I suppose considerations on the nature of power could be applied to the literary scenes. If power results from free group consent & alliance, literary creation & response is more like freedom in essence. . . hence the inescapable, persistent disconnect between prestige & taste. . .

Arendt, unlike Gandhi, drew a line between love and politics; for Arendt, love was private, personal - inevitably tarnished in the political sphere, because there it becomes a spectacle of interests, rather than pure disinterested charity & adoration. . .

I haven't nearly done justice to the nuances of The Unconquerable World - questions of cooperative vs. coercive power, love & fear - the quotes from Hannah Arendt are wonderful in their own right -

"While violence can destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it. From this results the by no means infrequent political combination of force and powerlessness, an array of impotent forces that spend themselves often spectacularly and vehemently but in utter futility."

in 1969 she wrote: "the head-on clash between Russian tanks and the entirely nonviolent resistance of the Czechoslovak people is a textbook case of the confrontation between violence and power. . . To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power."

"Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities."

Curious to read about how the parallel-culture philosophy & concrete local activities of the Polish, Czech, Hungarian activists against Soviet domination in the 70s, paralleled the early-70s turn to grassroots neighborhood organizing by the left in the US.

Of course, constructive projects to address injustice, poverty & inequality through local organizing is what civil society is or should be all about. . . today. . . acting not to complain or condemn but to address suffering directly. . .

Antonio Savoradin writes:

I'll quote Christopher Hitchens: "It was on September 11 1683 that the
conquering armies of Islam were met, held, and thrown back at the gates of
Vienna."

Life Imitates Art dept.:


Watched TV last night. A thriller from 1998 called Enemy of the State, with Will Smith, Gene Hackman, Jon Voigt. Rogue NSA officials commandeer hi-tech intel technology to attack innocent bystander-witness. Gene Hackman is lone wolf ex-CIA guy who operated in Iran & Afghanistan. He & Smith (innocent bystander) turn the technology around & use it against their NSA enemies. Film's last words are spoken by a corrupt senator, who had previously supported vast invasive intelligence-gathering on behalf of national security. Now, after the incidents shown in the movie, he has reversed himself, supporting civil liberties & right to privacy. His last words go something like, "they are attacking us in our own homes".

At one point the ID card of Jon Voigt's character, the evil bad guy who manipulates the NSA intel technology, flashes on the screen : birth date, 9-11-40. I did a google search this morning, found a few mentions of this coincidence. But I wonder : perhaps Al-Qaeda actually chose the date 9-11 as a commentary on the film.

In Al Qaeda's eyes, the "state" in question is an infidel imperialist behemoth; the "rogue element" is not merely some bad guys who have manipulated the control system, but the state system in toto; and the plot, involving turning its spectacular intelligence technology against itself & displaying its impotence, is Al Qaeda's own mission.

(As Jonathan Schell brilliantly shows, however - quoting Hannah Arendt, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel, Gandhi & others - violence is not actually the foundation of power, but its opposite. Power is the outcome of group action based on mutual consent and cooperation for shared goals. Violence is more often a symptom of the lack of power than an expression of same. The fall of the Soviet empire is only the most spectacular recent example of the action of nonviolent power based in popular consent. As Schell quotes Michnik or (or Arendt?) somewhere: "the phrase nonviolent power is redundant". Al Qaeda may attack the symbols of Western dominance & oppression with violence, but they offer no alternative to western civil liberties, on which democratic politics are based.)

Watched Bowling For Columbine with my daughter last night. I know, I'm a little slow.

Talk about violence. . . had the feeling that Michael Moore never found the answer to his question (why so much gun violence in the USA?). I don't have the answer either, not yet anyway.

There were the beats & the langpos & the confessionals - now there's the jug band poets. Mike & I will have to put out a CD. We'll ask Jonathan to play the triangle.

Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World is extremely powerful. One of the best books I've read in decades.

If you want to know how nonviolent political mass action based on consent has been at the root of even supposedly violent revolutions through history, etc. If you want to know how Gandhi relates to (& differs from) Clausewitz & Mao etc. If you want to understand the nature of & relations between political movements, violence, nonviolence, satyagraha, insurgency, war, weapons of mass terror, etc. This book is superb, profound, superlative, great. It will enlighten & turn your head around.

into the grassland of innocent whispers. (from another olde poem, "Radial"):

                  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.

another little old one from Way Stations (may have sent this before). . .

