Mandelstam in one of his essays talks about poetry as the crossing of two strands: the verbal material & the impulse. Or sound & sense, to simplify. (Elena Corrigan's interesting book "Mandelshtam's Poetics" goes in depth into this concept.)

Achieved or received lyric forms add a third level, since these forms create signals of their own, another semiotic dimension. S.K. Heninger (in "Proportion Poetical") describes how the early sonnet form was designed as a replica or microcosm of cosmic creation (the 7 days in 14 lines). The coils of the sestina supply an undertone or overtone to the verbal statements.

So these received forms can act as invitations to send complex messages. For the most part, though, in late 20th-cent. US poetry, the invitation has been turned down. The motivations have been varied. For one thing, the modernist practices of Pound, Marianne Moore, WC Williams, ee cummings extended technical innovation far beyond the limits of these medieval and Renaissance forms. The populist impulse of free verse gave them an outmoded image. And the multiple alienations and "makings-strange" of postmodernist poetry made illegal, so to speak, the communicative contract of the traditional forms; they represented a fallacious, naive harmony, just as did the uncomplicated egocentrism of "mainstream" free verse.

In the 80s & 90s I was on a different track. As described earlier in this blog, I was in the process of absorbing & integrating a religious/Hebraic/incarnational worldview with making poetry; in the effort Mandelstam & Acmeism were serving as models & guides. At the same time I was getting interested in the long poem, as a way of formulating some kind of comprehensive vision/message. For me the problems were not the one posed by postmodernist anti-metaphysics or the stylistic differentiations & alienations of the New Americans. For me the problems were simpler, in a way: the means toward the conceptualization & articulation of a message which energized me. Direction, not indirection, was the aim.

So for a while, before I could manage long poems, or as a way of taking a break from that issue, I played with some of the received lyric forms. What I liked to do was "cross" them with other strands. So for example in a series of sort of autobiographical poems called "Midwest Elegies", I interwove allusions to early anglo-saxon forms. I was crossing my personal origins with the origins of poetry in English. I wrote a dream-vision ("Grain Elevator": see archive for Jan. 9); I put down a subtext of a.-s. laments & elegies into some of my own; & I wrote this little poem, crossing Hart Crane with a particular a.-s. riddle, along with the Song of Songs:



RUSTY EXIT RAMP


How many spears, frozen in phalanxes,
how many iron hills circled the fathers'
hope - chained waters of enmity,
cars harnessed for a pathway through the sea -

when, with a jesting wave, philosophies
of unsettled pyramids the fluted palm
of your promise whispers toward autumn
beneath twin-risen towers, O City of Cities!



This is a poem about Crane & New York; it's also about the displacement of hatred & despair by some kind of metaphysical/poetic intervention. It has a strange sound to me after 9/11.

To reiterate: at the time I was interested in "crossing" the lyric received forms with opposing material. By sending a fairly direct, simple message, via the traditional over-determined envelope of received forms, I was really doing the opposite of the encrypted, hermetic, disjunctive approaches of the contemporary postmodernist poets. For example, I wrote the following sestina in the mid-80s, when mass homelessness was still a shocking anomaly, before we had become so inured to & complicit with this social evil. I wanted to cross a very sophisticated literary form with a very unsophisticated message. The closing stanza, however, can be interpreted in several different ways.


DOWNTOWN SESTINA

Downtown is gleaming, a nest of glass
scant refuge for the homeless and the poor
who trudge along under looming towers
hungry, frazzled, begging small change
and subject to the better sort of people
whose eyes reflect the glitter of the city

And so many circles animate the city
captured in the high gloss of the glass
what's taken for the playground of the people
erases every doorstep of the poor
in sprawling ellipses of loose change
under the stolid mystery of these towers

Under the bright conundrum of these towers
these measuring rods allotting every city
gyroscopes adjusting every change
by whirling speculation in the glass
the downward spirals of the ornery poor
set stirring turbid shadows in the people

And shuttling promotions of the people
forecast by divination in the towers
(who's growing rich and who remaining poor)
start dancing fevers in the chattering city
and snarl the artist in her broken glass
frail craft undone by overmastering change

When fortune is the favored end of change
suburbia the limbo of the people
and tender conscience faints before the glass
rocketing skyward in pretentious towers:
to serve the sleek imaginary city
or swell the sullen rancor of the poor

Meanwhile the rhetoricians of the poor
in campus pockets rummaging for change
inscribe the true authoritative city
and mint sterling mementos of the people
studies wherein the mind serenely towers
over safe specimens tacked up under glass

So let's raise a glass to the dizzy city -
a toast to towers, and all red-faced people!
And drink for a change among the homespun poor.

3.16.86


Again, after 9/11, the poem has a strange feel.