they were playing Benjamin Britten

LEAF-MURMUR

In the peace & quiet of her little room

with cactus & late poinsettia

on the sill, she’s growing quieter

herself, just one step from the tomb.

They were playing Benjamin Britten

on the radio, his Moonlight

from Sea Interludes.  Slow

breathing, like tides come in;

the pulse of one high cresting wave;

flute-shrieks of gulls.

Her strong deep swells…

receding now.  She curls concave

into her wheelchair, brave head bowed

(the pride of life, brought low).

Her potter’s wheel, slow

spinning, rounds her own clay into cloud

as in the Garden of Gesthemane

all-powerful God

knelt to his own rough mud

fleshing star-fire to flinty harmony.

The wheel of life, how she runs down

at last!  This shadow of herself

feigns sleep, feigns prayer.  Only

the fleeting elfin smile remains her own.

Stalin, Akhmatova… terror & grace,

beauty & ugliness meet

in the grave.  A life’s complete

that hears leaf-murmur through a face.

3.5.20

oak-leaf plate by Mary R. Gould

a grain of truth

Vladislav Khodasevich; portrait by Valentina Mikhailovna Khodasevich

BLUE EYES

Vladislav Khodasevich,

past master of style

felt that truth, not style

unites the beautiful with Uglich

& art with life (so much ongoing

sordidness & light).

& if the heart is upright,

somehow… even pain might sing

as honest witness to the memory

of what was loved, back then.

My mother, once again

so firm in her infirmary

looks in my face with such solemnity

I have to shift my gaze

from stern blue eyes –

your aching isolation of senility

since I remember just how quick

you sprang for joy (sheer

giddiness of being here)! 

Now you’ve forgotten how to walk.

Maybe we’ll limp along in spirit, then –

as once Natasha with Osip,

Anna, Nadezhda… slip

the chains of boring gravity one

Leap Day!  Deep in snow & sunlight

not much different from Siberia

or Voronezh, syestra-Columbia –

imaginary friend… (wings’ wavy flight).

                                                      2.29.20

February, face-to-face

VERTIGO-CURL

It was a night of misty melting;

Hobo, the boho, sawed

through his dark glass so

in old St. Paul.  Janus was hinging

everything on sister Sue’s nag,

at the racecourse (Mordish

Hippodrome) – his wish-

ful thinking left him holding the bag.

The sky mottled gray, like a blurred

chessboard of dirty snow.

An alleged RI rainbow

filtered through Amina’s pocket (mirrored

Pocahontas), while a Balkanized

cannibalism consumed

the demos, knocking Sue

Mixam to the maximum (paralyzed).

Irma admired the Emir’s muscle

from her stolen distance.

In that mossy manse

with her ear to the hearth, the hustle

all over the earth seemed a triangle

built by Souperior Deo

for a bonfire canoe

– his own, by Odin’s kayak!  & to bungle

it was Man’s bad gamble.  Sal

Miniato & Silo

Paennim could tell you

as much – ‘twas comet Groundhog’s tail

                        *

after all.  So they went eel-gathering

all over Galilee for that

matter of Bretagne, mate –

the official King, along with his blathering

& corny Maid Minniver, his lovey-

dovey yaw-way L-vessel.

She would sail through hell

for old Ossifer Osiris – hand-in-glovey

with him, all the way!  Ecstatic Itasca

purled in the tiny whorl

of her Vertigo-curl,

like a Topsfield spanner in Alaska!

She was very moving, that sheepish yak

shellacked in the clay.  Like

an emerald in the smallest tyke

of a state, of all states – the Union, Jack!

She dwelt in the heart-hearth of Odd Eddy,

looming through mystic slips

like Evangeline E. Nilegnave (skips

across rocks down Jeannie’s Mississippi);

like a raven over Neva, like Anna

acting the dove in our eye

– is you serious, Rus?  Why

risk ice for Osissyshipiris?  In Louisiana?

