HG Poetics

Essays in Critical Flame

2012-01-26T12:36:00.004-05:00

New review essay floats Ben Mazer and John Beer on the sea of Ashbery and TS Eliot :
Jerusalem & Albion; or, Maze & Barleycorn

This is the 2nd essay of mine there. Also wrote one about Gabriel Gudding a while back :
Reading Gabriel Gudding

The epic drive

2012-01-25T15:46:00.003-05:00

Knowledge, taken in the abstract - say, by the vulnerable ephebe just starting out in college - displays a frightening visage : abyssal, disorienting, nightmarish. Knowledge, in its authorized, authoritative forms, is demanding (all those martinet-professors, those requirements, those deadlines & examinations), impersonal... fundamentally inscrutable. Say our tenderfoot student is curious about History. The question is, where to begin? If all "facts"are equal... & if the historians, each with their particular perspective and expertise, number in the thousands upon thousands... Indeed, there is a specific demon of angst which persecutes the undergraduate - whose malicious intent is to induce a painful, extremely self-conscious (to the point of paranoia) sense of being lost . What do I know, in the midst of all this formidable universe of chilly and alienated learning? How can I know anything? How can I trust my own feeble capacity to find meaning, to understand?

It is just here (as has often been pointed out) that the arts attempt a rescue mission. Art is synthesis, not analysis; its aim is not to detach elements of experience by means of abstraction in order to re-align them into codes of information, hierarchies of data. Art does not truck with the supposed "objectivity" of formalized knowledge; rather, Art produces holistic representations of experience - images which we need not learn, because we already recognize them. We do not "acquire" these representations - we immediately identify with them. And in these identifications our inward sense of personal understanding is encouraged, fortified, strengthened, and above all, expanded. (Perhaps the paradigmatic expression of this commonality of experience is John Donne's famous passage from Meditation 17 : "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.")

Is this the happy end of story, then? Art comes to the rescue, trouncing adolescent despair? Well, yes, perhaps. But for the artist the picture may be more complex. How, say, in poetry, are these holistic representations - these charmed and charming narratives, capable of evoking sympathetic understanding and identification - to be successfully created? The endless debates within the various guilds of poets over issues of subjectivity/objectivity, personality/impersonality, individuality/commonality, point toward unresolved difficulties, internal contradictions. How does the poet achieve a balance between self-indulgent, anecdotal subjectivity on the one hand, and a bloodless, abstract objectivity on the other? How few are the poems which succeed in integrating these polarities - in presenting "concrete universals": those characteristic particulars which are nevertheless capable of global relevance.

Works of the past called "great" are just these poems which have achieved a kind of wholeness and universality. The Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare... these are some of the familiar benchmarks - narratives which fuse representative, characteristic individuals, with a shared history - Pound's "tale of the tribe" - the many and the one.

We could call this the "epic" drive in poetry : the struggle to present multiplicity in the form of holistic order. Northrop Frye described this totalizing impulse as the defining characteristic of the epic mode. The works which achieve such encyclopedic synthesis become foundational texts, paradigmatic narratives of peoples and cultures. They construct a kind of aegis or rooftop of mutual understanding - or, to use another image, a sort of network of vital pathways, which encourage individuals to emerge from isolation into the ethos of a shared tradition.

The path toward such epic achievements involves the most intense struggle : because no imagery of wholeness will be accepted as authentic unless it has been earned. It would be impossible for an audience to assent to epic pretensions, if the work itself did not display an indwelling awareness, a comprehension, of actual, lived experience in its heights and depths. The achievement of an epic narrative is thus a kind of celebratory moment - when individual artistic making is matched with the real existence of the whole society.

- to be continued, maybe... -

Lanthanum 9.13

2012-01-24T23:09:00.002-05:00

13
for Chris Kraemer

That bridge in your old photo, Chris (beehive
of hexagonal girders, poised in a mirror-
agon of contrastive weight – taut Piranesi-
pattern)... a quick sliver of dove-

wings flits through those ribs. Flotsam
of memory asway below, sheathed
in snakeskin of crusted limestone (teeth,
bone, shells)... only the river seethes, I Am

& only Time will bind these liquidaceous scars
in one eddying canyon-volume : synthesis
or wave-continuum : the hand-or-eye’s
own natural rest note (a fulcrum-focus).

At Prospect Terrace, the statue of young Roger
steps a stilled foot into the bow of his canoe.
Silence marks his brow there too, at prow
of Providence (lips close upon their origin).

What might ye behold there, by glinting granite
glance – through whisper-facets of the river?
On rungs of welded iron, raindrops shiver
in jointed deltoids, whose spinal height

arcs up to Union (forged from a million
bolts of eyebright)... reaches their hands
(mirrored, multiplex) into those wounds
(ineluctable, irreducible – your own). &

shadows of a Piranesi-body (dove-borne,
Pentecostal) rise from the rails of
sunken Soo Line (sun-thorn, whale-
horn)... eyelash of Beatrice-Magdalen.

1.24.12

Poet Buried under Rock Emerges!!

2012-01-20T09:45:00.011-05:00

Here's a new way to find a lot of my poetry - free pdf. versions, linked at the Brown University Library catalog. (On each page, just go to "click on the following"....)

Chapel Hill
Dove Street
Forth of July
In RI
Island Road
Lanthanum 1-8
Rest Note
Stubborn Grew
Way Stations

Lanthanum 9.12

2012-01-17T22:47:00.001-05:00

12
for Karen Donovan (who noticed them)

Here’s a photo – a flock of ducks in the river
swathed in steam-shimmer, lithe silver & gold.
The day itself was overcast, crepuscular; an old
sepia print of Providence (unknown engraver).

Those ducks for certain make a joyful noise
though for us it’s only a tacit Jubilee. &
snow was just a sketch, a promissory
morning sprinkle : 7 wavy scimitars

of moon-flakes, traipsing their descent
to elemental winter ground. It was a sign
for manna from the summer sun – the Son
of Man (intuitive angel of untold ascent,

centripetal within each ice-bound tear)
flutes in the market as predicted – yet
that handish cloud overhead is implicate
with wing-tip folds; yon leafy paramour

Jessie O’Balm’s forming up up there
a demonstration (maybe very gentle rain
later today). Sleep on it, Berryman; let
splay of almond palm undo the nightmare

(this is my prayer). You had an answer in
your own, when rondure of an unkempt heart
spun back upon her yearning path (O startling
Ind). The sprite who knelt beside you there

came dropping slow (like Chesley by shoreline,
shielding struts with ingrained, unaccountable
care). Benign, compounded with the fallible...
infallible & secret element (a sign, cosine).

1.17.12

Lanthanum 9.11

2012-01-16T22:13:00.001-05:00

11
for Allen Grossman

Once, on a planet where earth & sky are partners
(emerald & sapphire) emerged an unknown pharaoh
cleft in a dreary mountain... quiet shadow
swimming into sun. He was met with sneers

row upon row, with hosts of angry errors. Then
he began to sing : sweetly mortal, this one,
humble & low as a dusty pigeon : crossgrain
against the chilly currency of that thieve’s den

(for lo, it was a land of bilk & money).
Against Memphis silt his melody set sail
upstream – steel compass shepherding a frail
canoe, whose prow & wake bear one bright V

toward heartfelt matrix (ruby, diamond).
His chant was not unheard-of in that land,
not strange : just passionate echo of grand-
ma’s hymn, & preacher’s reprimand :

a sense of rightness, stubbornly evoked
(tempered to the time at hand). His weapons
two arms crossed upon his breast – someone’s
stern angel, binding warmongers (Wovoka-

avatar). Just shadow of a gray shadow,
or slip of pebbles in a tidal wash : inkling
of forgotten plenitude, laughter’s foundling.
Lost land where river shallows press the bow

toward shore... among warbling lips of
silenced wings – that rosy treasure
chest, where blue & green, & black &
white, I & Thou, & earth & sky are one.

1.16.12

poem published in Providence Journal on 1.13.12

2012-01-14T11:28:00.004-05:00

I started reading Tomas Tranströmer's poetry after he won the Nobel Prize - & liked it a lot. The Providence paper printed a slightly garbled version of it on the op-ed page yesterday. Here's the corrected version :

STARS IN THE EARTH

homage to Tomas Tranströmer

The quiet Swede goes for an evening walk.
It’s growing dark already, cold.
Far off, a silent bivouac of trees, asleep
beneath snow-blankets. The gray sea, whimpering.

Overhead, tiny train-lights of stars
skim past the dark station, toward unmapped regions.
His feet slush through old shelves of ice. He feels
the planet sleepwalk – muttering, dreaming, sailing on.

On a gray-green brow, a lonely farm opens one eye.
A star has made its nest on earth. And now
more lights... a constellation swims into the forest.
He’ll christen it “the Hearth” when he gets home.

Lanthanum 9.10

2012-01-10T21:45:00.002-05:00

10

The earth, a flaking Roman ampitheatre,
doddering old ham... waiting (by that river
in Vienne) to cradle One who comes, deliver
Him - Emanu-el, the One-with-us (now, here) –

while amid Mayan ruins of Piedras Negras
students pencilling their scribble-diaries
mimic the very pliant sediment they prize
from plaza, limestone crypt, acropolis –

intent on disinterment : one petrified root
of the Archaic One. That buried king, or
child – lurker in the villages, oppressed
oppressor – fatherless, beneath the boot

of evil-doing thugs. Tacit one, who waits &
waits there, in the dump... that groundsman-
gardener (asleep or dead) upon whom Magdalen
trains her indomitable emerald eye (understand

what Iris lurks beneath such blurred-out Violet).
O mudpie innocents, ephebe-gravediggers, I
would join you in your soggy trenches – misery
of the world is quenched in labor so inviolate –

& in the spousal sarabande of Mayan time
inch toward an ur-outcrop of waterfalls :
grave yet lightweight pumice-composite (all’s
figures, Horatio) streaked with lanthanum-

streams of limestone. Where a bass-chorus
swims in droning schools : a fluent solidarity
of Wills (Roger, Blackstone)... & nostra pace
e’en la sua voluntade. IN RI, chanted... for us.

1.10.12

Lanthanum 9.9

2012-01-09T22:25:00.001-05:00

9

It was the faintest whisper of the lightest breeze
you felt not heard, the most ineffable lightness
breathing across the river’s curve, at night;
near St. Louis, under the wingèd shroud of trees.

Stillness; quiet; only a creak of cottonwoods
as the bow slips downstream. & you lie back
along ribs & spine... & trace another track
remote, milky (buffalo, or thunderbirds).

A pair of spare steel calipers lean into sky.
A lightweight tripod, anchored from above,
almost; made of open air, its alcove
seems to shepherd weightlessness (a mile-

high smile). You lean against the gunwale,
press your ear into Karelian birch; the veins
thread tiny rivers, seamless as woven spans
of Inca stone; you enter the black-hole tunnel.

& it is so arranged, we never leave
the tender circle of those tight-swathed hills
A light wind-vortex lifts her glittering vessel
(diamond now) on a sigh of joy (heave-

ho!) – a choir of humming fingertips
in unison (their pregnant sails seamless as
woven Incan shroud). Hiawatha-longhouse
of loving fellowship – red-willow slips

of smoke & singing ghosts... the pure air
of diamond-heart, at center of the six
directions. All bound in Magdalen’s hex-
agon : reunion or reconnaissance (ours

be her beatific ninefold choir).

1.9.12

Lanthanum 9.8

2011-12-30T16:07:00.002-05:00

8

Low sun, gold-creamery December light
mark the end of another year on earth.
& what is Man? Mindful? His worth
a little under-angelic (more than ant,

anyway) – tendered (legally) amid the regal
eggshell of an Humpty-Dumpty sin. Remind him,
homunculus, his microcosmic status – sign him
up for the Y & wherefore – before the urnful

vigil & last rites, so he may right his wrongs
beneath a shared seesaw (yon looming doomy
tombtree). He aim a little whorl – whee-zoomy
Higgs bos’un. Particle of puny-verse (songs

have sung thus before, friends) whose dignity
is but a tear in her em-passionate upwelling eye
– one diamond octahedron adamantine guy’s high-
wired disCERNement (solomonseal pipmass) she

will lift (with Rog-whim) through the double hoop
of Eviemine Allpebbles. The rose of her hopeful
encompassment d’étoiled a sundance inside steel
of risen dust on every side – chicken-coop

or Henry-O-meter of the last buried man slept
off cottonblood (Sioux peacepup-kaleidoscope)
to lift prong against grain, & shape
flow of paradisal waterfalls (promise kept

in limestone palimpsest). Scratched with rod
of iron through rain of epluribus omnitears,
blab of tout-monde baobab (all ears) –
shaggy Maggie Sophia (minitransmogriffin-eyed)

at the limpid garden gate. It was in her mind
to finally do & say it, after seeing him dead-or-
alive to the very end of the pier, & the year –
& so she did, like piñata or katydid. Near 28 Pine.

12.30.11

Friday Thoughts on What the Heck

2011-12-22T12:12:00.013-05:00

For poets & readers raised on modern-postmodernism, the sovereign autonomy of art is a foundational tenet. So I would hardly be surprised if some people viewed my poetry, & my :"theoretical" writings, with suspicion : a dangerous mix of incommensurate categories, a sloshing-together of art & religion, a shackling of free imagination with dogmas of theology...

This might have something to do with the somewhat narrow, squinched contemporary sense of what a poet is, & what is a poet's proper social role. For us, today, it seems to be either/or : either one is a detached, thumbs-twiddling artiste, exuding free & playful & harmless arty baubles : or one is engaged - convinced, angry & convicted about the crisis du jour, the world situation - full of passionate intensity, ready to man the ramparts on behalf of a slogan greater than ourselves.

What's lacking for the moment, perhaps, is a confidence (across culture at large) in effective speech as a form of social action. By effective here I don't mean solely political, but rather meaningful discourse in a more general sense (social, cultural). The fact is we live in an unprecedented Babel-explosion of varying, contradictory & rivalous tweets & chirpings (including those philosophical trends which deny any purposive connection between language, meaning, & action whatsoever). So the idea of a poet, and poetry, actually contributing something of substance to more general public discourse - in poetry - seems to have grown steadily more absurd and impossible, since those (19th-cent.) days when Matthew Arnold began to voice qualms about the situation. We are far gone from the Victorian Poet-Orator.

Again, I'm not referring to the engaged poet - the populist - the voice of the streets. This kind of poetry is enjoying a great resurgence, actually : from the Occupy encampments to Kremlin Square to Tahrir Square, the rapping-tweeting poet-singer is the heroine & hero of the day. And it is certainly "effective speech", and to be admired & praised. But what I'm thinking of is a form of discourse perhaps quieter, simpler and more basic : the kind of philosophical or theological musing/reasoning which is world-shaping : foundational in terms of humankind's most basic worldview and orientation with regard to life's meaning & purposes. I mean the visionary storytelling represented by Biblical prophets, the Psalmist, Homer, Dante, Blake... many others. For example, Hesiod and the pre-Socratics shared an interest in enunciating "first and last things" : theogonies of origin, ultimate verbal formulae. This is a very ancient and primary social role taken on by poet and philosopher alike.

I wouldn't try to pole-vault myself up among that exalted company of visionary propounders. But what I can say is that I'm drawn to a sketchy outline of this mode of poetry, this concept of a poet's social role. I look to the special faculties and resources and potentialities within the specific craft and modes of poetic making - its rhythmic/harmonic/conceptual/referential density - as powers which create the conditions for adequate verbal equivalents for the real and possible nature of things : an adequate or accurate model or mirror of the way things might be...

And just how might such things be? Let's say that poetry might be culturally - humanly - foundational if - and this is a big if! - if reality as a whole is ultimately founded and grounded in ecstasy, wonder and joy. In the joy of creation.

I think it was Aristotle who described God, the Prime Mover, as "the thought that thinks itself." It occurred to me today that this might also describe one of the avenues for reflection on the structure of human being, human nature. That is, perhaps we can imagine human nature as essentially reflective - as the consciousness which considers its origin. Today I have the sense that this is one way to describe - to body forth, characterize, depict - our human situation with respect to consciousness per se. The dominion of human thought and action on the planet earth (imperfect, still wrongful & destructive, not yet hopeless) is a miniature analogue, a proportionate ratio, to the everliving Consciousness existing in creative dominion over the universe, reality, as a whole. When one recognizes this Consciousness as infinite love and goodness & joy, one begins to grasp the import and purpose of the message of Jesus, his "good news". When Jesus says he offers the keys to "eternal life" he means exactly that joyful recognition of an undying creative Being which suffuses the entire cosmos. This "eternal life" is the real Holy Grail : the source of spiritual fortitude, hope and joy in the face of every earthly sorrow and pain.

So if in my poetry I attempt to stand with Blake & Hopkins & Dante in sketching out (singing) a version of this most basic ontological concept of reality - of its meaning & purpose - of first & last things - well, this is the rational confidence underlying my little craft. (See, in this regard, contemporary philosopher Alvin Plantinga on the "normative" quality of belief in God. According to Plantinga, faith in God cannot be proven - but it doesn't need to be, in order to be accepted as rational. One can legitimately believe something to be true, without proof, as long as it has not been proven to be false : just as I believe I am going to leave work for home soon, although there's no way to prove that to be true.)

& my faith in the joyful-creative substance of things has consequences for society. If we are all children of God, then we ought to love our neighbor as ourselves. Ask Black Elk about this.

(p.s. just so you know : I don't believe it's Friday yet. I'm pretty sure it's Thursday.)

p.p.s. But I also hold that poetry is good in itself, whether it poses problems or asks questions or provides answers or simply delights & entertains. Poetry has its own proper glow. Yet also I'm saying it's that glow which allows it to carry these other burdens too.

Thought for the day

2011-12-21T09:53:00.006-05:00

It seems to me that a basic dimension of religious faith is entirely personal and individual. It has to do with the psyche and personality, and with one's own individual stance toward spiritual things : with what you and I actually do : how we think, how we act, how we proceed. Our personal way in life.

Thus there are severe limits on what can meaningfully be said about faith and religion in a general way : abstractions, theoretical constructs, ideology, criticism, scholarship, journalism, public debates and polemics, & so on. Faith always involves a personal dimension : an individual orientation & practice (with others) - a private history of repentance, let's say - which is resistant to theoretical abstractions & descriptive conveniences.

This situation makes me think of the contrarian, paradoxical quality (or non-statements) connected with Zen Buddhism (not that I know anything, really, about Zen Buddhism). Or the warnings, in the Gospels, about prayer & fasting. I'm thinking of Jesus' comments about the "tower of Siloam" incident. A big tower falls, killing a lot of innocent bystanders. Jesus says, "unless you repent, you will all likewise perish." The warning is to urge us to be wakeful, to "gird up our loins", to be aware, to be prepared & ready. (The parable of the "wise & foolish virgins" is similar.) Jesus also repeatedly warns against hypocrisy, against substituting empty words for actual commitment. "Beware the leaven of the Pharisees" : ie. avoid the temptations offered by seductive theories or fashionable paraphrases of the actual ethical content of your faith. This is a "leaven" (a fatty substitute) you do not actually need to add to the unleavened bread of heaven.

An early passage in Stubborn Grew :

21

It was only a moment coming round.
Bowled over, on the Terrace.
And then she got mad, got gone–
and he eloped with his pen–

witch! Falcon Ace!–
of which he was deeply fond.
Some said he drowned.
Someone–a siren cantatrice–

mare of the night, see–
might rob his rich rhyme
of all reason. . . sometime.
What will be, will be.

Repentance is all.

Advent Message

2011-12-15T11:27:00.009-05:00

I don't have the strength to blog like I used to. I'm working out every morning, doing jumping jacks & so on, to try & get my mojo back. Jump along with me, dear reader.

The year is drawing to a close, Christmas is coming, Advent is here... am sketching out a few stray memories of the poetry & Lanthanum-writing experience in 2011... what it all means...

One high point was reading (re-reading?) Gemstone of Paradise, by G.R. Murphy. This is a remarkable book. The author explores Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval romance, Parzival, & attempts to discover why Wolfram, unlike other narrators, insisted on describing the Holy Grail as a "stone". The inquiry leads deep into Wolfram's humane & spiritual vision - a very ecumenical vision, which presents the grail as emanating from the stone Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus was buried, as transmuted into the elegant, & portable, stone eucharistic altars - miniature holy sepulchres - inlaid with precious stones and carved with designs representing the 4 rivers of Paradise, etc. Wolfram's eucharistic version of the grail represented the universality, the "portability", of the Holy Spirit & divine Love - which breaks down barriers, draws enemies back into familial harmony (we are all children of God). In Parzival, grail-searchers, Crusaders, Muslim "infidels", all participate in a comedy of errors & mistaken identity, as they discover themselves, in the end, to be brothers (actual blood relations).

Of course, most of the books I read are things I stumble upon in my search for grounds & inspiration for this ornery poem (Lanthanum), which I've been struggling with for some years now. A poem is also a kind of symbolic object, hopefully harmonic (a sort of music box). & we write in the shadow of history & memory. Part of the long argument (sometimes explicit, mostly implicit, I guess) in this & other poems of mine involves a kind of response to other poets who "included history" in various ways - Pound, Crane, Eliot... History for me has this theological or spiritual dimension : there is this (dove-shaped) shadow of the presence of Jesus... the strange light of the empty sepulchre... light through stone... the testimony of other minds - centrally, for me, the elusive (partially-erased?) Mary Magdalen... (it is her primary witness, of Christ as a living gardener, standing by the tomb, I'm thinking about)...

It's all a faintly absurd hobbyhorse, I'm sure, to the sceptical - but we can only bear witness to what we've experienced, & let people scratch where they may itch. I've been lifted out of my own tomb more than once - & that memory is, for me, like an immovable Rock.

So this was one high point this year. But I find I'm proving inadequate to the task of relating what's happened, happens. Writing a poem is partly a matter of waiting for the impulse, the hunch, the intuition - & it's also partly a construction project. What I feel I've been experiencing somewhat this year is a kind of correlation or harmonization of different symbols or aspects of reality. Happens to the craziest & sanest amongst us! What I'm talking about is a kind of overlay or fitting-together of disparate symbolic elements. For example : this concept of the paradisal grail-sepulchre, and the spiritual "gate" represented by the Gateway Arch monument in St. Louis (built just across the river from the primordial "grave-mound" of Cahokia). This notion of an object full of spiritual "mana" & power, a matrix, a center, and the idea of a mandala. The puns uniting mandala, mandorla, Mandelstam, "almond branch". The mandala & the rose windows of cathedrals, like the one in Chartres (sponsored by & built during the reign of St. Louis). The atomic abbreviation for the element lanthanum - and the abbreviation for the state of Louisiana (La). An obscure "painted church" located in the woodlands of Romania, near Bukovina (birthplace of Mandelstam-translator & kindred spirit, Paul Celan) - with a fresco of a "Tree of Jesse" (say, an almond) in which the branches are ornamented with an ecumenical collection of poets, prophets, saints, apostles, philosophers...

