The whole race is a poet

The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.
                 - Wallace Stevens

My wife Sarah & I have been enmeshed in a drawn-out campaign to pack our belongings & sell our house & make a move out of Rhode Island, back to my home town (Minneapolis).  We're vacating this place & buying my mother's house.

"Home to his Mother's house private return'd."  So ends Milton's mini-epic sequel to Paradise Lost (that is, Paradise Regain'd).

His mother's house.  Milton's Jesus goes home, after his confrontation with Satan - back again, out of poetry & mythology, to his mother's familiar house, encrypted somewhere in the archaeological past, in the disputed chronology of an actual, historical Nazareth...

In an interesting study first published in 1950, titled The Nazarene, Eugenio Zolli traces this epithet for Jesus not so much to his native village, but to the term "Nazir" - which he refers not only to the sect of holy men called Nazirites, but also, etymologically, to one of its meanings in Hebrew : "singer, poet".

The past many months have been relatively changeful & tumultuous for me, the meek little library worker inured to Brown-mouse quiet, books, walks, silence, routine.  I made these choices at least 25 years ago.  I didn't want to teach.  I didn't want to be an activist anymore.  I didn't want a high-energy job.  I wanted to read & write.

Did I have the moral-political grounds to make this choice, to have such an option?  I don't know.  I was responding to what felt like a calling, a vocation.

The fact that I'm even sitting here noodling these ruminations is due to the aforementioned disruptions of my usual mode.  I'm trying to revive the productive state of mind, which I've been unable to do for a couple weeks at least.

It really is a kind of trance state.  Not so much irrational as sponge-like, responsive - yet focused on certain landmarks or compass-readings.  Ravenna Diagram, the big canvas I'm working at, does indeed have its own sort of structural foundation or center of gravity.  The "trance" process is aligned with that.  "The way, when we climb a mountain, / Vermont throws itself together." (Stevens)

I don't yet understand my fate, in Stevens' sense (see epigraph above).  Maybe I'm blind, a sleepwalker.  Maybe I inhabit a solipsistic ego-bubble.  But I don't think so (at least not quite yet).  It is hard to avoid the doubts, the undermining of self-confidence, when the reception for one's labors seems effectively nil, sums up to zero.  Is this evidence of my mistake?

I try to grasp the self-designed blockades to such reception.  There are all sorts of personality issues as well as problems related to the work itself.  Regarding the former, I haven't helped myself.  I am introverted & shy.  I over-compensate with an internet poet-persona I started to manifest in the late 1990s - often annoying, iconoclastic, provocative.  I do not swim with the schools, I don't "network" very well.  I do not teach writing.  Yet I have become something of the typical online self-promoter - self-publishing book after book... understandably, this does not sit well with fellow poets & editors.

But I have tried to get published in journals.  It has been an uphill battle.  It seems likely that, with regard to reception, the issues with the work itself are the more determinative.

I've been writing poetry for nearly 50 years!  The hegemonic critical mantra about "two American poetries" - mainstream and postmodern/avant-garde - has always been a waste of time.  I've liked neither Language Poetry nor New Formalism.  I've been engaged longtemps with the long poem - as Berryman was, & others.  Berryman is not considered part of the "experimental" wing, which seems ridiculous to me (see Brendan Cooper's book, Dark Airs, on this whole question).

Unlike Berryman, in the early 1980s I got absorbed into a mode of elliptical "telling it slant", sourced in the radiant music of Osip Mandelstam.  I found analogues for this approach in both Pound and Hart Crane.  It took me 20 years to elaborate my own manner in this general field.

Such obscurity & obliquity is probably one of the rocks piled on my personal blockade to reception.

Probably a bigger rock, though, has to do with the worldview, the preconceptions.

But enough about me!  Let's get back to the trance state.  What is my trance?  Who is my "muse"?

I think maybe my writing telegraphs on a frequency out of range for many.  The preconceptions & background are too abstruse or occluded.

Why am I writing about "Ravenna" (if I am, even)?  Ravenna was an outpost of Byzantium.  It is a nest of amazing mosaics, towering icons - an outlier from Hagia Sophia and Byzantine Orthodoxy.  But for me, in my poetry, this is a kind of meta-icon for something else.  It leads back to the "Russian" roots - in Mandelstam, in Acmeism.

