2.28.2017

Rose Island Light



HIGH C

Hobo takes his descending path
sloping to the great river.
What can he give her,
steady Delta Queen, to stanch the wrath?

Past frigid walls of enmity
feathered with graffiti –
a rust-red major C
like an iron magnet... Rimini

or Cleveland?  Venice, maybe –
where the blind king lies,
his crazed hawk’s eyes
closed (petrified) beneath the sea.

The crane dance of the manic poets
circles the salted harbors
of the Gulf.  The Earth bears,
pining, their smoldering caskets

toward one windy maelstrom-vortex –
matrix of Rose Island Light.
Human massif, beaming bright
rotating manna-sun, whose Artifex

is spoked with rays like peacock’s eyes;
radiant Ancient of Days
out of the heart of praise
within a ring of living creatures

breathing fire against the cold
accidia, the starved
& shriveled souls carved
with the scar of Queequeg’s mappemunde

                   *

the raven-star, the midnight sun.
& the Nazir of poets chants
one Galilean entrance –
lacustrine circle, Aquarian –

out of the sea as rapt Columbia,
planetary bird of clay;
cloud-shade of Day
for restoration of Terra Incognita.

Hobo beheld this mighty mandala
like a rose wheel of limestone
light, through human bone
& muscle, limbs & ligament, figura

tattooed by Piero della Francesca
as a mirror for your glance –
as Miriam in moody trance
harbors the light ray’s umiltà.

Like the Hart of Marsden Hartley
in a rose from the sea,
in a sea-knell’s 33,
out of the sunken chest floats free

the vision of immortality –
Love’s salty clarity
spouts from the clay
enchanted unison, octave’s high C.

So Hobo lay in his muddy riverbed
south of St. Louis.
His clay revolved; his
turtledove hummed overhead.

2.28.17

2.27.2017

poet goes to the movies



TWILIGHT WING
                                  It must be abstract.

The trees grow slowly in the sacred wood,
quietly, unnoticed.
Oscar night I missed.
The little gold-plated crusader stood

on his black pentagon of film
(the royal Real reeled in).
I recall those figures hidden
in moonlit home movies – Requiem

for Camelot – Jackie & Juliet
on the beach in Manchester,
Henry falling off the fence (Her
See-Saw Trap) – traipsing all wet

from Gull Lake (North of Galilee)
– the memory’s a blur.
Something about her –
Mary?  Rose? – abstracted, free...

like a cousin from Cuzco, nested in quipu
with bow & arrow.  This tall
old Norway pine, with her small
sibling cedar... standing close to you,

like a hamlet in Denmark... old foundations
digging down deep, old roots
in raven-dark red deserts,
old Incan knots of sacrifice, old bones.

As if the moss-grey Italian movie
were projected onto two
dimensions – the hollow
curvature of holy lapis lazuli

                   *

a flickering shadow in the sybil’s leaves.
The shadow of a red wing
echoed in a lapsing
thread of golden fleece, or sheaves

in limestone lattice, out of ultramarine –
the scar it sang from the ravine
(Quauhnahuac, Afghanistan)
like Night Sea waves (remote, Martian)

emerging just at early dawn.
Methodical crossweave
of whirling squares... conceive
this integral chart – piñon-spun

vernal thread leaping an orange span.
Maid manifest beyond
this world... my dark fond
twin, eye of Medusa-hurricane...

O double knot-rosette of Providence!
Of Maximus theoria
the illustration – mirror-
W lacing an iron fence

like glinting fleece out of Black Sea –
divine & human being
whispered into seeing
as if east of Eden rose again, to be

grey sheltering twilight wing
of Jonah – shell, whale,
Ocean – bird & sail –
one lambent mauve (living, loving).

 2.27.17

2.24.2017

Abba Tor & Eero Saarinen



GREEN EYE
                                i.m. Abba Tor (1923-2017)

If this roof were to fall on my head now
I would die a happy man,
said Eero Saarinen
to Abba Tor (Kennedy Airport, 1962).

The engineer won’t stand on cardboard –
number, weight & measure.
Concrete is dumb.  (For sure.)
It doesn’t know for whom it’s being poured.

Let’s use this requirement to let some light in.
Skylight ribbons through
the Jet Age double-U.
They builded better than they knew.  Someone

whispers like a humming bird beneath
French limestone gravity –
gray shadow cavity,
the leaden heart of black corroded wreath.

