if I could gather all 9 muses

IRON HORSESHOE

If I could gather all 9 muses

around the iron horseshoe

Hobo found along the shore…

a middle C stranded by silted rivers.

If I could loop a thread-corral

around the bullish history

of bardic poetry…

Whitman & Olson, the whole passel

of a thousand Pounds – a ton

of raw American aggression

packed in Julian tin can

of salmon absolute (O prodigal son).

You must bind up the strong man

if you would rob his house,

strums Shep Jesus –

the Son of Man opposes Czar Ivan

K. Trump (& all his lawless minions).

For Moses was an anti-

Pharaoh, & his text a fey

neutrino-trace – reversing their dominions

(anti-matter realms of fearful absence).

Their malice plays for keeps –

the quasi-Reagan creeps

who stigmatize Abe Lincoln’s conscience

of profound Union.  A government

of people, by & for people

whose penny is a steep

L-rectitude – the normative ligament

                   *

of every child of God (my soul to keep);

the stony fundament

that grounds each document

hedging the tyrant (as ye sow, shall reap). 

For this Hobo bent toward St. Louis,

where clays rotate

around an elder potentate;

the foolish king, whose power was on lease

to that familial mutuality

(the kinfolk circle

& the starry wheel)

Jesus displayed in his nativity.

Star of David, hidden in the clouds

like 4-leaf clover

in a rainbow cover –

ark or Argo of celestial crowds.

So history plays out as Tauromachia.

Watch Minotaur succumb

to Ariadne’s plumb,

Man lifted up beyond Monarchia;

that restoration of all things

the servant-son proclaimed,

chanting beside the famed

Magdala Stone (rose of sharing) –

when Clover twirls in Hobo’s fingertips

& Isis-eye looks from his palm;

when JFK comes home

& Venus blooms… & Sophie Coulombe skips.

4.28.20

under the sign of the Virgin

WRITING HAND

Herod the Great is out hunting tonight

to make himself great again.

History, all over.  Hen

clucks in pigpen.  Overhead, bright

Star of Stars yet hovers (esoteric,

weightless).  Invisible world

of worlds to come – squirreled

away in a barn (near Bethlehem, Pa).

Maximus, transfixed by history,

his writing hand severed,

still corresponded

with his nephew (far end of Black Sea).

Hen’s fishing for sense, like Hobo

the limp lamprey (curled

on the riverbank).  Churl?

Fisher King?  Overhead – Virgo.

Not the Twins, but something like.

Twin sitters.  Throned

drones, long retired

from hive (72 bricks of...).

Not trying to be obscure here,

that f’sure.  Innocence

dances through the universe

unfathomed on our faithless sphere.

On her Milky Way.  Here Grace Ravlin

sketches a summer evening

at Mt. Vernon – fingering

the treasure map (Pennsylvanian)

                  *

tracing a quiet constellation

echoed on the ground.

Her wisdom is profound

through purity.  Just perfection

mirrored in frame of Providence;

sunlit warmth of hearth

stirring Pig’s Eye from death

to life (St. Paul to Minneapolis).

The artist makes an eye with fingertips

at edge of scabbard.

Ariadne-thread.

Clue to labyrinth.  Slips

into Gloucester (blind man’s buff)

to paint twin boats

nestled in soft coats

of emerald.  Grace is enough.

Ceres, under Sirius... sparrows,

hysterica passio...

madness of Angelo

or any other tyrannos

threatening an alien child

(warped in labyrinth

of jealousy).  Absinthe,

minted at Fort Knox – wild

wrath of slighted boar (the king’s

own Fury).  Here’s the church,

here’s the steeple – open

the door... (where the sea-choir sings).

12.28.18

Grace Ravlin, Overlooking George Washington's Garden, 1922

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

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.)

Related topics (there are many others):

American poetry, Dante, narrative, numerology, Stubborn Grew...

Odd how this stanza from #7 (posted 5/29) parallels, somewhat, some of Ron Silliman's recent comments on Olson (the Olsonian portentous innards, mustachio'd).

