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”

I'd just finished posting previous, when poet David Cashman stopped in to see me. He had come back from a trip, visiting his daughter in Amsterdam; & told me how he was walking around there with his friend Anne, when she noticed a small plaque on a run-down hotel. It turned out to be a memorial to Chet Baker, marking the spot where he fell to the pavement.

watched documentary again last night - Let's Get Lost, about Chet Baker. Gifted like Mozart, a natural. wasted his talent; a prodigy who fed (the talent) (off others) like a worm. . . something uncanny about his music. Essence of "lovesickness". Actually, essence of music-sickness. A trumpet-Orpheus, coming up trumps. (Then I found out today my wife had a bunch of her father's old Gerry Mulligan quartet records from early 50s.) In another life I want to play trumpet. From an old poem (In RI):

         This is the voice of nobody, rambling, mumbling.
 And it's hard to imagine the God of Descartes,
             of the Deists,
 a solitary supreme being, remote, Master
 Clockmaker, Big Brother in the sky.
             But language
 is a joint project, a choral endeavor,
 and if thinking is thinking with,
             and perception
 a common inheritance, and under the masks
 of skin color and race and tribe flash
             subtle unspoken
 communications, and if nature displays
 asymmetries of inconceivable
             intricacy... then
 it's not impossible thought might
 outrun matter, and mind might be beyond
             the visible frame,
 and speech might be the mere flower
 of reality, like a morning glory
             or the trumpet
 of an aging poet - the whole body becoming
 a trumpet (wavering, fading) - the life
             an indelible sign.

also watched vol. I of Russian epic version of "War & Peace". I'm starting to understand the Russian, hey. das vidanya.