The terminal’s long-empty now
(hotel-to-be).  But the sound
of twine cats cradling profound
equilibrium is as a Finnish prow

of voices laboring in harmony –
it lifts a catenary prong
where the cartwheel song
creaks like rust in clay, or an eye

from the bottomland (circling palm)...
Green eye of Liberté
from Providential bay –
Columbia’s rose wheel, her feathered helm.

2.24.17


(NY Times obituary for Abba Tor here.)

2.16.2017

Ancient John Berryman



Immured like a feeble Fisher King, home with the flu, old Henry offers a few stray thoughts.  Have been spending some time with Berryman again, aided by a fine study by Brendan Cooper, Dark Airs : John Berryman and the spiritual politics of Cold War America (Peter Lang, 2009).  Cooper goes a long way toward clearing out some of the commonplace critical pigeonholes, the convenient groupings.  He delves into the political commitments and concerns in Lowell, & especially Berryman, as they shaped them into poetry, & provides evidence that the handy label "Confessional" - with all its negative connotations for scholarship of the last 3 decades, at least - diminishes the real social & political complexity of their work.

So I delved into Berryman's poetry again today, reading Homage to Mistress Bradstreet & some of the shorter poems.

It struck me how this poetry from the 1950s still maintained a living bond with old high modes of poetic diction, stretching back to Shakespeare, & Chaucer, & beyond to Dante, & the ancient poets.  It's high-toned, scholarly, informed, intelligent.  This matter of tone or diction provides the poet with a way to explore cultural, historical & religious phenomena on a sort of "intimate" basis.  The everyday demotic speech of the present confronts a chasm of incomprehension : the tools of articulation are no longer there.

But Berryman is not simply a "traditionalist" or "formalist".  Far from it.  He wallows in archaizing vocabulary : he plays with it, alternately leaning on it directly for effect (as when the rhythm of the Shakespearean pentameter comes to his aid in powerful passages), and making a travesty of it - flipping it around with wisecracks, slang & verbal pratfalls.  It's Berryman's way of actually absorbing, confronting & making something new out of his encounter with the great forerunners, going back to the Bible & maybe beyond (Henry/Gilgamesh?).

Another thing : on this question of "confessionalism".  It seems to me that Berryman, in the Homage and the Dream Songs, is indeed confessional : but maybe in a different sense from that of the critical cliche.  Berryman is confessional in the old medieval sense, of a sinful man facing Eternity, frightened for the future of his soul.  This comes through not just in the late "(re)conversion" poems : I found it so powerful today in the Homage as well.  Berryman's shady, adulterous epithalamion for Anne Bradstreet provides a plot-frame for a painful, terrifying soul-shriving.  Terrifying in at least two senses : first in that Berryman provides no consolation (except perhaps very obliquely, in the moments of praise for the natural grace & beauty of Anne & her children).  Cooper points out the Homage's ironic judgement on the spiritual enthusiasm of the Puritans : they thought they were founding a "city on a hill"; instead they were setting the stage for mid-20th century American version of decadence & systemic violence (Berryman is writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the advent of the atomic bomb, and the Cold War).

Terrifying, secondly, in that the Homage seems to implicate the poet in an irreversible repetition of the "damnation" which threatens.  In these passages it seems to me that Berryman becomes "confessional" in both a personal & a theological sense.  The formality of the poem strains with Berryman's sense of guilt & soul-fear, his anxiety about his eternal soul in the face of his 1) sins and 2) unwillingness to repent.

There are many aspects to Berryman's persona and writing which seem ancient, archaic.  The beard, the bardic grandeur, the Irish, the Yeats, the Shakespeare... but on another level there is this access in his poetry to an older way of being, of understanding.  He's like an Old Testament prophet, castigating his nation while at the same time pouring ashes on his own head.  The fact that he can also convey at the same time a fragile gaiety & antic wit, speaks to his humanity.

Needless to say, the more I read Berryman, the more I realize this Henry is not that Henry, if you know what I mean.  It's hard to exaggerate the sense of despair and desolation emanating from much of the American literature of the mid-20th century.  Existential angst.  Its keynote seems to be the loss of faith : the death of God.  The inability to reconcile the horror with any kind of theodicy.

Berryman seems to have been torn by agonizing & recurrent crises of faith - the most powerful spiritual experiences coming toward the end of his life.  I've been there, too, in my way... but the pivotal crisis happened when I was young, around age 19.

Along with Brendan Cooper & Berryman himself, I've been reading another book on my sickbed : The Gothic Cathedral, by Otto von Simson.  A beautiful, brilliant work, focusing on the architecture of Chartres Cathedral.