I'm rambling a bit now, but I want to combine these references with something architectural.... a humane architectonic, as in the theory of the Russian Acmeists (Akme... Kamen (stone)). A sort of poetics of analogies or equivalences... by way of which mankind & the cosmos - nature, reality, universe - are brought into a vital harmony. A vision of proportion : logos, ratio : through which we begin to sense & recognize, & participate in, the primal joy of universal Creation. What is this primal proportion? The kinship - the familial bond - of God & Person (God's imago). "We are all God's children" runs the timeworn phrase - familiar, yet true. This is the invisible crystalline framework of the spiritual Power of Love itself. Love is this loving relation, by which we have all been touched throughout our lives, whether we notice it or not : & the "good news" is that this love of which we have had an inkling & a brief taste, has its cosmic & universal & metaphysical & vital ground in reality itself - the whole reality, the cosmic One. This is why Wolfram calls the woman who "keeps" the Grail by the name of Repanse de Joie, or "overflowing joy" - this cosmic creative ecstasy of eternal Beginning & Being, the cup of which we have all had a little sip, a premonition.

So in the poem Lanthanum I've also wanted to ground everything in what's personal & real to me, my own place, my own memories, my own country.... & thinking of the unaccountable dream I had of the Gateway Arch monument - I began imagining it in a kind of "figure & ground" reversal. In other words, I had the odd dream of the Arch, which began to filter into the poem, as figure on a ground; but then I began to sense the Arch-symbol as a kind of matrix, or magnet, or center of a mandala or force-field, exerting a sort of metamorphosis on the surrounding "land" which it celebrated - so that, in other words, the actual Arch began to generate notions of a "dream America" : a future land, a regenerated & healed nation...

When you start taking on such vast challenges in a poem, you inevitably come up against your incapacities. To even think of a possible "spirit of America" nowadays : it sounds hopeless! But maybe it's not. & this brings me to the most recent of this year's spadework/explorations. For me, any "re-encounter" with America brings to mind the original settlers - the Native Americans, the Indians. As I mused away at the poem, I imagined sloughing off my own 'Euro" origins... coming into a relation with those others who were here first, & all the terrible & wild history of that encounter. I had always thought of the poem Lanthanum, & of the Gateway Arch, as a sort of synthesis-project of New World & Old, of Hart Crane & TS Eliot, of contemporary & medieval : now I started thinking that the mandorla, the canoe, the vesica formed by the intersection of those 2 circles had to include Native America as one pole, one center of a union. I began re-reading Black Elk Speaks and The Sacred Pipe... & then I happened upon some studies & a biography of Black Elk. I was surprised to discover that not only was Black Elk a very great spiritual teacher in his Lakota world, but that he also, in turn, crossed over to the other circle in my imaginary mandala. He converted to Catholicism, and became a catechist & lay teacher at Pine Ridge. I'm still busy reading in these sources : but in a way this discovery encouraged me to keep going in this direction with the poem. America - along with every other locality on earth - is a sort of "colony" of a more universal humane civilization : & this is part of the deep project of poetry, music, & all the arts. We are not meant to forsake our cultural origins on behalf of some merely intellectual or shallow ideological formulae; rather, the universal & the particular are set in a stance of fruitful synthesis - a wedding of opposites. (This is one of the deep meanings of Incarnation, as the Orthodox monk Maximus the Confessor so eloquently explained : the whole cosmos beautifully participates in the harmonic Union of God & Man.)

Finally, one of the funniest things I realized recently was that this imaginative immersal, this diving back into Indian-Land, this "going native" (Roger Williams' & William Blackstone's task)... was not new. I realized : I've been here before. The even longer poem of the late 90s, the vast Forth of July, is essentially another such plunge into the physical & spiritual "center" of America - with me, the poet-narrator, led along by my nose by that trickster-figure out of NW Coast Indian lore, old Bluejay...

I suppose this is a very representative Blog Post : verbose, vague, rambling, confusing... but I'm trying to sum up some of the octahedral facets of the diamond sutra of the Lakota ceremony of the six directions in the sacred hoop of the people on the windy grasslands where I come from & where I go back to longingly in my daydreams....

Lanthanum 9.7

2011-12-13T22:26:00.003-05:00

7

Winter dark drawing on, Blackstone lingers late
beside his companionable willow-leaf of flame. O
Rock, afloat there, higher than I am... & became
his own salty psaltery. Pine-bough (compassionate

in heartbeat’s quiet). Look you, if the ratio
of loving river-flow between a father & a son
is bright, clean, perfect token – mumble-icon (or
lips’ manger) for a cosmic oratorio – say,

welling up eternally with overflowing & maternal
harborings – yea, spousal rapture! – why,
then, we have reason to be glad alway
& every which way, aye! sez I (the watchful

hermit, smilingly). Sudden attunement
startled up his spine – high notes of nether-
cloudy zither-strings, like Degas feathering
a pastel La-La Land beneath the bent Arc

de Triomphe of an octahedral cathedral
(somewhere north of N’Orleans). Its gray
pigeon-nave (adrift, heavy) anchors a-weigh
right here, forthright, upstream : a sundial

planted on sunburnt clay, or airy diamond’s
undisintegrated flare – adamant prow-brow, set
to blaze through water out of limestone night.
Rose from old St. Louis graveyard (someone’s

woeful man-measure) like pink dawn-eye
or rubicund mandorla – dust-cloud gardener
held in huntress-glance. Magdalen myrrh-
box, cask of emerald foresight. Hey-ya-weh...

12.13.11

Lanthanum 9.6

2011-11-23T16:57:00.002-05:00

6

November. Melancholy Bruegel-sky
freckled with lost leaves (set adrift,
sent into exile). What thanks to lift
out of year’s graveyard? Selah (sigh)...

Crows float over reservations, over
blank spots on maps, colonial footprints.
Ghosts of old vexed souls squint through
far panes... their windvane, bloodvein choir

of air, silence, distance. Blackstone, too
(exile, Injun-lover) curls into his cave,
soaks his couch with futile rain (his dry
ravine, his autumn gloom). Wh’cheer, Netop?

Not much. Yet these same barren trees
just now blanched gold, alchemical – rose
flagrant, flush with vineyard glose of
astonishment (choral rainbow-melody)...

He closes one good eye (vestigial retina-
glow, blushing Yellow Sweeting) only to fold
in a trim tackle, passionate wrestling-hold
the whole dappled manifold (soul-cornucopia);

within cloud-rim of funereal sky
reframes a welded reunion of horizons :
tongue-laced, -lashed dome of fiery orisons
capping ruddy mandala (lamb-candelabra)

sunleapt out of limestone clay (warble
of exiled turtledove become foundation-
stone). Enter a dewdrop, mournful sun.
Fly from your autumn grave, leaf-people.

11.23.11

occupy my heart

2011-11-21T22:28:00.000-05:00

chords for Thanksgiving

2011-11-15T20:38:00.000-05:00

Black Elk & the 4th of July

2011-11-10T18:52:00.003-05:00

I recommend a book to anyone interested in America... that is, America as a spiritual/historical/cultural... entity. Something. The book is Black Elk : Colonialism and Lakota Catholicism (Orbis Bks, 2005). I just sent a copy to my son for his birthday.

Full disclosure : I am not, & have never been, a Catholic. Though I guess some might say I'm a crypto-Catholic (Episcopalian). How did I become an Episcopalian? That's another story. My grandmother, Florence Ainsworth Gould, born on July 4, 1900, was the 1st Episcopalian in the Gould clan (our local clan, anyway). Why? Because her father died when she was about 15. Of TB, or pneumonia : one of those scourges running through America in 1915. Florence became very gloomy... so a school friend invited her to a youth group at her church (which happened to be Episcopalian). Everything else followed (my infant baptism, for instance)...

The Episcopalians, I think (I'm not very informed on this) had a lot to do with missionary work among the Ojibwa, in Minnesota. But that's another story. THIS story is about a book, about Black Elk's conversion to Christianity, & what it all means...

This is a very valuable book. I would hazard to say that there is only one Truth - universal, local, personal, cosmic : but there are many ways of expressing it, paraphrasing it, or denying it.

This book is especially valuable to me. I've been dancing for a few years now around a long poem called Lanthanum. The poem emerged out of a dream I had, one night, about the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. And this book (Black Elk, by Damian Costello) seemed to materialize in my hands, in response to some intuitions or hunches I was having with respect to the poem. (One of the advantages of working in a library.)

In my intuitions I saw - in a vague way - I kind of conjunction of 2 circles. First, the circle of old Europe (see, for iconic example, Henry Adams' book Mont St. Michel & Chartres) - and beyond that, old Byzantium (St. Maximus, WB Yeats, Osip Mandelstam) & old Israel (Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam). Second the circle of the New World (I could cite a lot of examples here... but for now let's just say Hart Crane, Roger Williams, William Blackstone, Malcolm Lowry, Black Elk).

Anyway, I had a vague sense of these two circles intersecting, forming a vesica (geometrical shape something like a canoe - formed by 2 intersecting circles)... around the space of the Gateway Arch. Old World, New World. Pound, Eliot/Crane, Stevens. St. Louis/Black Elk.

I was having these impulses before I read Damian Costello's book (& others about the Lakota) : & reading these things seems to have complexified my understanding as well as confirmed my intuitions.

It was the impulse, as a poet, to shed my (Anglo-European) skin : because there seems no other right way to get in touch with the sensible actuality of American soil... the feeling of the prairie & the woods & lakes. (Which is also part of my childhood nostalgia. My Dad & my brothers & I were active in the "Indian Guides", in the 60s - a sort of alternative to the Cub Scouts, based on "Indian" values... & there was a lot of this incorporated into Boy Scouts, too. I was initiated into the "Order of the Arrow" in Scout camp (which also happened to be an Episcopalian summer camp... Camp Lawton, near Balsam Lake, Wisconsin).

The funny thing is that as I started going in this direction I realized I was repeating myself. The very long poem Forth of July (finished in 2000) is a kind of Anglo-Native masque... a real (Ojibwa-style) Dream Song.

An aside : my mother was a childhood friend of the granddaughter (the daughter of "Laughing Allegra") of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They grew up as neighbors on the River Road, along the Mississippi in Minneapolis. The Longfellows invited my mother to their vacation place on the coast of Maine when she was 12 or 13... & so she had her first alcoholic drink (my mother's parents were Iowa teetotallers) - a glass of sherry - in the Longfellow House in Portland, Maine. HW Longfellow, of course, wrote the famous "Hiawatha" - a poem my father memorized (in part) in elementary school, in Minneapolis - based on an Ojibwa story (& set by Longfellow to a meter from the Finnish epic, the Kalevala). There's a statue of Hiawatha carrying Minnehaha across Minnehaha Creek, in Como Park, in Minneapolis, near the Falls... where we used to have a picnic on the 4th of July every summer...

Lanthanum 9.4

2011-11-06T18:13:00.004-05:00

4

Quiet Sunday in New England. November eye
(low glance through ancient tenement panes).
Lights up a fleeting countenance – shines
there, your face... Blackstone’s Mont-Joie,

beyond their corny wine. My learned Sunday
scholar, true to his spirit-bull’s eye. Attuned
thereby to all hope & charity – seedling rune
of human future (out of planetary ruin). Hey,

who kin shave us any good? the blind men cry
& gnaw each other’s shoulders. I’ll shew you
everlasting gladness, mumbles Will (from yew-
bough hermitage) – here in my hand : an eye

of murmuring myrrh. & he lay down on his bed.
Communed with mine own heart (silent
figman). Old monk, stooped figure, patient
at the morning gate (of the Land of the Dead).

Cryptic groundskeep. Eld priest, old shaman...
medicine man. Henry Thunder Winnebago
croons in the prairie twilight... I’d go
there with you, Henry – shed my skin –

become that other Henry – Henry Lightfoot,
released from grief at last (& gravity
too). The shadow of a peacock’s wing... see?
Through an eye-rainbow... serpentine sky-root.

Inverted arc, smiling through rain. Swim
through the shiny pillar, shuddered Jiminy Hobo
parked on his iron rail. Toward absolute zero.
Yon Ojibwa wheel (Arowra Bury All-Ice). Dream.

11.5.11

Let go the superflux!

2011-10-30T17:27:00.009-04:00

Just as in the Elizabethan age, or that of Sophocles, theater sheds oblique moonlight on the "form & pressure of the time".

So today we have the Tea Party & Occupy Wall Street, both in protest agains the status quo : the Tea Party, against a patronizing liberal consensus, which supposes every problem can be solved by throwing taxpayer money at it; the Occupy movement, against an amoral & greedy crony capitalism, piling up its own wealth without the slightest sense of mutual responsibility, compassion, or common welfare.

& also we have a new film, "Anonymous", the premise of which - that "Shakespeare" was a front man for an aristocratic ghost writer - has stirred up populist/elitist antagonism (within the little snow-globe of Shakespeare scholarship) for almost a century.
99% vs. 1%.

Moreover, the "Oxford" theory of Shakespearean authorship sends a tremor of unease through the settled layers of western literary culture. The idea shakes the historical foundations : this is one reason it is dismissed so vehemently & sarcastically. It's troubling to all sorts of grand traditions & accepted ways.

I don't have a firm opinion on the controversy one way or the other. But I will say : if the author of "King Lear" was an aristocrat & nobleman, he was an aristocrat with a pretty radical sense of the common humanity (cf. the character of the Fool) underlying all the pomp & circumstance of noble place & privilege.

So here we are in 21st century USA, split apart like old Byzantium between red & blue, right & left. Underlying both TP and OWS, however, is a protest against the status quo, on behalf of what is thought to be the ordinary people (silent majority or 99%). It's an ethical protest on behalf of the common good.

What the OWS movement has failed as yet to recognize, maybe, is that high-minded protest is not sufficient. If you are going to tear down capitalist privilege then you have to take responsibility for the consequences, you have to be prepared to govern. What the TP fails to understand, perhaps, is that neoliberalism - the true legacy of Reaganism - every (rich) man for himself - is a theory of political economy which fails the test of public ethics. It cannot provide the minimal basis of mutuality and shared responsibility which humane civilization requires in order to survive.

Maybe "Shakespeare" could assist us in finding that common ground... whoever he was.

"Poor naked wretches, whereso'ere you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O I have ta'en
Too little care of this. Take physic, Pomp;
Expose thy self to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayest shake the superflux to them,
And show the heav'ns more just."

- King Lear

http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/mudlark06/hg32.html

http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/mudlark06/hg34.html

Lanthanum 9.3

2011-10-30T13:54:00.004-04:00

3

You slept & woke & found the earth had changed.
Cycling octaves on a muted pedal. Your voice
gone south, like William Blackstone (nice
Anglican, gone to live with Indians). Strange.

Plangent chords played on iron threads of rails
in the back of your mind (while you
bunked). From the side of your mouth, Ruth
(burbling young mother, looped in corny sky-

trails). You woke to find a January snow
at October’s end – gemstone sunlight, all
a-glint through dogwood remnants – tawny
gold, a few ash leavings – still-green lilac, O.

Green grows the still lake so, by All Souls’
Eve. I would go down into the ruby depths
with you, dogwood – where Blackstone sleeps;
step blind along yon rose-bent labyrinth (Mole’s

Way) into the sleepy heart of the country.
Like those little children walking brave (brave
braves) into a night of masks & terrors. Have
no fear, for I am with you, warbles drab paltry

pigeon with rainbow throat (from near your
feet). From the emerald moss in the cleft
of the trunk, in the midst of the darkest
wood – toward that coppery sheen (iron,

serpentine) – rusty gold dust, silvery
starlight – where the volcano glows
all winter long – the hearth turns snows
to brimming tears (rivers from mountain rills).

10.30.11

A Carpenter's embrace

2011-10-21T12:23:00.015-04:00

Last week I joined several friends of the late Edwin Honig, along with his sister, Lila, in a memorial tribute to him sponsored by the Brown Univ. writing program (which he was largely responsible for establishing back in the 1960s).

I read the last poem in Edwin's collection Time & Again : poems 1940-1997, a poem titled "Hymn to Her." & I prefaced the poem with some off-the-cuff remarks, things I had been thinking over in preparation for the event. Will try to summarize them here.

I met Edwin in the spring of 1971, when he was a visiting poet in my freshman 'writing" class, held at a young prof's apartment on Medway St. in Providence (I met the late Michael Gizzi in the same class). So I knew Edwin for just 40 years.

One of my favorite poets, Osip Mandelstam, had a talent for pithy aphorisms. When asked by an interviewer for a definition of the "school" of poetry from which he emerged (Acmeism), he said : "nostalgia for world culture." I think this applies very well to Edwin Honig. But with Edwin it wasn't just a matter of longing : he was busy making world culture, contributing to it, as multilingual poet and translator, as learned literary scholar. His cosmopolitanism spanned both time & space.

Edwin's global perspective had a strong impact on me, a young writer coming out of a suburban high school deep in the Midwest. But his cosmopolitanism wasn't just a matter of sophistication, of connections. I think Edwin really sensed, and believed in, and looked to the future for, a real internationalism, a humane culture transcending political, ethnic, linguistic & other boundaries. I think he wrote for this future world culture (which Mandelstam longed for too).

But what is it in particular about poetry which gives it a usefulness in this endeavor? How is it that poetry, like music, can make these crossovers & connections?

I think that poetry, when all is said and done, is human language under the sign of love : or as the Song of Songs puts it, his banner over me was love. Now the word love, in English, is a rather multivalent term... a "many-splendored thing"... So what do we mean by it more specifically, in this context?

Love - eros, agape, caritas - is a mysterious force or "spirit" which is essentially integrative, synthesizing, harmonizing, mediating, healing, and constructive. As St. Paul expresses it (in his most moving paean), "love builds up, it does not tear down." This harmonic, harmonizing force unfolds and reveals the relation between different or opposing things (heart & mind, thought & feeling, you & I, I & Thou...) - brings them into mutuality and shared being. & as anyone who has ever fallen in love can testify, this force of affinity & new relatedness can be immensely powerful, metamorphic, transfiguring : suddenly heart & mind are transposed (translated) into a new & "melodic" reality : & the whole universe seems to be transfigured along with us.

So if we say that poetry is human language under the banner of love, we are adumbrating its essentially harmonic, musical, and experiential quality. Poetry is language directed not so much toward knowledge for its own sake, an objectivity & objectification for purposes of control : rather it is essentially dialogic : it is a sharing of experience & what we know under the sign of wholeness & synthesis (both mind & heart, intellect & sensibility, thought & action).

Lately I've been thinking a lot about TS Eliot's notion of the "dissociation of sensibility" : of how the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century offered an example of some integral vitality which poetry somehow lost soon after. Edwin had an interest in that era, too. Perhaps every literary scholar of the generation coming after Eliot had to take such an interest - but Edwin brought his own special intensity to the reading of Donne, Marvell, along with Shakespeare & Jonson. & there's a metaphysical wit lurking in the last poem in Edwin's collected, which I'm going to read ("Hymn to Her").

Who is the "her" of this poem? A particular woman, perhaps. Maybe also Edwin's mother : note the emphasis on "hard labor" - Edwin was born on Sept 3, 1919 - Labor Day (his mother's own pun). And also, I think, Poetry itself, its "muse". It makes sense to me that Edwin would choose, in his closing poem, to address the theme of "poetry" itself. So the "her" of the title is both woman, or a woman, and poetry.

Now what is a "hymn"? In this case, it's another pun : the hymn is also "him" ("him to her"). A kind of love poem. And the word "hymn" has been connected etymologically, of course, to the Greek god of marriage, Hymenaeus : a hymn, in ancient Greece, was a praise song to this god, sung by the wedding celebrants on their way to or from the wedding chamber.

So we have a kind of witty conjunction of opposites, a metaphysical conceit (in embryo, anyway). We have "him & her" as both persons, and as facets of poetry itself. There are more such oppositions : heaviness & lightness, mistakenness & rightness... (the poem seems especially suffused with Edwin to me : he was a large, imposing personage in many ways, carrying a lot of heavy & painful psychological & intellectual burdens, yet one who never lost his swift lightness of mind & humor...). I love the word "bracing" in this poem. Bracing here has a double sense : as both invigorating, enlivening (awakening), and as supporting, in an architectural sense. (Edwin, whose grandfather was a carpenter in Jerusalem, who worked on the facades of temples there...). Love is the power of harmony, the bond of mutuality which makes civilization, world-renewal. Bracing. "Love builds up..." & embraces.

HYMN TO HER

The load you take
is dense, backbreaking
and mistaken.

It can be otherwise:
and in full light
wholly undertaken,

the load is slim,
and to the one that
takes it, bracing --

owed to none but
for the life
that lifts awakened.

Saying & Doing, Reading & Watching, Dream & Act

2011-10-14T18:48:00.004-04:00

Many, including myself, have posed the situation of poetry in America today as a problem or dilemma. But maybe it's more like a puzzle - a puzzle for each poet to work out for themselves.

Maybe it's not so much a problem of institutionalization - MFA programs, official & semi-official authorization mafias (MFA = MAFIA). & maybe it's not so much a problem of politics (blue poets in a rageful red world). Maybe, in fact, it's something more mundane and technical : like the disconnect between poetry as a reading experience and poetry as a performance. There's a slight gap or dissonance there, which, if unacknowledged, just maybe grows into a sort of malignancy (sounds scary, Henry!).

Because reading is a pure & exquisite pleasure, for some. More than that : it's an exercise of the mind & imagination. We read : & a whole imaginary psychic theater leaps up into cognizance, the boundaries of our inner world are lapped in a tingling metamorphosis. It is possible we haven't yet acknowledged the silent resistance, even resentment, of the reader for the performer. The poet who performs his or her work with dazzlement & panache might just possibly be felt to be taking away something from the reader. (This kind of theory really pleases the bad actors & readers among poets out there, like me.) This might be the source also of the amused contempt in which the idea of "poetry reading" is held by many. The poet is out of place reading his/her poem out loud.

What's the "solution" to this problem? TS Eliot had an idea : the verse play. (This was something which occurred also to the Elizabethans - folks like Marlowe, Shakespeare... you know.) For Eliot, dramatic poetry was the telos of intelligible "objectivity" in verse.

Ben Mazer is aware of this, I think. His little verse play "City of Angels" has come in for some carping & sniping - but it got some people's attention. Why? First of all, because Mazer has a real gift for verse. & secondly, because he's pioneering in this direction - this corn maze, this labyrinth which has wrapped itself like a snail shell around the gap between poetry and performance (between word & deed).

Wings of the Dove

2011-10-04T12:54:00.003-04:00

Poetry is no more sacred-holy-divine than any other phenomena. Language is powerful, but communication - signs, semiosis - involves a wider range of verbal, non-verbal semaphor.

Nevertheless one dimension of a poet's intent might be to evoke, express, represent, or transmit a sense of the sacred : an intelligible model of reality under the aegis of what is holy. In this case poetry might serve as a medium for the fulfillment of such an intention.

Poets in past times have marked this distinction (between secular and sacred). There are, for example, John Donne's love lyrics, on the one hand, and his divine sonnets, on the other; there are his verse satires, and his verse meditations (on last things).