Hobo says, I see our sis Lady Liberty

surge like Old Ironsides

through the fog, on this Ides

of July.  Let’s go find her, Henry.

02.02.2020

all the unspoken waltzing things

SEA-GRAVE

Henry has his scribbly hobbies.

Hobo is obsessed.

Osiris in his nest

buried (maybe touches the Keys).

A Viking ship in Minnesota

sleeps near Lake Itasca

like a Moses-mandorla

or canoe (garaged in Ferrara);

a pregnant Virgo by Francesca

curves in an oval

like a miniature whale.

These fish are scaled to hallelujah

& back – one swallow swallowing

a smaller, swifter swallow –

& water seems shallow

until you measure it (by hollowing

a sea-grave in the Milky Way).

& so Jonah yodels,

while Akhmatova spells

lowly on an ocarina (hey ey

yo).  A warbling robin sings

out of Mississippi clay

her infinite wedding day –

all the unspoken waltzing things

logrolling like a planet made of grace

in a dream-songe dream, Henri.

Near that Melusina-sea

glistens in memory (her San Fran face).

7.10.19

the axis of the earth

ACORN-DHOU

The river moving through the cottonwoods

inspires Hobo-composer

to exceed his Oeuvre

Clumpy-Cloddy in the key of C.  Buds

trace their roots down limestone crevices

to seek that cave-lake

where dark streams make

ripples in a mirror-image (Beatrice’s

triune goddess?) in a palimpsest

of light reflections.  Mother,

lover, friend... your sister-

dove.  Affectionate witness –

Akhmatova’s golub-golubyanka

(an undertone beneath

the granite banks).  The wreath

Natasha flung into Fontanka –

today an angel, tomorrow only a worm

in the grave... only a promise.

Mary, in her distress,

beholds the gardener beside the tomb.

Hobo digs deeper, down his own

dream-channel.  Almond

eyes... the veil of Isis

in West Branch... curtains for Henry’s own

Clover, in Washington (where Adam delved

while Eve spun vortex-grief).

Vertigo in high relief

on Henry’s charcoal Chartres – shelved

Synagogue laid low, below Ecclesia –

belies a Nazarene concord

older than Byzantine crossword

shaded by almond-Hebrew Bona Dea.

Keep digging then, my clod.  You’ll find

the key, within a boxwood box

where lies a bunch of keys.

A black Egyptian Queequeg pine-

box, layered with tattoos

of hero-griffins – figures

of hexagonal stars

that shine like golden bees... Who’s

                    *

there?  Out of the mirror-wars

of courtly kangaroos,

through shady fig trees

shines her diamond Southern Cross –

the double trinity of Black Elk’s

six-way sign.  An acorn

emerald, lightly borne

as crown of Restoration Day : melek’s

JFK : Zion’s Nazir out of Galilee;

spume-signal from an Ocean

State – whale-oil ensign,

anointed Son... clé-figured Charity.

That old medieval Paris of Villon.

Pigments of blood, limestone

& sky.  Stained-glass zone

of intellectual Aquinas-light – reason

& faith cross-braided, interwoven

in the jewel-box of Suger,

in the emerald sepulcher

of Wolfram’s wayfaring communion-

wafer.  Omnipresent grail

of equal daughters, equal

sons... Love’s universal

sea-supremacy – each heart’s high sail.

So the rod of Aaron blossomed

over Nile sandbanks,

& a bronze serpent yanks

all eyes to Hobo’s Bottomland

Jonah.  Out of that Okie Okean,

out of that Osage eagle’s

den, your clay-born angels

rise to foot their river-span –

a bridge of International Orange

pillared like Jachin, Boaz

in wisdom’s corny maze

of adamantine joy.  So rich & strange!

Whispered by the Sybil through

these gold oak leaves,

for everyone who grieves.

A comfortable acorn-dhou

                   *

down Nile, or Mississippi, weaves

her zigzag victor-wake;

from Jordan to Lake

Galilee, her circle rings the sheaves.