I was intrigued to learn that Suger and the other masters of the early Gothic were part of an intellectual milieu centered on the spiritual vision of St. Bernard, and much influenced by the Neo-Platonic Christianity of the Byzantine mystic known as "Pseudo-Dionysus".  Pseudo-Dionysus got blended with the patron saint of the Il-de-France, St. Denis.  According to Simson, the "Dionysian" theology of progressive emanations of spiritual light was filtered to Paris by way of an old acquaintance of mine, the Byzantine monk, St. Maximus the Confessor.

All this is neither here nor there.  But Simson explains how the anonymous "Master of Chartres" was an artist of genius, transforming the Romanesque into a new aesthetic unity of perfect proportions and overwhelming light.

I can't go into all the insights Simson provides.  He writes about how different the medieval worldview is from our own (his book was published in 1956).  I'm just here to confess how this study helps & reinforces my own viewpoint.  For me, a rational faith in the incarnate Word is possible; in fact, it's the door to all hope for humankind on this planet.  Chartres is simply one of the most powerful architectural expressions of this "rational faith" on earth.

Job's debate with God about suffering, horror and evil goes on.  It has no simple rationalistic verbal or formulaic resolution.  The inward "confession" of the human person cannot be abstracted, turned into a determinism.  & yet as far as the legal argument over the problem of evil, I stand on the following principles :

1)  Human persons have free will; they make choices for good and evil.
2)  God as spirit & creator is not responsible for Man's free-will choices for good or evil.
3) The message of Jesus is that repentance, mercy, forgiveness & transformation are not only possible, they are the power of God at work in Man to save the whole creation, and to save and heal individual persons.

Where Berryman is anguished, I am calm.  It is startling to me that while I was growing up in Minneapolis, John Berryman was living in my parents' and grandparents' old neighborhood, where I live now.  My family & I probably passed him on the street.  I wish I could have held out my little Henry hand to help him.


*

Postscript

I realize my juxtaposition here of "the old high modes" and "everyday demotic speech" lands me plop in the middle of seemingly-outgrown battles over the true progress of American letters.  I come across as would-be mandarin, elitist, aligned with Eurocentric Anglo-centric stuffy traditionalism in poetry.  My comments seem to dismiss what has been a prime element of American literature : the search for an idiom adequate to specifically American speech, and to the vastness of American experience, exemplified by W. C. Williams, Wallace Stevens & so many others.  Instead I appear to have opted for that rather stuffy, contrived mid-century period, when New Critical academics sought to perfect & standardize their pedantic version of T.S. Eliot's "tradition".

But I think Berryman's poetry exemplifies how & why nobody has to align themselves with these critical pigeonholes or literary clans.  His absorption of the disciplines of the "old high style" reveal a debt to Yeats; the desire to emulate and recapitulate the ancient manner stem ultimately from a passion for participation, which moves poets to inhabit & revive the ghosts of ancient texts and long-gone times.

In my view this is of the essence of the poetic vocation; it comes from a power within "song" itself, to enliven and resurrect dead words, dead times, the old poets.  The bard goes into a kind of visionary trance in order to re-encounter these things - the way Homer, or Virgil or Dante all went down into the depths of the afterlife to speak with their ancestors.

So there is always something uncanny, a whiff of archaic mana, when a poet starts to mime the old speech in a new way.  And all I mean to suggest by the above is that Berryman's or any poet's engagement with the "old high forms" - various modes of traditional poetic artifice - opens doors to time and history not otherwise available.  The poetry of American "plain speech"  has indeed made accessible enormous new spaces of artistic perception & grasp of experience; I'm just suggesting that someone like Berryman re-enacts the exploration of past human times.

2.12.2017

Abe's in the Gulf



TROMPE L’OEIL

Peto, Reminiscences.
Such silent stillness
in a wooden door.  This
repressed memory (forsakenness).

The mottled copper green, absinthe.
Like curdled Liberty.
Coins, ticket stubs... three
paths into the shredded labyrinth

of old glued paper notes.  Almost
erased, some calculations –
sums, additions...
within the mandorla (Abe’s

photo-ghost).  Abe’s playing golf
today, down at the Gulf –
in Florida, with grimacing
elf.  By the marred lake, full of pelf

& flattened tires... distended Brown
Decades of gaslight shadows,
drilled by torpedoes
into stunned prey (pressed down

under demented mansions).  Still
there is another window
clears this reified view
(black coral reef of sacrificial

scars).  The solidarity of living
stones is leaping light –
scaled from a dragon-fight
like trompe l’oeil Thanksgiving

                *

or hologram of humming bird
circling the whisper dome
of spiritual freedom.
Ghost Dance, suspended word

hung from the apex of the tent –
a veil of murmuring linen
around the target sun
of a salty human sacrament

of joy, shipmate!  Ahoy, Jonah!
Cresting the deep wave,
smiling palm-wave
circumference hailing hurrah

for the red white & blue!  Old Glory
spangled by Love!
Columbia, dove
of Liberty... Emancipation story!

