Good Friday in Wales

MEDITATION ROOM

My mother’s late twin watercolor

(Bardsey Island, 2002).  Dark

room, light room.  Look

through the window to the cemetery –

crumbled walls in Wales, a stony cross.

Pale green as early April

outside the infirmary – still,

fresh, frail.  Her final brush with grass,

her hopeful air.  The Boanerges

were the Sons of Thunder –

redheads, most likely – Dioscuri

in their scarlet robes – woodpeckers,

Thunderbirds (like my two redhead brothers).

Dakota found him on the earth

near Red Wing – red-feathered

Thunder-Birdman (portent for Little Crow).

Thunder-&-lightning were one mighty Bird –

a firebird, roaring crimson.

Fire-flinging wingèd one –

a Persian peacock (Rhody Red?)

or Phoenix, soaring like a rainbow

from gray winter ash.

Woodpecker, with his calabash

tap-tapping oaks for golden honey-glow

Morse codes the closing of an Iron Age

& restoration of that Paradise

the Son of Davy Jonah scries

from his doom-rood.  Just turn the page,

                    *

he cries.  Along this feathered spine

where all the leaves are bound,

your legend of Twin-Town –

refuge for sacred monsters (in a pine

grove, under Ariadne’s Crown,

northward of everywhere).

The holy child of Mary

is such a singularity.  Scapegoat-twin,

divine-human, he will dethrone the kings

with goldenrod of charity;

rise from his bed of cruelty

with flames of sunflower – with Easter wings.

Just beyond my mother’s watercolor

David Jones grotto, I glimpse

tall flickering cave-nymphs…

a moonlit retina (of temple vault, pillar).

Twin rooms, of light & dark, enclosed

(like matryoshka dolls) inside

each other.  Casket-scaffold

for a model ship, perhaps?  Micòl's

canoe?  A meditation room

for mourning Magdalen.

Through tears of rage… vision.

A ragged almond tree, coming to bloom;

immense pressure of gravity, around a shell;

the coracle of wounded heart

lifting as purple columbine – a spurt

from humming bird-nest (thunder-sky-well).

4.10.20

like Frisco shepherd

SOLID AIR

Our Lenten season creaks along.

Involuntary shut-ins

calibrate their sins

or contemplate that deep-time throng

still singing songs through solid air

(celestial City on a Hill).

Who loves like Roger will

yet see Rose Isle, past baleful stare

& power-grabbing guile.  Meanwhile

Prince Hal will follow Hobo

like Huck Jim, & go

where currents flow (deep Delta style).

That Sleeping Lord of David Jones

dreams watercolor landscapes

old as Magdalenian apes,

bright as Justinian gemstones…

they glow with compassionate faces

beneath shimmering raven-stars

across midnight blue

while drowsy Hobo rolls a smudge of clay

(Pipestone maroon) into an eye

anchored in leafy palm (ala

Cahokia) – de son bateau c’est clé.

The King looks from his mandorla

like Frisco shepherd… mild

as forest mint gone wild,

sweet as nursing nightingale (selah).

His mother is the Queen of France,

his father is invisible

whose whispers out of Israel

ignite Prince Hal’s American romance.

4.6.20

like a gouache by David Jones

LITTLE GROTTO

Day like a gouache by David Jones.

Diaphanous vision, muted

by sea-wind, raincloud.

Mountain, meadow, rust (earth tones).

The nightmare of the Great War

like sulphur tuning fork

or buried line in Eden Park

commingles its dilemma in a metaphor

like rose in steel dust (Roger’s compass,

pointing NNW).

& Image of the Beast is

emblem for the matrix of that enterprise

encrypted at the center of a corn maze

where Satan & his Minotaur

(ICE-bound, possessed) are

snared (handcuffed in their own cold glaze).

The Man of Lawlessness, like Terrible

Ivan – he makes his own desire

the absolute measure;

he’s lost to caritas (in his own bubble).

Imagine Ghiberti’s golden doors

at the Baptistery in Florence

with angels forced to dance

to the lash of demonic matadors…

imagine Eugenio, alongside Clizia

locked in the library

with Mussolini – her sturdy

sun-glance, over the chessboard… ah,

*

bright wings!  When Everyman & Woman

breathe in the heartland

of their living temple… &

Joachim’s eagle plummets through the Plan

of Ages!  Providential restoration, O

downglide of Holy Ghost!

Multitudinous host

of human happiness – blue emerald glow

of soft & silent cat’s-eye revolutions,

roll!  & be the planetary

hearthland, wide prairie…

deep swell of Thunderbird flute sessions!

Because all the world’s a stage, coach;

the play’s the salty verse

for catching Eddy the Perverse,

who suckles his Corona like a roach

out of the Minotaur’s bleak heart –

rotten as… who can say?

