13

 
The jungle was a mutiny of limbs.
He couldn't tell his fingers from the worms.
Each hypertrope's unctuous display deformed
itself incorporating prey.  Screams

 
magnified muteness.  Death was comedy.
He vowed - distended in extremity -
if I return once more to the limpid city
of the living... he would renounce all vanity :

 
habits of monkeys, haughty beastliness,
stubborn querulous gaudy fraudulence,
the bent for quarreling, the indolence,
the time's idolatries... the tide's excess.

 
The jaguar (half animal, half jungle) (or
its spotted shadow) listened.  A chrysalis
hung from an almond tree : a pendulous
appendage (cicada, drowsy bugler).

 
Fevered, his father seemed oaken volume,
valid redeemer; his mother, the almond tree;
and a wind (where there was none) breezed
his crown with their features, like a pendulum

 
of heart-beats.  Bored, then, jaguar padded off.
The former president was bloated cask.
Ground smooth, grown fretted basilisk
of weedy breath.  The planet was enough,

 
he seemed to be chanting, over, over and over.
As if the jaguar and he had parceled out
the river in a double game of go - absolute
checkmate.  And he wore a crown of jungle clover.

Read-along-with-Rest Note :

Poem # 2 :

I'm sort of worn out today (stayed up too late). So comments brief. A way to think about Rest Note structure : it's built on the most basic form of design, simple variation, back-&-forth, turning & returning. Software binaries : 1/0/1/0... a/b/a/b/a... night/day/night/day... That's the first level. The second is : return, recursion, reflection : a to b and back to a. It's in the rhyme-stanza scheme (ABBA). The third level : such returns or recursions are expansive, or exponential : a/b/a, A/B/A, A/B/A... in other words, the ring structures are reflected up from the smallest to the largest units.

There's a thematic aspect to this shuttling back & forth - but maybe I'll get into that another time. With respect to poem # 2, the variation goes from the 3rd person description of poem #1, to the 1st person soliloquy of poem #2. It's TR, feverish, in the jungle, addressing his wife, Edith, back in the USA.

2. (epigraph) : "In Xanadu", etc. - from Coleridge's famous dream-poem, which his companions said TR was muttering obsessively, over & over, during his fever-delirium.

2.1 : pretty clear... "pinhole star-swarm" - glance back at the camera obscura of #1. TR is also Lazarus.

2.2-3 - Again, see Candice Millard's book River of Doubt for insight on the eco-biology of rainforest. "my demise... undo myself" - echoes of Shakespeare's Richard II. Shakespeare's Richard is something of a narcissist as well as sacred king (ie. something of a poet). Mixing here the "hero" representative figurings - TR, Richard, Lazarus, poet. (Selva oscura.) Chaucer was a courtier in Richard's reign. Setting up relations between these figures.

2.4 : center stanza establishes image of arch-swing-tree for first time, on its smallest scale (the inch worm). So the imagery, in spreading & growing, will echo, to some extent (improvisationally) the structure of the poem as previously described. & eventually (hopefully) images & structure will fold into certain ideas or themes.

2.5-7 : TR's expressions of discouragement & despair. Part of the same alternating variation : thus the hopeful image of the inchworm (a "little little worm" - cf. Richard's "little little grave") is shrouded in gloom. And the tone of #2 - rather hopeless - contrasts with the tones of the adjacent sections (#1 - sort of apprehensive, wary; #3 - more hopeful, forward-looking).

12


 
I heard some crickets planted here and there
in a wayside meadow.  Lying on my back
in the shade of an iron pier, where tracks
of the Soo Line leapt a moody river.


 
You might recall, too.  I start to remember
something familiar (half-gone memory)
whenever I notice the crickets' skree, skree.
It penetrates, easily, adamant layers


 
of daydreams (vague, swollen, viscous, slow).
So time attempts a mask of gravity,
unsheathes its blade : mirrored peripety
(grave) revolving to a tune the crickets know.

                                               
                 *


 
The echo of the railroad's ruthlessness
blends like thunder into thirsty plains.
An overarching, regal blue remains -
an edict in the heart (its hollowness).


 
Relinquish them (the pride, the contumely)
the way a peevish king divests his crown.
Yon imperturbable (unplumbed, unknown)
shuffles the weights, invents a remedy.


 
And the wind trestles the urgent stream.
And the formidable iron swingset
restates its formula, in triplicate :
back, forth, back, forth (life, dream).