Recently while working on a book review of some recent poets, I had occasion to reconsider TS Eliot's famous theory of a "dissociation of sensibility" in literary style, which he claimed took place in the early 17th century. Some reading in literary historians Harold Fisch (Jerusalem & Albion) and Charles Nicholl (Chemical theatre) has confirmed my view that something like this dissociation did actually take place, and that it was part of a larger shift in Western thought : a disenchantment, a desacralization of Nature. To put it baldly : the new scientific rationalism excised "Spirit" from Nature. God was the remote machinist who turned on the switch, but that was the limit of his involvement in what followed, which was fully explainable and determined by mechanical, material causes.

It was a convenient intellectual move for the purposes of dissection. But then poetry, in this view, was lumped into the inevitable collateral damage : rendered obsolete, mythical : mere verbal mystification, sleight-of-hand : a marginal hobby, serving strictly sentimental ends.

Nevertheless, I like to think this preeminently modern worldview - this mechanistic rationalism - has not had the last word. Standing, I hope, as a writer who aims to instill an opposing perspective into poetry, I vote for spirit and consciousness over the discourses of materialism. In this I am not at all opposed to science per se, which I hold to be a spiritual vocation in its own right; but I hold for the over-arching presence of a mysterious spiritual reality, an intellectual architecture which frames and upholds the physical universe.

Poetry, in this view, is a kind of intellectual play, which is analogous to the play of Nature as a whole, in its character as Creation-from-nothing. It is the Sabbath rest of human thought - abiding in a sense of the mystery of life and human civilization shaped toward graceful, happy, and ultimately victorious ends.

This is not always an easy way-of-seeing to grasp and keep hold of : it can seem strange, otherworldly, or simply naive and ludicrous, to modern "realists". But as it happens I find it more realistic to believe in a cosmos which is spiritually grounded in consciousness, a form of universal "soul" or personhood, which manifests itself (a flowering) in multiple planetary histories as the Ur-Drama of compassionate self-sacrifice and graceful redemption. This is the "holy grail" and "philosopher's stone", the "light" in light of which all things take on a new and vital aspect. And it's the theme of many poems & songs. I'm trying to sketch out one version of a sense of never-ending Vitality - the source of a kind of unstoppable, unceasing spiritual joy, even hilarity. Death is not the end; death is that over which an infinite, eternal Spirit is victorious.

Just so you know

2011-09-19T14:24:00.007-04:00

Went to the bookstore and picked up a new paperback, Tom McCarthy's novel C, which sounded intriguing in a review I'd read. Skimmed a few pages... put it back down. I don't much care for novels or stories written in the present tense, which seems to be all the rage these days. Actually I have a strong distaste for it. I'm not reading a film scenario; I don't need the extra illusion of watching a movie unroll directly onto the printed page. I like the residue of the past tense : it's like the shadow cast by the fictional scenes evoked in the imagination.

Lanthanum 9.2

2011-09-18T16:52:00.005-04:00

2

Fat autumn bumblebee wrings out the nectar
from a hosta’s swaying purple belltower –
irenic furball, dawdling black-&-yellow toward
the equinox, you are the imperturbable Hector

of your own sweet Troy-town (elementary
tumble-sovereign of late summer air).
Deep sunlit mumbling brought you to bear,
to ferry such weight from earth to airy

eyrie; your floating gravity’s a droning lesson,
homing, homing, with relentless waywardness
– a single-minded monarch in disguise
of threadbare color, training her magnifying lens

on Cedar Mountain. For them (for monarch &
for bee) it is the mountain of mountains,
melodious matrix of cosmos jocose (someone’s
playin’ hide-’n-seek). The lasting laugh of an arch-

archeus (muy mysterioso, señor) – your soul’s
galactic rim – a twinkling cosmopolis, or
Noahide grapevine, one eld pre-Roman oar
of well-doing & well-being. Bruno’s original &

interstellar hearth (hexaemeral & ever-living
nimbus-lamp). So why do the nations rage,
the unrighteous puff themselves? sez page-
boy Dave, with zither all a-quiver – sing,

stars, sing with the bumblebee, he cries –
the prong of whose iron lyre is grounded now
in lanthanum-earth, central, centripetal – bow low,
ye proud – bend limbs before those almond eyes!

9.18.11

Lanthanum 9.1

2011-09-04T18:16:00.002-04:00

1

i.m. Edwin Honig

just like a tree,
standing by the water...

You feel the autumn coming on now, in the slant
of plangent sunlight – the foam of starry clematis
breaking over the old iron fence. The sense
of a closing scene, a dénouement, in the chant

of crickets, lodged in their grass caskets, whirring;
of a turn, now, toward eschatology, at last –
& I’m thinking of you, Edwin, who almost
matched your father’s age (a birthday bell rang

yesterday). Your excellent elephant ear, elegant
master of Lips Monastery : bespeaking a faith
in the embodied word, steadfast. Only a wraith
of willow limbs toward the end, hanging on, gaunt

(haunted) through the fog of Alzheimer’s, you’ve gone
to the light of your old high home, big-hearted boy;
dancing on home, through a rain of hobbledehoy-
providential by-ways, awkward prodigal son...

tenderfoot father-man, magnanimous. The poet
stands for the embattled, earth-bound word : &
for the silent ones (everymen-&-women) whose
halting speech is only the stone (clean, upright)

of their deeds. You lay in their shadow, durable,
year after year – a willow, standing by the river,
with them – shading them too, fleet word-giver.
Now as I arch for the last fluted pillar (a stable-

argument – Jachin, Boaz) I see your grandfather
the carpenter – he of the temple, in Jerusalem...
& the long curved eyelash of an almond limb :
a shade that reaches to embrace – closer, farther...

9.4.11

Jerusalem & Albion

2011-09-02T12:44:00.010-04:00

Am in early stages of putting together a review of some recent poetry books. In the process have gone back to T.S. Eliot's theory of the "dissociation of sensibility" (sketched out in his essay on the metaphysical poets). Which led me back to a great & remarkable (& out-of-print) book by Harold Fisch, Jerusalem & Albion : the Hebraic factor in 17th-cent. literature (NY : Schocken, 1964).

At this point can't really say much about it. He starts by investigating (& pretty much taking apart) Eliot's seminal notion : but it leads him into an exploration of some dimensions of poetry in English which seem to me to be very weighty & central & still important (... they are to me, anyway). It has to do with the interface between poetry and worldview, poetry and science/philosophy/theology : the effects of larger (vast) changes in Western intellectual/cultural history on the character & place of poetry.

These topics & fields have been gone over SO many times, it seems impossible to find much new to say. & I'm hesitating here to supply yet another resume which will come across as a rehash. But the fact is I'm finding (or re-finding) something which seems of great import... just beginning to come to grips with it.

The question of "poetry's place" in America seems to be a perennial & recurrent preoccupation. Most recently the 20th-cent. debates over art & kitsch, poetry & kitsch, have re-surfaced (see Don Share's recent blog post of Daniel Tiffany work-in-progress, or the latest issue of New Yorker, & Louis Menand's piece on Dwight Macdonald - a key figure in this debate). This gets at the question of the relation between poetry's role or place, on the one hand, and the question of style, diction, mode of address, on the other (high/low, Modernist/Pop, serious/lightweight, etc.).

I guess for me - thinking about my own efforts in testifyin'-versifyin' - this question of poetry's and the poet's role or status hinges on poetry's capabilities - and limitations - to represent Truth, or the Real. Over the centuries, Western culture has wavered back and forth on this issue : from Plato's scepticism about poetry and its representations, and the Biblical prohibitions on pagan idolatry, to the present day. Fisch focuses on what still seems like a very pivotal moment in that history : when the Medieval-Scholastic unity of Faith and Reason, and the Renaissance unity of Aesthetics and Ethics, began to crumble. Under the pressures of Protestant iconoclasm, Baconian scientism, and Machiavellian (worldly) cynicism, the old zeitgeist was swept away. Bacon, on behalf of an emerging scientific pragmatism, was the most programmatic theorist for imposing an intellectual separation between faith and science, and between "mere" language and experimental knowledge. This dual attack on the status of language, and on the relevance of religion, had the deepest consequences for the future : it basically shaped what we think of as the "modern" (detached, observational, sceptical, Stoic) intellectual perspective and stance, which is so familiar to us (and which in turn, perhaps, is drawing to an end).

The various manifestations of Baconian philosophical scepticism, about language, rhetoric, and poetry, created a framework - represented a portent - of cultural developments far into the future : it filtered into the abstract-analytical style of Restoration (discursive, didactic) poetry; it was the force against which the metaphysical idealism of the Romantic movement rebelled; it lurked within the Victorian sense of fatalism & discouragement with regard to the intellectual relevance of poetry. And the "spirit of science" was there at the birth of Modernism ; both spurring a desire for greater relevance, realism and "exactitude," and inspiring a new turn (or reaction) toward abstraction, psychological inwardness, and aesthetic autonomy.

What Fisch examines are some of the counter-currents to this inexorable roll-out of the Modern age. But where Eliot leaned toward a sort of pure Medievalism of the mind, with its rejection of any Puritan taint (ie., Milton & his offspring, the Romantics), Fisch explores the "middle way" writings (prose & poetry) which opposed the splitting-apart of faith & reason, language & knowledge : which aimed, instead, for their synthesis (Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, Marvell are some of the more familiar names). In so doing, Fisch reminds us of the fundamentally poetic character of the Bible (his "Hebraic" dimension). And what is Biblical poetry, in Fisch's terms? He focuses mainly on the Psalms : & what the Psalms do is represent Truth and Reality as, at root, a metaphysical drama - the plot of an encounter between human and divine, the iteration of a foundational I-Thou actuality. We are sketching out the ground of a mode of synthesis or integration of the psychological, the cultural, the historical, the intellectual, the religious, the scientific, the philosophical, the cosmological... & the aesthetic : a kind of architecture of reality grounded neither in Renaissance humanist confidence nor in counter-Renaissance unease, but rather in something more ancient, simple, and personal. This is the ratio, or logos of the I-Thou relation - dramatic, ongoing, & insusceptible to "objectification" - between the human soul or identity and its creative source/origin, the concept of humankind as Imago Dei.

I've written elsewhere about the humilitas-sublimitas (humble sublime) mode of Western literature, analyzed by Erich Auerbach, M.H. Abrams, R.P. Blackmur & others : a thread running back to the Biblical-comedic mode of Yahweh's tumultuous intervention in human affairs. It seems to me that this mode is one place to start if one wants to reconfigure a direction for poetry, a "place" for poetry in the larger intellectual life of contemporary culture. Another is the Petersburg-Acmeist notion (out of Gumilev, originally) of a "chaste" vision underpinning poetry, or supplying its vital spirit. Because the notion of "Word made flesh" which grounds both these modes has ramifications for all those other forms of thought & culture mentioned above (ie. their potential for integration or synthesis).

Maybe I'm ascending into clouds of the vaguest theological hoo-doo here. But I think not. I think the vivid, emotionally-integrated, intellectually-holistic discourse of poetry dramatizes that which is substantially dramatic in itself ; ie. the whole truth, the real, the conscious, the loved, the (I-Thou) relational. This power in poetry was challenged by the analytical scepticism of the modern world, which divided Man from Nature, Man from God, Thought from Feeling, Heart from Mind, and finally, Poetry from Prose - all on behalf of a chilly, sceptical, no-nonsense, pragmatic utilitarianism, which, in our post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima world, has begun to seem neither pragmatic nor useful, in the long run.

(An aside : let me just say I am aware that many readers will have qualms about what may seem to be my extreme & romantic religiosity. But what do you expect : I'm a poet and graduate of Blake School, in Hopkins, Minnesota...)

Here's a pertinent passage (of many) from Jerusalem & Albion :

"Bacon makes Physics not a technique but a religion, and Induction becomes for him not so much a useful mechanism for the discovery of certain limited axioms, but rather a mystic path, an ultimate revelation and a millennial hope. And let it be said that this part of Bacon's philosophy, this pseudo-religious faith in the possibilities of the scientific method has worked even more powerfully (howbeit surreptitiously) in the history of modern science and modern civilization, than his immensely influential stress upon a mechanical Physics, and indeed to this day when the mechanical account of natural law has proved its inadequacy, Bacon's Faustian dream of magical power over the world continues to possess us and drive us on. It is in that sense that Bacon is, as Whitehead has well said, the architect of the modern mind." (p.86)

Postmodernism, some will claim, has moved beyond that "modern mind". But that's a debate tangential to my topic here : the question of the intellectual & social status of poetry today. What Fisch clarifies somewhat for me is that the roots of poetry's dilemma - its "low self-esteem" (see Auden's famous remark about his sense of being intellectually out-classed in the company of scientists), its "unserious" aura, its schizoid zigzag between aloof High Modern disdain and kitschy Low Postmodern obliviousness - does lie indeed in something near to Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" : a symptom Fisch has diagnosed with a more acute precision. And what I am trying to suggest is that there are some firm grounds for some kind of restoration of the balance...

Poetry & kitsch

2011-08-31T16:21:00.006-04:00

Sent this comment to the 2nd in a series of long posts from a work-in-progress by Daniel Tiffany, conveyed by Don Share at his blog (Squandermania) :

"Very interesting subject.... & Mr. Tiffany covers a lot of ground, reconfigures a lot of received notions about kitsch.

Not sure I would want to identify the "poetic" so directly with the values of kitsch, however. Kitsch - in the sense of a mindlessly-manufactured product of mass commercial appeal, which reproduces (simulates) authentic art - ie. the binary kitsch/art - seems analogous to Coleridge's binary fancy/ imagination, in that the products of fancy are somewhat superficial & calculated rhetorical ornaments - frills, let's say - as opposed to the organic-formative-substantial structures of imagination. And for Coleridge the synthetic (as in "synthesis", not "artifice") power of the imagination to unite disparate aspects of experience into meaningful intellectual wholes is the essential mode & purpose of poetry. Poetry exhibits a vivid vitality which stems from its emotional empathy with that which is depicted - powers of ethos & pathos which are absent from many streams of analytical prose.

This whole discussion might well be framed by attention to an incisive study of 40 yrs ago by Harold Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion. Fisch begins with a critique of Eliot's rendering of the famous "dissociation of sensibility". The real split between poetry and prose occurred BEFORE the 18th-cent. flowering of bourgeois literature, which is the period of Tiffany's focus. The split began under the impact of dual 17th-cent. phenomena : 1) Baconian scientism, with its suspicion of language in general and of rhetoric and poetry in particular, and its desire to supplant them with a mode of "pure" scientific observation; 2) Puritan iconoclasm, with its emphasis on virtuous "plain speech" as opposed to the snares of flowery rhetoric, luxurious poetry. As Fisch demonstrates, when Baconian scientism melded with Puritan suspicion of language, a tremendously powerful anti-poetic animus was infused into the intellectual-cultural make-up of English-speaking society : an ironic situation which involved the elision or avoidance of the main stream of poetic sensibility and eloquence (the King James Bible). The repercussions of this fundamental divide are in very clear evidence in the stance and ideology of William Blake, for one example, with his "prophetic" attacks on Locke & Newton, etc.

This, it seems to me, is the locus of the real battle between poetry and prose, even today : it has less to do with the maneuvers of "fancy" (kitsch) than with the ontological (& social) status of the imagination."

Lanthanum is a Book

2011-08-26T22:01:00.013-04:00

New edition of Lanthanum now available : Books 1 & 2. Larger print, easier to read, with introduction and extensive explanatory notes. Restoration of world civilization, at no extra charge.

Grossman, Lerner, Maximus & all

2011-08-24T10:08:00.009-04:00

The Poetry Foundation's Yak Disseminator highlights an interesting interview. Ben Lerner emphasizes his debt to the writings of Allen Grossman (my fellow Blake School graduate of previous generation) : a basically tragic perspective, mourning the limits of art, language & poetry, and the gap between Paradise and life as we know it. Lerner apparently finds a way to make this deeply ironic worldview work for him.

I've only read parts of Grossman's book (The Long Schoolroom) - it's on my desk, actually : but the reason I've left it unfinished is I find myself almost immediately resisting and disagreeing with his formulations. (Interesting that Grossman years back wrote a seminal short essay on Hart Crane, a poet whom Grossman clearly cares for as deeply as I do myself.)

I'm fundamentally an optimist - a comedian (in Dante's sense) rather than a tragedian. In my "Acmeist" world, wholeness - intellectual, spiritual, physical, historical, moral, cosmological - trumps division, irony and brokenness. Am reading again in Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor (as I try to get ready to work on the 3rd & final book of the poem Lanthanum), and encountering some clear cogitations on the nature of difference (distinction). For Maximus, difference does not automatically entail complete division, separation, or antagonism. Differences can co-exist, be harmonized. His thought in this vein is basically folded into an anthropology rooted in the concepts of divine Creation and Incarnation. The divine and human are dual and distinct, but are united "without confusion, without separation" in the incarnate God-Person. This unity is at the core of all the cosmic arrays of difference, of individual & species, of many & one.

In this perspective, an "Acmeist" poetics might acknowledge sharp distinctions between word & thing, art & life, poetry & truth - while at the same time remaining open (hopeful) to the possibility of their real coherence, their harmony.

Lanthanum 8.24

2011-08-12T21:35:00.002-04:00

24

In Evening Land near Minnehaha Falls
in August at beginning of the end of summer
when chirring crickets commence their Sumerian
eulogy in 7/9 time when the walls tumble

down & the multiplex day a monarch butterfly
skitters down too into night’s monotone
(one late cicada out of the gloom) when
weaving swallows metamorphose into bats (high

up across the wistful pastel) & back again
then you’ll behold curious figures interlace
merge in a waltz of compass arcs across a
sixfold stone rosette out of Iran or Babylon

on an old stone sepulchre in Haifa (or Jerusalem)
between Jachin Boaz the two tall twin
amphorae (clay mimicking limestone) with a fan
of peacocks preening astride each funereal rim.

In Romania’s gold haze Czernowitz, Bukovina
the unmarked graves bend stoop with grass
of hot dog days under leaf-light shade (mass-
ive). & your imaginary friend (baobab, the

noman’s rood) becomes friendly little bird,
or tree (goldfinch, almond) tipping his eye
your way like a Chaplin hat or prairie (sigh)
all in one day, one night as soldiers slumbered

between night & day under milkweed portal
your starry canopy or wisdom-dome Hagia
Sophia in Cleopatra-coracle, light Cahokia
canoe or Memphis barge (small portable grail)

only some garbage truck, rumbling down 44
while the monarch waits on the balcony
near the microphones fate’s falconry
winging along toward Mexico (high cedar air)

8.12.11

Lanthanum : draft for an introduction

2011-08-12T13:12:00.011-04:00

Short poems are usually better off on their own, without preliminary paraphernalia. But before asking a reader to plunge into the trackless Siberia of a work in verse that runs for hundreds of pages, if not miles, it might help to offer a brief survey of the territory.

Lanthanum is a work-in-progress, and I can’t predict where it will tend – but the poem is designed numerically around the number 57 (the atomic number of the element lanthanum), and at least in terms of simple length, this volume represents about 2/3rds of the whole – two books out of a projected three. And so I believe there are a few general things which can now be said about it. First, the poem has a narrator (the poet) who discourses in his own voice, but also assumes brief masks or personae, or speaks through (or by way of) distinctly different persons : Hobo, Maximus the Confessor, Roger Williams, William Blackstone, Berryman’s “Henry”, etc. Second, these splintered personae are aspects of a general ambience, at the poem’s opening, of loss, loneliness – as of a situation in which the speaker is missing a close friend, a companion, a beloved person. This predicament is never really clarified or explained : but in a literary sense it parallels the dilemma outlined by Dante in the Vita Nuova and Divina Commedia, or, going further back, the plot of the myth of Orpheus : in which the poet has lost a beloved person, the personal embodiment of love – and he must come to terms with that, and he goes on a journey to do so.

To some extent the poem itself is that journey. There is a mutual enfoldment of “orphic” song (lyric) with plot (narrative), of medium with message. In this way poetry offers a promise of healing through its own constructive elaborations : the “muse” becomes the imaginary friend who replaces the lost real friend. Obviously there is a real danger here of withdrawal into empty solipsism (literary, psychological) : yet there is also the possibility that poetry might become a proving ground for intellectual and spiritual resources beyond mere psychic substitution. This, after all, was the “comic” theme of Dante : that the loss of the beloved’s physical presence entailed the poet’s self-examination, a moral-philosophical struggle with the real nature of love itself. Something of value might emerge from suffering; what seems lost might be restored.

Obviously to speak of one’s work in the same breath with Dante’s is the extremity of foolish impudence. There is no point of comparison between Lanthanum and the epochal Divina Commedia. The latter is a didactic poem, in which the whole elaborate and fabulous architecture of medieval thought is brought to bear, toward the end of re-orienting the individual and culture as a whole toward everlasting goodness. Ezra Pound once famously complained that modern poets (and modern humanity generally) no longer have access to Dante’s Scholastic blueprints. And we don’t – at least not directly. Much of what was dogma now reads like myth; much that was taken for history has since become fable; what was understood as science looks now like dream. One cannot read Lanthanum and find anything approaching Dante’s encyclopedic morality play. The effort here is more primitive, basic : to investigate how poetry can re-intepret experience, the substance of things, in its own terms. The title (Lanthanum) is evocative of this aim : the reference is to something elemental, that is, number 57 in the periodic table of elements. Lanthanum : a rare earth which is actually not rare at all; named by its discoverer after the Greek word for “secret, hidden, overlooked;” of which one practical application is as part of a compound used in innovative road surfaces, in order to draw particulates out of the atmosphere (“clearing the air”).

I began writing this poem in December 2008. A few months later, in spring 2009, I had an extraordinary dream, which seemed to help focus and crystallize my intentions. The dream came out of absolute nowhere : I was looking at the Gateway Arch monument in St. Louis, Missouri. Now I have never seen the Gateway Arch, and prior to this dream I had never given it a moment’s thought. So the dream impressed me : it appeared to offer an implicit confirmation of some pathways I had been following in poetry for years. I have long been fascinated with structural frameworks for poetry, the technical and thematic analogues offered by mathematics and architecture. The origin of this interest lies in my affection for the poetry and life of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. Mandelstam, along with fellow Petersburg “Acmeists” Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, constructed an approach to poetry which offered a kind of architectonics of gratitude-for-existence. Gumilev called it “chasteness” : a moral conscience, a fundamental respect for unique and living phenomena on earth – as they are, humble or grand. Poetry, music, architecture share in this fundamental harmonics, transversing time and eras in somewhat Proustian/Bergsonian fashion. And in my explorations of these poets, I found affinities, both stylistic and conceptual, with the work of Hart Crane – whose long poem The Bridge offers a similar “architectonic” worldview : a paean to reality, grounded in material/historical particulars, on the one hand, and in a kind of cosmic-orphic optimism, on the other.

So my dream of the Arch served to confirm these compositional motives and directions. But Lanthanum is not only a reiteration of Acmeist or “New American” themes. The poem emerged before the dream, and its motives are deeper and more obscure than any enthusiasms I might have for fellow poets. The “plot” as previously sketched still shapes the song : an attempt to discover and come to terms with the deepest strata of love, reality, experience : an attempt at recovery (in all senses of the term). So the Arch begins to resonate for me : to serve as a sort of magnet, a multifaceted cluster-image of something at the spiritual root of time, history, life on earth. Something substantial and enduring, under the violence and suffering on the surface of things.