                  Bees dance above closed lips;
  in the clear shadow of the oak
  wherever they turn their heads
  they follow the bright pattern.

   
                  Quietly, by the granite cistern
  under a crowded canopy of reds,
  in the cool wind a broken spoke
  sways whichever way it slips.

Approaching a 6-month leave of absence (my first in 25 years of 9 to 5, 49 wks/yr) during which, if all goes well, I can write to my heart's content. Rarely have I felt more scattered, enervated, uninspired. Hope I can pull myself together (like Vermont, in the Stevens poem).

Reading Jonathan Schell's book The Unconquerable World. Clausewitz, Gandhi, the changing history of war (total war & people's [guerrilla] wars), the history of global liberation movements, the future of peacemaking.

Extra busy at the Rock these days.

Reading the poem examples over at John Latta's Hotel (evidence for non-binary unpigeonholeability), thinking

there should be a poetics - a theory of poetry in the Wallace Stevens sense - capable of interpeting recent & contemporary literary history - under the aegis of a concept of poetry per se -

which transcends the politico-polemics of the subcultures -

both the modest/minor security of academic conservatism (finicky re-workings of traditional forms for mandarins in the wilderness)

and the bowdlerizing, vulgar blare of all these callow oppositionalists -

said poetics would go beyond particular notions, such as my remarks here recently about "dialogic" resurrection of past poetries - this is only part of the story - & would "explain" the relations between a beautiful, well-wrought, careful style, the sense of an addressee or audience, and the conceptual/aesthetic transformations made possible in the process of reception - based perhaps on an underlying notion of the synthesis of speech, language and beauty -

a more rigorous general poetics might create a context for closer attention to what a particular poet is trying to do - a frame for criticism rather than promotionals -

A thin layer of white on the garage roof next door this morning. Frost rhymes with rime.

Frost, antique farmer
becomes antic Lowell
unwell amid antiques

I've been thinking of snappy 2- and 3-word rejoinders to the edifice of Sillimanism:

Robert Frost

Wallace Stevens

Hart Crane

William Butler Yeats

John Berryman

Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Robert Frost (in Russia, meeting Akhmatova)

Joseph Brodsky

Anna Akhmatova

Les Murray (mustn't forget Australia)

Osip Mandelstam (vs. russkii-amerikanskii futurism)

Robert Frost

Busy here in the Rock today. Meanwhile, another simple old poem from Way Stations :

                                 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.

I'm not repeating myself, because I'm repeating what Prof. Hinkel said (quoting me).

Poetry is a resurrection game, an art of giving life to dead letters & blank pages. And of bringing the "mana" of past poetry and a past time back to life in the present. I was impressed by Philip Guston's assertion, at the height of abstract expressionism, that painting is an "impure art", that we live in images and are "ridden" by them. & also by the ways he continually re-worked & re-encountered both his Old Masters (Uccello, Piero della Francesca), and his own early imagery, & that of his contemporaries (Max Beckmann, Krazy Kat...).

The question of an innate American "disruptiveness" (opposition, resistance), which Gary & Josh have been discussing, should maybe be looked at in the context of a more fundamental dialogic principle, rooted in this encounter with the creative emblems of another, earlier time & place. When a poet brings artistic "resolution" to his or her own time - within their poetry - this achievement sets up a dynamic of echo/response in the present, for poets now.

I see Ron S. has mounted another defense of his heroique historie of anti-School-of-Quietude Americana.

Last year I started this blog with a critique of the oppositional mentality.

Ron believes there is a reactionary-establishmentarian cabal which is holding back & resisting the triumph of oppositional poetries.

My idea as mumbled here last year was, that "oppositionalism" in the poetry world is a mental prison-house more fearsomely fortified with dulness & blinkered thinking than anything a supposed cabal could come up with.