But those roots too are like the upper layer of a psychic puzzle-box.  Why Mandelstam?  Why Acmeism?  Why Nabokov?

Orthodox Christianity - one aspect of which includes "iconophilia" - is bound up in my mind with the purposes of art, for one thing.  It is incarnational.  The theological dimension includes a commitment to the divine embodiment in the human - their fusion in the process of overall cosmic purpose, the "plan" of the whole.  Art is a limb of Creation in general - a bloom, the flower of flowerings.

Dante is buried in Ravenna.  Pound is buried in Venice.  Rimini sits on the Italian coast between these two.  The complex here is a way of symbolizing something perpetual in poetry - something tying together Dante & medieval Italy with Pound and contemporary America (by way of the "long poem").

But why do this?  Here we get down to another layer of the archaeological dig.

Why Christianity?  Why incarnational, etc.?  This is the 21st century, after all!

Jesus, the "nazir", the poet, the singer, may be the eternal 2nd Person of the Trinity : I'm not going to go into that here.  My focus is on the "Jesus of history" - the real individual who acted and spoke & made claims & taught, suffered, died.

Jesus had charisma.  I think it was founded on his confidence in the divine goodness.  No one, ever, has expressed more serene joy & love for the "Author" of life, the source.  St. Francis tried to replicate this spirit, & perhaps came closer than anyone else.  But Jesus expressed it first and most firmly.

"Home to his Mother's house private return'd."  What shall we say is represented by "his mother's house"?  I would say Judaism itself, the historical people & faith.  The Jews are & have been many things, but perhaps most signally they have been a people of the Word.  Poets.  The Psalmist & prophets sang of the promises of their God - promises of a land of milk & honey, of an era of peace & safety & abundance.  These words were crystallized in writings, encased like scarabs or butterflies in exact & exacting speech, which drills through centuries & eras like the point of a diamond - the hardest thing on earth.

Literalists & fundamentalists & sectarians (of many Abrahamic strains) try to reduce it to their own stingy formulae.  They don't understand, they do not grasp the message.  It is a global human message, representing the whole earth, Earth as a whole.

So, Henry!  Here we go with another preacherly rant.  No wonder you have no readership as a poet!

The matrix of Ravenna Diagram is a Venn diagram.  It is Henry, the American poet, writing in America, now, at one point of the Venn design (of double circles).  It is Jesus, the Jewish poet, singing in Galilee & Judea, at the center of the second circle.  The mandorla in which they overlap (the middle of the Venn diagram) is poetry itself - epic poetry, long poems, on the track of Dante (who finished his Paradiso in Ravenna).

Poetry is one mode of spiritual metamorphosis, of transfiguration.  In this case the epic poem is a vehicle for transmuting history into an expression of divine purpose.  Reality is henceforth framed by the personal : that is, by the human person, who experiences & interprets the given & its meanings.  Prose is the "objective" and impersonal : poetry is the ecstatic and personal.

Poetry is essentially affirmation, the praise song of the "nazir".

Obviously this is far too much baggage for most readers, editors.  It certainly has to be proven by the work itself : no amount of explanation will suffice.

Why must Henry pile Pelion on Ossa to establish such a Baroque or Gothic superstructure for poor little ol' poetry?  My enthusiasm must scare people.  Literary folks like to sit back & evaluate, which is only right.

It's simple, really.  I had an encounter with "the Word", back around 1972.  I was around 20 years old.  I was burned, I was branded, by Gospel fire.  The Word sinks its tongs into you - the word of the old desert, going back to prehistory.  The proverbs, the parables drive like nails into your conscience.  Yet the meaning proves true.  It is enough to transfigure life on earth - it is Milton's "divine Providence".  For poetry has its lion-claws, too - digging down through the sediment of time & shifting cultures, of languages and nations.  They might be one & the same, these nails, these claws.

design by Joachim of Fiore

Nostalgia for world culture

Quick stray thoughts tonight... Osip Mandelstam once defined the impulse of the Acmeist movement (early 20th cent. Russian poetry) as "nostalgia for world culture."  Nostalgia for world culture.  Implying that "world culture" once existed (or still existed, elsewhere).  But then Acmeism also promoted a Bergsonian, anachronistic anti-sense of Time - what was deep in the past (Ovid, Dante) was actually calling to us from the future.  (In this he may have been attempting to one-up the contemporary Futurist movement, among other things.)

