Ravenna Diagram Reading Guide : #2

Here are notes to the Ravenna Diagram poem "Lunar Corona" (p.4).  This poem also is not posted to the blog.  (See previous post for a link to the physical book.)

RD READING NOTES #2

“LUNAR CORONA” (p.4)

Poet seems to be confronting enigma of the poem itself, his own work-in-progress.  City of Ravenna, for long a remote, neglected backwater, is presented here as mirror-image of poet’s own solitary endeavor.

“Brown leaf... my neck of the sea.”  : poet worked for decades at Brown Univ. Library in Providence, RI – his “neck of the sea”.

“picture a forlorn cathedral...” : many such for many centuries in Ravenna

“Rothko Chapel” : first of many references to visual art in RD.

“gray memory... wheel of silence” : see Jasper Johns’ works in particular

“Osip’s selva os” : linking Dante with Mandelstam.  “selva os” : dark wood (see opening of Divina Commedia).  Os – short for Osip – mouth or gate to his own inward wilderness.

“Consul’s barranca : the ravine in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano

“My one and only... speechless trumpeter” : Chet Baker (another suicidal artist)

“Remote... (sans crown).” : Dante, buried in Ravenna, lacks the public bestowal of a laurel crown from his native city (Florence)

“flies / who?” : haunted Ravenna visited by owl of Minerva/Beatrice (wisdom)

“shady rainbow” : a transmutation of the purely subjective (“blind”) colors of the “personal Rothko Chapel”