God knows.  Only way

’s to pinwheel back where we start,

Pocahontas – up to the swirling

origin of springs.

A little grotto brings

its whisper of clear water.  Everything

draws near.  Pleroma for Fisher King

(little lad in oak tree)

shines, golden, leafy.  His

mother smiles… rainbows from nothing.

3.28.20

keep on pushkin, straight ahead

RED FOX

Under the silver shoreline of late cottonwoods

the quiet gray clouds

the dry river weeds (wounded

with scattered sumac) Hobo broods

as always.  Trying mightily to bring it all

into focus, under the aegis

of an ineffable Isis-

eye (black West Branch granite, under veil).

Seated on her throne, standing for a Mind

of grace.  The poets’ doctrine

as against the matter-men –

lambent clay mutter-shape (FOR BLIND).

Johnny, we hardly knew ye... Iona

clover, twirling like a dervish

in the shadow of an Irish

Tyche.  Liberté, coulombe, Columbia...

Jeanne, Jonah.  Up from pacific waters

of an Ocean Rose, an Okeanos

Newport oakenship – ceremonious

wedding (chaste prow, beyond all wars).

Like scrape of diamond on a coal-black

door.  Marking your graffiti-

passage, Henry Contumely –

he hath entered the realm of signs (alas,

alack).  You search the scriptures, lil Red

Fox – but do not come to ME.

Swift as cottonwood leaf

her sun-heart passes... (Dion-Isis?  Fled.)

10.2.19

Henry Bard has second thoughts

The ghost of Edgar Allan Poe troubled my sleep, and I awoke feeling reservations about the gaudy bardic proclamations of previous post.  Perhaps there are two deep currents in 20th and 21st-century poetry : 1) the urge toward engagement, fellowship, judgement, passionate witness; and 2) the urge toward imperturbable detachment, disinterested objectivity, the autonomous perfection of the art work.  You could say Whitman is representative of the first impulse, and Poe of the second.  David Jones across the Atlantic, another great modern exemplar of the long poem, wrote some wonderful essays in defense of the absolute freedom of the artist - as artist - from social/political requirements.  Art has a moral purpose, and forwards human freedom and dignity, simply by fulfilling itself, by working out its own quest toward integral beauty, in free association with the manual arts, applied technology and useful crafts.

It seems clear to me that I have wavered through my writing life between these two poles, between Whitman and Poe.  It's why my favorite American "bard" has always been, not Ezra Pound, but Hart Crane.  Crane's Bridge is a national paean to American culture : yet the poem is so dense and "overdetermined" with pure poetic resonance that it is always more than whatever abstract or paraphrase is applied to it.  The Bridge is multidimensional and recursive, self-referential : you could say the poem radiates the free-standing beauty of an achieved work of art, an "end-in-itself".

Also the serene formulae of the early-modern poetic movement of Russian Acmeism gave me examples of possible integrations of these two poles (call them the aesthetic and the political, or the communal and the individual...).  Gumilev and Mandelstam found a mediation between revolutionary Futurism and reactionary or detached Symbolism : by making poetic works of integral, pure and free art, by following, revising and fulfilling artistic traditions they had inherited, the Acmeists produced an art of and for the people.  "The Word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of flesh and bread : suffering" (Mandelstam, from the essay "Word and Culture").

Yin & yang, systole, diastole... the poet goes out singing, and comes back again - to work late, & in secret, at the smithy of the integral poem.

This may be another partial explanation for my marginal presence on the contemporary scene.  I've been too busy working at the forge.  My massive unread poems are an effort, in part, to bring the American long-poem enterprise to some kind of artistic, integral fulfillment, on the model of Crane's Bridge and Osip Mandelstam's life-work.  Island Road, Stubborn Grew, Forth of July, Lanthanum, Ravenna Diagram...  It would be somewhat ironic if someday critical reception picks up on the idea that the American national epic has been fulfilled by a contribution from Soviet Russia.  But don't call Putin or Trump : Mandelstam and Gumilev speak from a completely other Russia, the Russia of Pushkin, Chaadev, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova.  The spiritually-free Russian psyche, so radiant with balletic grace and deep chords of solemn harmony.

Gateway Arch Monument, St. Louis

Defense of a Diagram (4)

An explanatory introduction, an apologia for a literary work, is a double-edged sword.  In the process of unveiling an informal "defense" (or preface) for Ravenna Diagram, the side-notes are inevitably extraneous, maybe counter-productive.  For one thing, the poem has to stand on its own two (3, 4) feet.  For another, the explanations fall short of clarity & cogency.  I'm left with a nagging sense of things unsaid, or ill-said.  To render things explicit seems to muddle them at the same time.