Begin, then, with the perilous retort
of speechless limbs.  What marks the man
from the also-ran.  The game in Yucatan,
the racing heart – iris of the jungle (smart).

from the Charles Olson Library :

Olson 1132 Hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico and psilocybin : a bibliography / R. Gordon Wasson. 
Olson 1133 Myth and ritual in Christianity. 

Still reading G. Mazzotta on Giambattista Vico.

Someone could write something interesting on Chas. Olson & Vico, if they haven't already. Olson would have found him agreeable.

Vico disputed both Plato & Aristotle on the nature of poetry. For V., poetry is essentially history. Memory's recollections, imaginations & inventions are inseparable from the drives & passions of peoples, and writing (poetry) records (or adumbrates) the distance or dissociation which is memory itself.

Vico against poetry as "craft", or as something having to do with philosophy or the critical intelligence. He sounds berry much like a Longinian-sublime Romantic.

cf. Mazzotta p. 150 or so.

Likeable post from Robert Archambeau today, via John Peck, on Pound's & Olson's differing syntax. Daniel Albright (in Quantum Poetics) also covers the way ol' Ez would sideline the subject of his sentences & promote the verb (in a letter to someone, EP re-did the opening of the Gospel of John as "In the beginning was the Verb"). (Mandelstam wrote once that he'd like to live in the "future perfect conditional case" [hope I've got that right]. Probably means something completely different in Russian.)

I practice the harmonica walking to work these days. Learning from Sonny Terry again : less is more. You focus on the tiny shifts here & there. This is what such attention to the texture of a poet's diction does - leads to new possibilities, new pleasures too.

[huh. synchronicity. Hotel man wrote about harmonica-playing today too.]

Reading Marguerite Yourcenar's The Abyss. By centering the story on Zeno, an alchemist with a single-minded scientific passion to know & to free himself, who delves into the hermetic secrets of the 4 elements within nature & his own body, Yourcenar gives very rich & vivid shape to a distant time (1500s Europe). The novel somewhat reflects Zeno's own fascination with the human microcosm, becoming a literary microcosm.

Funny how yesterday I was sidelining "hermeticism", since this novel reminded me (this morning) how important the alchemical-hermetic aspect is to the U.S. long poem. Both Paterson ("the giant, Paterson"; "a man = a city") & Maximus are structured largely as literary-alchemical transmutations (the epic questor becomes "Everyman", the image/bearer/creator of a cosmos). I've noticed before an odd thing about alchemical notions (the 4 elements, the transmutation of metals, etc.): once you take note of them in literature, they seem to crop up everywhere. I guess you may say that writing itself can be read alchemically.

Kenneth Warren, in his little mag House Organ, has published a serialized study of Charles Olson & Maximus ("The Emperor's New Code") which is steeped in alchemical-theosophical lore.

(However, let's be clear: alchemy, hermeticism, literary obscurity, trobar clus... these are not all the same thing. In other words I would still disagree with Ron S. when he suggests that a kind of secret writing for adepts represents authorial respect for the intelligence of the reader, or that trobar clus-like poetry is or will be the engine of literary change & advance. Yourcenar (or Nabokov, for another example, or Shakespeare) is a great writer because, among other things, she is master of a clear, precise, and capacious style - capable of absorbing and reflecting realities on many different levels.)

Olson, Zukofsky. . . the epic boys are in the weather.

Very curious how Olson is still a living psychopomp in some circles: Kenneth Warren, at least, keeps the "drama" of Maximus Poems compelling, wherein the encounters of Maximus & his agonisti are mythic, iconic Kultur-ectomorphs.

Kent points toward some of the wider rings - Dale Smith, Stephen Ellis, Ed Dorn. . .

Zukofsky too, in his way, as the centennial celebration shows. Ron Silliman's post of yesterday begs the question : is the big-poem-epic deal a men's preserve?

Traditional literature in general was a men's preserve for a long time, obviously. How much is the mode of heroic culture-quest even more so? There are elements of "Iron John" role-modelling involved. Zukofsky clearly modelled his work on Joyce & Pound, as ephebe-challenger.

This is not necessarily bad. I suppose what's sexy today is the inquiry into what slanting illuminations or criticisms these heroic (& anti-heroic satirical) works bring to gender dynamics.