7.20.18

rim of that heavenly Rome

COSMIC BATTLE

Inching back with my mother down

the nursing home hallway

from dining hall... hey ey

yo.  Keep her from falling (too soon).

Sprightly, amnesiac, brave.

We filtered burnt photographs’

international orange (‘70s

epitaphs).  Look – you still wave

from chilly distance, eldest one.

Your sister, brothers... your

father, meek & mild... War

obliterates peripheral vision, son.

Like game of hangman (simplified).

Figure out the letter

in the word.  Row, Edgar

Poe – enough rope be dangled

like that infamous platform

lifted out of season

like Francis from prison...

only to travel far from harm

along a single beam of light.

Real American creed

spooling through Voodoo

Queen Marie – gonna be all right.

Antithetical Poe held

his ivory casket

in a bird-basket –

row, row, coracle... spelled

               *

IONAH on the bow... over & out

for now.  The cosmic battle

between Caesar & that

measly songster (Stalin puttin’ Anna

into the hollow double-barrels

mimicking Utopia – everyone

happy in warehouse, hon)

becomes a set of Shaker castanets

or scallop-shells of Aphrodite;

– a skirmish in St. Louis

soars above Cahokia (she’s

us) into a supple Rimini-

design.  The poet, poison-pounded

pharmakon, cribbed out

his hazy Paraclete

in limestone layerings – founded

Apollinairy nothings on a pole-starred

pine.  Rose horizontal stripes

on snow led wayward ships

to Milky Way, somehow (the bard

might know).  Over the river E

(for equal sign) carry

me back to cosmic liberty,

Eurydice – united we are free;

like Sophie with P. della Francesca fan

loving galactic neighbors

stitch their laborious

light-canoe (twin Manitou of Man).

10.21.17

O splendiferous butternut

SALT-CUBE

September butternuts bombard the ground,

soft lime-green globes a-burst

with rich black compost-

muck.  By genealogy of sound

they must descend from Milky Way

on high; from some black hole

of fiery Moloch-El

shifting the gravitational display

plummeting like an otfe-stone

out of St. Peter’s burg

to vertiginous epilogue

(Akhmatova-agate, or Pushkin-

bone).  Sealed with a raven-knife

tattoo, absinthe still-life –

l’Affaire Dove-Sister-Wife,

mired in a faro-game of civil strife.

Her smile’s invisible as air.

Now Phoenix is on fire

& flooded Lone Star Empire

waits for Milly the Kid to appear;

up here in Minneapolis, Frank Gehry’s

fishtail art museum

harbors Hartley’s muse.  Glum

Crane surfacing as white shark – hairy

situation! & out the window, there’s

Berryman’s burnt span –

marooned sad son of Man

abridged to riveted soul-tears.

                   *

Some autumn in King Lear, mayhap

(John’s doggèd copy?)

may Heav’n shed mild mercy-

milk through these blind spokes, old Pap.

It’s waiting for you, Cain, McCain –

open your magnanimity

to gratitude!  See

to the superflux...  She comes again

light-feathered through your heart –

Cordelia, Columbia;

unscrolls the epigraphia

footnote on warped LP (dappled 8-part

harmony) – spectrum of a weedy

Jonah-flag.  Within gray

scales, smoke-signals (hey

ey yo) her hand waves complimentary

colors – black earth, jungle green

& orange flaring yellow-

gold (passage to indigo);

red, white & cinder (ultramarine)

complete the ashen diamond

salt-cube of Manitou

(that Hiawatha 1-3-2) –

whose handspin sets a table ronde

for Pilgrim as for Wampanoag

& etches mene mene tekel

onto Minotaur’s tough Jekyll-

hide (only a promise, Nadia-Mag).