These are some of the dimensions of the versified wilderness up ahead. I won’t try to characterize my personal style, which is full of games and puns and secret allusions; such things intrepid readers will have to dig out of obscurity on their own. I am grateful to all of you, my readers, intrepid or not – and I hope you find something rewarding in these woods.

Lanthanum 8.23

2011-08-11T20:14:00.002-04:00

23

They are always with you, ghosts in the shade
of the raven-knife – sprigs of the innocent,
personal sketches. Though death was sufficient.
They no longer suffer the human hell we made

for them (for ourselves) on earth. They
will not be transmuted by sublime Concept;
they are your brothers, sisters, & you wept
too late – the stain cannot be washed away.

Their water & wine run down into clay
glimpsed in an arc-light (everlasting form).
Their hope & sorrow are your paradigm –
their almond bark a sheepdog gate. A way.

It floats in the tattoo of an evening rain
that ripples like wind through the hair
on your arm echoes the few spare
notes of milk train waning over prairie

Where the motes gather & lost letters
raven-black on yellowed onionskin
outline of a cherished face on wooden
outside wall in Voronetș a potter’s eyes

light blue a painter’s olive-green the dove’s
grey deeps the ocean-sigh gull-cry oils,
oeuil in the mosaic mish-mash, the what-all
collage under almond ash oak-leaves’

deep shade those philosophic walls of a tree-
of-J the wisdom-loving love of Love (that
cricket-Magdalen a summer prodigy hove-
to ancient cicada in dying dogwood) free

8.11.11

Lanthanum 8.22

2011-08-10T22:18:00.002-04:00

22

The peaceful evening out of which the poem comes
or maybe doesn’t – the special quiet of the poem’s
own hum imposed upon squawky cacophonics (home
street home) of yon triple-deckered, cumbersome

dronopolis (I mean the poem of Providence)...
the quiet of homesick willow-violin, its wayward,
solitary hobo tune... what’s at the heart of it,
Edward? Figment of sister-dove flown hence,

mayhap – melodifying on her spiral Jonah-horn
between the dry ribs of a dead grey world-whale
somewhere (my heart, my heart). Hear, O Israel!
The chariot of Elijah & the steeds thereof – worn

like a bracelet round her Sabbath-tambourine!
Waltzing menorah! Footstep of Shekinah,
Bride... ancient familial concert-pal... J-
bird (furtive, always in flight). Has-been

Hobo’s will-be (again... again). ‘Member her...
Like a dream of the Gateway, she comes
from nowhere, some new whirr : freedom’s
Imago : quick-change artist (Shakespearean

erector set) : as if Earth were born anew
from flash of sympathetic lightning (Imago,
Imago) : as if all be splendor... & what do you
make of it, Horatio? A mortal debt last narrow

bed a love poured out like wine, like blood
at apex of the Sparrow Hills, one harrowing
hill at base of skull unknown, unknowing
lamp lambent, surrounded by fire (bluebird)

8.10.11

What's new?

2011-08-09T13:55:00.003-04:00

Seth Abramson compiles a grand list of some of the wee corruptions of the literary profession (Poetryland version), here. A good-intentioned list of good intentions gone awry, I guess. I remember thinking & saying similar things (if not so well) 10-15 yrs ago.

But then I suppose the alchemists of olde also had their array of petty schemes & self-serving vices, their egotisms & narcissisms & jivings & trimmings, in their day... but what we remember is that they were simply wrong most of the time - that their theories were based on myths, not scientific reasoning & experiment.

& I get the feeling today's poetry scene is much like the alchemy scene of yore... some underlying askewedness puts all those petty corruptions in the shade. I can imagine a literary culture that repents of, and washes itself clean of, all the vices on his list - purifies itself morally - yet still fails to produce any good art or poetry. It makes me think of Joseph Brodsky's provocative & Promethean assertion that ethics is determined by aesthetics. I don't really hold with this, either - but what if the fundamental problem is a failure of imagination? What if we are living in the deep shadow of the mythos-styles of the late 19th and 20th century - or a conservative reaction against these styles - resulting in the manufacture of cultural cliches on an industrial scale? I'm thinking of the shadow (the great Poe-ish raven-shadow) of the Baudelarian anti-hero & flaneur-dandy : the Dostoyevskian underground man : the Camusian Rebel : the Joycean/Svevoian Chaplinesque shlemiel. We inhabit an age of the pop-culture glorification of the anti-hero & the anti-heroine, oe'rtopped with an epicene academic culture of creative 'writing" designed to memorialize the same (our wild youth) in award-winning verse & prose.... & how does a culture with such a pre-installed & -approved Mythos - a zeitgeist, a worldview - how does such encounter the authentic, the real, anymore? This I would like to know.

I wonder if artists need to turn back to the "new" - but not the packaged & certified Modern, Postmodern, or Pre-modern new - but something actually.... different.... a vision of life based on a different set of philosophical grounds, a new architectonic, or an old made new (really new)... I actually think Hart Crane & Wallace Stevens, in their different ways, were searching for these grounds, this newness : but I'm showing my old biases there, I guess...

Lanthanum 8.21

2011-08-08T13:10:00.001-04:00

21

A whiff of old earth-smell after belated rain
leads me back to August, winding down
in Mendelssohn. Light fluttery bell-sound
of Heidi-piano... cicada sawmill-drone (against

the grain)... a slip of willow in his hand
will guide blind Hobo back to wavebent limbs
over the riverbank (yonder, where WW swims
in a dream that is no dream). A promised land

that slumbers yet beneath catastrophe – where
Melchizedek climbs from Cahokia mound
with bread, wine... where every Charlie chap &
Harlequin finds Pulcinella, somehow (near

edge of tsunami, by Heartbreak Ridge, under
petrified gaze of cratered power plants). How
can it be? The soul survives, the heart (slow,
slow) regenerates – these will not surrender... &

so today (in this RI holdout of veteran memory)
shall be no longer V-J Day, but Victory-of-J
Day – the Victory of J : kingfisher-melody,
furled seashell-game, Euphrates boat-shanty... for

a dream is a dream of Everywoman, Everyman –
unaccountable & indestructible; & this life
is tailfin of an ocean-mind (bride-wife
of buried ghost-Jonah); its denouement began

one night (a thousand years ago) when
a jay-pianist of Voronetș blue (perched, hidden
on an almond branch) let spout her siren-
88s (at a young fellow in far-off willow). Amen.

8.8.11

Lanthanum 8.20

2011-08-07T14:10:00.001-04:00

20

A Sunday rain soaks this recumbent spine
of Providence ‒ old town like a sleepy dinosaur
that would be lofty bird. Fine water-veil for
Iowa Isis, Osiris paddleboat ‒ some sabbath-mind’s

own fancy daydream (liberation, Jubilee).
Key to the highway ‒ like a roadside icon
leaning home. Faint inkling, rosy Rubicon,
rounded square beneath bus-shelter Milky

Way. Above that crossroads’ lowly drop
of martyr-blood, not far from Memphis ‒
Martin’s bull’s-eye witness, crosshairs
of a brooding sentience. At the top

of the tentpole of Polaris, the shrouded gate
of a third heaven ‒ architectonic of glimmer-
sense ‒ moss-grey intuition ‒ willow’s wonder-
branch. Out of Solaris ocean-mind, the frigate-

harbor of the human form. Just a sketch,
an outline of an understanding (sympathy)
hidden in wisdom-submarine (highly holy) of
an oscillating universe. A thought, a touch ‒

a mason’s 20-20 hand ‒ bent on restoration,
reconciliation, joy. Soul-victory is innocence,
renewed. That sign of love-swelled sentience,
a rood-sign planted over galaxies. Bus-station

by the frozen cemetery, near the river... at
the fringe of the veil of definitive quid. A
rain-wrought mandorla crowning your head.
Yours, mine ‒ equal, always. Elemental Fiat.

8.7.11

Lanthanum 8.19

2011-08-06T16:45:00.001-04:00

19

These gray clouds loitering, chary with rain
& that drop of red, far off in a black walnut
like a cardinal point, figure my inward Orient
on goldfinch ground (of flighty song, & pain).

You love the earth... so trust the magnanimity
(shady grey bran, intellectual) that formed it ‒
forms it, unaccountably, on All Souls’ Night :
this light-sped masquerade, spirit-birthday

frisbee’d on high, beneath a frosty brow
of Milky Way (insouciant, happenstance &
milkweed monarchy). Night wake of Argo-
salience... Europa-trail (scarred Voronetş blue).

& the signs in the sky, the prong in the earth
are only emblems of a sweet conception,
lamb-lamps of a fiery warmth ‒ your heart’s
limehewn scriptorium (wavy mandorla-berth).

O my little tree of Jessie O., adrift
in your shaky-leaf experience... your flow’ry
shallop-shell, your thunder-coracle... O be
at ease there in your honeycomb, left-

over wreath of empty hands... O bee
at ease. Here in woodlands of Bukovina
an ear can hear you still, steadfast cicada
(near rainbent eyelash-hull of almond-tree).

The throaty pigeon-maudit pecks at a bread-
crust (rarified coot of everyday gray stone);
she’ll watch for that gardener again ‒ the one
who looks for her (amid the veteran dead).

8.6.11

Lanthanum 8.18

2011-08-04T22:57:00.002-04:00

18

From Cahokian mundus in heartland, soaring
up a Finnish ladder (lofty thought-swerve)
to the finish line. Candelabra, spinal-nerve...
red leaves, rain-skimming back to commingling

clay. Like that vine planted on Jacob’s dream-
limestone, on the way from Padanaram ‒
after wrassling with a light-bermed, harum-
scarum heavyweight... meet the extreme

bow-taut communion (eyes, tears). Of sense,
intelligence. Here. Hear. Only here ‒ inhering
in your heart. So the mandala-rose coheres,
nearing... looms, beginning (woven-fine parlance).

This grail, this spousal, this conjunction ‒
plainchant of YHWH-shade, keening ‒ your
turtle-ghost, who haunts us, here & there...
sad-merry morsel, Everyman : Louis’ royal

unction-prayer (inward, homeward). Bare.
There are as many spirit-trails into this wood
as there are feet to walk them : the neighborhood
is infinite : but the way is narrow, drear ‒ your

own (lead-Lenten plumbline). Shaking off
the grave, the gravity, is not for Icarus,
but Israel (after the last sacrifice,
the burial). 12 gates to the city, O

my Lord. So, after 12 moons & a year
of doubtful drought, this double prong (folk-
tuning tong) leaps as a willow branch (divining,
rude) in my hands ‒ an eye in my hand. Here.

8.4.11

Lanthanum 8.17

2011-08-03T22:11:00.002-04:00

17

On a coign of Prospect & Waterman, near
bird-peak of Providence (Roger’s palace)
a crew of masons rectifies the balance
of Tuscany belltower ‒ Carrie’s sheer &

spousal sepulchre (Love is Strong as Death).
No pizza-tilt worktable here. We must aim
for the perfect. Orthogonal. Cusa’s Game
of Spheres ‒ spiritual akme. Starry zenith

of Einstein-wand (here, there... hear).
Heart’s hyper-geomancy requires no less;
its subtle foreknowledge, its feeling-sense
scans horsehair-spectra (near, far... near).

Why? Cuz th’hairspun plats of Prov’dence
depends on youse ptahticipation, Haht ‒
one global splinteling (careening charity)
dubbed on the brow of deep-down river-

sentience. Its voice a whisper, whole &
holy (wholly whole, by golly) from strum-
circadian, Circassian cicada-circus ‒ sum
of circles of the sun. One baker’s dozen

(almond buns). Get off the pogrom,
Oddity ‒ evening urns its bleed. Your
own. Settle up accounts with the fore-
crawdads (Mam’ship) for the fleet I AM

is faster than a canefield smartphone
(sliver-horn of mirror-Mammon) &
more real, churl. Under an amplified
sand viol... Rosie Oasis (swell-photon).

8.3.11

Lanthanum 8.15 (& 8.16)

2011-07-27T22:35:00.003-04:00

15

Summer in Providence is cresting now.
On the cusp of evening, seashell sunset.
Caribbean pastel pinks, blues... inlet
of cricket equanimity (in shadow

of night). The granite hand of the founder
floats over the prow of his canoe, at the edge
of the Terrace. Blackstone, brooding, hidden,
tries that pledge (in profounder flounder-seas

of lostness, anonymity, oblivion). Finds
it fair (& kind, & true). Soul liberty...
your spiritual magnanimity is poetry.
Your metaphysical gratitude binds the

ensemble in its upsurge of a cosmic urge
toward harmony ‒ that rose-petalled state
where many states & planets merge (what
forgotten melody-memory rises to the edge

of her cave-mound now?) in an almond curve ‒
an eyelid buried in the garden-cemetery... one
teardrop planted by the vernal sepulchre (wan
limping Wanda of an everliving-leaping vault).

Only the sign of the whisper, out of the shell.
Like a tattoo on the shoulder of a rocky brow.
Like an air out of nothing; like a game of Clue
or Hide n’ Seek (one eyelash, lofted out of hell);

or like a glance from a cherished face, toward you ‒
of measure, law & cognizance; of mercy, patience,
lovingkindness ‒ substance of soul-confidence,
ration of the bread & wine (of Magdalen-Yeshu).

7.27.11

16

Under the byzantine bickering in Washington
lurks a kind of autumnal undertone ‒ the wobbly
gait, the straitened happenstance of an elderly
citizenry (O senile generations...). Peevish

widower’s refrain (mothballed Uncle George)
‒ There’s not enough! Then cut some more! ‒
reverbs the pensioner’s paltry share (just one
lottery win, Chief, will even the score). Gorge

yourselves on bile & special perks, ladies
& gentlemen of the pork-fed Beltway!
You’ll buy a lengthy trial in the illusory
labyrinth-mirage ‒ yon Babylon-daze

of symbolic checkers (who’s keeping track?)
for egomaniacs (& other spoiled characters
with something to prove, absolutely
nothing to lose). Take me back,

little Sheba! chants remorseful Solomon ‒
the world’s too big to fail... meanwhile
the kids are not all right (Absalom in exile
twitches his next move, under a pseudonym).

The world’s too big to fail ‒ isn’t it?
Or maybe not... or maybe it’s just me.
Lately I’m alert to the flyweight harmony
of a simple salt ‒ that Black Sea anchorite

with hands chopped off (by tyranny) ‒ yet
continued writing his hopeful letters (elegant)
with imperial stumps... So what’s his secret,
Jason? What’s yours, Ariadne? Not yet, not yet.

There’s a revolving door beneath the everlasting
dome of heaven ‒ where fingerprint of Everyman
whorls in its sovereign mystery (of one is one
& all alone). Tattoo of trumpet... flowering.

8.1.11

Lanthanum 8.14

2011-07-24T15:49:00.002-04:00

14
i.m. Amy Winehouse

On this gray Sunday of indecisive rain
a lone rose plants a scarlet matrix in my
backyard hideaway, on scraggly stem. High
in blues, the sweet chanteuse, lost in the wine-

fields of one Detroit soul, has come down early
to her clay bed, has sailed away on a trumpet-
tattoo... blues mingled with red-eye (delicate
heart). White on black purred that pearly

pigeon, banding Machu Picchu with a shady
ululation-ring : flotation device for overall dove-
mind (reclusive, swooning into the earth, love-
light switched on). Under all the neighborhoody

spectra-differentia, a furtive song
of bran-matter & wine : of black in white
& back again : of human mind & heart.
Soul (indivisible, immortal) is forever young.

& needy of light. Rhode Island, for example,
is a state confessional : refuge for all those
troubled in mind (conscience) the footloose
founder underlined. Each soul a sample

of ruby, diamond ‒ forged from, blended
with coal & clay. Like that earth-mound
(Cahokia) under a tungsten steel-wound
Arch : both prong and spire, in a tensile

mend (grounded, centripetal). Your rare
earth path, your solo hum, your Amy-soul...
the limestone center of this wine-red world
is in your heart. Is resting in Elijah’s chair.

7.24.11

Lanthanum 8.13

2011-07-23T15:21:00.003-04:00

13

The sailors, Hart, the sailors in Barbados
fashioned lightweight seashell valentines ‒
mosaics, shell mandalas, roseate signs
(centripetal) of love-bent order (logos-

flowers). & as each visible valentine
is emblem of a violet thought (seal of
a mute immaculate intent, made real)
so every shipshape coracle, each fine-

spun sailor’s hobbyhorse, is like a shallop
sharing scallop shells, or key for a box
bearing hoards of keys : one spin unlocks
them all ‒ each moonshine signal-envelope

exuded by the softest, warmest, most
sequestered crest of life (encrypted pine
beneath the tides). Be Mine,
my Queen, my Cleopatra-Desdemona, ghost-

Ophelia, in the photograph ‒ couched there
(nearly bare) with tintype bit-part players, on
the sidewheeler (from Jewett City down
to Lima, gal). Thin bodkin-signature

on haunted lake, one sinuous moustache
(melodrama-miaow) ‒ negative footprint
off slim rafter’s board (lost heartfelt
Argonaut). Lips lift the calabash

on sounding wave, toward shaken die of
yearning-hurricane... Aye-aye. Your eye.
Scrimshawed in a rickshaw by & by, O
Cap’n Bligh ‒ patented & omnipresent (Joy).

7.23.11

Lanthanum 8.12

2011-07-21T21:54:00.002-04:00

12

Fresh scar of Omphalos, you plunged back
(through hurricane season) to the natal brine
or naval brain ‒ original River of Heaven
where your songs come from... (deep black-

&-honeyed Melville dream). & everything
grows implicate, symbolical, after the fact ‒
your heavy father’s red Lifesaver, racked
in his empty hold... the guilt-ridden ring

of twin clerical compatriots, collared
by strict safe-keeping (spinning through
Mississippi locks, each zigguratic Zulu
combine). You jump the wheelhouse, holler.

Yet planetary batta-babbling of tango-tongs
will never cease, except by grace, cries
Everyman, fleet Falcon-Ace ‒ this prize
so steeps the tethered mantra of all song :

except by grace, which yieldeth grain by local,
keepsake earth. Each foreign, sanguine Eden
of each stranger-tribe ‒ each crime-ridden
bloodsoaked mythograph, each folksy focal

pinprick ‒ each herb & flower cloistered there
in arch-hives of the speechless yokels (weed-
diggers, well-doers) ‒ grace, dwelling in the spell
of humble ship-launches, handshakes... Love’s share.

Hart, you reign thus, with Herman, in the sea :
I hear you, lambent singer, where eagles gather
& serpents loiter, checkmated ‒ ‘mid feather-
rainbows of mimosa, cedar-fanes of Galilee.

7.21.11

Lanthanum 8.11

2011-07-20T20:53:00.003-04:00

11

I had an encounter with a bluejay this evening,
solitaire in dogwood niche or perch, a lonely
lieutenant ‒ or maybe just at ease (one homely-
pearly moment). Looks around, intent, scanning;

watches me (through the window) watching him.
Animals are great actors ‒ each minuscule move
steeped in suspense (a rifled minie in its groove).
No wonder Egypt wallah’d hawk-head Wisdom ‒

hoary Horus was a watchful bird. But I digress.
Where was I? Bluejay watching. Watching me.
Involuntary improviser, memorious volunteer,
funereal... north-southern (riverine, I guess)...

African button, lost in the hold of a Petersburg
prison-ship. Melville’s tomb (honeycomb)
at the bottom of the sea ‒ small room
(portable) slivered in Marlowe’s eye (O mirror’d

Mag). Loaded magazine (a-glinting dirk).
The symbolism of these brassy, clashing cymbals
keeps one wondering & wandering forever & anon ‒
yet yon center of centers, yon gate of gates (hark!)

rests in your soul : yon Equalizer to the last degree
(Simon, Rupert). Just is. Just is the end.
When the Eternal comes, & you spend
your last penny on a rags-weedy gown, Marie.

So be it. Her humorous leg-kick or poke
in the ribs is evening’s promise : the memory-
star. When the whole weight of your soul, see,
is lifted... anima-child, bird-whistle-bone... look

there...
7.20.11

Lanthanum 8.10

2011-07-19T21:22:00.003-04:00

10

I criss-crossed the country on chicory highways
to visit my ailing father in the deep midwest;
past emerald orthogonal planes of pest-
control crops (inimical now to milkweedy

monarchs), vast calm ruminant spaces that
nestle on vanishing points of immemorial
homesteads. O this Lincoln-logos world ‒
full of illness & noise, yes, but also quiet

heroic Ohio highs-&-lows (those visionary
feats, O Hart) ‒ not to mention Pennsylvania ‒
where, in the evening, some sequestered cicada
perched aloft (silo’d, yet somewhat loud) tells me

‒ keep on keepin’ on, like the song says :
because the slanting sails of cedar telephone
poles still lean toward poignant sky, horizon...
finite, infinite... their polestar (immortality).

Because there is something deeply foolish in poetry
which corresponds to something playful (fairly
prodigal) about this magnanimous & silly-lowly
sower’s universe (frisbee’d through every

black & mustard by-way) ‒ the way it was
in the beginning - in the very beginning ‒
the veritable Beguine ‒ before our sinning
singèd the surface of a planet with such woes

as tears are made of. When we were naked
dancing on goatskin, unashamed ‒ robed
in garments of light, just light. Globed with
water droplets, water ‒ shaken awake (shaqed).

7.19.11

Rapture & Poetry

2011-05-20T11:11:00.014-04:00

My time is still unbounded.
And I have accompanied the rapture of the universe
As muted organ pipes
Accompany a woman's voice.
- Osip Mandelstam, trans. by James Greene

Until today (the day before the predicted Event) I haven't paid any attention to all the yap about The Rapture. It seems to be of more (comic) interest to the irreligious gabbosphere, than to soi-disant "people of faith."

One way to think about some statements of Jesus in the Gospels about the Day of Judgement, and what is called "the Rapture" (ie., to paraphrase : keep watch : no one knows when the end is coming : "on that day, one will be taken, and one will be left behind" etc.), is that they fall within a general Gospel/Biblical emphasis on a distinction between soul & body, spirit & flesh, invisible & visible, heaven & earth, eternity & time. Contrary to prevalent stereotypes - most of them originating with Christian monastics & preachers themselves - this distinction, in both Judaism & Christianity, is just that : a distinction, no more no less. It does not mean a denigration of the earth, the body, the visible, the flesh, etc. All these things from the latter half of the equation are to be accepted with joy & gratitude as gifts of the Creator. What the emphasis on this distinction of Spirit is meant to do is to restore the balance : to bring humanity back to spiritual wholeness & health, in a world overwhelmed by the fleeting & changing things of "this world." Thus the reminder of an End-Time - & the focus on individual alertness & awareness (ie. "let your loins be girded", for "one shall be taken & one left behind") - is again a kind of memento mori, and a reminder of the nearness (though invisible) of the "kingdom of heaven."