The latest issue of House Organ arrived yesterday, including another chapter in editor Kenneth Warren's ongoing Olson research, "The Emperor's New Code", and a little defense of the vitality of "the line" (& rebuttal of Ron Silliman) by Dale Smith. Also some nice late-summer poems.

Warren's effort is unusual. He has a mercurial, intuitive capacity for interpretation, which is a perfect lens for Olson's psychological-historical-occult mentality; he brings a vast store of Jungian-astrological-mythological-sociological knowledge to bear, combined with a critical sense (which is not about "promoting" Olson, but opening up both the dark & light aspects of his epic ambition). This issue's chapter is a fascinating look at the Olson/Ferrini constellation, in which the "ferrous"-iron Ferrini stands for "Red Knight"/Mediterranean/Jewish/feminine qualities, which Aryan/masculinist/German-idealist Olson must challenge. (Here's a Warren review of Ferrini, drawn from another House Organ issue, which gives a sense of what he's getting at.)

p.s. Kent Johnson appended a good comment to this post, please click the box below(even if it shows "0 comments!").

Charles Olson started working on poetry after he dropped out of his job as apparatchik for Democratic Party, right? Or something like that. With a sense of disillusionment.

Someone could do a history poem (in Olson & WCW vein) based on investigations & juxtapositions of "democracy" as global phenomenon, as a project of states & multinational groupings - "democracy in Middle East/Asia/Africa/South America" etc. - juxtaposed, that is, with historical roots in New England local politics (sovereignty of the people out of village town meetings). What it all means to have a superpower on a democracy mission compared to the felt reality of actual civic life (what that used to mean, what it amounts to now).

(Been reading de Tocqueville lately.)

I might even try doing this myself, if you don't get there first.

Something from Grassblade Light (vol. 2 of Forth of July). I may have posted this before. I like to think of my longish poem as stylistically somewhere between Hartford & Gloucester.

(My life changed after 2000 - watershed. Kenneth Warren's essay one of those goads to put it all back together.)

         4


  
         Orpheus in love goes undeground,
 a demonstration - Blackstone's Law: what's lost is lost.
 Blackstone dives into his pile of leaves, his palimpsest,
 to prove a mother-of-pearly paradox - what's lost is found.

  
         They baptized you outside the colorful cathedral doors,
 a point of light, a peephole in a dreamy spectrum.
 Something other than angel, animal - a hum,
 a hem in someone's seemly seamless smock - hers,

  
         yours, ours.  Henry remembers you, remembers then,
 via the impress of your lack of shade - he floats
 in whiskered haze, within the darkness that you made,
 a Noah, sinking in a sea of bird-calls, in the wine-

  
         dusky seas of Evening Man, winely drunk...
 - at the pinnacle of that majestic oak, bluejay
 or mockingbird salutes a descending starling, sideways
 (choral grackles measuring the distance Henry sank) -

  
         I shall not drink it with you again til Kingdom Come,
 he said to them.  Blackstone footing out the Roman foot
 from here to there:  only a cupful, only a child's foot,
 only the spectrum of a children's toy, he told them,

  
         spinning and coming round again.  A rainbow.
 Noah, Bluejay, Blackstone, Henry -
 drinking together from the horn of plenty
 of memories... old autumnal children now,

  
         old men.  And Orpheus goes down into the chaos
 shod with mercury, to reap the enormous harvest;
 Eurydice, still silent, paces toward the past -
 ghost of his future, empress of all his shadows.


        
                                     10.26.98

Kenneth Warren's House Organ, issue #45, arrived yesterday. Includes another installment of "The Emperor's New Code", his serial meditation on Charles Olson.

If you want a model for engaged poetics, why keep looking at Olson & the grandfathers? Why not look at Sophocles? If you look at Sophocles long enough, you might see some interesting poets working NOW that you missed before.

I lost my choo-choo of thought, because the computer died on me.

The constellation of "American Renaissance" poets, with Melville the new moon underneath.

Moon & Israel & the sea.

What meaneth "Israel", in this context? Yahweh & David. Which is the Trickster in context of Mesopotamia. Jacob & the stolen blessing. Solomon & Shulamit. Song of Songs.

What meaneth "the sea"? Olson wrote about this.

What meaneth "the Moon"? Good night, Moon. Good night, Coatlicue. Buenos noches, Mexico.