The enemies of poetry : dullness, boredom, hypocrisy, fakery, lack of talent, lack of inspiration. Neither the redoubtable resources of these enemies, nor the forces that poetry arrays against them, have anything much to do with institutions or bureaucracies of supposed progress or reaction. To turn poetry into an illusory rivalry of factions is the best way to render it too petty and negligible for any serious public (or private) purposes.

Talent and dedication and sensibility will come to the fore in the arts, on their own merits and by their own efforts. No program or critique will ever keep up with them.

Happy New Year, everyone. Happy Birthday, HGpoetics.

Went into NY last Friday to see the Philip Guston retrospective. Happy me.

This little blog will be 1 year old on Jan. 4th. I'll be away until Jan. 5th, so y'all come on back around then, hear?

Have been flued out for some time. Advantages of illness : wrote my first children's story. People have been telling me to do that for years. Look out, Madonna.

Rumor has it the Schooner of Quietude will try for a comeback next year. A flotilla of iamboids was sighted off Chesapeake Bay last week. Word circulating (anonymous Topper) a sonnet mole has penetrated Buffalo. Gangs of Strong Monsieurs heckling Lang Pos reported in San Jose, of all places. Peace, O my people.

Live it up & party down (cough, cough) - Happy New Year, where'er ye be!

Still bugged out with bad virus. No whiskified egg nog for me, thanks [sigh].

Watched PBS magical-mystical program last night on origin of 3 Kings. Magi may have been Zoroastrian astrologers from Babylon & environs. On April 17, BC 6, there was an eclipse of Jupiter by the moon in the constellation of the Ram (which signified Israel). Gold : royalty; frankincense : holiness, priesthood; myrrh : death & burial. Lo & behold, there on the program as one of the commentators was William Dalrymple, whose book I mentioned here a few days ago (From the Holy Mountain).

Here's a very old HG poem :

Proverbial


 
I give you the parables as I received them -
my mother's voice, the nursery rhymes,
the memorized rhetoric and the anthem
leading us like sheep to death sometimes.

 
The mystery ringing in our ears,
the noise of the cultivated howl
of ubiquitous unknown lusts and fears,
the music of monkey, wolf and owl.

 
In silence before music and the word,
a voice already prepared to save
delivers you into a pastoral world,
out of the dank and bestial cave.

 
A cadence I cannot repeat just right -
the pristine choir of many morning birds,
or the patience of children in the dancing light
performing the ritual of careful words.

Looking around at home, I found these curious precursors of the long river-poem (Forth of July). Sections of a poem called "Octaves":

4

 
Is it the sea or is it a voice,
or is it a sea-voice (rocked
by heartbeats long ago docked
in petrified wave-lengths, ice-

 
water)?  Or the wind in a tree.
That one, rising like a broken delta.
Speaks through me.
Rafted away now...  Huckleberry.  Selah

 
6

 
Mississippi, Mississippi...
Gravel and silt slide down the stream. 
Mississippi, Mississippi...
Spell it out, spell out your dream.

 
Why should I spell it out for you
(New York - D.C. - California)?
I hit the road before you do.
(Minnesota...  Alabama...)

& finally, here's an couple of odd (as usual) bits of something for the day, from The Grassblade Light:

21

 
The snow covered the ground like the shoulders
of his white bull, only colder, colder; he saw a cloud
of ice breath, chill between warm heartbeats.  Old
Blackstone, in clear December light, ponders, ponders.

 
Some penetrating sound, a loon-call through the aether,
or... some answer to a riddle, rectifying denouement,
perfect solution... some snow-crystalline all right,
like the moon sailing across deep soothing black... or...

 
Good King Wenceslas looked out
on the feast of Stephen
when the snow lay round about
deep and fresh and even

 
High clear children's voices above the dark
tops of pine trees, as they make their way
through snow from house to house.  Gradually,
slowly, peacefully (in the cold night).  Hark

 
the herald angels sing...  He looked out toward the mangers
of the world.  There... on the outside of the inns...
in the cold, among animals, straw, the thin
coverings, the sparse walls... the hungers, the dangers.

 
And like Balthasar astride his mule (riding west
and staring east) old Blackstone thought:
what One is this? - as, bright-wrought,
an arc of moonlight moored above that nest

 
(a lowly nef, berthed under a lofty shell).
An airship, or some hovering bell... it shed
a sweet, translucent music overhead.  And
music changes everything (as Wenceslas could tell).