This is just one way (a low-key, common-sense way) to approach what is implied by the "Day of Judgement" exhortations in the Gospels. But I want to foreground this distinction (earth/heaven, body/spirit, visible/invisible) as an entry into what follows. I want to talk a little about poetry and "rapture". Osip Mandelstam points toward this theme, in the stanza above - from a late poem, written (not long before his final trip to Siberia & death) after listening (from exile in provincial Voronezh) to a recording of Marian Anderson, singing gospel music on Moscow Radio. Poets - in their visionary, enthusiastic, prophetic, charismatic, shamanic modes - have been associated with "raptures" from the beginning of time (isn't rhapsode a name for "poet" in Greek?). Plato memorably contrasted the "reasonable" discourse of the philosophers with the Muse-inspired, unpredictable flights of poets. The ancient kinship between poem & oracle was a cross-cultural given. What is involved here is the charisma of possession - of the in-coming of the God, the Divine, the Spirit : of a somatic/intellectual experience which transports the poet into a "harmonic" state, resulting in song : the expression, the narration of the holistic, visionary experience itself : Mandelstam's "rapture of the universe." We are reminded here of the apostle Paul's account of his sudden transport to "the third heaven" (ie. above the clouds, and also beyond the stars), where he saw things he could not put into words; and of Dante's journey to Paradise with Beatrice (which explicitly adumbrates Paul's confession). These are what you might call canonical examples in the history of "rapture." They are akin as well to the Gospel episode, when the disciples witness Jesus' Transfiguration - standing on the hill with Elijah and Moses - from earthly man into heavenly being.

Many people - maybe everyone, really - have experienced, at one time or another, brushes with the inexplicable : the uncanny, the marvelous, the serendipitous, the wonderful, the mysterious... the spiritual, the numinous, the holy. Encounters or events which one cannot (or will not) reduce to some rational explanation or verbal equivalent. For the rare saints & holy people among us, ordinary life, whatever it brings, is perhaps transformed into the "bread & wine" of spiritual understanding : for the rest of us, most of the time, we're O.K. if we can just stave off trouble & get through another day....

But I've had my share of such rare & extraordinary experiences. Some of them have profoundly shaped the direction my life has taken. As I've written about before - when I was about 20 yrs old (in 1972-3) I underwent a series of seismic psychological events - uncanny, charismatic experiences - which seemed to mingle faith, vision & poetry. As a result I was shaken out of my practical life and rational pursuits : I dropped out of college for three years; I hitchhiked around the country (& England) in a kind of cloud of pondering & meditation on the mystery of things. & in a sense I have never stopped seeking that understanding : in 1973 I was brought up short by a kind of rational enigma, which spurred my curiosity about metaphysical, spiritual things. But I misrepresent what I went through, if I narrate this as merely some sort of gnostic search for occult knowledge. It was really an experience of being moved & changed in the heart of my personality : morally & emotionally as well as intellectually. My life was changed.

One of the consequences of this - & because what I went through was all tangled up in my mind with my sense of myself as a poet, with a literary vocation - was that I was unable to return to academics & the pursuit of a career in a "normal" way. I felt I had been through something which no teacher or classroom could explain to me; moreover, I felt motivated to find a way to express what I was "seeing" & learning directly in poetry. Poetry, vision & experience seemed irreducibly entwined. And I think at least one part of the reason I've worked at a kind of low-level job in a library for 25 years, is that I needed that independence from any kind of "worldly" demands on my ability to express things in poetry. I couldn't teach writing, I couldn't study or pursue an academic degree in a "sensible" way, because the intellectual & vocational responsibilities involved would be more than I could bear. (I realize there might be other, less charitable ways of evaluating such diffidence on my part. I'm sure there are many sides to it - "character issues"... I'm explaining just one of them.)

But setting aside the autobiographical vein : what I mean to suggest is that these extraordinary events - these strange spiritual promptings (nudgings?) - have provided me food for thought now for a long time : a food which has never run out. & over the past few weeks & months I've sensed a sort of integration in my mind, of longstanding notions & new researches - connected with the long poem I've been struggling with (Lanthanum). Integration, synthesis... it's a sense of certain ideas becoming substantial, & harmonized with each other, so that they provide a sort of confirmation, a weight or substance, which I can carry around with me... in a state of mild rapture & joy!

This is really not easy to explain without degrading it in the process. I've been searching for images & rational analogues of something at the root of the poem (Lanthanum), which was an unusual dream I had a few years ago about the Gateway Arch monument, in St. Louis. I've been reading about architecture (Padovan, Proportion; Van der Laan; Smith, The Dome). I've been reading various things on the literature of the Holy Grail (Gemstone of Paradise by Murphy was especially interesting, as was an old book by Helen Adolf, Visio Pacis). I've been reading some theology, especially the Byzantine church father, Maximus the Confessor. I've been reading some physics & cosmology. From these & many other books I've been drawing nourishment, I think, for a sort of productive way of seeing, or way of understanding things in general. & out of all this there was not a single "Eureka!" moment - but a kind of drawn-out, successive, gradual, gradually-expanding & growing & strengrthening E-U-R-E-K-A !-sense... a real "rapture of the universe", as Mandelstam put it.

How can I say it? I can't. I've been trying to say it & express it & sketch it out in the Lanthanum sequence & other poems. But since tomorrow's supposed to be "The Rapture," let me on this special occasion try to articulate my own intellectual joy-glee-rapture as I seem to feel it & see it.

Murphy, in his book on the grail, sets himself the task of explaining why the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (in Parzival) describes the grail as a "stone." He explains how the tomb of Christ was considered to be carved out of stone - to be a rock tomb. He explains that the Church began sanctifying portable eucharistic tables, so that pilgrims & soldiers could receive Communion even away from churches proper. These tables were little boxes or stands, made out of stone & gems, beautifully designed, with small hollow sections - miniature replicas of the Holy Sepulchre - which held the sanctified eucharistic bread (Christ's body). He shows how Wolfram's descriptions of the grail seemed based on such portable eucharistic containers - Murphy even discovers a specific box (in a museum in Bamberg, Germany) which he believes may have served as Wolfram's model.

The implication of these affinities is that the grail is equated with Christ's eucharistic Body : which itself (the eucharist) stems from, is part of, the body of Christ himself (in the Sepulchre, and resurrected on Easter). The Sepulchre today rests under a domed building in Jerusalem. Domical structures (as Smith relates) are a very basic & global figure for the human "home" (being a microcosmic representation - from nomadic tent structures to Hagia Sophia - of the "dome of heaven" arching over the earth). Thus we have the image of the mortal/risen Man/God - Jesus - located in the symbolic "center of the earth" (Jerusalem) - beneath the microcosmic dome-home - & replicated in a portable eucharistic "grail", available to anyone who seeks it.

Thus far we are discoursing on symbolic-religious symbols (which, taken by itself, could be criticized, I suppose, as a species of mystico-antiquarianism). So let me try to explain how I understand a sort of philosophical analogue or parallel to these symbols. And I want also to try to relate all this to poetry.

I think the human mind & imagination have an inborn orientation toward understanding. The discipline of science subjects this drive, this orientation, to the demands of analysis, experiment & proof : but the drive itself - to understand - came first. The mind - the imagination - is synthetic : aiming for wholes, for completeness, for the integration of disparate facts & experiences. The urge to wonder seems primordial to me : and what it answers, what it responds to, is an awareness of the basic difference between nothing and something. The vast universe - something - stands against nothingness, non-existence. I remember pondering these things in adolescence - but it probably starts in childhood : wondering, questioning the origin of life, of the universe.

Further, I think there is a basic consequence of this original human wondering, which is a state of what used to be called "natural piety". It is a deep and mostly-unconscious gratitude for being : an attitude of thanksgiving for the joy of mere existence, of being-alive. Of course, many things (we all know them) work to crumble & debilitate this attitude of gratitude : but this doesn't mean it's not still lurking there, beneath all our fears & disappointments. It is too basic, too primordial, to be destroyed.

Now let me try to pull some of these threads together toward some sort of conclusion. Here's what I say : the true "holy grail" is a kind of portable state of awareness. An awareness of what? A sense of an underlying harmony. What is this harmony? It is a harmony of proportion : a proportion (ratio, logos) between the human & the divine, between humanity & God. In a stance of gratitude. Gratitude stemming from an awareness of the "createdness" of the visible universe : of something born out of nothing. And not only that : but also gratitude stemming from an awareness of this central proportion itself : that human persons - in the "architecture" or "ecology" (the dome) of their lived lives on earth - represent visible images of divine Personhood. The earth, as Mandelstam, put it, is a "mansion" - & we are "God's grateful guests". This is a very basic (& fairly traditional) insight - shared by another Petersburg poet, Gumilev, & by Anna Akhmatova : it was part of the "chaste vision" of the Acmeist poetic project of the early 20th century. On this most simple foundation of gratitude or thanksgiving, the whole normative structure of civilization is seen to be constructed. It is stated most clearly in the Gospels, when Jesus explains that all the law & commandments hang on two basic commands : "To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind & strength, and what is like unto it, to love your neighbor as yourself." This is the core activation of the most basic sense of faith in a divine or metaphysical or dream or dramatic order of cosmic reality : this is the "bread & wine" of the poetic vision of the universe - its "rapture." Under the estrangement of time, and change & mortality, this is the promise of a kind of Easter metamorphosis : a resurrection of the mind & spirit through a mysterious Approach of living Consciousness - the dramatic victory of "sacred history" - its epic plot, you might say - its "divine comedy" : the victory of spirit over matter, of immortality over death. This, you could say, is what Mary Magdalen "saw" when she found Jesus - "the gardener" - near the empty tomb. In another late poem, Mandelstam put this kind of deep rapture into words again, a poem which is one of my all-time favorites (translated here by Richard & Elizabeth McKane). The "clarity of a concept" - this is it.

To Natasha Shtempel

1.

Limping against her will over the deserted earth,
with uneven, sweet steps,
she walks just ahead
of her swift friend and her fiance.
The restraining freedom
of her inspiring disability pulls her along,
but it seems that her walking is held back
by the clarity of a concept :
that this spring weather
is the ancestral mother of the grave's vault,
and that this is an eternal beginning.

2.

There are women, who are so close to the moist earth,
their every step is a loud mourning,
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,
and be first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,
and it is impossible to part from them.
Today angels, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,
and the day after, just an outline.
The steps you once took, you won't be able to take.
Flowers are immortal. Heaven is integral.
What will be is only a promise.

Lanthanum 8.9

2011-05-18T22:08:00.002-04:00

9

New England fog shrouds a founder’s promontory
in delicate gray-green quiet. Moist light,
kind to the eyes. Prospect Terrace : height
of land above forgetful traffic (lethal, desultory).

Benign stone Roger leans from his avant-canoe.
Lifts hopeful beneficent hand... mimes the blind
seer’s foresight (insight). What’s in the mind
of Providence this morning? What borne anew

out of this misty-rusty matière, downstream
from piney swamp to Delta confluence?
Sign of the seal of the human arch : immense
message parked in a rushing homing pigeon’s light-

beam coda. Government be upon his shoulder,
warbles a sere Nazir : the servant-gardener,
the burden-carrier, kindly Samaritan : where-
ever two or three are gathered together... &

where you must go, I shall go too... these
are substance of a dovecȏte-code. Now I hear
the mournful drone of the milk train coming ‒
where the delta mingles Memphis garbage-boys

& the low hum of harmony of things. Matrix
of all unacknowledged goodness... sweetness
deep down there, Gerard (by George). Just
is. Who finds a footnote (horseshoe, asterisk)

(Aaron’s budding divining rod) will frame the
nonsense of those mumbling lips’ menorah-
tree. A metamorphosis of monarchs’
flight... limestone river-tomb burst into flame.

5.18.11

Lanthanum 8.8

2011-05-17T22:24:00.002-04:00

8

Unseasonable cool of this Providence weather.
Relentless gray clouds riding like the sea
against Labrador cliffs (far north, remote). If
we could dive, like Jonah, through the quicksilver

substance ‒ this galactic dream-stuff (through
this curtain of mirrors)... if we could ponder
the formula, like a thirsty Maximus, deeper
& deeper, to the quintessence of truth... &

say it ‒ where the 32 and the 1 make a perfect
33... through the cloud-shimmer of bass chords,
high notes... the whole 88 ‒ then that primordial,
irreducible Whatness would be... the actual Subject

of the Poem (the regal Word, the living One).
& it would be a Someone in disguise ‒ Peter
on tour ‒ paisan, gardener, ever-loving father-
brooder... shady Melchizedek (his bread & wine).

* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *

It would be a version of yourself, a shadow
of you : the greater portion of the Great
Proportion ‒ snowy mantle of the ratio.
A you made perfect lovingkindness (how

I do not know). As when a loving father
turns back to his child with a radiant look
to help him along the fearsome path he took
himself, long ago... here it is ‒ the farther,

farthest, deepest gate, my son, my son... &
out of the cold limestone & the rocky tomb
you emerge, Lazarus, Jonah, JB ‒ home at
last amid garden air... the eyes of Magdalen.

5.17.11

Lanthanum 8.7

2011-05-16T18:08:00.002-04:00

7
i.m. Bernard Greenhouse

The dogwood’s white cascades, under cool gray skies
like a mantle of foam across the terraced branches
‒ a petal-waterfall, or flocks of small white doves
that drift (as if one thought) on the evening breeze.

This shapely tree gives the suggestion of a dome
or movement of a cello, or a sturdy Greenhouse
(wrapt about his Countess). Where the whispers
of the sounds are born ‒ in young leaves, at home

on high. Only the bright thread of a glissando
lathed on a painful knot ‒ low note, Ruby ‒
rubato now, legato. It is the law of to be
or not to be ‒ the covenant with sorrow, Micky...

Alessandro... Absalom (my son, my son).
The everlasting boy is rabid for the sceptre,
now ‒ the crown of righteousness, the scimitar
of justice (make it right!). Roland, his chanson

for Charlemagne. & who will wear the crown?
Jason’s chasing Ariadne through the labyrinth
forever... lust & revenge pile up the plinth
of a putrid catafalque. The doves are gone.

On an almond retina, their silent flight, into
gray twilight of a late-born spring. She is
your alloy of steel, bumpkin; your mosaic law
woven hidden in the wave... your Sheba-rescue.

Who is, was, always there. Like that tiny figure
(Rex Artus) threaded through the iconic mish-
mash of a tall window (Otranto). Yon wished-for,
once & future tolling surf (étoile Jeanne d’Arc).

5.16.11

Lanthanum 8.6

2011-05-16T13:05:00.003-04:00

6

When Hobo finds himself in rehab (a kind of harbor,
built on hardy cross-braced beams of honeycomb-
light) he makes a marvelous recovery, some-
how : harbinger of things to come. His neighbor

in the adjoining cave (one Lazarus, a gardener
from Lazicum) has seen it all before
but every time he wonders all the more. He
taps a whisper through the wall ‒ Did you see her,

Hobo? She saw you. Who? Madeleine,
your steadfast friend. Came each day, to wait
& watch beside your bed. Maybe you’ll celebrate
Thanksgiving with her after all. Thanks, cave-man,

mumbles Hobo (to his wall of stone). I’m still
in fragile health, he thinks (132 ailments just
now under his belt) yet healed I am, trust
me. Am hale & whole... one life left to fulfill.

The hospital (St. Magdalene) was planted in a park
one sabbath-day, once long ago (the specific date
no one remembers). From his bed, the late
reprobate looks out the window, tracing the arc

of a swallow’s flight : a bird built for the sky,
he thinks, as I was shaped for the clay.
Soon enough it will be Memorial Day...
he sinks toward sleep again. Never to die,

never to die... he watches his mother whittle
a baby boat for little Frisbee the leprechaun, &
letter its name on the bow (Sophie). Someone
will find it, she says to him - someone very far...

5.16.11

2011-05-15T21:07:00.002-04:00

5

Imagine you hiked up a song-path, pilgrim
following the beeline of a pearl-gray lamb’s-
wool cloak. Your GPS (like an eye-in-palm)
her phantom form ‒ one of the seraphim.

Into a crystal cave ‒ mouth of stalagmites,
candlelit. Night beehive, star-dome ‒
underground. Where dreams come from,
and memory... a jumble of anthracite

riven with iron threads. & she leads you on
as if blindfolded, like a magnet ‒ & you hear
the rustle of an unknown stream, somewhere
out of your own past (far-seeing, unforeseen).

It is an everlasting realm, she whispers,
turning halfway round ‒ where you were
before you were. A crystallographer
might understand : this crypt of aquifers,

this sky beneath a tomb (of petrified wood)...
& then I saw the petroglyphs, the writing
on the wall. Just one stick figure, hovering
beneath one dented arch ‒ an O for head,

an M overhead ‒ sketched with a crayon
of scarlet fire (edged with maroon & plum).
What does this mean? I whispered. Thumb-
print of an almond stem, she murmured ‒ one

burnt bud about to flower. From the dark baobab
of joy ‒ under the streambed where we followed,
singing. Then I turned too ‒ beheld the cave-
mouth burst with light... muttering Rahab, Rabbi...

5.15.11

Lanthanum 8.4

2011-05-15T18:20:00.002-04:00

4

This patchwork poem could never be the whole
for which it was the hoped-for, hopeless emblem
‒ yet the Gateway Arch, that lofty steel amalgam
planted one night in my sleep, is just a symbol

too. For something greater, yet less visible;
more actual & omnipresent; ungraspable
except by some unmerited mercy, unpredictable.
Your own lambent grail ‒ a beehive vestibule

(mindful, heartfelt). The proud, the cold
cannot approach that fiery source (so near,
so quiet, listening) ‒ their hearts not here,
not there. Close by... shading a foretold

epitaph ‒ tattooed onto that breathing cenotaph
(carved across th’embarkèd lid of an amber
mandorla-circumference). Melek or Malakh or
Molokha-Regent, Prince du Mille Lacs or Laughing-

Water-Duchess ‒ borne away (bear with me) on
a barge (near White Bear Lake, upper Mississippi).
Toward your own delta of displaced memory,
the ripple-texture of the stream (up, down)

& the ragged willow branch that plows, unfazed,
against the current (knots of driftwood, flotsam,
slipping past)... its creaky-curving arm
in a gentle bend over the riverbend. Dazed

by its flickering implications, the summer sunlight
in a radiant matrix, moving with the water...
Love’s little ensign-sepulchre or Frisbee-spider
scoots for shore. Ridgeline. Cahokia sunset.

5.15.11

An Amateur Defense of Poetry

2011-05-12T11:33:00.000-04:00

What follows has no footnotes, no scholarly apparatus. Just my own faulty memory and groundless, amateur speculations.

*

When did poets begin writing "defenses"? My guess is that Philip Sidney's was one of the first, in Elizabethan England, around 1600. The Renaissance (or post-Renaissance) was in full swing, the Reformation was underway, the Enlightenment would be arriving soon. The Middle Age of faith was giving way to the Modern Age of reason & science. Prose was splitting off from poetry. Prose leaned toward facts, practical utility, rational argument, scientific evidence and explanation. Poetry leaned toward Art & Beauty (in caps), toward the emotional life, the life of the spirit, toward everything that could not be quantified & examined with objective detachment. The "defensive" stance, signaled by essays like Sidney's, represented a reaction against new pressures brought to bear on the traditional role of the poet-as-seer, as bearer and enunciator of ancient & communal knowledge - an immediate kind of understanding, outside the frameworks of rational argument or scientific proof. & I would say the division, the polarization, between the rational & the poetic approaches came to a head, was crystallized, in the shift from the discursive rationalism of the Restoration poets, to the imaginative vision of the Romantics (epitomized & defended perhaps most stoutly by Coleridge & Blake, with some help from Wordsworth).

*

But why does any of this matter now? The Romantics were a long time ago. Modern and Postmodern thought found other & seemingly more relevant ways to challenge any simplistic versions of rationalism or scientific positivism. But perhaps that is the crux of the problem. Poets have relinquished the debate to philosophers, physicists, biologists, commentators, theologians... to everyone except themselves. A defense, then, would have to involve a re-assertion, a new expression, of the cultural-intellectual authority of poetry. & poets themselves are variegated into all sorts of distinct groupings based on style, or on poetic theory, or by specific ethnic-cultural-historical-linguistic identifications. Often it is claimed that there is no such thing as poetry, only poetries. An intellectual defense such as I am suggesting, then, sounds like a tall order.

*

There will be no "return to Romanticism." But there might possibly be a return to something more venerable than the Romantics : a sense of poetry as matrix of cultural understanding, as source of vision. It seems to me that there are ways to step tentatively in this direction, from various points on the circumference. So here I will toss around a few hunches in that regard.

*

We could start by thinking of poetry as a kind of living monument or textual distillation of a culture's language. This is not a popular notion in these times. The focus today is on the immediacy of vernacular engagement : people find odious the idea of poetry as a kind of textual crypt of language. Yet something in the back of the mind nags every real poet like a guilty conscience : the language we speak is objectively beautiful; thus poetry ought to build lasting containers, expressions, exemplifications, of that language. Poetry ought to seek both the exquisite & the necessary - the best verbal equivalents of both experience & thought.

But to accept that challenge is to be confronted with considerably difficult consequences : for it means that new (or perhaps old) thematic demands are applied to poets & poetry. The "beauty of language" is not just sound-music, not just elegant wit & ornamentation. There is also the profound dimension of meaning & thought - forsaking which, poetry has already relinquished any claim to cultural authority.

To meet these demands, however, poetry brings to bear some surprising strengths. Because a poem is a kind of playful, seemingly-purposeless end-in-itself, it is capable of modeling the ends of things : forms, shapes, distinct entities, in their particularity, their integrity, their wholeness : in their identity as ends. The integrity, the self-fulfillment of things is echoed, modeled, sanctioned by the harmonious, inherent integrity of poems. This is a specific kind of verbal modeling (Aristotle called it mimesis) which is peculiar to poetry.

*

For Blake & Coleridge, Wordsworth & Whitman, Keats & Dickinson & others, poems are the verbal distillation of human acts of imagination. Imagination is a specific faculty, a power of the human mind : essentially a power of invention & synthesis. The human power of invention is likened (especially by Coleridge) to a supernatural creative Power (the origin of reality itself, as a cosmic whole, in the divine "I Am"). The problem that these Romantics had with the rationalism of the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, et al.) was what seemed to them a split between mind & heart, mind & soul, mind & spirit - between the reasoning, analyzing, abstracting mind, & the inspired imagination - its "sacred" representations of the whole of life, of life as wholeness.

The modern development of free-standing scientific rationalism, as the centerpiece of human thought, meant the inevitable sidelining of the imagination, and hence of the purpose of poetry and the role of the poet. These are, of course, far from new ideas! But I think they represent the fundamental cause for the essentially ornamental & trivial social status of poetry in the contemporary world. It is, in sum, a question of two things : 1) the growing alienation of poets themselves from a sense of poetry as a distillation of the best (most memorable) language of their culture; and 2) the historical shift from imaginative (verbal) modeling of truth, to its rational analysis & (mathematical) verifications.

*

Is it possible today to counter these two trends - to rebuild, in a new mode, some of the intellectual confidence of, say, a Blake or a Coleridge? Many poets, in very distinct ways, have certainly made the effort. My own sense is that there is no method, no workable approach built on rational discourse or stubborn will-power. I think back, rather, to Wallace Stevens' notion, expressed in many of his poems & prose "adagia", that individual written poems are merely traces of something larger, more pervasive - some "poetry" inherent in the marrow of life itself. Poetry is thus some mysterious yet basic aspect of "nature" or of the human, which comes to the fore by its own power - the faculty of imagination somewhat in Coleridge's sense. The human mind synthesizes experience - its ultimate or "authorized" expression - not in discursive prose tracts nor in mathematical formulae - but in poetic invention, the insight of the human imagination, the vision of the whole, the All (though of course poetry - being pervasive - is also visible, lurking, active, in prose & science & mathematics too).