There was a constellation in the previous century : Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman, Poe. But unbeknownst to Eliot & Pound, underneath this constellation, lurked something more profound, of which Crane was aware (via Waldo Frank?): Melville.

What does Melville represent? A submerged, umbilical, cabalistical connection with origins, with Genesis. & not simply intuitive : his honeyheaded whale-brain grasped & absorbed both classical & biblical scriptoria; he re-invented them, like a Leonardo-literatus. (Olson, thanks to the rehabilitation of Melville 15 yrs later, revived Crane/Frank's discovery for his own purposes. Olson is Melville's pet squid.)

& speaking of modern epics, look at the dazzling, astonishing re-creation of Roman-Christian-early Britain-Wales historical reality in the work of David Jones. Not to mention his great war prose poem[?] In Parenthesis. Finnegan re-wakes indeed.

The past is not even past. [see FW: 1132-556-(Silent.)-556-1132.] In Stubborn Grew I "apply" Joyce to surround Pound/Olson et al. (it's a military maneuver) & sink epic into the microcosm of Everyman (HCE). Then he pops up again chasing Julie in The Rose (of Rhode Island). Forth of Julie, jewel-eye; reversal of Julius Sieger. (I talked about this earlier in hgpoetics.)

Reading: Agon, Logos, Polis : the Greek achievement and its aftermath, ed. by Johann Arnason (Steiner, 2001).

In ancient Greece, for reasons people are still trying to figure out, the oikos or household sense of communal responsibility got translated into democracy : the idea that within the small island or mountain polis everyone (male, anyway!), both rich & poor, baron & farmhand (excepting slaves!) had a SAY in the common good. The ethos of Homer Hesiod & the tragedies showed how individual hubris & greed brought on oppression, revolution, civil wars & destruction, by a kind of natural law of selfishness & irresponsibility. Solon was inspired to codify this ethos & establish political well-being on the "middle way" of the common good, the equanimity of barons & plebs both. Interestingly at the core of his lawmaking was the concept of release from debt - the same notion that underlies the Hebrew institution of Jubilee.

All around Greek democracy lay the authoritarian monoliths - divine kingship, monotheisms. History developed into a confrontation between Asian tyranny & Western democracy; this development overtaken by the Roman synthesis of Republican values & imperial ambition; this development overtaken in turn by the confrontation between Rome & Jerusalem, imperial authority confronting divine authority. Hebrew culture can be considered another kind of synthesis, of monothestic, Middle Eastern authority with the unaccountable, trickster-like behavior of Yahweh - a kind of anti-Emperor, intent on liberation from slavery & a government of Law rather than divine monarchy.
The Christian development of a new kind of oikos, the Church, dedicated to counter-imperial values (love of neighbor, servanthood, dignity of poverty), a religious-cultural development which changed Roman imperialism even as it was synthesized with it in turn (Constantine; Roman Papal authority).

These specifically political developments & historical turns are still with us: "the past is not even past". With respect to poetry, witness the epic variations of Pound, Zukofsky, Williams, & Olson (with his intense focus - not always egalitarian by any means - on polis & localism). With respect to contemporary conditions, just look at the debate over America's role in the world. I think the critics of Bush policy should begin to look at the threads connecting both authoritarian & opportunist strains in the administration to decisions made about post-war governance in Iraq. Is there collusion, among advisers to a President brought to power in a flawed election, to benefit from connections with the regime to be installed in custody of Iraq? How will Iraqis themselves decide who governs them?

How do we as poets in our cities re-invent & apply the "core values" we have inherited? How do we express them in our poetry? This need not simply echo Olson's tendencies. Auden is just as interesting as a political poet. Olson made a fascinating opening around these issues at the beginning of Maximus, but perhaps he got consequently lost in a mytho-ego-poetics. Perhaps my "epic" efforts exhibit some of the same problems & tendencies: Stubborn Grew does try to present a sort of time- & space- crosscutting of poet & "polis" : then it takes a deep & obscure dive into inner-orphic space, riding William Blackstone's bull into the green constellation. Maybe if such is ever to find a place among the American makings, I will have to work my way back to the "polis" myself.