Read-along-with-Rest Note:

Poem #1:

The combined imagery of this section puts springtime, birdsong, "Lazarus" coming out of grave, and Teddy Roosevelt in the jungle on parallel tracks, in a sense. Here are some notes by individual stanzas:

1.1 - "An April day" - allusion to opening of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales ("When that Aprill..."). We are starting out; we are going on a journey.
"in camera obscura" - Lazarus in the crypt compared to the inverted shadow-box (with its pinhole of light) of the proto-photo camera.
- "Clay lips" : birdsong reminds Lazarus-poet of living speech ("infant words"). Phrase is an allusion to Stubborn Grew's opening line ("Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay"). We are going to reflect back on that (lost?) epic poem.

1.2 - "woodwork" : a synthesis of birds in the woods, poetic "wordwork", and (proleptically) toward TR in Amazon forest.
- "gleam... trumpets" : sort of a synaesthesia - Lazarus sees the pinhole of light in his crypt as a gleam - like a trumpet-call. But distorted, off-key - as if a "parallax" (light bent through water).

1.3 - "the spring breeze shifts" : sort of a self-reflexive mirror-moment, here. "the breeze" is the poetic afflatus itself, shifting as the poem shifts (rhetorically) from stanza to stanza : the shifting is like the shuttling or theme & variation of weaving. So the light is sound, the birds are trumpets, the trumpet shape is a tree-shape, the word is wood. Lazarus - wound in a banderole - is "rewinding" (as in a "winding horn").
- "banderole" - a kind of cloth used in medieval depictions of Christ, saints & emperors - it was a formal border between the visible and the invisible, between the earthly and the heavenly realm.

1.4 - "it was... sighs". Here begins play on notions of poetry's reflexivity as self-enclosed solipsism, narcissism, self-destruction.
- "But the President...tribe" : - the previous countered immediately by a political-epic problem, the "lost President". 1st of series of representations of Teddy Roosevelt's famous, excruciating, near-fatal expedition on "River of Doubt" in Brazilian Amazon. Poet-Laz's self-doubts echo here. Also I'm returning to river themes of Stubborn Grew & its sequels (Mississippi, in that case).
- "his doubtful wish" - Hamlet, narcissism, death-wish in this & next lines.

1.5 - "devoutly" : ie. Hamlet's soliloquy ("devoutly to be wished"). This stanza represents TR's feverish state. "Scavenging insects... pity" : malignant, competitive jungle ecology (cf. Candice Millard's book River of Doubt) compared to poet's situation.

1.6 - "jaguar" : brute power of nature, reality. "Flags..." - ironic allusion to line in Hart Crane's "Repose of Rivers". On emerging from jungle to meet his rescuers on April 26th, TR saw American flag flying. Crane died on this date 20 yrs later.

1.7 - the melodramatic "action" of this section is shaken off by "Lazarus's" own "shift", his physical re-action. He is waking up. "Turtle-dove..." : almost every longish poem opens with an invocation...

Chris Murray alerts me to interesting Dale Smith essay & discussion in Jacket 30. Will want to read this. I got a lot out of an earlier book by Jeffrey Walker, Bardic ethos and the American epic poem.

I agree pretty much with Mark Halliday (in his review in Pleiades), when he says that every good poem can be paraphrased. As long as you admit that there's always a better, deeper reading down the line : the one even the poets themselves missed. "The builders builded better than they knew."

Thinking of Wallace Stevens' letters (they might have been emails) where he explicates every stanza. So I might try to do something like that with Rest Note. Read along with me (follow the bouncing ball).

11

 
June in the jungle, rain upon the ruins,
sweeping across, doubling back.  Two lines
of riverbanks, but only a single line
for the racehorses, where the race begins

 
and ends.  A bugle set the broncos off.
Sweet gold upstream whets the appetite;
well-wrought, remote, plucked at night
from piranha beds : a treasure-trove.

 
A Hawkwood hosted in the King's own house
is the result.  Rain falls on the mercenaries,
merciless, on the just, unjust : last
evenings tremble on the lips of stars.

 
The forest makes a melancholy lithograph,
sandstone and muddy sentences, the river's
drone.  A cataract in the center wears
down a blind whorl : each palm's a cenotaph.

 
Tangled knolls (the gardener's long gone).
A shrouded cloudbank between earth and sky
stippled with fool's gold for the jubilee.
Holy steeps (lightheaded Magdalen).

 
Between the prudent and the prodigal,
prodigious perspicacity in the minstrel -
in the duck-blind, hunting through hell
with a pilgrim bell (sings well, after all!).

 
Such were snortings that the jaguar heard.
Sortilege, for some, some summer eve.
Yet the lantern swung in the wind, a sieve
for fireflies; the jungle reckoned every word. 

REST NOTE : AN EXPLANICATION (1)

Because it's a quiet day at the library (students gone). Because it's not easy to read (this poem). Because only 12 people a month visit this blog any more - most of them from Mars (because I've lost interest in febrile wrangling?).