*

& I predict that as historians, anthropologists, archaeologists & scientists persist in digging through the deep layers of human origins and the history of the planet, they will discover more & more evidence of the imaginative leaps of the human mind, which have emerged even in prehistory, to visualize & foresee amazing, "incredible" phenomena of the future (the vast, galactic, cosmic future), which we today find difficult to conceive or conceptualize.

Lanthanum 8.3

2011-05-10T20:11:00.003-04:00

3

The frail ancient splintering dogwood over my head
(with its iron band-aid) leafs its white lightning now;
has been with me, swaying above me, bough on
bough. Steadfast curve, sky-rib’s brisk veer aft

toward homestead (victory at last). Unspoken
presence. Longing’s compass. My voice whispers
ash down from another tree (sea-green conifer) &
yet another (almond mandolin). Gray wind-token, or

memoir of memoirs. The song-turtle (its gypsy-dom)
dove deep. The turtle dove deep. Dove deep,
Jonah ‒ into the blind sea-night, where moon-pearls
keep, & gemstones shine like eyes, stars... dove

home, sang home. Its mark, its Orient (bull’s-eye).
Home in its shell at the center of the earth
(Jerusalem). Whose bending womb was berth,
Jerusalem : a-traveling home (nostalgic guy

in Babylon, who’s gal’s in Galilee). The creaking
murmur of this familiar tree ‒ my friend, my
pining amber (sap-glow in the cosmic dark). Why
seven years of waiting, Rachel? My heart breaking.

Why this menorah, shining fifty more long years?
To make an anthem for our wandering land.
Was it not we that wandered, Ruth? I’ll stand
beside you. So the song filled up with tears.

So the voice came from bottom of the sea
& height of sky; its sounding laughter
only echo of a secret smile (my daughter).
Eyelash semaphores dove, alight... look, see.

5.10.11

Lanthanum 8.2

2011-05-09T23:33:00.003-04:00

2

A baby half-moon (pale, spooked) winks up there
behind a wispy pane of clouds. Centered just
over the Mayday dogwood ‒ its phosphorus
petal-crosses branched in flaring armada-

wings, like Inca footbridges (through shady
Andes). Not the stringy spans themselves
but sign language (quipu for crossing over).
Toward that aerie, dove, darker than any

Crystal Cave, loftier than Milky Way;
through the posh, lost bole of a cosmic
cranium, abaft the train-hoot of a tragi-
comic orb (half-&-half confusion-whorl).

These are some of the advantages
of standing on earth. At confluence
of physicists, them calibrated dalliance
(haruspicatin’ on a livid prune). Plumbs

a mental multiplex, sans doubt. I wonder
if they vegetate too much? Unhealthy
habits ossify braincells, somebody
sermonized this morn (on the radio)

‒ and it’s not like they don’t know what they’re
on about, reports BBC. Hey folks! There’s
money in know-how! proclaims Spokes-
person Numero Tweetie ‒ pure air

for sale! Yet the moon is loaded with dust,
noted rotten prophet. Iz not for sale
yet. & we keep walking toward that hail
of atoms, Josh ‒ wh-why? Moon or Bust.

5.9.11

Odd High Formalism

2011-05-06T09:41:00.007-04:00

As the talking wheels of American Poetry World wring their hands over various issues (including hand-wringing), and gaze up at the unanswering blue sky crying "whither Poetry?" and such, I would like to outline, briefly, my prediction - not prescription, but prediction - for the general shape of the future, based on the general shape of the past. The past and future of American poetry lies with OHF, or Odd High Formalism.

Not "New Formalism," a 90s movement which called for a return to formal rhyme and meter and received forms (sonnets, sestinas, etc.). The generally reactionary attitude of that trend inhibited more profound experiments with form : as long as we went back to the good old tennis net so sadly neglected since Robert Frost's day, poetry would revive... no.

Nor do I refer to the formalism of the professional avant-garde, primarily represented by the descendants of the NY School, the Language Poets, and various offshoots of experimental Modernism. The formalism of these groups was terribly overshadowed by two influential & contradictory notions drawn from 20th-century philosophy and "theory," namely : 1) reality is constituted by language, and 2) language does not, cannot, really represent or refer to anything outside itself. It's not hard to see where such ideas might lead with regard to poetry : straight into very formal but also highly-mannered self-enclosed & solipsistic literary entities ("language poems" & such).

The perceived ailments & frailty of contemporary American poetry - it's academic effeteness, its anemic detachment from the larger, living world, its introverted fishbowl solipsism & narcissism, its loss of a public audience & the ordinary reader, etc. & so on - might be remedied by a clearer recognition of the main tradition in American poetry, which is none other than... Odd High Formalism.

What is the nature of Odd High Formalism? Here I can only sketch its main elements in a minimal way. Perhaps the best way to understand OHF is to consider the kinship between poetry, music, and public dancing. An era's leading styles of social dancing are paralleled in its poetry. A generation ago, in a series of books, Alastair Fowler analyzed the design properties of Renaissance poetry - combining number mysticism, seasonal or calendrical measures of time, the occasional thematics of major holidays, public events or persons. Poems were shaped to mimic the stately, ceremonial movements of social dancing. Think, on the other hand, about today's social dancing styles : mostly anarchic wiggle, bump & jump. & though fancier, more formal dancing seem to be making a comeback, it is still mostly limited to individual dancing couples, rather than the elaborate group dances of the past. And anarchic wiggle & hop seems like a pretty fair description of the formal approach of much contemporary poetry.

The poet launches into the poem : the audience or reader has no idea where it's going in a formal sense. It's free, it's experimental... it's of the moment, it's raw, it's real... these are the current values. Poetry wants to blend in with the prosaic activities of the world around it. It wants to be liked for blending in. But it will never be liked on this basis : it will only be held in slight contempt. Odd High Formalism accentuates poetry's difference from prose and ordinary life, by lifting its intricate and elegant formalities to another, higher, more intense dimension. Not a dimension of obscurity or elitism : rather a realm of highly-articulate order and elegance. The world of hip-hop and rap is closer to the ancient and Renaissance sense of poetry than anything being produced by the mainstream poetry factories. One may reject the hip-hop artist's often bleak, violent, selfish, cynical and misogynist worldview, yet still learn from hip-hop's focus on formal differentiation and intricacy (the meter, the rhymes, the word-play) - its separation from prose.

Most of the really great American poets of the past have been Odd High Formalists : that is, they have developed a highly-ordered & articulate formality which easily distinguishes itself from prose of any kind. It is inventive, personal, and suited to its own unique aims, rather than patterned on traditional schemes for tradition's sake (hence its "oddness"). Think of Marianne Moore's sui generis formal patterns; Elizabeth Bishop's elegant & playful designs; Emily Dickinson's construction of a poetic universe within a strict and minimalist formal pattern; Whitman's careful development of his own unique cosmic-bardic metrical form and manner; Melville's re-invention of the philosophical travel poem; Poe's highly-mathematical and calculated sense of poetry's rhythmic/tonal mesmerism; Hart Crane's re-invention of the Pindaric praise-song; John Berryman's manic formalism in the Dream Songs... the list could go on for pages. What these poets have in common is a bold - almost extreme - conception of poetry as an intense, highly-differentiated formal dance of sound, meaning, theme, occasion. The OHF poetry of the future will set a new standard of difficulty. This is not a poetry that will "blend in" easily with the prose world : it will be very much harder to write than what is offered at present in schools & literary communities. It will have to distinguish itself - by its formal qualities - from prose. It will have to offer a very high and strange dancing music, a relief - both from prose and from the mannered allusive theoretical academic obscurities which passed for "difficulty" in the last century. Only American Odd High Formalism will set the measures of the dance to come.

From the days of John...

2011-04-15T13:18:00.007-04:00

From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force. Pondering this passage from the Gospels (here, Matthew 11:12). Jesus is eulogizing John.

"From the days of John until now..." I understand this as making a distinction between two different time-periods, one being under the spiritual "authority" of John & all the prophets (since "John is Elijah who is to come"), and the other under the authority of the Son of Man (Jesus). Two distinct eras of the spirit of God. Now = where the person of Jesus is manifest.

"... & men of violence take it by force." This is a deep & resonant saying. Interpreted & misinterpreted again & again....

How do I read it today? Well, have been reading a fascinating old book (1940s) by Julian Morgenstern, The ark, the ephod and the "tent of meeting". Studying & speculating on the affinities between the ark, the Temple, and very ancient tribal war-gods and their symbols - their temples, their cult objects. The god of the clan & the tribe was above all a divine defender of the tribe : through prayer & supplication & magic & divination, the tribal priest-leader would call upon the god in the ark (or tent, or temple) to come to their aid in battle.

In other words, men projected their sense of actuality, of truth, of fate, onto their own symbol of divine authority & sanction. And these religious projections would in turn be ratified and codified by force, by shamanistic magic. Man's own alienated powers were projected onto their shared symbolic totems.

I don't see this as pure false consciousness & mystification : I see it as archaic humanity's efforts to grasp and control a bewildering and violent & chaotic & dangerous world. At the same time, I think it must be recognized as also a reflection of that violence - it is suffused with force. & I identify this dimension in part with what Jesus is pointing toward in this passage.

We are talking about very basic background or foundations of human civilization, I guess. And there are no hard & fast distinctions or divides - it's more like a moral/ethical continuum. What I mean is there is a gradual change from conceiving the divine solely in terms of power, force & violent control, and conceiving the divine in terms of mercy, mutual understanding, reason, compassion, kindness... peacemaking. & we can see this change emerging in the Decalogue (the 10 Commandments). Necessity is the mother of invention.... & when the Hebrews emerged from servitude in Egypt, it was the legal-political wisdom of Moses which adapted ancient forms of tribal worship, cult & divination toward the beginnings of a notion of the divine as universal moral law.

So when Jesus speaks of "from the days of John", and the "kingdom of God" formerly coming with violence, he is pointing, it seems to me, toward a basic, fundamental re-orientation : a recognition that in God there is no sanction for force & violence : that force & violence and arbitrary rule actually have nothing to do with those ethical strata & dimensions of life which are part of the "kingdom" (love, mercy, kindness, compassion, justice, peace, happiness, hope, joy...). "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God."

This dimension I see as the "underside" of authoritative religion... the Mary-Magdalen-at-the-Sepulchre side... the "poetry" side... & there are a lot of these themes running through my scribblings...

R.I.P. (Cesar Vallejo, Abraham Lincoln)

2011-04-15T12:49:00.006-04:00

(& some background on them in July)

Lanthanum 8.1

2011-04-12T21:38:00.003-04:00

1

Just a few stray notes eddy from the 88
(swirl over amber cove). Deflected light
on limestone cliffs hovers aft that
dark matrix-maze (starry checkmate).

Just a century and a half ago (forty days
& nights) the war began. A falling-away
at first, blind predator & prey ‒ then
slow allowance... leaky Cherokee gaze

of stricken countenance. Unmanageable,
unbearable... bearing it. Still. What
indeed will maintain the Union? Recalcitrant
crossword (Coptic?). O pregnant, impregnable

Rock, where are you now? Spar of galactic
ages... under the drab, defunct gaze of those
cleft, cloven Brady photos. All us leftovers
(me, you). Who recollects us now, O manic

one (forsaken stuttering Everyman)? Who
startles Lazarus-corpse from his cold hearth?
Only a flash from blind amygdala (Martha-
moth). Only a grace-note, silent (blue).

When you go beneath the earth (next week, on
your ring-structured Jonah-dive). Your rainbow
coo-coo turtledovey neck-of-the-wooer’s
woodland flight (shady, shady). Lake

of the Woods, maybe. Your own Yuri Gargarin
yurodivy St. Vitus dance ‒ your sister-dove’s
twins’ birthday, Dad (Mary, Mary). Love’s
homing pigeon’s aching back again (like a sign).

4.12.11

some new chords

2011-04-09T22:56:00.000-04:00

...discovered some new (for me) chords, & wanted to tape them before i forget.

Pushkin & us (U.S.)

2011-03-29T09:48:00.030-04:00

Individual poets, whatever their imperfections may be, are driven all their lives by that inner companion of the conscience which is, after all, the genius of poetry in their hearts and minds. I speak of a companion of the conscience because to every faithful poet, the faithful poem is an act of conscience. - Wallace Stevens

Have been reading interesting book on Pushkin and other Russian poets of his generation (The esoteric tradition in Russian Romantic literature, by Lauren Leighton).

Leighton explores the background in Freemasonry which, for the poets, included some knowledge & application of numerology, "cabalistics", and other esoteric codes in their poetry. She quotes Pushkin : "How fun it is to guide one's lines / with ciphers precisely row by row." & she investigates the incredibly sophisticated numerical design in Pushkin's gambling story, "The Queen of Spades". (Anna Akhmatova : "how complex, The Queen of Spades. Layer upon layer.")

But the numbers games of Pushkin and fellow poets (such as Bestuzhev, .a.k.a. "Marlinsky") were motivated not only by aesthetic "fun", but by a need for secrecy. In the early 19th century, revolution was in the air - Romantic poets (inspired by French & American models) expressed heroic aspirations for liberty, democracy, the end of autocracy.... & naturally, came up against the Czar & the secret police (cf. the Decembrist revolt, on which Leighton elaborates).

In fact, what strikes me, reading this study, is how (apparently) seamlessly knit-together were aesthetics and civics in the vocation of poet - in the poet's self- and public image. Poets were (re-)tellers of popular tales, romantic novelists, vox populi, "public intellectuals." They were also tangled up in webs of intrigue and complicity with the Czarist government, and the small (& murky) world of elite aristocracy. The oppressive might of a centralized, unaccountable government, in dialectical fashion, clarified the moral position of the liberal intelligentsia : & this continued even into the 20th century (see Mandelstam's remark - in one of his essays(?) - confirming his "sacred vow to the Fourth Estate").

I started thinking in a vague way, walking to work this morning, just how much this world of poets & literature differs from our own. Here, today, in the U.S., we tend to take political liberty for granted : the temptation is not so much in the direction of conspiracy or extremism, as toward a complacent kind of factionalism. The basic principles of government are not in question; instead, the debates are over how to apply them, and on what ethical-pragmatic-political grounds. We do not have so much a "liberal intelligentsia" as a political class, divided by party affiliation & allegiance to contrasting ideals. We have a nation polarized by partisanship, more interested in one-upping the opposition than in finding common ground. We have professional political careers maintained primarily by lobbyists & the media. Meanwhile, in poetry world, we have a sort of institutionalized "poetry class", dedicated to the idea of differentiating "poetry" as a special kind of substance and activity which requires special treatment, and distinct professional-academic institutions for its support. What is involved is a sort of abdication of the role of "poet" as free intellectual, of the poet as engaged writer.

I don't mean to assert this in order to cry "j'accuse" : I'm just as implicated in this abdication as anyone else - perhaps more so. I'm just trying to understand it. We hear the seasonal calls for more political engagement from poets and poetry : poetry should be more clear, more sincere, more virtuous, more popular. Meanwhile, in counterpoint, we have the seasonal & generational developments of special techniques & styles by means of which poetry is supposedly enabled to promote a more enlightened politics (cf., in their various ways, Language Poetry, the Cambridge School, Flarf, Conceptual Poetry...) .

Somehow I find something basic missing from both these wings of the poetry scene. Poetry is only hobbled by a dependence on either institutions or technique. Both of these approaches reduce poetry to a craft, a career, or a cabal. I tend, rather, to conceive of poetry as a gift and a spirit. The free-standing autonomy of the process of making art (& poems) is allied with imagination, a profoundly synthetic faculty of human intelligence. Yet this constellation of forces is not driven or motivated toward more autonomy (ie., indifference), but in the other direction : toward deeper participation. Here art is allied with science as free intellectual activity : and it's this essential freedom which allows art & poetry to bridge partisan divides, to question & evaluate political slogans & vested interests, to find common ground (often ironic) between supposedly bitter ideological opponents.

The kind of literary activity I am idealizing can only be developed on the fertile ground of literary tradition. We have to get beyond the knee-jerk experimentalism of the nouveau-nouveau (which is profoundly shallow & uninformed), as well as from the marketable brands of traditionalism which reduce poetry to a set of learnable skills. Poetry is a gift & a calling toward engagement. Craft is inseparable from intellect & worldview, as larger, holistic dimensions. On this basis, the dignity of poetry is something sustained by the inner, moral discipline of individual poets (integrity : Stevens' "conscience"), and granted by society at large : it is not an attribute of professional networking or social cliques.

Ars Poetica

2011-03-26T16:15:00.000-04:00

I'm making these serial Youtube videos, reading my long poem... but I suppose I'm the very opposite of a performance artist. With a contemporary performance artist, or spoken word poet, or such, the PERFORMANCE - the video, the scene, the show - is ALL : the text is merely a script. With me, on the other hand, you have (on film) only the ghost of a text. You have to READ the poem (slowly, carefully) in order to get it. To "get" it.

Does this mean I align myself with postmodern textual obsessions, "language" games? Is the presence of the author, the speaker, displaced or disembodied or rendered ambivalent etc. by the controlling "text"? No. Rather, the text is a test, a trial, a labyrinth, by way of which everything is directed toward living, breathing, PRESENCE. It's not dissembling, it's not hermetic - it's personal. It's hide & seek. I write for readers.

Lanthanum 7.24

2011-03-26T14:27:00.005-04:00

24
to John D. & Mary Ravlin Gould

As every poem is a summer sum
& every sketch a project of relations ‒
two points, united by a thread (conjunctions
of silver spider-light)... so that dove-hum

in the willow tree ‒ two mourning doves ‒
is one. Tomorrow is their 60th
(is it a diamond?) anniversary ‒ skittish
Hobo’s steadfast Mom & Dad, that is :

like one limestone outcrop in the Mississippi
whose bionic hieroglyph of layered streams
lifts up an evening stillness through time’s
wrack & roar. & tomorrow will be

another promise too, somewhere ‒ such
gracefulness engaging gravity ‒ when
limestone, sunlight, mark their honeymoon
together (near St. Anthony Falls). Watch,

then, Hobo : these unions are your own.
As every moonlit strand of Ariadne
threads through blind night its charted
labyrinth (a golden coign), so Blackstone’s

lightweight coracle is welded by an arc
of molten fire : & as the monarch wanders
point-to-point, unerring, to the high cedars
of his Lebanon (in Mexico), so the little spark

of her firefly-love will wind galactic splendor
on a spindle (at the hearth of life). So light
the leafy sprinkle from its ash-tree script...
so strong the bond of almond-eyed mandorla

(birchbark-swift). Where every sepulchre
is resurrection, & every heart immures
its grail... there, in a shady arbor in
St. Louis... or Bukovina. Near where you are.

3.26.11

Lanthan 7.23

2011-03-23T07:30:00.000-04:00

23

& so Blackstone fell fast asleep, & dreamed
of Maximus, the Enunciator ‒ hived away
in his steep prison cell, by an azure sea.
Ninefold-more-monkish monk (esteemed

by Empress Theodora for his mellifluous
mind, his clarity ‒ his charity). It was
the articulation of a honeycomb ‒ those
bees of Queen Bea (Regina Magnanimous

in amber trireme, milky dome) made it.
All in one Netherlandish night. Curviform
like windblown home or prairie ship ‒ borne
on nine wings out of a cove (by candlelight).

& the magnetic force, the gravitational pull
of the ballast (hidden below decks, below
the water line). The centripetal prow
of that golden nine-sense, dodecagonal ‒

encrypted, engraved (with royal warning).
It was the enveloping sea, the shadow
of the Argo’s grave. It was she, of the
crow (Civitas Regis Regum Omnium) thing ‒

of the seal, of the talisman. The ravens’
meal. When the sea raved, & the sky
raged, & Jonah, shivering, readied to die...
then blackbirds flew, & a cave-voice bent

Elijah’s ear down low (where servants go).
Down to the sepulchre (its empty cup)
whence that voice (like a lotus) rises up :
gray omnipresent eminence. Fire-halo.

3.22.11

Lanthanum 7.22

2011-03-21T23:57:00.009-04:00

22

On the eve of the vernal equinox this year
the moon drew extra-near, a super-moon. We
watched it rise over the East Side ridge, gone
round ‒ heavy cream-&-honey disk, the color

of limestone. Behind the State House dome
downtown, where we were standing ‒ by the
Masonic Temple, under the Independent Man
(Roger W.) ‒ by Veteran’s Auditorium,

where we were going. For the 11th symphony
(a veteran’s number) by that shady veteran
of Stalin’s reign (not-false Dmitri) : ironic paean
to the veterans of Kremlin Square (1905, & every

year after). One cyclone-harmonic blast (intense,
excruciating). With an octave for turtledove
in-woven like pain ‒ minor keystone of
its void (of agony). Until the last bell sounds

(at last). It must be heard to be believed.
& so the moon drew near, as spring drew nigh
as once a clay chamber became a ball of sky.
As if a shadow (under pyramids) conceived ‒

as if an image of the sun were set on earth
proportionate to recessed light. The greater
with the lesser light ‒ the joy (grief, later)
of the antiphon (of black & white). Rebirth

from death. The choir sings from its honeycomb,
its fugue, its counterpoint ‒ its pain, its counter-
pane. From depths of milkweed camouflage, where
monarchs reign (a seedy Lebanon, beyond all doom).

3.21.11

Lanthanum 7.21

2011-03-18T00:18:00.003-04:00

21

A hint of iron spring in the backbone, like
that crook in Rififi, holding up the safe.
I am coming like a thief. Enough
will be just enough, murmurs Melchizedek.

Here’s the combo, my sweet pale
omen, my Peg in a square poulet, my
palomino. Tonight’s do or die. Pourquoi?
‒ Sez that beak of a coarse cousin, mal-

adroit (sans cinema) Corsican ‒ be
cuz. Bees cause your gemstone-blaze
(in the pink), like a happy hearth-maze
(quattro sorelli) horsing a roundelay

under a lampshade (d’accord). You’re
sweet, villain. For now. Comme tu veux.
You’ve got visitors (in the make-up room,
ma chère). So... your trip... les jeux

sont faits. What’s happenin? The key’s
in your hand, mon idiot, mon frère
(Percy?). They looks like brother & ‒
brr! ‒ oak (some hood!). C’est ma jeune fille.

Gotta practice my style o’harmonique, Sal
(this way, spaghetto). Fleurs, masques...
C’est fini. Les jeux... ‒ the ice ‒ fast!
I forgot his number... so revoir, Mel. So

long, the whole rotten bunch of you!
L’Age d’Or’s closed, for now. Here come
that black-eyed Irish clover, strummin’ her
baobab banjo. Let the bad guys go (for now).