So the battle lines are drawn
at last.  Maid Marion –
trampled onto a plane
with Jack & Jackie, by the Lion-

Tooth (orange-tan phony-booth) –
you loose one gray thread
from the bleeding head
of Apollinaire... qui chante... the truth

shall make you free.  The limestone
wrinkles beneath clear streams.
Sovereign of human dreams,
arise like Francis to your servant throne.

2.12.17


it depends

Quiet evening here in Minneapolis, along the River Road, by the U of M (no, this is not Garrison Keillor - he's retired).  Sarah is down with the flu (mild for now).  We spent the morning at the clinic.  I'm off the big poem momentarily (Ravenna Diagram).  The house was quiet & the world was calm (right).

Thinking tonight for some reason of Eugenio Montale.  The phrase "superior dilettantism" - from his groundbreaking essay "Style and Tradition" (I like Joseph Cary's translation of that particular passage much better than Jonathan Galassi's).

Montale was a librarian, as well as a journalist, critic & poet, so I feel some slight personal affinity there.  (Not that I was ever much of a librarian, or much of those other things either.)

As person & poet he seems to emanate a good deal of something like Keats's negative capability.  He's sort of oblique.  He doesn't assert; he suggests, he implicates.  It's very sly, but also, strangely meek.  I'm speaking of his poetry.  Out of the literary blind alleys, undertones, non-sequiturs & jokes, you sense this emanation of a cherished & familiar landscape, a way of doing and not doing things.  A landscape of music, feeling.  Lacrimae rerum.

So he's very ancient & very present at the same time (Virgil, Dante, Bible).

He tightropes between the "aulic" & the ordinary, the colloquial.  (Maybe Benedetto Croce has something to do with this...)

& he sings.  Montale aspired to be an opera singer before he turned to poetry.  Let me repeat that : Montale aspired to be an opera singer before he turned to poetry.

Montale the poet is playful & subtle.  One of his striking images is that of the chess-playing woman in Firenze, somehow eking out a spiritual victory over the (Fascist) forces all around her : his muse.  I think he would have made a very good chess player, if he hadn't gone in for opera & poetry.

But I reiterate this idea of the landscape seeping up through the poetry.  The simple vernacular of the land - beautiful & troubled, suffering.  The "earth in labor", so to speak.  The artifice of pastoral yielding gracefully to the fatal wisdom of experience (rustic Adam & Eve, & all that followed).

Not sure where I'm going with this.  I'm surrounded by old books (I am a former librarian).  Montale's "dilettantism" appeals to me.  Not simply because I could be labeled a dilettante myself, but because the concept offers an opening to what Berryman called "the freedom of the poet".

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty..." spake the old vase, & the negatively-capable Keats.  There is something uncanny about the effect of the beautiful - the wholeness, the total impression of the complete work of art, however humble.

The rustic poet speaks quietly out of the landscape, out of experience... & we recognize the truth of those sounds.  We hear (with some trepidation) the implicit judgement of their rightness, their finality.

It's a certain way of responding to reality.  Distinct, that is, at least in some respects, from the scientific, the philosophical, the theological, or the political.  It's more raw, more colloquial - & more refined, more graceful.  Don't ask me why.  (Ends vs. means.  Reality vs. theory.  Innocence & Experience.)

Think of Robert Frost at Kennedy's inauguration.  Think about that for a while.  About what they both were trying to accomplish - & how it actually fell out (in an odd, unfinished, lovable, screwed-up way).

I'm perpetually obsessed with old texts, old words... I'm a librarian, I guess.  I started out as a very with-it (in my view) late-60's hipster poet.  It's how I managed to get into Brown University, back in 1970.  Basically I was following an impulse (by way of Rimbaud & Baudelaire & ee cummings & the New York School & all the 60s novels I was imbibing).  I was making poems.  But then I underwent a religious-psychological crisis, in 1973-74 (when I was about 19).  Not that different, I imagine, from what happened to T.S. Eliot - something deflected his river from its course, and so the waves rippled relentlessly through his life & poetry.