Why am I writing this poem, which is so recalcitrant? The sameness of structure & syntax - the vagueness of reference...

Well, I'm just getting into it, myself. But with every step I have to try to increase the resistance.

Who are these people - Lazarus, Hobo, Edith, Teddy Roosevelt? Figures, I guess, representing renewal. Renewal in a sort of all-encompassing sense. Renewal as a concept.

Art, well, it seems to be self-reflexive, if that's the right term. Folds back on itself, renews & extends itself through echo-effects. Implication.

So a poetry will try to renew itself by writing about renewal. Lazarus will sing himself out of the grave. With help.

This basic image (Lazarus) is meant to represent aspects of reality in general. "Lazarus", in a sense, puts a person - a particular image of the person - near the center of one's imaginative image of (cosmic) order.

& philosophical consequences result from that ordering choice. What they are I am only beginning to be able to articulate & defend.

*

Besides - does the poem so far really exhibit sameness, etc.? Well, maybe so... I seem to have a taste, a habit, an appetite, for the sound of it - at least for my own way of sounding. Maybe no one else hears it that way.

But, as mentioned, I want to make things difficult for myself, to find the resistance (which is related to reflexivity). So the aim would be to move toward a betterment of style. In some ways the serial mode helps allow for that possibility, along with many more negative outcomes (logorrhea, graphomania...). ("...he that of repetition is most master.")

That's part of the aim, & part of the difficulty. As one can tell from the nervous blur of the openings of Rest Note, I'm anxious about it. I've had too many false starts, & too much resistance (in myself & my life) toward writing anything at all.

OK, now I've probably gone & jinxed myself.

I realize the majority of people & literate bloggos are not up for reading my obscure poem-in-progress online. Just bleep over it, friends. The daily post helps me keep track of it. Sort of an archive. Maybe I'll set up an extra blog for Rest Note, eventually.

The restless Rest Note keeps a-tumbling on. There's kind of a plan, sort of a pattern...

10

 
The wave of a smile curves around a cup
of tea, or stony rooftop in Byzantium.
The figure of refreshment is the same:
a logic of enchantment, welling up

 
to flight.  And where the oscillating stream
unrolls its mesmerizing equilibrium,
and where the venerable broken limb
crosses the field of vision with a beam

 
of motionlessness... there, in wilderness,
a path begins.  We found ourselves in jungle
as in a vagrant viper's glose.  Angel
or jaguar, Eve or Jonah in distress –

 
a riddle curled nine times around the brain
which left us haunted at the boundary, or
hunted in the deep – mocked in our quandary
by monkeys in a tree (paean to pain).

 
I'll be buried in the King's highway,
mumbled the President.  He tore his robes
on thorns.  In spite of everything, the globe's
my home (he muttered on) – another day.

 
The tragic dénouement was understood,
foretold from the beginning.  Son, my son.
"For joy they set out then, self-knowledge won
and Eden, lost and found again, for blood."

 
This was a span that spun itself, around
the fire, tiers lofting sharply side to side,
behind the dark – a little brook of tidings
riveting those pilgrims (lost, star-bound).

                            
                *

 
... and over the vapid, frozen void.
Unexpected extremities arose
for arrant voyagers – harsh lozenges,
alien cones – acres of celluloid

 
cindered to the stump.  Lucky Lincoln
had a major war, he groaned in green;
here, all I can afford are byzantine
piss-ants, Brazilian mosquito drone.

 
Edith... cat-scent cut him short.
Janus-face of the forest, grim balance
of forces.  Azure echoes?  Second chances?
Primitive injustice (quick unnatural dart).

 
Sounds... resound.  Keep looking, looking,
drooping (droppings show).  The way.  Humble
servant : your hand : knotty, Sheba rumbles,
from far; abstracted, you will find him – wakeful,

 
seeking, near at.  Zee.  Not far behind –
ahead.  You hear the sound of it – a wash,
awash, a waterfall.  And we are there, by gosh.
We made it – we, the deaf, the blind.

 
They'll tot him up someday.  The bravo rings,
the smoke, marvels.  Kid Saturn in underwear
– so saturnine (behind the curtain there,
in Oz).  Antiphonal, just balancing.

 
As a single star, unmoving, at the crown,
sheds a blue light, encompassing;  as a union
of two sets foot, revolving, toward a sun;
as the tale spun, as a voice began.

Odd how this stanza from #7 (posted 5/29) parallels, somewhat, some of Ron Silliman's recent comments on Olson (the Olsonian portentous innards, mustachio'd).

Begin, then, with the perilous retort
of speechless limbs.  What marks the man
from the also-ran.  The game in Yucatan,
the racing heart – iris of the jungle (smart).