But what would be a real world culture?  A global culture, life-supporting, life-enhancing, humane, refined, playful.  Not the world as we know it today... but maybe an aspiration.

Then again one way of thinking of culture is as an inherently parasitic lichen-like growth.  Culture is opportunist.  For example, the culture of the "divine king", established around the world in various phases & formations - the culture of powerful rulers and autocrats, with their enormous suction machines for collecting & channeling the labor of millions of slaves (see : pyramids) - the culture of royal power might be seen as a defense mechanism of the kings themselves.  A survival mechanism, in other words, insinuated into society by the rulers, to protect themselves from being divided up and eaten, tossed about in communal games, by the whole peon mass of the tribe itself (see A.M. Hocart's Kings and Councillors for a consideration of such phenomena).

Then imagine that the speedy vine-growth of culture takes another world-historical bend, once the ziggurat of royal power & totalitarian government reaches its apex : I mean the turn toward apocalyptic messianism (see Norman Cohn's classic study of the Iranian-Zoroastrian roots of same, Cosmos, chaos & the world to come).  Here religious thinking happens upon a viral antidote to overweening political power : the idea of the return of the God-King - the uber-King, the "King of Kings", who will finally put the tyrants in their place (like Yurtle the Turtle, at the bottom of the pond).

I think of these parasitic culture-shifts as edge-phenomena, happening on the margins of something even deeper & more invisible & slow.  I'm thinking of the historical project of "species-Man", homo sapiens, seeking equilibrium.  Humankind is still building the conceptual house which is truly life-enhancing, lovable, livable.  This, as it happens, is another theme which turns up in Mandelstam's version of Acmeism : the idea that poetry has a role to play in the human project to "domesticate" life on earth.  "Domestic hellenism", he called it.

What would be a really "domestic" global culture?  Livable, lovable, familial, gemutlich?  It would have to involve the old English theme of liberty - the freedom from encroachment by tyrannical government.  But, on the other side, it would also have to involve something beyond pure individualism : the active engagement in the common good, the commonweal, the welfare of the whole community.  (These are, you may have noticed, the primal ideals, respectively, of the two major political parties in the U.S. - yet how sadly & stupidly & rigidly & uselessly & backwardly & corruptly & blindly & dogmatically & inflexibly they have worked themselves out in the electoral process.)

What's really needed in order to stimulate Mandelstam's "world culture" - what's required at the most basic level of conception - is a spiritual orientation.  Pope Francis, it seems to me, is saying some of the right things in that direction.  The "poor church" is the global house we share.  The spiritual attitude is one that sets aside narrow pleasures & greedy ambitions & haughty pride on behalf of a sense of wholeness : a "gratitude for existence" (another Brodskian, Gumilevian, Mandelshtamian theme).

How is this possible?  I'm not an advocate by any means of any kind of theocracy : don't get me wrong.  Rather I am talking about something much more basic, simple, and primitive - the kind of childlike faith represented by the original St. Francis.  How can we live in the global house if we cannot trust in the benevolent love of the Spirit that formed & created it all?  How can we build a future without a sense of being "at home" in the universe?  I think of Jesus, the first "son" of God, as playing the middle C on the piano, of a major chord of affirmation - of union with the source of Being.  Francis only echoed the same.  "Unless you turn & become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

Granted much of this will strike many as idiocy or ideology, or both.  So be it.  The poet represents a "nostalgia for world culture".  As such he or she represents a link in the spine of historical time - a time working itself out in the human sense of reality & possibility.  The poet's vision is grounded in harmony, triggered by a basic sense of wonder : of wonder at all that exists, majestically, from nothing at all.

The personal, subjective & familial love we experience among ordinary friends, strangers, & family, might someday be echoed & reinforced by culture at large - & this might, actually, be a return to "Nature" itself - the natural cosmos stamped by the seal of divine Providence.  "The Son of Man is coming, & he will restore all things."  O ye of little faith!  Sursum corda.

Charlie Hebdo, Peter Chaadaev, moral freedom

Two Frenchmen, brothers, apparently with training & inspiration from the Yemen branch of the terrorist network Al Qaeda, murder a group of Paris cartoonists & journalists, for the crime of publishing satirical images denigrating the Prophet.