I never liked Eliot, I couldn't stand him.  I actually reacted viscerally to the slimy sibilant sibylline sound of his verses. Some of this certainly must have been mere cultural conformism on my part (nobody liked Eliot back in the 20th century).  We can argue ad infinitum about TSE pro & con.  My point is, that despite my animus, my polar opposition to Eliot, it seems we underwent some kind of fairly similar psychological-cultural-religious crisis of conversion.

Why, oh why do I bring this up, right here in my Nobel lecture about Eugenio Montale?

I think poetry is something we don't really understand.  It comes from the deepest layers of the human psyche & spirit - dimensions that reach far backward & forward, from our very animal prehistory to a future we can't yet see.  Matthew Arnold's notion of "touchstones" gets at some clue of which he may have been unaware - something primordial, like a low iron tone or wooden knock or flute whistle through prehistoric bone.

So, if this is correct, the "vernacular" or the colloquial or the amateur or the unprofessional or the dilettantish or the rustic or the pastoral music of poetry might speak in its own way to the human condition... & possibly in such a charming manner as to reshape the public's conception of reality itself.

We need the old words right now, old words of faith & hope & charity, whether we believe them or not - because there are powers at work that deny the meaning of words per se.

My grandfather Edward S. Gould was a veteran of World War I, and led the veterans' Armistice parades through downtown Minneapolis during the 1920s.  He & my grandmother (Florence Ainsworth) lived in an apartment near the University of Minnesota, where I spent the first 18 months of my life.  Grandpa kept an old brass shell from the war in the corner of their apartment (he was an artillery captain), and over the dinner table hung a print of a famous painting, of George Washington & Lafayette, at a celebratory dance in Washington (Grandma was a member of the D.A.R.).

Grandpa & Grandma were part of the American historical panorama, the fabric.  They were ordinary people.  Grandpa would be called a racist today.  Grandma's beloved D.A.R. tried to keep Jewish refugees from Hitler out of America, and tried to stop Marian Anderson from singing at the Lincoln Memorial.  These are sad, absurd truths.

Yet what did that dance in Washington celebrate?  The experiment of American democracy; the experiment of a new people in a new land of equality.  Eventually Lafayette's dance would bump up against the reality of America's license to enslave, exploit and deceive (the America of Herman Melville's Confidence-Man).  And the Civil War would instill a pattern (freedom vs. slavery) which we have not yet resolved unto this day.

America is an experiment, an improvisation.  Yet the experiment is rooted in something quite deep : the legal concept of equity & justice, of the inalienable rights of human persons, going back before the Revolution to the jurist Edward Coke, and to his student, the pioneer-theologian-lawmaker Roger Williams.

There is something very grounded & rooted in this particular  legal concept.  It is a spiritual ground, a spiritual root.  It is the very ancient notion of Creation, of the realm of Spirit - the mantling wings of Manitou (the Thunderbird).  Martin Luther King's righteous web of mutuality... Black Elk's 6-directional diamond.

2.09.2017

unfurling Providence



ANGE D’OR

Pythagoras & Aristotle
felt both stars & sun
move (by persuasion
of love) around the atlatl

of the Pole – slow sarabande
of heart’s desire (my soul
pines for your solo Yule
just so, trompette marine).  &

though we scoff now, Harry,
your wedding dance is just
a veiled illusion – dust
on cosmic rewind, arbitrary –

yet those ripples on the strand
projecting gracefully
sound waves of sea
through particles of sand

put me in mind of relativity,
so that behind this mesh
of silken crossweave rush
soft murmurs (hush little baby,

don’t you cry)...  & a kind face
beyond divisibility
windy invisibility
ghostly ellipse of human race

gathers in gravity & mass
like a cloud-pebble
or magnified Hubble-
infinitesimal, lifted by windlass

                 *

into a masque of morning glory
from the outer darkness
with a rose compass
to inward salience (galactic story

of grave milky equilibrium
outlasting mirror-war
of swollen Minotaur
to bind the wounds with honey-balm).

The Earth’s unfurling Providence.
Slow-forming pearl
beneath the gray whorl
of a clay-worn shell – immense

agate of Agape, threaded
with light gold fleece
around a centerpiece
of Paradise (salt bread

& wine out of a stone casket).
Indomitable almond
branch, a blooming wand
cut for a lilac shoot, whose trumpet-

vine leans like a flinty mule
against vain headwinds
to Pacific ends –
vast azure of a wingspan’s rule,

bright Gate of international
ange d’or (meek door
for lambs, forevermore).
So sighs your shell, antiphonal.

2.9.17

2.08.2017

west of St. Louis



MASON JAR

& the word came out west of St. Louis.
Kind of hokey, like
a dust-devil psych-
out on eccentric orbit.  She was US.