More from Rest Note. Don't ask me what I'm doing. "Edith" refers to the wife of TR, among others.

9

 
Raindrops curve in their multitudes across
the windowpane.  And on the retina,
the image of your tears.  Camera obscura,
lonely room, long watch – the crumbling moss

 
of manuscripts.  Lazarus almost
turns back (dragged by iron ball, silence).
Heavy toes tromp gaily toward an intense
yet empty canyon (some coyote jest).

 
There are lead mines in the Amazon.  Teddy
resolved to be a bear for bravery.
It was not El Dorado, but compunctions
of the scullery, upwelled his sanguine eye.

 
Horse-sense, in a sense.  The jockeying
knights joculant.  A chivalrous dominion.
Character, my son, my son!  Spent millions
magnify the milling around a ring

 
of blue spontaneous corncobs (in Kentucky).
Hobo remembers, Lazarus too renumbers:
the squads of backs of letters, the gang members
along a tarred and faltering highway.

 
Someone swings a scythe, opulent shadow.
Draconian sway – the way a chameleon
mimics a lemon (soft – a round someone
in the sweep of your eye, under a windrow).

 
I'm freezing, Edith, in this fever place.
The stars don't go together, and the mail
is slow.  Just wave your arm, smile.
Be a nine, San Juan.  Draw tight your trace. 

David Hess back, with some intelligent, informed readings.

For me, though, there is an element of literary demagoguery, or journalistic opportunism, in the constant harping on catastrophe.

There is suffering, there is injustice, there is cultural dessication, there is, yes, moral catastophe. So look for solutions, answers - don't just sit there moaning & piling dust on your brow.

I suppose that's what they told Jeremiah, too.

Reminder (tomorrow night) :

CORNELIA STREET CAFE 
June 7, Wednesday, 6-8 pm. 

 
INTERCULTURAL POETRY SERIES 
hosted by Andrey Gritsman (www.interpoezia.net)  

 
AN OSIP MANDELSTAM CELEBRATION
Celebrate the release of an anthology of translations of 
Mandelstam edited by Ilya Bernstein for Ugly Duckling Presse.  
 
(http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org) 

 
Come hear translations of the Russian twentieth-century
poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) read by many translators. 

 
Cornelia Street, off Bleecker (in NYC) 
(www.corneliastreetcafe.com) 

Enjoyed Mark Halliday's review of Helen Vendler book in Pleiades. He's got a light touch & a logical mind.

Also the M. Theune essay on poetic structure & "the turn". However, his point seemed rather feebly argued. Theune is onto something : but if he's going to talk about structure vs. current notions of (surface) "form", he needs a broader range of evidence. The "turn" is just one aspect, I would think.

Have been dealing with family repercussions this week. Someday perhaps I'll write something more considered about John Tagliabue. Hard to maintain "critical distance" in this case.

A few days ago (before he died) I was digging around my books, looking for something, & came upon an edition of Pound's translations from the Confucian anthology (early classic Chinese lyrics), which I hadn't remembered, or ever looked into. Then I noticed it was inscribed, from John, for me.

One of the last things he said was, "If you're looking for me, you'll find me in my poems." This was an allusion to Whitman's Song of Myself ("look for me under your bootsoles").

American poet John Tagliabue passed away yesterday, on Walt Whitman's birthday.

Tagliabue learned much from Whitman, but he took what he learned and went far beyond, into the world and into his own singing world. In fact it would be more accurate to say that he, like Whitman, was inspired by a certain very pure note of spiritual joy.

You would have to go back to the Psalmist for a real comparison. This is not saying too much. Tagliabue's theme was life itself, and all it contains - time, space, suffering, love, joy, beauty & grace, freedom. From the beginning - from his earliest poems from the '40s & '50s - he discovered that in affirmation - in singing a resounding yes to experience - through the artful yes of poetry - his affirmation is doubled, is magnified, redounds on itself, finds its own balance, symmetry and grace. His fellowship is with Blake, Whitman, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Shakespeare, St. Francis, Marianne Moore, & all the Chinese & Japanese poets he knew & loved... (I hope & expect he is with them right now).

He was born in 1923, in Cantu, a northern Italian town near Lake Como. His first language was Italian; he & his mother rejoined his father a few years later in Jersey City, where his father worked as a chauffeur & eventually ran a restaurant. (Tagliabue later attended Columbia, where he was a student of Mark van Doren.)