Obviously the shock waves produce varying responses, of many kinds, on many levels.

A phrase occurred to me today in this regard : "moral freedom".  The phrase comes from an early essay by Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, titled "Peter Chaadaev".   This curious short prose work reminds me of some writings of Whitman.  In describing Chaadaev, the 19th-century Russian thinker, Mandelstam seems on the one hand to sketch a version of his own iconoclastic mind & personality, and on the other, to offer a nationalistic icon of the spirit of Russia, situating itself dialectically (as St. Petersburg was perennially called upon to do) between the prestige of Western Europe, and the vast inchoate future of the Russian soul.   Chaadaev is presented as both that rare Russian emigre who returns to the motherland, with a message of intellectual rigor and cultural order - as a "Westernized" Russian, in other words - and as a representative of Russian moral freedom - the "diamond" of a perfected individual soul (in contrast to the enfeebled West, sunk beneath the weight of its own unquestioned tradition).

This Chaadaev is a fish out of water, a free spirit, an exile's exile : his rectitude is inward, spiritual, personal.  His moral freedom seems to stem (via Mandelstam's interpretation) from Orthodox Christianity, with its relative devaluation of "objective history" in favor of inward spiritual unity, perfection, "divinization".

What does all this have to do with Charlie Hebdo?  With events in Paris?

"Moral freedom."  The phrase rings.  Mandelstam says Chaadaev was obsessed with unity : the basic unity of intellectual vocation & moral value.  This was the source of his charisma, his personal integrity.  But where did he discover this unity?

I'm not a Russian scholar.  My guess is, Chaadaev was drawing from the well of traditional Orthodox values.  & what strikes me about Orthodox Christianity is its visionary focus on the unity and divine origin of the whole creation.  Life, with all its suffering & injustice, is beautiful & good because God made it so.  The Acmeist poetic movement, founded by Gumilev, Akhmatova, & Mandelstam, was grounded in this ordinary Orthodox sensibility.  Gumilev called it "chasteness" : an idea not very different from Whitman's notion of cosmic goodness. Each individual thing in nature is inherently valid & beautiful because it has its source in the supernatural Artist.  With this spiritual grounding Chaadaev (& Mandelstam) could represent a version of "moral freedom" : the dignity of humankind (& Russia) without the overpowering weight of Western grandeur & authority.  As Mandelstam wrote :

Let the names of imperial cities
caress the ears with brief meaning.
It's not Rome the city that lives on,
it's man's place in the universe.

But again : where am I going with this?  What has any of this to do with Charlie Hebdo?

My point is this.  So the phrase "moral freedom" - from Mandelstam's Chaadaev - came to mind as I pondered the events in Paris.  Why?  Because both Chaadaev & Mandelstam underline the central, sine qua non place of freedom in any architectonics of civilization.  For them, moral freedom is the primal divine gift.

& what then exactly is "moral freedom"?  It is the recognition that the whole benign cosmic order is balanced on a "givenness" or original context of moral choice.  The universe is designed for Man to choose goodness & righteousness : it is rooted in free will.  The path to Paradise and "divinization" is open to those who accept this free offer.

But if this is the case, then where are the powers of tyranny, force, compulsion, fear?  Where are the gods of domination?  Where are the thought police?  They have no place to stand.  They are vanquished.  They have been defeated by a supernatural power Who authorizes moral freedom : by the law that you must choose the path of righteousness yourself.

I tried to explain this in my letter to the editor published in the NY Times on Monday.  This is a basic theological tradition shared, actually, by both Orthodox East and Catholic/Protestant West.  You cannot impose spiritual values by force.  Why?  Because God ordained Nature for moral freedom : we are free creatures, as God is free : we are made in God's image.

The fanatics of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State want to punish others for disobeying the commands of their God.  In the process they commit murder and other outrages against God's own creatures, & against divine Law.  It may be that they are driven by political pressures and deep grievances : but my point is that their ideology, which provides them with propaganda and "moral" justification, represents the worship of a false god, an idolatry.  If God is neither hateful nor murderous, but instead calls on persons to redeem themselves through love of neighbor, then the propaganda of fundamentalism has no basis in reality.  They need to be saved from their own delusions.  There needs to be a new conversation about the nature of God.