3.17.11

Lanthanum 7.20

2011-03-16T20:28:00.002-04:00

20

& that Henry... who was he, again?
His shoulders ached with balancing mistakes,
with stumbling around bumping into things without
looking. On his creaky Percy-fool wagon-

agate, his waning Charlie-horse... it will take
some amount of grace to set him ever straight!
Riding his windvane like a tied-on rooster, what
with a ladder of pushpins he spun & tore a door

of cork right through that lazy bull’s tin eye ‒
like a laser eye, Polly. Go lie aft, then,
mate, on your limestone bunk ‒ sigh your ashen
anthem, lonesome Lonnie, son. Why? Tell you why.

In the parallactic shade of the negative parable
you seize your shadow in the narrow mirror,
the dim back ward. & a beam from way black
yond reminds ye of what ye was capable, Abel &

Mabel, of shaping up to be. Back in the beguine.
By the birch tree scroll of river-life, the tree-
river aforetimes, even. The script was (whee!)
predictable, Zeke (wheels!) like them radiation-

spooks daubed in the cave-lobby, by the bone-
fire (near Narbonne, Guillaume). Crystalloid
lens by (drip, drop) eddy-curls (ridiculous in
celluloid). Long Curly lashes together a lone

Blackstone soul ‒ original sod-farm, Johnny ‒ her
yellow-sweet plum’s like Xanadu manna-dew by
sock-it-to-me stony crew. Meet me in St. Louie,
Suzy, Hughie... watch her glide on in. You’ll see.

3.16.11

Lanthanum 7.19

2011-03-14T22:00:00.002-04:00

19
to the people of Japan

This March day, dressed in grey. Hollow
melody of turtledove attends one raging
ocean of destructions. Tsunami (anguish).
Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia-flood seeps through

abandoned stony vaults. & the lovesick
poet’s flimsy heart, a frayed basket... &
that fever-priest (manic, homeless) who
sets himself on fire... brief candlestick of

guttering street flame, against what storm.
Baptized with water & with fire ‒ where is
the rock of our foundation? voices choir...
amid such sweeping desolation. Lips form

the oval of their finis prayer (O mournful
hoopoe). There : there is the rock. The
Word. Is logos = ratio = proportion : a
portion-crumb of tears (O human imago).

We are baptized into the foaming waters
of its delta-source, straight from the rock.
Its Nile-mosaic, its covenanting ark,
its promissory arc’s rain-shrouded eyrie-

air. Its bending ligament, its last &
lasting testament, its all-encompassing
agape-argument. Its gift, its offering...
its death. Which is the death of death

itself, a last full measure of its vanishing.
Its limit-point, its form. Its grave.
For each grave is the limit of the earth.
One wave, one teardrop (harbors everything).

3.14.11

today's plink-plonk

2011-03-12T18:18:00.000-05:00

Lanthanum 7.18

2011-03-12T15:24:00.002-05:00

18

Blackstone, a figure for the solitary soul
sketches a synopsis for a love story. A resume
of sorts (his own). His tricksy Ariadne goes away
& leaves him with a glittering thread ‒ raveled,

tangled in a woodchip. Leading... somewhere.
Through the blind maze. A scintillant &
coruscating lifeline, like the golden ring Crane’s
father would have tossed his bursting Hart ‒ there,

under the shadow of a Mexican volcano
(mammoth earth-mound; pyramid, or tomb).
Draws him to that pine-grove’s little room
cut into rock, where the monarchs go

(defying gravity) ‒ that milkweed, milk-train,
morning trail. Blackstone’s astigmatism-
vision scratches only stick figures, clunky-
spelunky glyphs, like prehistoric spaceman

icons. An orthogonal matrix, with sunny sphere
for Shakespeare-brain... and over this, an arc,
a lens (a curvature-canoe, a rainbow-ark).
His trademark gravemarker (Osiris-bier).

He loves to draw, & he would love to draw love
into his Ariadne-armillary (armadillo-track).
Where the glittering string straightens his back
into an upright L ‒ into its almond alcove (its

refining fire). Where desire is tempered
in the habitat of mercy ‒ its just attunement
on the octave of thanksgiving, gratitude... blent
spectrum of the iris of the eye (my Ariadne-bird).

3.12.11

Proportion & harmony

2011-03-10T16:36:00.008-05:00

Have been reading a lot about architecture lately. Might have something to do with the fact that ongoing poem Lanthanum emerged out of an architectural dream I had one night (about the Gateway Arch in St. Louis).

Especially Richard Padovan's great book, Proportion, and another book he translated, by the Dutch monk-architect Hans van der Laan (Architectonic Space).

Padovan bases his book on an interpretation of Wilhelm Worringer's influential 1905 book on aesthetics, Abstraction and Empathy. Very basically, the impulse of "empathy" projects the human into nature, and then models art and architecture on a reflection (an empathetic imitation) of Nature. Whereas the impulse to "abstraction" is more basic & "primitive" : humankind looks out at reality as a threatening chaos, immeasurable, and (abstract) art is a sort of escape/shelter - a means of controlling chaos through imposing order....

anyway, that's just how Padovan gets going, & organizes his review of geometry, proportion, architecture & philosophy in the West over the past 4000 yrs.... it's the opposite of the mystical-magical occult numerological "Golden Section" theorizing which has been popular...

(I'd be curious to know if Wallace Stevens read or was interested in Worringer's monograph. A lot of the modernist artists read it.)

Proportion is the key to form, whether in architecture or aesthetics generally. But do we draw proportion from nature, or impose our own orders? Padovan describes how van der Laan sets out the basic requirements for proportion (the smallest element in an ordered ratio with the whole, and with the other elements), and discovers the "plastic number" - a ratio of 1 : 1.325 (close to 3 : 4), which is proportional through a broad range of whole numbers, & thus handy for the kind of incremental design of basic structures... And this is tied in with van der Laan's very original philosophy of architecture (an "abstract" approach, in Worringer's terms) in which humankind imposes form & creates relational spaces, "homes", within the infinite & measureless continuum of natural space....

I'm finding all this very interesting, anyway, in relation to compositional & thematic aspects of poetry... & I am trying to connect it with other not-so-architectural dimensions of Lanthanum....

like the theological musings on the status or ontology of the human Person.... Maximus, & all that. A trinitarian, incarnational theology sets up a relational situation, a kind of family kinship or resemblance, between God & Man, Father/Son & Spirit.... so to make it possible to unite the notion of "Man is the measure of all things" ("I say unto you, the Son of Man is coming at the right hand of Power"... Jesus says somewhere) - but not in a disproportionate, arrogant stance : rather in proportion with the other Persons of the trinity.... the Image and the Substantial....

More later, maybe. There's a connection in all this with my Mandelstamian & Acmeist leanings. OM's "domestic hellenism" is about the Word as an architectonic that "humanizes" the earth, makes it fit to dwell in.... Gumilev's "chaste vision" is an embodied kind of sense of proportion & harmony....

*

- & having digested as best I can the great syntheses in Padovan's multidisciplinary work (Proportion) - science, philosophy, architecture - I find my response is a sense of mystery, a recognition of the limits of human knowledge.

The book itself is really built like a large structure, a cathedral... on the simple ground of an essential contrast : between 1) the empathetic/Platonic attitude - which finds its human reflection in the (numbered) order of Nature, & understands human intellect as a union (or reunion) with the order of nature - rooted in memory (the mind as a blank slate on which impressions appear); and 2) the abstract/Aristotelian stance, which recognizes a fundamental break between inside and outside, human and natural, & understands the intellect as inherently active, formative, creative : what we know is what we make. Padovan shows how these fundamental stances return as leitmotifs through Western history : so the development from Locke to Berkeley to Hume exhibits a sort of dead-end for both empiricism and idealism - until Kant reasserted the human mind itself as formative agent of nature, experience, reality...

Padovan returns & grounds these abstract heights of western thought to the most basic & primitive human activities (building, shelter), by connecting a notion of the human intellect as active, form-creating (out of Aristotle & Kant), with van der Laan's sense of architecture as the basic human building-impulse. We know what we make, and what we make is a separate living-space (by way of walls) within the infinite space of nature : and in doing so setting up a ratio or proportion between the measured & the immeasurable, the inside & the outside.

Again, though, what I come away with from this reading is a sense of mystery, of the limits of knowledge per se. Because I understand the fundamental contrast - between Plato & Aristotle, idealism & empiricism, number & irrational space - as irresolvable on a purely intellectual or epistemological or abstract level. For me, all this is Athens : there is another & greater binary or contrast at play : with Jerusalem. As I understand it, the dimension represented by "Jerusalem" is the Hebraic-Christian understanding of personal, subjective consciousness & existence as the very marrow of reality : life. We live in an irreducible, inalienable cosmos of Persons : and the true proportion which maintains all life (which "created" the cosmos) is based not on knowledge or mathematics, but on love. This is the mediating "song of the turtledove" which is heard in our land (Song of Songs, which is Solomon's - the figure of wisdom).

Thus we inhabit, yes, something architectonic - filled with "number, weight & measure" - but also something more than architectonic, more than abstract, more than is found in your philosophy, Horatio. We participate in a fundamentally dramatic occasion : life on earth, life in the universe. A life rooted in kinship with one another, with relationship, with persons : where the ultimate harmonies & proportions are transposed to the ethical sphere, to the dimensions of love, to the plummet of the human heart.

*

Hart Crane's The Bridge is suffused with, & structured by, something like this kind of "dream-architectonics." I think my daughter Phoebe's photo on the cover of Lanthanum (taken from a bridge over the Mississippi, a few blocks from my parent's house - both sides of the family have lived in this area for 3-4 generations) evokes this dream-sense too.

Stewie's jam

2011-03-04T22:27:00.000-05:00

Sleepy chords

2011-02-25T22:58:00.000-05:00

Lanthanum 7.17

2011-02-23T20:37:00.004-05:00

17

The old stone church, its simple commandments
Hobo left behind, has not left him behind ‒
under the chaste L of the lamb-lamp, its spine
of bone structure, marrow of the fundament...

of a law that makes a nesting-place for grace
amid kin, among strangers. Its arc follows him
into the wilderness of his lack-love, to limn
(in the abstract) its geometry, its resting-place ‒

like a map from the delta, returning to the delta
(Hobo’s pyramid of sighs). A sunlit eye,
submarine, filigreed with wavy festoons ‒ sky-
arch of acanthus, like a pattern of bear feet

leftover from the midnight pole (dancing
in a ring). Through curving lashes of palm-
leaves, & through the glinting rain-spectrum,
gleaming, shining... a human soul, glancing,

looks out ‒ like Promethean fire its light, its
smile... that will prevail. As through a translucent
babushka-doll (or wooden icon) wisdom’s acumen
twinkles through Hobo to Blackstone to ancient

hermit Maximus : who formulates (in chaste &
chastened syllable) a simple outline of the earth’s
foundation ‒ limestone sketch beside a lambent
surf’s salt curve. Where line & curve are one

like the dove that mantled & remained on Him
(as foam upon a wave’s bare crest) ‒ where kind
& personal are fused... where soul & grace depend
like the radius of a bowsprit’s arc (creation’s rim).

2.23.11

My new watch is my old watch

2011-02-20T17:42:00.007-05:00

I took a walk this afternoon, around the East Side (of Providence). Sunny & brisk outside. I was cogitating the next Lanthanum passage... thinking about time & memory & my own time & memories... about Proust & Augustine & Nabokov, & a phrase from Nicholas of Cusa : "Thus time, since it is the measure of motion, is an instrument of the measuring soul." & I was thinking about how this related to 1) Aristotle's approach to knowledge, his affirmation of the absolute, the primordial integrity (in an epistemological sense) of the reality of individual, distinct, unique living things... empiricism, I guess, of a sort... (I really don't know much about philosophy - dropped out of the one ph. course I signed up for in college). & I related this sense of the soul also to 2) the Judaeo-Christian background, which is somewhat opposed to Plato's otherworldly idealism, since both Judaism & Christianity are all about hard & incontrovertible historical actuality (no matter how spun & mythologized) - about chosenness, redemption, Messianism, and Incarnation... about the History of This World, its fabric - the Greek "appearances" (which Aristotle wished to "save")... (ie., "Before Abraham was, I Am." That's a very soulful comment. It means, to me, that something in us exists before time & history.)

Anyway, I was very vaguely pondering all this stuff, in the context of some personal issues & themes & imagery in my poem - the question of time & memory & loss & recovery, of the things we love & don't love enough... wondering about the idea that "grace" or forgiveness allows one to re-enter the texture of one's own past, & love it & understand it in a new way... "Proustian" in a sense, I guess, or Nabokovian...

So, I was vaguely chewing over these things, walking along a side street on the East Side... when suddenly I noticed, down on the sidewalk... a wristwatch. In fact, it looked like a brand new wristwatch. In fact, it was the same inexpensive Timex "woodsman" wristwatch (sort of an outdoorsy, Boy Scoutish watch) which I had owned all through the 80s & 90s, & then lost or broken or worn out somehow, & replaced with a watch I have never really liked that much. I hesitated... but no one was around, no one seemed to be looking for it. "Finder's keepers," as we used to say back in Hopkins. Right there on the sidewalk, I took off my old watch and put on the new one.

It was a sort of epiphany, this afternoon - which belonged with the poem. I found my old Timex.

Lanthanum 7.16

2011-02-20T15:49:00.004-05:00

16

Gray Seekonk ice is gone. Your river’s royal
blue today, Blackstone (kingfisher blue, maybe)
& trimmed with white ‒ a roving, silvery
sheen. Where you crossed over with your pal

Roger ‒ flinty Pericles of curious lone-
rosy city-state. You more quiet, private ‒
no less stubborn... the one who went
to live with Indians. The record’s scant, sown

on fearsome wind (your library, notebooks);
you’re somewhat anonymous, like a historical
Jesus (who avoided interviews) ‒ typical
Everyman, like her, me... & this the crux

I would sing, this quiddity : in chaste eye
of Aristotle, Blackstone, Joyce ‒
a sea of ex cathedra cymbal tones
that ripple from the stem of every ordinary

Dublin bloom. The deep & potent human faculty
of soul, whose pregnant salience is the spring
of springs ‒ its clear Itasca hoisting up
Big Muddy time : for every pain & difficulty

here is the matrix of a healing symphony.
It is a qualitative change, a change of heart
that comes on incognito... unremarked & quiet
as a dove’s low anthem, cooing from a factory

of forlorn bricks, out of a central fall (Babel
to Babylon). That building salience of song,
lifting ‒ as when a grim lambda, unstrung
on the retina, turns over... into smile

(El-trove, Red Rover, veltro). You know your eye
has something of a Finnish curve (like Saarinen,
or Tuonela)? Like a Hopkins lake ‒ deserted oasis
where Franks met Steins (for wedding, by & by).

2.20.11

late night riffle

2011-02-20T00:05:00.000-05:00

Lanthanum 7.15

2011-02-19T17:50:00.003-05:00

15

February afternoon. The sun through a mosaic
of little blue-gray cube-clouds, like a glowing
Inca wall. Henry collects his 50 states of wing-
nut flux... (77 J-sessions, for sake of one LP).

& the stream flows on, ungraspable (almost).
Time’s newspaper, after the paper boy has grown
& flown. All those anonymous hollows, sown
in red-veined wilderness (blown wilder, ghostlier

day by day) ‒ your own heartfelt Nowhereville,
O most AWOL Unknown Soldier. Dispossessed
of every predicate, as Aristotle sketched it ‒
eraser-point of description, inimitable windowsill

of bifocal-vision : what you know, of what
you have been, of what you have made, of who
you are. And as you are, you are : owl’s hoot
or nom de plume - a chapter in the ziggurat

& its demise (brick-breathing fiery Book
of J). What magnet trains this iron heart
toward its own sunburst? What alchemist
transmutes hungry desire to one sweet look ‒

one infant-newborn love’s Thanksgiving Day?
It’s just arisen... just a rose in your eye,
Sharon. Soul-salience, diamond mandala,
Almond Joy... one upright L at apex of a

wayward Noah’s arc (orthogonal, just) ‒
anachronic lanthan-cornice of Maximus-
Blackstone’s pursuit of personhood. Most-
sunny disposition. Ancient of Days... akme.

2.19.11

Lanthanum 7.14

2011-02-16T20:51:00.003-05:00

14

This gray bird gravely mourning in the rock
shall not be moved. Rock-dove, rainbow-
neck... my pigeon-heart, filled with low
eaves, low-embered evenings. Aftershock

of earthy worlds. Those wheedling ravens
homing on their jasper nests (of sunken
anchors, knives, old nets) along forgotten
rivers ‒ droning (bass & catfish havens)

through steep hobo calendars (like iron).
Pretty soon Hen will do his spastic number :
1,3,2... (half-limping over that star-flower,
child). Mimic of a cold-cocked spring (one

Russian January’s janissary). & it is not
ashes’ temple he intones (the buried man’s
dry wooden corner). For the heart demands
answers (while the dove coos not today, not,

not today). Maybe tomorrow. (Promise.)
Answers it already knows, almond ‒ heartfully.
Hopefully (intuitive). The poem’s true play-
pen (play dough, play, Penny... play rusty-

green copper). Nailed to the mast
of a cedar-tree, in old Romania (or
beech). Where the fresco-church, for
centuries (of rain & wind) might last, &

last, yet. Where a wall of summer branches
flakes leaves that filter your philosophy,
Horatio... & rise through solid snow, Henry
‒ through river ice (Espiritu Santo, she sez).

2.16.11

Lanthanum 7.13

2011-02-15T23:21:00.007-05:00

13

Birdy sings, Birdy, at the center of the earth
(shy, low, shy, low). Birdy of no form, no
comeliness. Pigeon (pi-Jean, pi-Jean), you
silly castaway, stray street-person, worth

less & less. A pig’s dungeon, maybe (Villon-
pissoir). Filled up with contempt, with
impotence, with rage. With rags (blithe,
Gadarene) of possessions. Old news (mon-

otonous, processional). Your soul (pearl
in disguise, disgusted). Ghost. Like mist
of melting snow in the pine barrens (south-
west Jersey, just past the freeway). Swirl,

pitch-black raven-Hellene (Isosceles) on
your silver tripod O... O Gorgon-trestled
railroad-Pythia... micro-knife, who wrestles
pins from hobo-tribes... my seedy-cedar sigh

of Lebanon (Romania). Birdy calls us
(on the jasper perpendicular ‒ the hand
out of the depths of the sea, circumfer-
and on fire) to the old union, my Valentinus;

Love’s rainy monarch’s milkweed wasteland
leads lightly to Cedar Mountain, somewhere
deep in Mexico. On an angle lifted in the air.
On an arbor-breeze... (old amber ampersand).

This human thread, purple... immeasurably
subtle (weft of butterfly across Armenia).
Aimless, free. My soul, my soul (Jessie
Ophelia, Jenny). Rainbow in clerestory.

for Valentine's Eve

2011-02-13T21:07:00.004-05:00

This is a section from the long poem Forth of July. Tom Fleming was a childhood friend, passed away around 1990.

12
i.m. Tom Fleming

You would have been glad to be here today
Fleming to read the Sunday funnies
Aaugh! As Lucy lifts the 12-millionth football
and Charlie Brown flips for the 13th time Bonk!

A little sad too the way the everlasting ends
this evening light limping so slowly only lent
limpid toward the vague rim of tonight’s Milky
Way Sparky’s wavery quickness trembling

only lent now Good grief! While it’s raining the
Doctor is [IN] and you are uncommonly
weird like a Red Baron’s flying mach-lemon
in the mind of a pup and the rain it raineth

every day like frogs pummeling our foolish blind
shopping carts ah for I am sick of love he
cried running down the street in Lisbon
that twines with a tiny pulse a nub

like the distant crown of Shakespeare’s head
a curvature this pause or sigh this dome
between waves or salient mud-caked
seed so small set adrift (centuries

surrounded with fire your burning bones, Tom
a greenish Copernican flame in the marrow
planted amid the avarice of the pilots the raw
and envious violence of Ahab a mote

that will grow limpid) you know there are women
limping with this cenacle (like myrrh afloat
upon tears) (chambered in the upper tiers)
(up the stairs) helical of their wombs

unknown to us but only a promise
when the last full measure is poured out
beside the shores of great rivers the trumpet
sounds into the depths of that prairie siempre

2.13.2000

lanthanum 7.9 (with text)

2011-02-13T20:15:00.000-05:00

Lanthanum 7.12

2011-02-11T22:03:00.006-05:00

This section was written as a sort of riposte to an earlier section, written on the 4th of July a couple years ago. I'm thinking here about my grandparents, Edward S. (the WW I vet) and Florence Gould (born on the 4th in 1900). It's also a counterweight of riposte to this earlier section (Lanthanum 3.12), written on the 4th of July.

12

A symbol is less than nothing, less than empty
word, husk of oblivion. Unless blooded with
life’s valve, heart’s pulse. Watered with
tears, that Liberty Tree. With the Thirty-

Third Division he was in the St. Mihiel drive...
for gallantry in action... Meuse-Argonne...
decorated... Silver Star. Verdun Medallion.
His Book of Common Prayer, peppered, hived

with shrapnel. Florence, at home, barely
grown yet. Father swept off in the flu
rampage. Starts going to church then (blue,
yearning). Born on the 4th of July (1900).

The sabbath day, the sabbath day
rooftops the world with its gray
cloudy clerestory; & my old tree
(shrub mountain laurel) blazes 33 ‒

99 strings of alpine bells (their echo-
avalanche). Thus I follow the yoke of
your wool-shrouded shoulders (odd murk-
moody bulwark). To that pin-oak (riveted,

revolving axle) where my seven weak
candles join the fifty stars. Galaxy
of mortal gravity & winking lights, cast
up ahead... Amalgam-sign (meekness,

fortitude). For the grain of the song stems
through suspension-spaces in a hollow nave ‒
as snowbound Berryman jumps from his grave
or branches nest above brave woodchip throng.

2.9.11

lanthanum 7.11 (with subtitles)

2011-02-11T21:25:00.000-05:00

Experimenting with including the text with the video... have a few kinks to work out, but here goes...

Life as a left-handed Bluejay

2011-02-10T10:04:00.008-05:00

About 16 years ago, around 1996, I started writing short interlinked poems, in a simple rhymed ABBA quatrain form. I was modelling them on some poems & sequences of poems I admired, by Osip Mandelstam. Written toward the end of his life while living in exile in Voronezh, a Russian provincial river-town, the poems were collected posthumously in the Voronezh Book or Voronezh Notebooks. I liked many things about these poems, including their very lyrical pathos and their sketchy, "outdoors", plein air quality - & also the way individual poems echoed & responded to each other in short sequences.

About the time I was just getting started with this, I remember sitting out in the backyard & hearing, for the first time, a bluejay really improvising - like a kind of strange scat-singing. Somehow this experience got infused quite deeply into what I was trying to do in poetry : the sketchy improvisatory element, but also the persistent desire to synthesize things, in longer complex works... the result, after a couple years, was a book-length poem, Stubborn Grew - which, just as soon as I finished it, triggered two even longer book-length sequels (The Grassblade Light & July). Finally, around 2000, I finished it, & called the whole thing Forth of July. (All these books, & others, are available here.)