I point this out in order to emphasize that there was, in this American poet, something very ancient, a kind of spiritual hilarity. From an early age, Tagliabue was always dancing : his first ambition was to be a ballet dancer. I remember him in his late 60s, prancing around the room to some Indian ragas with his delighted grandchildren. Tagliabue most likely would have felt right at home with those serene, smiling people who emerge from the Etruscan sculpture of his native region. The sweet hilarity & refined exhaltation of his poems is infectious - that is their purpose. He was devoted every day of his life to praise.

In a land obsessed with physical sports (his cousin Paul, by the way, was commissioner of the NFL), this spiritual athlete, with his Italo-Chaplinesque quirks & laughter - with his daily devotion to poetry, meditation & correspondence - was the best of all.

"The giant race of American poets between the two world wars agreed that the great, the permanent, subject of poetry is the ennobling transformation of common existence by the imagination. Their axiom was old enough, in a sense, for they believed also that wherever art rises beyond the motives of religion, politics and vanity, it accomplishes the great purpose."

- Irvin Ehrenpreis, in a review of Donald Justice & others, published anonymously in TLS # 3760 (March 30, 1974). Quoted in Certain Solitudes : on the poetry of Donald Justice (Univ. of AK Press, 1997).

(This seems to me like one of the best, most accurate formulations of "what it's all about" I've ever come across. Even though it reminds me that my own poetry, most of the time, is a murky obscure mixture of religion, politics & vanity - my own private Amazon jungle.)

p.s. Happy Birthday, Walt.

8

     
                             for John Tagliabue

 
Hobo drifts through rusted railroad world.
His tongue rasps out the iron flavor
of refusals, privy contretemps.  Over
cautious caravans, his pet raven hurls

 
exacting retribution - narrow gauge
thrown down to a thin red line of lips.
That curved plum of silence, where ships
descend... the promise of their tutelage

 
a concord at the vanishing point.  Stout keys
of shared reality.  Not disenchantment,
now, but hopefulness - ninefold reconcilement
(sweet reunions, recognition's ecstasies).

                    
                   *

 
Edith, I slept across the roots of the jade tree,
hopelessly.  Above me, the driftwood
(strung from slow parallels) rocked quietly,
back, forth... drawing a pattern (see-

 
saw) out of suspended gravity.
It was the inclusive arch, spread tenderly
between obdurate stones, above the turmoil
of indifferent waves.  A lambency

 
of recursions, curled toward equanimity;
an almond shadow-lens (cornerstone
of coronations) twirled into one
untutored sport - light spirit-ditty. 

I went to visit the poet John Tagliabue in the hospital today. He's my ex-father-in-law, my children's grandfather. He dedicated his collected poems to them, along with his wife & daughters.

He's dying of cancer, in a great deal of pain. Tomorrow (probably) he goes into a "hospice" room in the hospital. It's a block down the street from where my children grew up.

You probably haven't heard of him. He's a very fine & dedicated American poet. He went to Columbia with Allen Ginsberg : he sort of lived out a parallel version of Ginsberg's dedication to Whitman's example.

He traveled all over the world & brought things back, in Whitman fashion, in his poems.

He's written many thousands of poems. A "Collected", published by the National Poetry Foundation, probably only skims the surface. He's written even more letters. He used to get up in the morning & write, & walk, & teach, & write. This short, excitable, Chaplinesque person (born in northern Italy, grew up in Jersey City) is a real spiritual & literary athlete. He comes from a talented & energetic clan - his cousin (another) John Tagliabue writes for the NY Times; his other cousin Paul is the retiring head of the NFL.

I will have more to say about this unusual poet. He asked me today if I remembered the poem he had written about his mother & father. I couldn't, but I'm looking for it now.

Today's helpful hint re previous post : this is Memorial Day in USA; Oak Tree Day or Restoration Day in UK; Rhode Island Statehood Day; (& my b-day).

7

 
May day, memorious.  The old soldier
processing to the podium, a bullet-
wound to remind him.  Roosevelt
in Milwaukee, Bull Moose in Madison Square.

 
Progressive.  Rich men and ruffians,
lean-to prophets, kings of snow –
the brittle glory of the Medicine Show,
the Big Tent, windy with quotations...

 
Stern was the sterling word, stirring
the crowd.  The veteran tasted the rust
of blooded lavender.  It was a test
for metal filings – it was Vulcan, simmering.

 
Lines of poplars point past the chateau.
Beyond the mansard and the glinting fields,
there, off in the distance (among some weeds)
an oak tree squirrels her bantering manteau.

 
A sheltering ripe post.  Ancient annuity.
The octave muted in the squire's arpeggio,
the hand's St. Vitus' dance.  And it was so.
Silence appends its rest note; the incongruous

 
miracle-ditty (quarrelsome cowpoke's vine
and trumpet) grew.  Hid from fresh alarums
and Goliath gloss - wrapped in films
of a young seal's frozen frame (its spine).

