its appearance. & this is why Hart Crane's formulation of the Bridge symbol seems so apt to me - poetry encapsulates a surrender to wildness & the unknown WITHIN words. But not a total surrender - it's both a surrender & a report from that region, thus a bridging action. Poetry is impulsive speech, like a glossolalia, like a response to unbearable pressure - pressure too strong for the constructs of ideology or the plotted atmosphere & stage-craft of fiction.

So poetry is a kind of charismatic or epileptic or orgasmic response to the failure of artificial fictions of the world. This is an aspect of poetry that strikes me in poets like Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Mandelstam. Of course poetry has its Apollonian side too, the aspect of wit, harmony & intellectual elegance. But the Dionysian element is just as powerful, & it plays against prose of all kinds.

Among other effects, this is what underlies the appeal of really good descriptive poetry. You are getting a symbiosis of effects : Dionysian escape combined with the pure joy of questing into a larger landscape of the real world. Crane was right : the hobo has the key.

(p.s. I reckon the Taoist & Zen poets of East Asia knew something about this.)

. . . he says, sitting in judgement, parochial type that he is.

I don't believe in a man-made utopia; I don't lobby for The Way Things Are either. I just want to see more perception, more complexity, more specificity, more carefulness, more disinterested consideration. Less ideological jabbering & knee-jerk "critique" & sophomoric cardboard pettiness.

Jordan. . . I guess it's not the dream part that bothers me, it's the Dismantle. As I contemplate the dust storm of poetry list & blog political talk, I see mostly sterile, self-righteous, ignorant condemnations, by people who don't recognize or understand the values that sustain our own culture. It's a closed spiral of capitalism, globalism, militarism, Americanism, according to them : and they themselves are the flip side of the Rush Limbaugh US-right-or-wrong spouters. Both apply a utopian perfectionism in order to sit in judgement - one says America is always right, the other America is always wrong. It's a kind of rigid thinking. Unable to comprehend that politics is the art of the possible, and that we have to also look at societies laterally, comparatively, not just from a vertical superior position.

I'm part of a study group at my church. We're looking at Papal encyclicals on social life over the last 100 yrs or so. There are several consistent principles or themes over time, centering around the inherent dignity of the human being. Some of the economic principles struck me : such as the idea that labor & capital need each other, and need to find common ground; also the idea that the right to own property is a basic right & a social good, though it is a right that is qualified by the common good and by the responsibilities of stewardship. These are deep & pervasive global ideas, which the superficial anti-capitalist conspiracy mentality cannot understand.

Most of the so-called conscientious protest I read on the poetry sites strikes me as mental ignorance & complacency. It's a kind of glorying in marginality, and the irony is that those who spend their hours & years in fussy ressentiment, rather than doing something useful for themselves or their world, are the most parochial types of all.

They are like people under attack who close their eyes & hope the badness will go away, while shouting imprecations at their own defenders.

They are like people thundering "Wait! We know better! Dismantle this society & remake it according to my dreams!"

p.s. to first post of today (below):

Zaccheus' brother Jeremy left Massachusetts for Newport with Anne Hutchinson's group. His eldest son Thomas owned a small island in Narragansett Bay (still called "Gould Island"). For a few years Thomas Gould rented a parcel there to Roger Williams, for growing hay.

Jeremy returned to England in the 1660s or '70s, at the age of 90. He died in his hometown in Herefordshire (Hemel Hempstead, I think), and was buried under "John Gould's Oak".

another section from July:


10

Across the wide ms. River shedding dough
and papyrus and leaping from junk
to junk the lincoln logs nudge
through dislodged snow driftwood

and balsam leaves and patches
of wet birch scrolled by heartworms
glowing under the bark the storm-
blown shells of beaver's feverish scrap-

muddled shields this is the stripped
taiga icebreaking in early spring
not unlike what you glimpsed
through the frozen window pressed

against the glass across rays of evening
through the black oak limbs peace
of horizon after century and seeping century
of sleeping centurions a last bronze shell given

away like a gong, Grandpa for distant Florence
swaddled in the haze of Voronezh hills
as the cardinal heart of a wood-dove swells
under the wooden ribs under their rough-

riffled sheath or shield of Grandma's
steel-eyed span the bird like a grain
of wheat (hidden there in Grandad's
elevator beneath remorse of guards)

piano thread of Pushkin-pizzicato violins
at the end indeed given not for the dead
but for the living a small knot of dried
clover out of mortgaged left field

shared by forty fingers in quartet
(thundering from empty oildrum of
Caesar's steel band's josh rolled-out)
a stalwart convalescent sweet Q-root

2.7.2000

How to answer the theocrats.

A Christian perspective : God the creator provided humankind (made in God's image) with the capacity for self-governance, conscience, good will. Human will restored from corruption by the intervention of the Word of God (considered as beginning with call to Abraham). Origin of the "law & grace" distinction : when human good will is restored, need for patriarchal, authoritarian, punitive law fades away. Thus Isaiah says "I will write my laws on their own hearts", and the Psalmist describes how as he meditates on the Law in his mind it is sweeter than honey. Democracy has its roots in faith in human nature, & in governance (& self-governance) as a benign, inherent aspect of God-given creation.

Faith in human nature a reflection of understanding of divine nature (mercy, kindness, forgiveness, understanding, love).

Qutb's version of Islam (at least from the magazine summary : I want to look at his writings) seems to imagine a conqueror-God who installs his theocracy on earth. The attributes of this God are said to be compassionate & all-merciful, but the actions seem to reflect authoritarian control, a mistrust or belittling of his creatures, requiring strict & brutal punishments, and an all-seeing totalitarian eye, on the lookout for any non-conformity in thought or deed. "Freedom" in this context is freedom only to obey. But the notion of separation of church & state is predicated on the sense that, while the state & civil authorities may write laws for the protection of civil order, God's greatest spiritual gift is actually liberty of conscience - the capacity of the soul to think, judge, and act independently, as it sees fit. (Reason. Another name for the Holy Spirit is : the Truth.)

Unable to focus on poetry.

Forsythia budding against wall on Prospect St. outside Rochambeau House.

Fascinating NY Times mag article on Sayyid Qutb, Islamic thinker/revolutionary, influence on Al Qaeda et al. According to Qutb one of the roots of Western corruption is separation of religion & state. I live in Providence, home of "separation of church & state" (Roger Williams). Some of my Gould ancestors came here in 1630s, with Anne Hutchinson, driven out by Boston theocracy. Others were Quakers. Gr-gr-etc-grandpa Zaccheus Gould, expelled from his Massachusetts church for "harboring Indians & Quakers" (one was his nephew). When he was finally re-admitted, he sat in his pew with his back to the pulpit.