The New Masons

As usual, I'm immersed in a serial poem which feels like a long-term construction project.  Only the most recent in a series of long poems (I've written 8 or 9 of them in the last 20 years).  I'm calling it, for various reasons, Ravenna Diagram.  (A Venn diagram, as you probably know, is based on a simple geometrical figure describing the intersection of two circles.)  In my experience, whenever I started fiddling with numbers & geometry, a poetic project is being born.

As part of my "research" I recently discovered a book from the 80s by John James titled Chartres : the masons who built a legend (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).  An eye-opener.  James is clearly someone with a builder/architect's background.  But he's a wonderful detective, too.  By studying the smallest changes & differences in details of Chartres' masonry & design, he's able to sketch out the individual masons/architects behind each part of the building.  There were at least 4-5 of them.  I find it marvelous how he illuminates their decisions in shaping & setting-out elements of this unbelievably massive stone structure.  He is also extremely sober, modest & circumspect in his judgements : there are no theoretical flights of fancy here.

One theme James emphasizes is the difference between the medieval artistic ethos & that of the post-Renaissance, modern era.  All these master designers & craftsmen are anonymous.  There is no cult of individual genius - no exalting of the fine artist (the sculptor, say) over the other workmen.  They work in teams.  Teams of teams, actually : each one guided by the characteristic artistry & temperament of the master mason, or team leader.

I started musing about this issue in relation to making poetry.  On the face of it, poetry today seems a typical phenomenon of that Modern individualism - maybe even an extreme manifestation, in comparison to other fields of endeavor.  I myself have certainly tried very hard to remain independent & idiosyncratic - absolutely free to do my own thing in poetry.

But if you scratch a little deeper you find traces of collective effort & collaboration in poetry.  Some poets in fact make an explicit counter-attack on individualism, forming group movements, defining their collective ethos & goals, engaging in collaborative writing projects.

I think there is a further level of collaboration, on a more implicit level.  It comes out of the poetic process itself - of reading, imitation, allusion, parody.  We model & shape our poems following, & revising, forms that have already impressed themselves upon us.  This process is in turn further shaped by collective "canon-formation" - when poets & poems enter the cultural bloodstream, moving from alien products to a kind of "second nature" (see Eugenio Montale's essay, "The Second Life of Art").

Long ago I became fascinated with the Acmeist group of pre-WWI St. Petersburg.  In many ways they were no different from the other modernist art movements springing up at that time (Futurism, Imagism, etc.).  A small group of young poets developed a shared sense of style & thematics - & sometimes formed personal friendships & alliances which long outlasted the platforms of the groups themselves.  In their early days, the Acmeists were quite formal about their activities - meeting at a long table at the prescribed time each week, reading & discussing poems with a kind of official sobriety, dedication & gravitas.  (At least that's one of the historical impressions which they left us.)

There seems a strange kind of literary eschatology involved here.  By that I mean the manifestation or instauration of an actual literary group seems to bring the implicit collective nature of art & craft to an explicit crystallization.  Something briefly surfaces which is perhaps there all the time.  Mandelstam's art of trans-historical allusive richness - & his emphasis on architecture as a prime analogue of the poetic art - are a key dimension of the Acmeist ethos.  Pushkin & Ovid are his contemporaries, Mandelstam proclaims.

There are parallels in American poetry of the same period.  John Irwin, in his massive study of Hart Crane, has brought to light the truly "Masonic" dimensions of The Bridge - the many layers of allusive groundwork laying a foundation for the song itself.  The poem is a "choral" piece, harmonizing American themes with ancient poetics (Crane clearly drawing on the "mythical methods" of Joyce, Eliot & Pound).

(As an aside, I am absolutely flummoxed by the striking parallels between Crane's mythography of Virgo, Astraea, & the Statue of Liberty in The Bridge - as outlined by Irwin - and the hidden Masonic thematics of the constellation Virgo - "the Corn Maiden" - explored by David Ovason in his fascinating book The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital.  This work seems to be more than just another New-Agey fantasy-occult book.  The intricate historical scholarship is remarkable.)

We are probably only beginning to explore this new (neo-medieval?) dynamic of artistic interaction : the collective building project & the characteristic thumbprint of the individual "master".  They go together.  Meanwhile nations & cultures, along their devious, submerged, counter-intuitive, dialectical paths, go about shaping the canonical myths of the future.

Poets : builders in the high room of the Pentecostal word.