Formalism. For a while I tried to run through all the forms in Lewis Turco's Book of Forms. But I've come to believe that the unique & particular worldview of the individual poet - as it interacts with the "cultural thinking" of the society as a mass - and as translated into aesthetic choices - creates a sort of para-form or conceptual armature within the poet's oeuvre. Maybe I can try to explore that further at some point. Omry Ronen argues that this parallel between the poet's role and the "sleepy" social group-mind is a major theme of Mandelstam's "Flint Ode" (see Ronen's book Approach to Mandelstam).

Anyway, here's one of my formal efforts. My wife & I bought a print, produced by a special technique of wiping the ink-covered plate (I forget the name for this). At the time we met the artist, Sylvia Petrie. Eventually I wrote the following poem, & sent her a copy. She wrote back to tell me that the image was not actually from nature, but from an etching in an old edition of "Piers Plowman". The poem uses a Portuguese form called the "glose" which I think is interesting in its own right.



ON AN UNTITLED PRINT

for Sylvia Petrie


The work is finished in the dark.
The world's invisible, unknown.
A night of snowfall leaves its mark.
It will remain, when we are gone.

Inside the silver picture frame
frozen winter night has come.
An image like a negative.
Black ink feathered off, by hand,
imprints a landscape (winter gloom).
The traces of your handiwork
are what gives light - the glowing land
flows down (from hills to scattered sand)
in random touches. . . flick and fleck.
The work is finished in the dark.

This labor scatters into day
like Monday mornings - who can say
what these wayward shapes contrive?
Triangular, amid uncertainties,
one tiny house (snowbound, lonely)
gleams (nestled, shrunken)
between the looming cedar trees
and those unclear interstices
which could be universe - or none.
The world's invisible, unknown.

The picture hangs against a wall
where afternoon light sometimes falls,
and sometimes (strangely) time will give
instead of take. . . and I can see
what you were doing, after all.
Through curving space, look
back. . . into reclusive memory.
This house, this hill, this endless sea
were yours. Engravèd. Cold and stark.
A night of snowfall leaves its mark.

We grow away from home forever.
Epitaphs for each survivor
elevate the long perspective.
Parallels we harvested
return. As in a childhood fever
everything we once disowned
(what seemed frivolous, detested
chaos) now coheres. Nested
on a hillside, sloping down. . .
it will remain, when we are gone.

3.23.97