9.7.17

the sense of being right

Stray thoughts of a stray dog, this afternoon...   Have been reading the translation of Mandelstam, by Oleg Lekmanov, a sober, concise, and poignant biography.  Came upon this passage, quoting a letter (written to his wife in the spring of 1935) of Sergei Rudakov, a writer who spent some time with the Mandelstams during their exile in Voronezh.  Rudakov :

"I have never seen anything like this in my life... At a distance it is impossible to measure or relate.  I am standing before a working mechanism (perhaps even organism - it would be the same) of poetry.  I see the same thing as in myself, though in the hands of a genius, which will mean much more than it is possible to understand now.  There is no human anymore - there is Michelangelo...  For the sake of 4 lines, literally 400 are pronounced.  He does not see anything.  He does not remember that some of these lines belong to his earlier poems and repeats these lines again.  Then by eschewing the old lines he creates new poems." (Mandelstam, p. 144)

Anna Akhmatova's memoirs are then quoted, reflecting on the same period : "It is amazing that the sense of space, breadth, deep breathing appeared in Mandelstam's poetry in Voronezh, when he was not at all free."

There are several statements here worth pondering.  I just want to focus on what they triggered in my thoughts.  First is Rudakov's impression of the "biological organism" at work.  The sense I have here is of an artist who has ripened and sharpened his talent over a lifetime.  This is not a dilettante, but a kind of word-sculptor ("Michelangelo"), who is refining - in compositional "real time", so to speak - his own conception of Russian poetry as a totality, and his own individual idiom, purpose & sense of occasion - within the theatre of creation which is the making of the particular poem.

Secondly, these pages got me thinking about works of art & poetry as monuments, turning points, as benchmarks of cultural refinement.  As great expressive achievements : quintessential, incomparable.

This sort of window on poetry seems unfashionable these days.  We don't think of poems (or poets) as "rare" : in fact we go out of our way to encourage everyone to be a poet.  We don't understand this picture - a poet composing out loud, not writing anything down - reciting 400 lines in order to melt them down to four.  The whole idea is alien to us.

Poetry today is nothing if not transitive, direct, colloquial, and above all informal.  Every line is a throwaway line.  Every line is a "hook."  Even our current "experimental", formalist poets lay out their organizing principles very explicitly,  as if on a blueprint, or as a Powerpoint presentation.  We are meant to see & appreciate exactly how A leads to B.

Difficulty is conceptualized as "technical difficulty".  Poetry is evaluated by the sharpness or effectiveness of its rhetorical weapons.

This is not to deny that sharp, effective rhetoric has not always been a part of poetry.  But what's missing in art & poetry today (in large part, if not everywhere) is some kind of elusive spiritual dimension.  The strange epileptic seizures or fits of passionate composition which we behold in Mandelstam should be understood as the culmination of decades of committed labor at his craft; yet they must also be seen as Mandelstam's own conscious submission to the wave of inspiration.  He cannot fully control what he is making, because it is happening out of the improvisatory process itself; and yet it is guided by a kind of overall sense of wholeness or cultural mission - a critical sense - which shapes and informs his artistic "oracles".

Mandelstam refines 4 lines out of 400 lines because he senses he is not just writing "for himself" but is composing something which has objective meaning for the Russian people as a whole, and perhaps for humanity as a whole.  Poetry is not solely a private egotistical achievement, but is part of a vow, a "commission", to produce these integral, free-standing objects or monuments of harmonic song.  They belong to everyone, and he is somehow aware of this, and his awareness reinforces his effort to sing it exactly right.

This is perhaps one interpretation of the retort Mandelstam offered, when asked by an apparatchik interviewer for his "definition of poetry."  Mandelstam simply replied : "the poet's sense of being right."

Where do we find this sense of mission in American poetry?  Where do we find a poet relinquishing the calculations of rhetorical guile, and submitting to a more profound source of inspiration?  Where do we find a poet refining & refining lines out of an obscure sense of enunciation, of oracular speech?

I'm not arguing such poetry is not out there in America now.  I just think perhaps it's a little hard to find, under the unceasing bombardment (from what Mandelstam called "the horde of scribblers") of easygoing, unctuous, smarmy, clever, cozening, glib, prosaic, tossed-off, complacent, shallow, and trivial so-called works which offer themselves to the public in the name of poetry.