                       
                     12.24.98





 
22

 
In December, in the snow, in the clear cold air,
everything grows double, everything is allegorical,
like those distant crows, high over the Bruegel
valley, and the hunters turning home, bare

 
bodkins, empty-handed; a half-moon, small
and delicate, glows through a haze,
and the stiletto of one star beside it says:
behold tight-woven final acts of good and evil

 
here now passing... upon theatrical soil.
Here simplest things are full of profundity:
hungry wayfarers, winecellars of reality...
gypsies, flocks, shepherds... an angel.

 
Meanwhile, under the dome, the black stone
of Isaac waits.  And gathering specific gravity,
to the city - through Stephen's Gate - comes Jubilee,
like spring streams down from Zechariah's canyon.

 
And he will stage these holograms of Incarnation
(strange attractors, gathering wise men toward one
star's dark matter)... cask them, roll them on board,
until the ark of Wenceslas is full, and Stephen's crown

 
goes round again, millennial - in those meadows 
where Time does not run down, but circles...
where May Goulding conceived, and Stephen's bulls
are papal, Romany... where Blackstone throws

 
his final boomerang : a child is born,
and everything is changed.  Come down,
you shepherds, to the manger now, come down,
behold - how God is cradling Isaac like a son.

                         
               12.24.98

Wishing you holiday cheer & lights - *

HG down with respiratory bug past few days.

reading My Name Is Red, by Orhan Pamuk. I like his style, have read most of his novels.

also immersed in tomes from library about medieval Aleppo & Islamic history. Aleppo, I love that name. Comes from arabic word for "milk"; legend has it Abraham stopped there on his way from Ur, & offered goat's milk to his neighbors. Many ancient shrines to Abraham in the area.

"That in Aleppo Once..." - short story by Nabokov. (A quote from finale of Othello.) Birthday of Nabokov & Shakespeare : April 23rd, St. George's Day. Patron saint of Russia & England. St. George a curious mythical figure : related in Islamic culture to the mysterious saint Al-Khidr, or "Green" : figure of strength & vitality, spring fertility (St. George & the Dragon). Shrines to Al-Khidr in Aleppo too.

"Milk", MLK, Melchizedek, Melchior. . . a motif in my poetry (Island Road, Stubborn etc.).

Happy solstice. It starts to get lighter today. (Just so you know. Prof. Hinkel told me.)

& speaking of heaven, I just finished Wm. Dalrymple's travel book, From the Holy Mountain (Owl Bks, 1997). He retraces the steps of 6th century peripatetic Byzantine monk named John Moschos, who kept a journal of his own (The Spiritual Meadow). Dalrymple's book is a remarkably vivid 1st-hand report on the fading (or maybe surviving - some of these hermit monks are amazingly resilient) remnants of various strands of ancient eastern Christianity still hanging on in monasteries scattered through Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel & Egypt. A unique lens on the Middle East.

Mairead Byrne's blog Heaven has been added to my list of links, which is hardly universal & rarely used by me. But I noticed over at the Buffalo poetics pen (where there's a "Keep Henry Out" sign) that she felt left out of the blogland link whirl. So there you are, Mairead. Merry Christmas, ho ho ho, from the highly-networked blog-Santa club.

It's been a quiet day in blogland, but I couldn't resist furthering the knowledge and love of cheese among poets & poetry/cheese lovers everywhere, with this quote from today's AP wire services, courtesy NY Times:

Back in Connecticut at the Abbey of Regina Laudis, 
nuns raise sheep, work the fields and sing Gregorian chants 
eight times a day. Marcellino, who is also an accomplished 
vocalist, was assigned to make cheese. The scientific interest 
came later.

 
In the 1990s, Marcellino won a Fulbright scholarship 
to study in France. She eventually spent four years 
here studying cheese fungus, going from farm to farm 
collecting samples. Her fame grew, and she was profiled 
in a documentary that coined her nickname: ``The Cheese Nun.''

The complete article can be found at the Times site (for which you might have to register), here.