 
Begin, then, with the perilous retort
of speechless limbs.  What marks the man
from the also-ran.  The game in Yucatan,
the racing heart – iris of the jungle (smart). 

                               
                                   5.29.06

Have been correcting that troublesome little piece posted yesterday. It may be a keeper, or not.

A replica of Empress Anna of Russia's elaborate "House of Ice", constructed in St. Petersburg around 1740, was built there last winter - article about it in last New Yorker.

Some think the House of Ice was partly responsible for some of Coleridge's images in his dream-poem "Kublai Khan". & that was the poem Teddy Roosevelt kept obsessively reciting as he was near death from fever in the Amazon jungle.

I'm trying to pull together various distant seasonal & weather & political threads into this poem which is focused for the moment around a sort of Lazarus figure emerging at springtime.

Regret the obscurities of this particular section. The line about the "table among enemies" is from Psalm 23. The bit about the promissory seal etc. is from Hamlet.

6

 
It must be cool inside the House of Ice
(stalactite pleasantry, in Petersburg).
We were married there, on a barge,
by decree.  The Empress flung the rice

 
herself.  The Patriarch was very nice.
We were as Swedes in Sweden (washed
and plush).  - "Dreams are hash!"
jabbed Hamlet suddenly, at minstrel mice –

 
thus endeth our parade.  A table set
amidst mine enemies (in Courland, wee duchy).
A cup and a signet seal.  Promissory,
sped across nimble floes (writ from the heart).

                 
                   *

 
We hushed ourselves, behind a hedge of speech.
The Empress collected dwarves, antiquities,
eunuchs, slaves (she loved the country
ditties, too), everything within reach

 
was reached for.  Tall toy soldiers
tumbled out of tumultuous versets –
uniform figures, in pungent vermilion
and puce, new-fangled armor... curious!

 
Along the brooding river, wayward light
dangled from a drowning sun.  So
the earth (formed long ago for everyone)
stoked her furnace for a rainy night.

Finished Winesburg, Ohio. I love that book.

Still reading Eleanor Cook's great book on Wallace Stevens (Wallace Stevens : Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War). On "The Man with the Blue Guitar", she quotes the final canto:

XXXIII

 
That generation's dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,

 
That's it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time

 
To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,

 
Here is its actual stone. The bread 
Will be our bread, the stone will be

 
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except

 
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

"The imagined jay" - jumped out at me. I've been imagining J-jay in many a way, for a while.

One of the things I'm trying to do in this new "LONG POEM" experiment (Rest Note) is correct my previous mistakes in that area.

Good luck, Hen.

There are spas & rest areas exclusively for poets & poetry. Did you know that? Dante wrote about them - they're in a section called "Limbo", someplace right under Italy.

Most colleges have direct entrance exams for these regions. (I've been waiting here in the library for a response to my application. Waiting for the last 30 years or so.)

One of the things which the G. Hill essays is impressing on me is the moral flavor (or smell) of literature - both its "successes" & its "failures".

The fact that some poetry begins to resonate with & actually nourish the culture at large is a wonder & a miracle. The good poetry, I mean. This is an ethical challenge to the artist as craftsperson.

Hill in his latest book opens with a terrific epigraph from Kafka.

Article in this week's New Yorker on the House of Ice (actually, a palace) built by Empress Anna in the 1700s & replicated last winter in St. Petersburg. Ochin interesnye.

Story of Pushkin, his poem The Bronze Horseman, & the Petersburg flood of 1824. How can I relate this to Katrina? Maybe I can't.

messing around with my mask today.

that's a piano in New Orleans (still in tune).

Reading a book of Geoffrey Hill's more recent essays, The Enemy's Country.

He has a fine way (by way of examples of Skelton, Dryden, Pound, many others) of getting at the nub of some impassable writerly dilemmas, challenges.

The slow poem creeps along. I'm calling it Rest Note for the time being. "My circuit is circumference." The said "cliffside park" is the one featured in colored postcard on HG Poetics masthead. Hobo has a plan, sort of.

5

 
May-time wakes the cliffside park to the wind
and light.  The craggy oaks dance stiffly.
The slouched hobo wonders if, wonders if,
and wonders if again – a drunk on the mend

 
from winter blanks.  If it were possible
to shape a wordy backbone for himself –
mumble a model of the heavens, formative
and homely – as it was back in Bramble

 
Tennessee, one time, once upon a time...
He can't recall his name.  But he prefers
romance, mysteries, puzzlers –
the leading-on and -on (Clementine,

 
whose shoes were number 9, at the edge
of the melting ledge) – voluble rambler
across dusty vacancies (brain-chambers,
solitaire).  Earth was lonesome stage-

 
stop.  Slumped, torpid, in the park,
he glances toward the little chestnut tree
that clings to the cliff itself (some free
spirit, given to stubborn staying-put) –

 
she was the pinion of his wandering,
he reckoned, once.  As every living being
trembles to climb beyond its cloistering
drawn by a magnet into rosy figuring

 
so, his muttering stretched absent limb.
And the oaks, shading that urbane plateau,
seemed to nod in agreement – go, go.
His echo lengthened toward the western rim.