That was over a decade ago. Since then, I've never really gotten out of the groove of that simple ABBA form. I've made a few forays in other directions, but never for long. I've written at least 2 more long sequences - "India Point" (in the book Dove Street), and Rest Note. Repeatedly, upon finishing one of these long poems, I take a deep breath & say to myself : "OK, that's it. Time for something completely different." Yet here I am, writing (for a couple years now) yet another poem in this vein (Lanthanum).

It's gotten to feel a lot like sculpture - or better, woodcarving. I'm very, very comfortable with it. But that doesn't mean it's easy for me. It's as though a special idiom, or language, or way-of-speaking, or mask (persona) has fused & intertwined itself with a particular form (these quatrains, in a repetitive-numerical design). & I feel most free & intellectually alive when I'm in the midst of composing these poems, working out the words & imagery & meanings I want to hint at or convey - elaborating, again & again, on old, cherished, half-expressed themes. When I'm not actively focused & composing the poems, well... lets' say the process makes me happy. So, this see-saw between writing & not-writing tends to make me feel perpetually a little on edge, off-balance... I'm in a co-dependency relationship with a left-handed woodcarving Muse. Something like that.

So I'm writing these long, seemingly-endless, repetitive series of poems, continuous variations on a simple form & a few themes. My approach does not have much in common with the short, direct-hit manner of much contemporary verse. & then another thing I was attracted to (& tried to emulate) in Mandelstam, as well as Hart Crane : a kind of indirection, an elusiveness. Maybe something like Edgar Poe's idea of the "vague." The truth is, I am slightly bored with clear, transparent speech in poetry - no matter how elegant, intelligent, profound or clever it manages to be. The meaning comes at you like a kind of aggression. I'm more passive-aggressive, I guess : I'm drawn to infinitely-absorptive poems - riddles, mysteries, puzzles, indirections. I admire musical imagery that signals a feeling before you understand it (if you ever understand it). I've steeped myself in this kind of indirection : it's a huge part of the persona or idiom I've projected. Readers might be tempted to misinterpret this as an expression of religiosity, mysticism, occult tendencies, etc. - but this would be a mistake. I like this kind of "secret" speech purely for it's game-like, puzzling, aesthetic qualities. I like the tune of something just on the edge of reason - like wind blowing through tall grass.

So I'm writing these endless, repetitive and obscure series of poems... again, not the most popular modus operandi these days. And I've grown tired of trying to win acceptance through the regular channels of the literature industry. I suppose people look at me & for many reasons think "crazy, eccentric." But put yourself, if you can, in my place. I'll be 59 years old this spring. I was writing poetry before most of the senior editors of our American literary magazines were born. After a while, you get a little discouraged - you simply grow tired of the rejection. I think I'm not taken seriously; I'm marginalized. Well, what can you do? I know something about copy editing, about DIY publishing. I've learned about YouTube (which I disliked at first). Now I've adapted my writing process to "instant accessibility." I write a section of my current, seemingly-endless work in progress : as soon as I finish editing it & shaping it up, I recite it on YouTube & publish the poem on my blog. No editors, no sifting, no middle-people, no problem. It's poetry as it happens, available immediately. Of course, I still don't get no respect - but that's not the main thing. The main thing is taking dictation from the woodcarving Muse (if she's still around today, like she was yesterday).

I don't go anywhere, I don't see anyone. I have a day job at which I must show up, bills, and family obligations. I'm a bookworm & a writer. I can't - & don't wish to - gallivant around on the lit-biz party circuit. I'll be 60 pretty soon. I'd rather try to concentrate, remember, meditate, contemplate, compose, write. As long as I'm still standing. I like woodcarving (it's a laurel tree).

Lanthanum 7.11

2011-02-08T22:13:00.004-05:00

11

Poverello Apollo patches together some laurel twigs
or blackberry (always was a berry man) for a
memoir of his lost tree-limb ‒ O nevermore,
he raves (orphan Orpheus). Swigs

liberally from wooden cup of ruddy, runny
mead. Gathers motley woodchips for his
crazy-tilt word-house - a potent gray ace
in circuitous moor-dance (double solitaire).

Only turn the leaf over. The new leaf
(elliptical enantiomorph). The lens
of deep green ‒ scored to bronze &
Ionian bark (Karelian canoe). On a reef

in Petersburg. & like the lightness of rumors
through lofty aeries, elevations ‒ hopeful
murmurs, birch-kindling ‒ he finds a river-trove
in mute soil, blown loess, looming stillness (hers).

He’s merged with her murmur-shadow (Imogen,
imago). Like Charlie’s wagon with its axle, or
the bear with its growl... like St. George &
his rude crusade ‒ his rusty crow, his Injun

shade... his evening bough, its lengthening.
Like that pin-oak where the king was flown
with autumn leaves. Her grace, to be gone
until he understood : the dream-songe, ringing

out of time. That gray ace, hovering
like jasper crown over the bleeding heart...
& the lamp-lance... baobab, almond, cart-
wheeling Jesse-tree. Past 51 P (sky-written).

2.8.11

lanthanum 7.10

2011-02-06T19:07:00.001-05:00

10

Hidden on the inner lining of an eyelid ‒ whose?
This hologram or macro-hole. Dangle-matrix
for raisin-fall of many a fair grape ‒ tricksy
mirror ever which way, like an eyebrow’s

bruised black eye, radiant with shooting stars
of ouch (agony galaxy). Still, bend of dream.
High vault that only you can reach, Centime ‒
penned in thy nonpareil & francophone corner

of desert, jungle ‒ whoever you are (burdened
birdy). Go down, Moses ‒ de day’s yo own.
Like me, sort of ‒ you. Get it? One
agate ray sees W.H. (in Willie’s hyper-learnèd

wail). What gray ace, Falcon ‒ after a great
long watch ‒ is yours to play? What raven
now dare caw thy rage? I’ll wager y’hat, men ‒
fished from mummers’ Troyes-town ‒ been ate

already. No? Nein? Could be, then (ten
to one it ain’t). & yet we’ll go for broke
around this yearning wheel again ‒ each spoke
a buried radius ‒ straight to your heart, Gawain.

Because the arc of this pinwheel tryworks is
grounded in you. This is the sanction
for each river-vagary, Hobo, each Western
Celtic bowerbird’s aromatic isola di rifiuti;

for as the spring leaps from the rock, &
wind shares its news, rocking the willow-limbs,
so the sleepy player-king slips from each grim
forecast ‒ pencil-thin, belovèd (able ampersand).

2.6.11

lanthanum 7.9 : for the people of Egypt

2011-02-05T20:21:00.001-05:00

9
to the people of Egypt

If you were here now, Grace, I know you’d be there ‒
from your Pink Gate in Morocco, en voyage
today, to this Cairo kairos ‒ embattled assemblage
filled with fortitude ‒ in Tahrir (Liberation!) Square.

Grace indeed encircles this square : plain men
& women, standing up at last to their full height,
facing down the hireling bullies (Pharaoh’s night-
owls, rabid birds of prey) to speak again

their ancient birthright : liberty. One word
found often on Williams’ tongue, and Clarke’s,
the cityfounders, here in their young upstarts’
res publica ‒ along with another one (heard

not so much these days) : civility. Providence
divine ‒ the providence of God, they held ‒
had granted humankind the capability (swelled
from primordial springtime root) to sense

the right, the true, the just ‒ the common sense;
& so, in wisdom, kindliness & fellow-feeling
to love thy neighbor as thyself (deep keel
of every commonweal). Heartfelt experience

shows in its works, proven by trial : to stand
with the people, singing, we shall not be moved.
Upright, on the square ‒ a human treasure-trove,
a sea of civic light. Triangulate my headband

of purple, Grace, beside you, there ‒ from here
in Providence, off Morris Ave. (near its honey-
comb sphere, Temple Emanu-El). I’ll wheel my
mummer’s dance your way, fluting... What Cheer?...

lanthanum 7.8

2011-02-03T23:13:00.002-05:00

8

Sings in the dark, where no one hears,
the deaf-blind fiddler, his secret way ‒
there in Bukovina, by that Tree of Jesse
flaking from old wooden logs (like tears,

in paint). Nobody’s song, & everyone’s ‒
the one without numbers, the ignorant
one (lone sum). Like stubborn plant
dead-centered on its half-wit revelations,

crippled vagaries of revery. Only,
possibly, co-revery (careening toward
recovery). If you’re there, that
is, windy beard-blown bard ‒ Henry’s

sown rye, oats, lea (unsprung) flung hard
a-lee (O wild, O light, O heavyweight JB).
J, be. Be tree. B Mine. Be three
in one, & all for thee, dark tan one (shard

of shepherd’s bole). Bucolic pin-oak, or
the king’s own regal-eagle hiding-place ‒ your
terrible, ferrous, bulbous salience (a meteor-
hole). Follow him down there, into the shelter

of nonentity (old rivery Hobo, medieval tater) ‒
into the core of primordial gravity (everywhere,
for Everyman). Earth-mouth. That feral O
you cannot know (where you must go)... waiter,

janitor, servant, slave... Melchizedek, dark
Sheba-spouse... dead weight in the tomb or
stubborn womb (of tomorrow’s bride’s bride-
groom). Bloom, wayward almond; homeward,

spark.

Jamming in Melaka (Malaysia), 2007

2011-01-31T16:14:00.002-05:00

Filmed by Phoebe on her camera. In a park at the old Melaka fort, met this street musician, who let me play along. (It was about 95 degrees there, & humid : typical fall weather, I guess.)

Dark Lady on the bus

2011-01-28T22:37:00.007-05:00

In the late 60s I attended Blake School, in Hopkins, MN (west of Minneapolis - poet Allen Grossman's alma mater) through high school. Every senior at Blake had to deliver a "Chapel Speech" at some point (I wrote a novella called Chapel Hill which describes what this involved). Anyway, my "chapel speech" in 1969 was a long poem, which came to me suddenly (one day in the fall of 1969) after I had stalled for a long time in the putting-together of that speech. The resulting poem (along with some others) was part of my successful college application to Brown U. I don't think I had ever read Shakespeare's Sonnets before writing this : the "Dark Lady" was just part of the cultural air. (Another element of the atmosphere was that Blake at the time was a "boys' school" : we were required to wear coats & ties every morning, in Chapel.) Anyway, here is the poem :

HIGH SCHOOL CHAPEL SPEECH

Hi there glad you could all come
just straighten your ties and listen to a tale
my name is Prester John
I'm a king from deepest Africa
ancient coptic christian
in heathen jungle,
where tigers and Tarzan
compete for prize money,
while cameras roll and monkeys scream
I'm Prester John
son of the magi
magi that's right magic
teller of lies/teller of truth/teller of lies
so just straighten your ties and listen.

I'm an old man
once I was young rolling in hay
heaving bright air through fields
bones of beasts not yet risen burned
me through laughter, silence.

Then one day
then one day the day turned aquick black
then back again new before I knew
I was pounding in the dark and afraid
but I could not go back to Smileand.

I pounded and frowned and groaned
pounded and groaned and frowned
groaned and frowned and pounded.
I moved slowly into enclosures of steel
then quickly broke them down
fearing dreams and fearing days
writing my name in different ways

(my name remember is Prester John, priest john.
your neckties are asleep. wake up and listen.)

So I climbed fresh-blaked on a bright bus
which wound its way toward washington
where we meant to carry candles, chant
and further exorcise the place.
we shall be a million strong, we sang
and we shall overcome. we rode like children.

and then
and then far back deep under the dark
rear of our bus arose a flower
arose a dark, dark lady on a seashell
from beneath the green seat
a dark, dark lady riding a seashell
a dark, dark lady riding a shell
and she drew me and drew me and drew me
back, back into the bus, back, back, back
back, back into the bus, back, back, back, back

(Wake up! Remember! I am Prester John,
mythical ruler in northern rockies
a holy flower colony of children
where our own few seeds sprout, and
we survive and live and grow.)

So she drowned me
and my lady and I were lost
and I was lost, and white washington
temples were lost and we awoke
exhausted in Ithaca, New York.
I read the news of Washington,
groaning in Ithaca nowhere.
My dark lady laughed her rage
and screamed her laughter
into frozen nights.
So I went away, away, away, away.

Wake up! This is the last time! Remember!
I'm an old man making food
in my children's colony, bearded
like Moses or Ulysses or Prester John
I rule my flower children with a fist
so they may survive in wilderness.
but my days grow yellow.
my children are not sane.
the ground lies fallow, while
my sons steal down the mountain to find
a hamburger stand, and my eldest now,
he wears a coat and tie, and my youngest, now,
he wants to be a business man, and my daughters, now,
they want to go to school...

(1969)

Tangled up in rose

2011-01-28T14:26:00.014-05:00

Have been reading this fascinating essay by R.H. Winnick, on some evidence that Shakespeare infused the Sonnets with intricate anagrams on the name of his early patron, Henry Wriothesley (the most likely model for the beloved "friend" celebrated therein).

The opening sonnets strike a comically-avuncular pose, in which the speaker advises the beautiful young man to marry & beget children, in order to share & sustain his loveliness into the future, rather than imprison it in a barren self-regard. Gradually, however, the sonnets develop another theme : that though the young man may not sustain his image in an actual son, that image, that "son", will live on forever in the literary dimension of the poems themselves.

As I have written here & elsewhere, Shakespeare's Sonnets, had a terrific impact when I first read them (as an undergraduate at Brown) in 1973. My reading precipitated a psychic crisis, replete with uncanny coincidences, etc. - elements of psychosis, or near-psychosis. It wasn't only that I thought William Shakespeare was (somehow) addressing me personally, directly - through some kind of time-cancelling occult sonnet-semaphore : it was also that the strictly poetic power of the verses reinforced the sensation, the feeling of being so addressed.

More than a quarter-century of (I guess) relatively sane living later, I still recognize & must acknowledge that that long-ago crisis represents maybe the most important turning-point in my vocational development, if not my life as a whole. My immediate reaction was to renounce poetry itself : but the psychological claims of that crisis - along with my very early orientation toward a literary career - compromised any such absolute revocation. Eventually I came back to it.

& somehow my inborn gamesmanship (& maybe megalomania) push me (seemingly ineluctably) toward a further iteration of that strange encounter. I've written elsewhere about how my own sonnet sequence, Island Road, encrypts a sort of re-encounter with Shakespeare. I think also of all the poetry-games I've played repeatedly with Shakespeare, John Berryman, & the name "Henry." & now, reading R.H. Winnick's piece, I am thinking again... (perhaps giving some pointers to future investigators)...

Winnick cites Helen Vendler's exploration of sonnet 67's word-play around the phrase "roses of shadow." He links this with line 2 of the 1st sonnet - "That thereby beauty's rose might never die" - which another scholar, Martin Green, has suggested, evokes (sonically) the name of Wriothesley (pronounced variably as "rizzly", "rizely", or "rozely"). Then Winnick unpacks a fabulous network of anagrammatic encryptions of "Henry Wriothesley" found in several different sonnets.

What I want to propose (with tongue only partly in cheek) is that one could read back through my own poetry for word-patterns and biographical patterns which actually emphasize the strange sense that Shakespeare was indeed writing to me and for me ("what's past is prologue"). Consider the manifold connections established in my work between Henry and Rhode Island (the first being that my birthday - May 29th - is also RI Statehood Day). Then there is the very long (600+ pp.) poem, Forth of July - the original title of which was Stubborn Grew the Rose. The line "stubborn grew, the rose" is underlined (bookends, actually) the 1st volume of that poem (Stubborn Grew). The poem is, in some respects, an RI epic (& we note that "Rhode Island" is another way of saying Rose Island). & further we note that Stubborn Grew narrates the adventures of a poet named "Henry" and his ghostly guide ("Bluejay") as they construct a kind of geomantic character - the letter "W" - across the landscape of Providence, RI. This "W" stands for various things... but in the context of this particular wild speculation, we remark some dimensions of that unusual name - "Henry Wriothesley." Henry... W... RI... risely... rosely.... Rose...

lanthanum 7.7

2011-01-27T15:36:00.002-05:00

7

Blackstone’s laborious, painfully non-
Euclidean scribbles toward squaring the circle
(on anterior hypo-moose antlers) percolate
with improvisational symmetry ‒ some canon

of fifths, that wheels with all the little candles
sweating wax & blood across expectant earth.
& it is a kind of flute-call summons (a lovers’
lonely train-hoot, far-off track, or tendrils

of lilacs’ trailing scent) that beckons him
toward those blank snowfields on every map
where he must renew & be renewed ‒ like that
saw-tooth spruce shaking snow from its shoulders

straightening up & starting over (toward
Paulette Polaris ‒ redhead northern star).
O most laborious-harmonious composer ‒
scored for vermilion wind-vanes ‒ crowded,

crowing earth-choirs! Aurora sways now
over your shoulder (serpentine, spectral)
as you orient your glittering triangle
into a matrix of such local-honey sounds

as Beatrice herself might hive (humming,
habitation). For the geometer of bees
& homing pigeons sights by crosshairs
infinitely finer than your banjo-string,

Blackstone; her olive-almond glance
you mimic with your skitterish vesica
(or wandering eye) is like Jessie Ophelia,
that river-ark (a buoyant permanence).

1.27.11

Oren Izenberg intro

2011-01-26T09:42:00.007-05:00

I'm very intrigued by this preview/intro to a new book by Oren Izenberg. It reads as quite clear & sensible to me... looking forward to seeing the book itself. Some of the emphases he outlines here seem related or fairly close to some things I've been blogging about (more incoherently) for some time : that is, the connection between a philosophical and ethical concept of "the person" as fundamental to our engagement with the aesthetic & artistic dimension of poems & poets...

I see this as a dimension I've sketched out elsewhere as "incarnational." A loaded (overloaded) word, I realize : in my scribbles it refers in part to a sense of life, reality, time, the cosmos, etc. as centered in, & somehow proportioned for, the person... the person as an ethical, teleological, aesthetic "end" or ultimate & self-sufficient framework or life-purpose...

A few days ago, reading a book by Hubert Damisch, A childhood memory by Piero della Francesca, I came upon a passage where Damisch discusses a theological concept called the Verbum infans, or "infant Word" (as the Piero work he analyzes is an image of the pregnant Virgin Mary). Damisch remarks that the Verbum infans, as (purely verbal) Word of God, in a sense disappears, or goes silent, as it is "made flesh", become incarnate, in the living divine Person (of Jesus).

The comment fertilized some inchoate ponderings on my part, which I am still working out. I thought about the particular aesthetic dimension of poetry - of the imaginative constructions of art & their inherent value as beautiful things, as ends in themselves. & I thought about how this involved representations : mimesis, recognizable impressions & images from the shared experience of both artist and audience, poet & reader. & I thought about how poetry seems to tend toward the dramatic : from the mini-dramas of a lyric poem to the full-fledged spectacle of a narrative or dramatic story, a novel or play. & I thought about something that Plato worried about : the danger that our artistic ("virtual") representations might actually displace or replace the reality which they represent. This is a way in which "Word becomes flesh" - the poetic word embodied in dramatic mimesis - which loses itself, goes silent, is absorbed in the larger synthesis, the synthetic whole, of its mirrored images.

How might poetry resist this displacement of reality, this turn to the self-absorption of its own mirrored irreality? I think perhaps poets themselves resist this pressure of the unreal, in various ways... One way they might do this is through a kind of reduction or abstraction - an intentional self-limitation. The poem does not aspire to be a "universal whole" or total mimesis : rather it aims for its own quiddity, or unique integrity - which might very well involve the making of literary fragments & very short poems, rather than cosmic epics or play cycles. (I'm thinking of this in terms of my original reaction to reading some short lyrics by Mandelstam in a Providence bookstore : how I was so taken with their brief, sudden, puzzling, musical but mysterious imagery. A kind of "experience-shorthand" or telegraphy.) Another way that poets might offer resistance is through the intentional cross-over or intercalation of person & poem, of art & experience : with the result that in responding to a poem we react to the presence of both a person & a poem, an artistic creation and a personal communication.... Poets & poetry have a way of pushing through the barriers erected between the objectivity of the art work and the personal charisma or presence of the poet....

But I have to think about this some more. (Paul Celan dealt with some of these questions in his little story "Conversation in the Mountains"...)

AA

2011-01-24T15:54:00.000-05:00

In my (imaginary) American version of Russian Acmeism (the St. Petersburg poetry group of roughly 100 yrs ago), there are certain basic AA ABCs :

1. Making poetry is a free & independent activity, capable of constructing its own means & ends, with its own inherent value & meaning - something to cherish & enjoy, aside from any spiritual, religious, political, ideological or economic usefulness that others may demand or ascribe to it.

2. Yet AA "autonomy" differs from standard-brand Modern & Postmodern orientations, in that AA's independence is not dependent on revolt. There is no violent severing of the bonds of ordinary life, history, or culture in general. In other words, the freedom of a poem is not dependent on either a private (hermetic) language (a symbolic code) or upon verbal or logical incoherence of any kind.

3. To put this another way : in art & poetry, acts of free exchange, of sharing, are of the essence. But how does one share the unintelligible? One doesn't. The AA has a certain faith (or hope) in the ground of culture, no matter how storm-beaten & humanly corrupt & problematic & crisis-ridden. We are intelligent & intelligible beings; nature is fundamentally intelligible, if mysterious; poems want to participate in this circus of meaning.

4. In terms of aesthetics (let's say), the art work is a kind of thing, a quiddity, a distinct whole, distinct from everything else. We enjoy wholeness; we enjoy exploring the distinctness of things, their difference. Poetry is the art of the word. "The word as such," as the old Russian Acmeists used to say. Words themselves - the material of poetry - also exhibit wholeness, as well as sociability (as they join in the carnival of speech, grammar, sentences, style). The AA treats the wholeness of the poetic material with kindness & respect & care. Words are not torn violently from their milieu - at least not without some intelligible (if cryptic) purpose. Rather the AA poet seeks the elegance of the mot juste, & the rightness of the accurate statement. For the world as we know it deserves no less; and we know no other world. The unknowable remains, as Gumilev (the Russian Acmeist) says, what it is (unknown).

lanthanum 7.6

2011-01-24T15:43:00.001-05:00

6

Close the books now, blear-eyed Willie,
Blackstone mumbles to himself. So glad
brother Roger lingers near ‒ my Galahad
of old soul freedom doctrine ‒ principium he

balances on delicate line (drawn from nature,
plein air). That is, give unto Caesar what’s
his dues; unto God your inner weather. Chaste
chestnut of unseen mercy, secret charity ‒ your

innocent conscience, or consciousness of
innocence (my child, my child). Pearl
signet of my days in the sun, sweet girl
(your dance, your prance before the stars

were, maid). For this, that St. George of old
Rhode Island, steely armorer of his own city-
state, set up a wall of separation : civility
for the brash mint-silver’d world ‒ & gold

for its hallowed background (vested, chaste,
sequestered from all eyes, save God’s alone).
So my song’s but a game for whistling home,
sezto humself. Memory-gnomon (if so graced)

for Noman Everyman (fret like a viol
in a triolet). He leans there, solitaire
into the pine of his foot-pedal. Where’s
the bride of my joy then, brother Will?

Good Will? & forth from the mandala
full of starry tinder in his eye, she comes :
an eyelash curve... silvery strand from
Natasha’s temple... cosmopolitan, selah.

1.24.11

brief chord sketch

2011-01-21T17:55:00.000-05:00