The weird windlass twirled due Nord
into a wilderness
of cedar & watercress –
deserted road, iced-over, hard.

Held up on a tiny pinhead pine-
needle of sunlight, she spun
like a gyroscopic moon,
beholden to none.  She was fine

to behold, like a mason jar, with her G-
fitz-G major Eyelash Curl –
a square-dance whirl
around an Irish jug (from C

to C minor & back again).
She spoked light so lightly
all the ire of unspritely
iron nations (dusty canyon

grandeur in a pride of lions)
molted into Phoenix
ash & rainbow peacock’s
eyes – & I can’t write these lines

without tears wide as Okeanos
coursing planetary curves,
as Stella Morris swerves
another starfish into star (yes, yes!)

                  *

2.8.17

2.07.2017

ultra rich & strange



MILITARY CEMETERY

His leaden haze puts Hobo in mind
of his old pal Willie
(Wallace), in D.C. –
simple homeless vet, friend

of Feathered Eagle.  You could find 
him, of a morning
(borderline bored) leaning
against that sunny wall behind

the taco place.  Told me once
about the time he met
the President.  Let
me have a word, sir... since

you’re headed to church, will you pray for me?
& old Bush says – C’mon along
brother, we’ll sing a song
together.  Man-fest, I guess.  Destiny.

So they trooped on down to the Cathedral
hand in hand, them two
old hands.  You know
there’s lots of masonry in the capital.

Big maze of marble, curious flame-
&-turtleshell designs.
Defunctive tombstones,
mostly – but I was there when King came,

for the March, back in ’63.
Love that constancy
in his treble prophecy,
you know?  Beauty, truth & rarity

                     *

– rarin’ to go, that meek milkman.
Love has her reasons,
I reckon.  The season’s
colder now.  WW long flown –

but sometimes I see his ghost wing
past the tyrant’s house.
Or maybe that was Phoenix.
I do get confused.  Wish I could sing

with the Prez too – like Maid Marion
underneath Robby Lincoln’s eye,
so redbreast mild (sigh).
Pall-bearers’ props (sable, crimson)

& the trumpets & the drums... the boots
in the saddle, all backwards.
Buried bee buzzwords,
scribbled graphs, epitaphs.  Hoots

from the midnight owl – soft whisper
over dim cedars.
Her grey eye engenders
all this concrete into something... suffer

the little sea-change, children, croons
Columbia.  The statue
called La Paix (flew
out of Normandy, wounded) from dunes

of military cemetery, comes
to life... Hermione
her name, Queen for a Day.
Rich & strange now.  Sound the drums.

2.7.17

Sophie at the Raptor Center

2.06.2017

Iris was a messenger



ROYAL FLUSH

This winter light is innocent,
salted with snow.  Downstream
from Franklin Bridge, steam
lifts by gawky crane, afloat

like nautical giraffe (all finished
now).  Henry Hobo
seeps his moonshine so
far down... devoutly to be wished,

that well-being.  Dante was agile
in the Tuscan sun, seeking
also – her flame leaking
through trumpet vine (light, fragile

grace).  Men search for causes
& neglect their ends.
Ophelia’s betrayal bends
into a sea of stinging roses

where Earth replies with Mendelssohn
& Paradise was felt
before her deck was dealt
(52 weeks of sun – Apollinairean

royal flush).  She seeks you too,
his glinting Beatrice.
Iris on her way
from infinite mercy (blue

rondure, flecked with gold, aswirl
from blazing central star)
brings home to where you are –
in thicket night, a glowing coal.

2.6.17

message to President Donald Trump


Dear President Trump,

Just thought I'd share something we here in America call "harmony".  Harmony is a concord of different notes - "e pluribus unum" expresses the same idea. We don't try to hate & attack & control others, because we all come from the same place, we're all brothers & sisters. Life is good. We're all immigrants & pilgrims in this world.

Sincerely,
Henry Gould

 

2.05.2017

figure for equality



DOUBLE LINE

The Mississippi mottled with ice
a milky translucence
in the limpid air.  Sense
of coral rings solidifying.  Twice

& twice... smoky astigmatism
of a sundog rainbow.
Miss Destiny, Hobo.
Frescoed Siena formalism –

sweet couch of Pax, Justitia,
grave horsehair salience.
A gray circumference
of flags, targets... the palm of Jonah

read into fragile cat’s-cradle
or spiderweb.  A disk
of gold nailed to a casque
(louis, doubloon) – mandala-medal

for Hamlet’s mettle (or Macbeth).
Time circles on a nail;
therein hangs a tail.
Serious blasts off the mast of death.