Forwarding :

CORNELIA STREET CAFE 


June 7, Wednesday, 6-8 pm.
 
INTERCULTURAL POETRY SERIES 

hosted by Andrey Gritsman 
(www.interpoezia.net) 

 
AN OSIP MANDELSTAM CELEBRATION

Celebrate the release of an anthology of translations of
Mandelstam edited by Ilya Bernstein  for Ugly Duckling
Presse. (http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org)
 
Come hear translations of the Russian twentieth-century
poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) read by many translators.

 
Cornelia Street, off Bleecker (in NYC) 
(www.corneliastreetcafe.com) 

Hope I can make it.

Have been reading Lords of Limit, G. Hill book of essays.

Much focus on 16th- and 19th-century English poetry & philosophy. Held together throughout by the notion of writing as an engagement which is ineluctably rendered up to moral judgement. Poetry's grounding - its entanglement - in both words and experience - its human particularity - is its weakness & its strength. It is implicated in, as it informs, the moral reality of persons, times & nations.

Hill's manner is extremely ruminative, somewhat oblique. He'll take up a single moral paradox or literary-historical impasse, and slowly ravel into his progress these very acute & nuanced evaluations of the chorus of poets & thinkers who have weighed in on that particular issue over the span of a century or so.

It's as if there's an unspoken assertion serving as the pillar for the whole baroque architecture : the sense of poetry as a culture's necessary redemptive presence (because of that very rooted & particular moral implication in its speech & history). Not exactly in Stevens' sense ("poetry is the sanction of life"). Hill points out that Stevens was following in Arnold's footsteps, seeking to offer poetry as a substitute for religion. For Hill, it seems, the ultimate judgement & sanction lie elsewhere, outside literature - but literature, when it approaches the beautiful & the true, bears witness to that judgement - or bears the marks of it.

Famous Reporter has picked up a section of the whatchya-mccallit I'm working on.

Thank you, Tasmania! (H-mania, brought to you by T-mania)

Eleanor Cook's deeply-learned book (Wallace Stevens : Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War) shows just how much someone with wide reading and a talent for hearing echos & constructions can discover.

& she shows that Helen Vendler & other critics were right to see Stevens as the central American answer to, & inheritor of, the main stream of English poetry.

America's "colonial" status, the long literary rivalry between England & "these states", has meant that Americans are in the (adolescent) position of having both to re-invent the wheel, and to follow their (English) forebears, at the same time. This causes all kinds of Oedipal exaggerations & generational nightmares.

Cook shows just how steeped in Milton & Keats & Shakespeare et al. Stevens is; how they inform the elegant subtleties of poem after poem. But was he a neo-Anglican epigone? I don't think so, Jack.

..."radicality" is not a justification, though. It may be a sign of fortitude.

Time to read the Federalist Papers?

"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried." - Churchill (funny - but not a ringing endorsement)

Time to read up on republicanism in ancient Rome? Cicero...

James Madison. Visited his beautiful plantation in Montpelier - Piedmont region of Virginia. A passionate, brilliant prophet of the Union. But never freed his slaves. (Neither did Dolly.)

MLK (Martin Luther King Melchizedek).

Reading Geoffrey Hill's Without Title. Airport reading (my daughter Phoebe returned from 4 months in Bangladesh yesterday).

May try to write a review of this fascinating book. Dedicated in homage to E. Montale, I seem to see influence of Montale's late style (in Satura). He also translates M's famous poem La bufera ("The Storm"). Some great "Pindarics", one of the high points of the volume. A poem about Hart Crane. Several allusions here & there to Mandelstam.

Still trying to fathom something of the political stance (not that that's the most important thing, but Hill sometimes speaks very gnomically & obscurely - hard for me, anyway, to follow). There are references to politics & democracy, but the outlook seems bleak, disillusioned. As though democracy suits his heart but seems unrealistic to his mind (politics is done by "the elect", in an ironic sense).

I'm sure I'm misunderstanding, though - too early to comment.