Jordan keeping up on cheese situation. There appears to have been a drop in interest in cheese poetics of late, both here and in Limburg. I attribute this to the recent focus on V-neck sweaters (I mean in the archival sense, of course : the V-shape being an ancient symbol of many things, including early "holding & lifting" tools, such as the Akkadian steamshovel). Prof. Hinkel's recent study, Molten Hermeneutics : Melted Cheese Metaphors in the Life & Work of Amalia Lamia (Left Overbie Univ. Press, 2004) should bring the recent dropsic malaise or aphasic lassitude in cheese poetics to an abrupt (top-broiled) end. Happy Holidays, Prof. Hinkel!

Mike & Jonathan continue good dialogue on fiction/poetry and the relative merits of Yeats & Milton.

Seems to me that Mike's demurrals might apply more aptly to the whole late Romantic/Symbolist poetic ethos, of which Yeats is probably the best exemplar. That is, the supposed weaknesses he sees in Yeats are representative of a larger phenomenon.

The advent of fiction signalled a split between poetry & prose. It's no accident that "Romanticism" referred originally to a return to medieval poetic romances which were analyzed, parodied, mourned & mocked in the greatest "modern" novel, Don Quixote.

Cervantes inaugurated the role of novel as analytical instrument, and with the progress of the social novel, marginalized poets began to see a parallel between the disenchantment of life brought on by science & industrialization and the dominance of "prosaic" values in literature. In a manner somewhat comparable to the development of abstraction in painting, poets began to emphasize their social role as avatars of pure imagination. The fact that, as Mike mentions, Milton had finally to choose between scriptural revelation and the book of nature for a "true" poetic representation of cosmic reality anticipates the Romantic attitude.

The core of the Romantic argument was, that prosaic, analytical description, whether in literature or science, actually fails as mimesis, is somehow untrue to the Real, because dull prose could never represent the ecstatic, mystical wholeness & beauty of Creation : only the inspired imagination could foster the images of innocence, sympathy, synthesis & unity, worthy of that ultimate reality.

Yeats' fascination with George Berkeley (the Irish idealist philosopher), and with the effect of imaginative symbols, are attributes of the "classic" Romantic stance. The Romantic poet registers a protest against the falsity of objective description : "we murder to dissect". This is fundamentally a religious attitude, which asserts the sacredness of reality against the profanation of (a scientific-Faustian) detached objectivity. & in my view this confrontation between poetic imagination and "objectivity", between prose & poetry, is not yet completely played out. Some of Wallace Stevens' gnomic aphorisms (about the "poetry of reality") still speak very tellingly to this issue.

I


 
LOCKE sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
Out of his side.


 
II


 
Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium’s mouth.
Out of nothing it came,
Out of the forest loam,
Out of dark night where lay
The crowns of Nineveh.

On Saturday morning I had an odd premonition, thinking "They're going to find Saddam before Christmas." Turns out they were finding him at the time.

Here's some semi-doggerel formality, from Way Stations, on the general theme of falling kings:

         Ballade Royale


  
         "The enemy is seething at the gates
 and all our stratagems so sorely tried
 have surely failed, and rebels – ingrates! –
 spit at us, and slink away, deep-dyed
 in treachery."  So courtiers sighed
 and muttered dreadful news, in sheer
 despair.  The king was full of foolish pride.
 All eyes filled with dismay – each heart with fear.

  
         "Let's go unto the king – it's not too late,
 perhaps..."  So down stone corridors they glide
 sharing the doom-filled business of the state,
 to find their king... lolling, side by side
 with his luxurious and mocking bride.
 His eyes feign drowsiness as they draw near.
 He snores – or mumbles something crass and snide.
 All eyes filled with dismay – each heart with fear.

  
         The great king disentangled from his mate
 and leaning on one elbow hoarsely cried –
 "Bring me my harp, O cowards that I hate!"
 The instrument appeared.  His fingers plied,
 and with his long arm's curve struck, chord
 on chord, such harmonies! – so sweet, so clear,
 his servants melted... floated on a cloud...
 All eyes filled with dismay – each heart with fear.

  
         "Miserable souls – your anguish I deride!
 When I am gone to rest – upon my bier –
 you'll curse your God I ever lived – or died!"
 All eyes filled with dismay – each heart with fear.