Today will try to record some thoughts on poetics, my poetics, hgpoetics, which came on coffee break on Thayer St. this morning; drawing on some threads from nearby bloggers, without being too prolix I hope. Inchoate ideas. Because I may be on strike (I hope not) in a day or so, & blogging may not be so easy after that.

David Hess is asking for a definition of "post-avant", an adjective applied by Ron Silliman. Interpreting Ron's perspective (hypothetically): he's referring to contemporary young poets coming after the Language Poetry phenomenon. He thinks perhaps of langpo as an American terminus (language/writing brought to a certain limit) for avant-garde literary energies of the 20th century. After the terminus, that energy has waned & new demands, new cultural forces & imperatives, have yet to crystallize.

Jordan & Jonathan meanwhile, wrote a little this week about childhood - what it means. Which reminds me of what I wrote on this blog in various places about the status of the Person in poetics; and the comment I made yesterday about Frank O'Hara's tongue-in-cheek manifesto on "Personism" (in the context of various worldview-scaffoldings which help undergird modernist poetics & technique).

I know this DOES sound prolix & rambling; please bear with me.

In an essay in Mudlark, I wrote about how the Byzantine-Christian anthropology of humankind as imago Dei underlies Western art & the poetics of Mandelstam. We are talking about ultimate worldviews or scaffoldings. I would like to consider childhood as a theological category. How so? The child - as opposed to the adult - persists in a particular relation to the parent. Consider the child/parent relation as a symbol of the human person's relation to God. Consider it before dismissing it : think of it as an image of an image, a fractal corollary.

God as parent : how ridiculous! But only if taken literally. And about God we can take nothing literally.

The poetics of the modernist & postmodern 20th century can be regarded as a culmination of the Renaissance concept of Man. The Renaissance concept placed the human intellect at the center. The Medieval concept (stemming from Byzantium), on the other hand, developed a trinitarian anthropology : body, soul, spirit. The soul is like the somatic mirror of the body in another dimension (eternity). The spirit is like the intellectual light which unites body & soul in insight & discernment.

These three, of course, correspond to the divine Trinity : Father, Son, Spirit.

The character of any poetics of the Person would be determined by its underlying anthropology. How do we know & respond to experience through this particular lens?

Consider Charles Olson's Jungian "Maximus" projection as a counter-weight/imitation of Yeats & Pound's sense of the history-transcendent uber-Self (at the vortex of the decks of cards playing out the personae of both A Vision and The Cantos). (Kenneth Warren in his magazine House Organ has mused on this extensively.)

I look upon Jung & Olson as fascinating, searching. . . heresiarchs. Gnostics of poetry. Look instead at THIS Maximus (from Byzantium) :

Thunberg, Lars
Microcosm and mediator : the theological anthropology of Maximus the Confessor
Chicago: Open Court, 1995

(I call them heresiarchs in no dogmatic sense! Only in the sense of Nicholas Cusanus and his doctrine of "Learned Ignorance". These metaphorical-theological-conceptual scaffoldings are metaphors for religious & spiritual insights - experience at the borders where words fail & vision goes dark.)

A post-avant poetics of the Person would interpret our experience of time, the earth, the universe, science & art, good & evil, mortality, love & knowledge through a post-Renaissance lens. Such a lens would offer no prescriptions for technical developments in art : but it might change the way we perceive the role of art in the life of the person, and by extension, the role of the poet in the life of the culture. Such things have stylistic & literary-generic repercussions.

. . . but then, isn't poetry where, through speech, we try to fuse "knowing" & "being"?

Which is a futile vain Quixotic effort. & we end up representing human nature through failure.

Comic gargantuan example : Charles Olson. His "Maximus" gains from its ungainliness. The reader's imagination is swayed by the image of the fat man in squalid little apartment in Maximus-town, trying to "say" the Great Unsayable. The mundane seeps in around the edges & gives the would-be Ezra color & humanity.

Another example : Montale. He was very aware of being the voice of the "man in the middle", between transcendent glory and human pettiness. His poems build on the contradiction.

You end up with a doubleness : a sort of incarnate word (poetic language - full, packed, weighted, embodied - Keats), & the shadowy feeble negatively-capable poet who utters it.