The little copperplate landscape
of Tower Hill (the Witch’s
Hat) my mother etched
reminds me of Big Bear’s last scrape –

Henry’s author – the buried man
on Arthur Ave.,
#33 (just below
that rise) – black Denmark sun

                   *

son of Dragon Pen.  & round
the table in my heart
Little Bear will shout
for joy – recomposing the sound

of Mendelssohn, his neighborhood
(old Arthur St., where
we’d begun).  Circular
the agate labyrinth, dark with the blood

of Jonah Fisher-King.  The gray
bird croons in the tamarack.
The rigid Minotaur is back –
orange Leviathan in search of prey;

only a copper penny in a well
might draw the milky-grey
dolphin to leap this way,
& breach his livid traitor’s spell.

Only a moon-shot Camelot;
only a breathing dream.
Green island scheme
lifted from pyramidal plot

to float – an almond eye within
a double line, one lofty
figure for equality.
Sign of a Jonah resurrection

(life-saver up from hurricane). 
So pearls shine from a shell
beneath deep ocean-swell,
Earth circling Maypole again.

2.5.17

2.04.2017

Jonah was a fisher of men


NO THING

Hobo couched on his frozen bench
& felt the dream of summer
flow through his mummy-
shroud (cocoon from Danish trench).

Everything from no thing,
mused the broody dagger-
raven, plastic bagger
limping toward immortal spring.

Must mean some one looking out
from furled oak leaves.
No one conceives
how close a whisper knits the plot.

Poverty’s a hollow ache.
Lento, lento, the fast
approacheth – one last
Sabbath before Easter break.

The one I love’s an almond slip
between Pharaoh & Laius.
An airborne edifice,
the bubble in the level’s grip;

the fisherman’s égalité
gal from Gesthemane
surfacing lambent sea,
coulombe crooning Liberté.

One blinding black diamond
clothed in octahedron.
Orange junk lantern,
Hobo’s caravel flamande.

2.4.17

2.03.2017

begin the Beguine



MINOR 7TH

There’s a baby high chair in the river
made of sycamore wood
(from Sycamore St., in old
Providence) – you could flip it over

& make a little car of it.
But the Miss is frozen solid –
can’t break the mold,
flow thru, maybe.  Love-seat

slung low.  The mood’s on Henry
sometimes, to be sittin’ there
– like Neptune, or Great Hare
the Leapin’ Dauphin (Huckleberry?) –

beyond the marina, where all the waters
congregate.  With Jeanne-
So-Dark of New Orleans,
the Cedar Queen (through the main door,

là.  La-la).  Her Rio never ends,
her rain is circulating
even now, hump King –
no matter which boar hounds, pretends.

Henry’s babble splinters echoes
down the ice.  Yet the flute
welds sheepskin & galoot
into a chord both Greeks & Hebrews

play (sustained diminished minor
7th, maybe, on
Ojibwan theremin).
Siddown – begin the Beguine, sailor.

2.3.17

2.01.2017

Walking around Ravenna Diagram


Ravenna Diagram, the project I've been engaged with for the last few years, begins with a poem called "Potter's Whirl".  That poem was set in motion by small ceramic plate my mother made many years ago, featuring a pale pink starfish with a background of stars & rays - sort of a cosmic little dish.

You could say this poem is an introductory pointer toward the shape of Ravenna Diagram as a whole.  The "diagram" in question is actually a kind of Venn diagram, with two interlocking spheres centered, respectively, on the contemporary here & now, and on Dante Alighieri's presence at the end of his life among the Byzantine structures & mosaics of Ravenna (Dante completed his Divina Commedia there, and is buried in Ravenna).

It's meant to be a kind of juxtaposition of Modern & Medieval mind & culture, or a synthesis.  The Venn diagram also points to the underlying worldview of the western Middle Ages : a concept of Incarnation, which is itself a sort of Venn diagram, melding the human and the divine.  In the poem, this worldview or philosophy is represented in part by the figure of Maximus the Confessor, a Byzantine monk whose writings on the Trinity had a deep impact on the thought-world of the 12th-cent. French cathedral-builders, as well as on the Byzantine Orthodox church itself (see Otto von Simson's monograph The Gothic Cathedral for more on this).

I think of my Dante juxtaposition as a sort of 90-degree tweak.  While the Divine Commedia climbs vertically (up & down the ladder from Earth to Heaven), Ravenna Diagram works on the horizontal - set upon the "flat plate" of the American Midwest, & seeking this-world ramifications and consequences of a spiritual worldview (the eschatological meaning of "Providence", for example).