The Best Translation of Akhmatova's Epigram

Anthony Madrid is one of those rare birds who listens in to the fine mesh of subtle rhetoric, syntax, metrics & style - the nano-landscape - of poems.  His brief article on translation & Akhmatova's famous sarcastic epigram, just published at the Paris Review website,  is a good example.

I think perhaps he slightly exaggerates the difference in tone between the first and second halves of the quatrain.  Akhmatova's powerful persona could mediate & blend both the archaizing poetickal "high style" of the first half, with the earthy directness of the second : she did this often.  Her poems are littered with the Ancient Greats, not merely as references or allusions, but by direct address : she could "naturalize" the most magisterial, heightened, exalted strains.  Still, I think he is correct & perceptive to note the satire on traditional patronizing male attitudes toward female poets.

Here's my own version of the epigram into English.  I reckon I have preserved something of the original meter & rhyme-scheme.  I have a little more Russian than Anthony, I think - though not much more; & anyway that's no guarantee of a better translation.  I just happen to think mine is the best.

Could Beatrice like Dante compose?

Or Laura glorify Love's fiery rose?
I taught the women how speech flows...
but how to shut them up - God knows!

Sketch (from canoe)

BEE-STING

The rough sketch reaches back

so deep into beforetimes

like those caves of limestone

dolphins, walking... some refraction

in the water-filter flips Time over

into clear half-moonlight,

where Word-is-Psyche

typed into a graveyard clover

prints snowfeet along Minnesota

River, cemetery

ridge of Irish faery-

land (Apollinaire in Georgia).

Hard to explain.  Grace Ravlin

what thou lovest well

this garden, under spell

of summer sun (your Washington

laboratory).  Someone brave

magnanimous & kind

who vaults the epic rind

from orange threadspan (architrave

of salt-blue ice).  An Ocean State

of mind, where ships sail

slowly down to Coral

Sound, abeam some forthright

rabbit lighthouse, trembling.

Forgive me, it is so.

Earth is very slow

a-borning.  Here (one dead bee-sting).

10.19.15

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : Russia (label : subject/Russia).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Some related topics (there are many others) :

byt, Futurism, Glazov-Corrigan, Potebnia, Russian Ark, Russian art, Tom Epstein, translations, Tsvetaeva...

On this date died both Stalin and Anna Akhmatova (she outlived him by decades).

Now there was a poet of surpassing style.

Ange Mlinko writes:

"As to the question, "How to find the way to write both an artful and utilitarian poetry?" I can't say I would ever use "poetry" and "utilitarian" in the same sentence, but if Sarah means "relevant to the daily lives of nonintellectuals," I think there are lots of examples, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Daisy Fried, but it entails an abandonment of abstraction and ornament."

I admire the impulse, disagree with the analysis.

Akhmatova was a best-seller in her time (the 1910s, -20s). She managed to write a poetry which fused the simple and the ornamental, the harsh & the sweet.

One can deflect this with more analysis, of one flavor or another. But her impact, her commitment to a social, populist poetry (similar to Whitman) is just one example which denies the Puritan form of this dichotomy, which American poets seem to fall into again & again.

& I don't want to surrender Wally from Hartford, either.

...thus the appeal for me of Hart Crane, Anna Akhmatova, Mandelstam, some Stevens, some Yeats - as opposed to the jump-cut edginess of much modernism, post-modernism.

adagios of islands.

sunny sublimity.

the gesture, the understated signal, toward the vast, the calm.

Two Acmeists on the right (Mandelstam, Akhmatova). Nadezhda Mandelstam, 3rd from right. w/friends & family.

... SO, poetry reflects that special embodiment, that embodied freedom-authority... & as such the messengers of that special space often come up against the other authorities. Thus July, the 3rd of Forth of July, ends on March 5th, the date on which both Stalin & Akhmatova (avatars of these two distinct powers) died.