But the question got me thinking. Perhaps democracy is only realistic as a radical commitment. By that I mean one must be - thoroughly - a committed believer in popular sovereignty and the intelligence of the common person and ordinary opinion - radically so, despite the debilitating processes & events so conducive to despair & cynicism. Because only such a commitment is strong enough to say nay to the centuries - millennia - of elite thinking on politics (from before Plato, to Plato, to Macchiavelli, etc. & beyond). One has to be radical enough - & sceptical enough of intellectual pretension - to regard the elite discourse on politics - no matter how intelligent, informed by hard experience, and persuasive - as wrong-headed and out-of-date.

Novus ordo seclorum.

I've posted a couple parts of current poem project. Started it on April 26th - anniversary of both Hart Crane's death and Teddy Roosevelt's emergence from harrowing trip down the "River of Doubt", an Amazon tributary.

The long poem of a few years ago ended up (in part) in the Amazon, so I'm trying to emerge again myself.

The juxtaposition of these 2 anniversaries has some thematic interest for me. (aspects of "national epic".)

(sometimes poetry-making feels like a scramble through personal caves & swamps, toward some kind of clearing)

4

 
Some old gaunt John sleeps in the quatrefoil,
his gaping mouth emitting tendrils – visible
glyphs, obscure and untranslatable.
A bronze rain falls, and fades into the jungle.

 
Providence all crumbling concrete.
Dogwoods flourish on the dripping ridge;
the old man stares into their foliage,
so multifarious, so implicate...

 
yet one vine short. (One like an infant cedar,
that, with wavy bowing, flecked the edge
of undulating flocks – uncoiled his rage.)
The shade arched like an echo of its brow.

 
I am a stranger here in Gloucestershire,
he thought.  The cave roared water and light.
Was he the king?  A boy lost in the night?
A shrouded sun shed May-gold everywhere.

 
Well-worn, he remembered the deep waves,
his forsakenness.  A spiraling vireo
climbed above the fanning palm-tornado,
fluting a pathway only the far wing cleaves.

 
Up there, Lazarus seeks your countenance.
Dr. Saturno interprets the age to come.
The maize-god in the arroyo, the slate plum
sail into his hand; and in a trance

 
Lazarus climbs from a log-strewn stream
and frozen moldering.  Maundering
to the cave-door, he blinks, ponderous.
Tendrils clasp his feet.  He shods his dream. 

... but it's not about dusty pedantry, but play, play - rambling around the old themes, riddles & heartaches.

Some intellectual rigor, some recognition that (some) poetry has a part in that too, can help free us from the stale air of immediate predecessors, contemporaries, their (unintentionally, perhaps) overbearing drone.

I think ever since I got over the French polio (Guillaume Barre), when I was 4 or 5 yrs old - after spending about a month paralyzed & in a respirator - I've been unconsciously greedy for wind & air. Clean sharp mountain air is what I would stumble toward, blundering & mumbling.

Po-biz, sho-biz... I'm a show-off myself. But we have to step back sometimes, away from the ego-trips, the easy, automatic, uncritical reactions to this n' that (sentiment, bombast, fakery, cliche), if we want to grasp even the tail of the firecat.

Reading : Poetry, word-play and word-war in Wallace Stevens, by Eleanor Cook. "Poetry is the scholar's art," he sd. Some of the semantic/rhetorical complexity she uncovers is astonishing, daunting.

Riddles, proverbs, charms. Poetry, in part, a burning-off, a paring-down, an escape from casual speech, cliches. "the firecat bristles in the way".

(Whereas po-biz acts like a miniscule sub-category of sho-biz.)

btw, interesting articles on Mayan glyphs in Times science section today.

from something I'm working on these days.

3

 
Walk with me through the jungle, whispered the voice.
The silence seethed with malice.  Bluebirds fled
to the Appalachians.  It seemed he was quite dead
to the world (asleep, perhaps).  He had no choice

 
but to rise to the occasion - otherwise.
There were jays in the trees, and twirling
vireos; there were empty sounds, hurling
hurly-burly Death into his eyes;

 
and the hollow tock-tock of the woodpecker
presaged a resolution at the crossroad
(if he could find that mysterious crossroad).
Nature was judgement.  Truth - very particular

 
(you might say).  In other words, the jungle
was a torture chamber of misunderstanding -
everything got everything else.  Wrong
(suffering the sum of all that wrangling).

 
Back, forth, back, forth... the old swingset
swung so calmly in the morning green.
Do you remember how it whispered, then?
Creaked and whispered, like a crooning pet

 
or paradisal tourniquet.  Sound was sound :
what more is there to say? or might be said,
she murmured (in an undertone) - and led
you down the inarticulate and droning

 
trail.  And so it was.  The jungle thunderclouds
boomed and passed - the sky grew grey, grew light.
Symphonic morning (slow Sibelius) : from night
to day, processional (with cloud-parades).