I sense that the poem actually gathers mass & energy in the same way that my mother shaped her plates and bowls from lumps of wet clay turned on a potter's wheel.  The making of ancient, medieval and Renaissance poetry was enmeshed in such "ring structures" - their unity welded by numerologically-concentric rings of design.  This process is something I've been pursuing over several long poems & several decades of work.  The chapters & books of Ravenna Diagram turn on their own centers, which in turn are linked by motifs surfacing in the corresponding or parallel "numbers" (ie. the 14th poem in Book 1 will find echoes in the 14th & nearby poems of Books 2-9+).

One of the strange effects for me of this process is that the individual units or poems will foreshadow each other in advance.  Here's how it happens.  My general method is to read through the aligned or corresponding "numbers" of the previous books before setting out on the next poem.  Thus if I'm writing # 27 in Book 10, I will read through the previous #27s in Books 1-9, seeking a general orientation.  Then I will proceed to write #27.  The odd thing is this : when I then turn to composing #28, and proceed to read all the previous #28s, I discover that what I'm reading has already been foreshadowed by what I've just written (#27).  It's sort of a double motion, planned/unplanned.

If this sounds convoluted, my apologies : the basic idea is that the large poem is structured on a series of rings, growing slowly outward, like a tree.  It's a massive ceramic plate - shaped by clay lips (a sort of "whisper gallery").  Or a maze, a labyrinth - a slow, spiraling pilgrimage one has to walk.

My constant companion in this seemingly endless project is a shadow of doubt & frustration.  There is no acknowledgement in the literary world for what I'm engaged with here.  The silence is absolute.  It's like I'm traveling in a separate or private universe, on an irrational fool's errand.  There is a vast chasm between creation & publication.  I have no prestige, no powerful advocates.  Ravenna Diagram goes out there on HG Poetics, with occasional forays into literary magazines (for which I'm extremely grateful).

I've written before about the motivations for blogging the poem. Basically I find that the blog is an appropriate way to present a long, serial, diaristic, processual work, which sometimes interacts with signal holidays or public events.  But the disadvantages are many.  Moreover, I have a very old & very bad habit of self-publication - which doesn't sit well with many people, especially prestigious academics, book reviewers & editors.  This greatly limits my access to the larger literary scene.

But I want to suggest that there is another, more fundamental dimension to this poetry thing I am acting out at such great length.  & that is that I am attempting to express a radical worldview, a sort of philosophy with my work.  The intellectual pivot of all these poetic ring structures is a challenge to the modern & postmodern era as a whole (an intellectual challenge).

One might see this coming with a poem structured on a parallel to Dante.  Eliot & Pound, in their own ways, did something similar.   But I'm not at all a neoconservative or revolutionary-authoritarian Modern, as they were.  My intellectual allegiance (if I have to choose models) is closer to Hart Crane & James Joyce.  Or to some of the visionary dimensions in Mandelstam & Yeats.

I believe in a new Age of Faith : but one in which faith itself is understood also in a new way.

Poetry, in my view, is a mode of expressing the vitality, goodness & beauty of Reality as a whole : as an End, as a Creation, as a living, breathing multivalent Sign of a supreme loving Consciousness.  This view need contradict neither human free will nor scientific objective reason (theory & evidence).  But it is rooted in this sense of faith : this joyful apprehension of a benevolent purpose in cosmic nature (call it divine "Providence").

I can only call it Faith, because it is incommensurate with simple verbal arguments or logical verifications.  But I do think this is what Jesus meant when he spoke of "going back to the beginning", or about faith as the root of all active accomplishment, or when he characterized God the Creator as Love.   This faith is really not that different from the "primitive" faith of archaic human cultures - that all goodness descends from the One Great Spirit, from the "Manitou" who is the source of all blessings.  We are talking about the root meaning of the general social-behavioral attitude we call "good faith", "good will".

This way of putting things will strike many as not "new" at all.  I agree : I'm not up to the task here in prose.  Hence the need for poetry.  Ravenna Diagram is circling very slowly around a new sense of "Incarnation" - something emerging presently, out of the here & now, out of the clay of Big Muddy, like an infant emerging from the womb, or Jonah from the whale.  An Incarnation which expresses and confirms (forever) an inherent thankfulness-for-being; a celebration of its own existence, a happy end-in-itself.

The foregoing sketches out a vision - not unrelated to that of the Russian Acmeist poet Nikolai Gumilev.  A "chaste" vision, of the inherent beauty & blessedness of all things; of the harmony of the cosmos as one fundamental, & fundamentally victorious, Dream-reality.