& anyway, all this providential history is a work-in-progress. So the unpublished history poem In RI deals more directly with Roger Williams & his unique state-founding. & this has been translated, wonderfully, into italian by Anny Ballardini. I'll be a Dante yet.

& what I mean by this "embodiment", in part, involves all these threads I've been tying (plowing?) between my rows of verse, and the "rose" of Rhode Island. Thus I first came from the midwest to this state on the merit of my college application essay, which was a group of Ted Berrigan (of Cranston, RI) imitations. & though my roots are in Minnesota, I've discovered a lot of family background right here. There's a little island in Narragansett Bay called Gould Island, named after Thomas Gould, the nephew of my gr-gr-gr-grandfather Zaccheus. Tom Gould was a friend of Roger Williams, & rented him a field on that island, for raising hay.

Anna Akhmatova was more intelligent & informed than either of these Americans.

I just want to say one last thing tonight, before 28 becomes 29, which is, that, beyond all my glibbery explicationary activity hyarabouts, there are 1 or 2 or 3 levels or aspects of Forth of July which remain & will remain classified. I have not discussed & will not discuss them. As Akhmatova says about her long "poema" Poem without a Hero, "it's a casket with a triple-false bottom", or some such. secrets of the life-raft (or Nile barge, cf. OM)

Hart Crane's Atlantis.
Paterson, Dogtown.
Brodsky : "Mankind was put on this earth for one purpose : to make civilization."
Mandelstam's definition of his poetics (Acmeism): "nostalgia for world culture".
& on the other hand, Akhmatova, transmuting Leningrad (& Russia) into herself.

The idea that every human being has a rightful place in a Kosmopolis, before which both the imperial metropolis and the colonial backwater are ephemeral parochialisms, fleeting fashions of human behavior, passing away.

World-city, evoked most forcefully by those who miss it the most - the exiled homeless hobo poet, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Walt Whitman wandering around ("W.W. is his name crowned here & gone").

NY Times today says Monarch butterflies making a comeback from terrible freeze-out in Mexico a year or so ago.

St. Valentine wrote love letters from the prison where he was eventually martyred. Tomb/chrysalis. La condition humaine. Time flowers.

The year I wrote Stubborn Grew, my father's birthday (4.12) fell on Easter Sunday. This is from the 1st sequel (Grassblade Light), toward the center of the book (a chapter called "Ghost Dance"):

30


Spring scent in the nostrils, and in the eyes
a fan of tender buds over the branches. Happy
birthday in the ancient garden. A voice searches
me out, whispers reedy Magdalen. She says:

I spotted a jay guarding the door of the sheep
in a meadow where time does not run and
a crow flies with a knife sharper than
a blade of noon sunlight across the deep

prairie grass. The jay doubled over and wheeled
in a circle like a flowering M or tall amaryllis
or bold forsythia - and soaring toward the apex
of the sky, plummeted - a kingfisher, anchored

in a mirrored lake. Rose then - vermillion-
sheep-clothed - spread both wings wide -
and - for an instant - a pied, rainbow-hued,
flared tepee floated - when with a sudden

reversal of his feathery coat, the quetzal - all
coated and colored over now in earthen clays -
spread her wings again: and monarch butterflies
and grey doves stream from that wide coracle while. . .

I listened as the woman in the garden gradually
marrigated her seedgreen purplescaled hypotenuse
(happily numbering) while my soul rode Blackstone's
white bull slowly toward Oxford on my father's birthday.


4.12.99

[p.s. note for advanced bloggertationists: for riding the bull slowly toward Oxford you should see the closing Finn-Wakean section of Stubborn, where "Akhtemydovie" Akhmatova makes sort of a spring procession toward Oxford (where she received an award in her old age) surrounded by Gould-Herefordshire farmfolk - & then recall that the symmetrical close of book 3 ends on March 5th, as explained below. . .]