Despite my disclaimers, the problem remains that I am offering, as a ground or argument for the poem, a worldview which perhaps 70% or more of contemporary readers will find puzzling, mystifying, off-putting, deluded, or simply wrong.

Yet there's something worthwhile in setting out on a journey against such long odds.  Intriguing, anyway.

Let me elaborate, then, a little more - a mini-defense within my Defense.  I have suggested (with Pound, Hart Crane, et al.) that the American epic is a "poem containing history".  The historian, of necessity, approaches the chaos or illegibility of human history with some kind of epistemological lens or measuring implement.

My particular lens is a form of theological vision.  (Some personal history laid the groundwork for this stance : I've written about it elsewhere on this blog.)  Previous efforts are part of the same song, in different modes.  The most recent poem, Lanthanum, parallels what I'm doing now, with changes.  In Lanthanum the idea was to find a place within American poetry to juxtapose and reconcile the American with the European, the modern with the medieval, T.S. Eliot with Hart Crane.  That poem circles around the Gateway Arch Monument in St. Louis (at the geographical mid-point of the continent, and Eliot's birthplace) - as a national-poetic symbol analogous to Crane's Brooklyn Bridge.

But what was the motive for juxtaposing modern & medieval?  It's basically the same impulse that motivates Ravenna Diagram : a particular way of seeing, an ontology of the nature of things, a model of human destiny on earth.

Roger Williams, the Rhode Island founder and prophet of religious toleration, is a pivotal figure for me, standing at the border between medieval and modern.  His message is still vital.  It provides a key with which to reconcile the sacred and secular, spirituality and civic liberty, the individual and the social, the one and the many.

The "medieval" mode assents to a spiritual concept, the Christian article of faith that Jesus was the living synthesis of human and divine - God and Man in one person.

The "modern" mode recognizes the limitations of theological vocabulary.  It acknowledges that what we mean by the "historical person Jesus Christ" may not (or not easily) be recognizable or acceptable to others, that the process of understanding one another across diverse human cultures and ideologies and experiences and forms of knowledge is ongoing, and utterly complex.

The task for this poet is to express the crux of this dichotomy or interface.  It is also to make claims and propositions about the nature of things - & celebrate the consequences.

A poem including history from a Christian perspective has its modern precursors (Eliot and David Jones among them).  Jones I find particularly appealing for a certain optimistic tenderness, for which one searches in Eliot mostly in vain.  His message is the "good news" : but it involves of necessity a translation or transfiguration of secular history into a pattern of spiritual meaning.  Christ is the pivot of earthly time - the Good Shepherd who lifts the human soul a little bit out of this world, from time to eternity.

Obviously, the notion of a divine manifestation has repercussions for any theory of history.  This is where poetry brings its special visionary powers of enthusiasm to bear.  We could suggest an analogy between the translation from secular to sacred time with the transmutation of prose to poetry.  "If you are willing to accept it."

But I also see a "poem including history" as having special obligations to that very prosaic reality which underlies the mystic icons of spirituality.  It is by way of a nekuia or the kenosis into the depths of the local, the temporary, the accidental, the mortal, that we discover the terms of shared experience - across religious and cultural differences.  This is the only path to shared understanding, a recognition of the kinship of experience, and the universality of truth.  It is only though this journey into the earth of details that new vision, new perspectives on old realities, is made possible.  The ground of actuality beneath "the historical Jesus" is still being excavated.  Our own, contemporary historical and cultural orientations continually react with newness to the unpredictable discoveries of ancient "artifacts".  The old is made new; is seen in a new light.

Again, I don't want to work at cross-purposes and defeat my own aims.  Ravenna Diagram is more than a "Jesus meditation", as anyone can see who bothers to explore it.  It's epic aspirations involve articulating a specifically American poem; this requires voicing a perspective on our land, people and history which echoes back and boomerangs within this larger, more global sketch (the theological framework).  It would be incumbent on anybody writing such a poem to attempt no less, if she wants to be heard, or say something of value to an American audience.  Thus the American literary background is part of the design of Ravenna D.  I am writing within the thematic and modal context of Eliot, Crane, Olson, Pound, and many others, who have traveled these regions before.

& herewith (I hope & believe) concludes my fourfold, flat-footed Defense of a Diagram.

Roger Williams at Prospect Terrace (Providence)

Defense of a Diagram (3)

I've started reflecting out loud, in a slapdash way, on Ravenna Diagram, an ongoing work-in-progress, comprising a certain diaristic sequence of poem-segments, some of which have appeared on this blog, and which are collected into an incremental design of chapters and books.

The first two postings under this heading ("Defense of a Diagram") might give the impression that the poet in question (that would be me) is merely filling out a pre-existent didactic pattern, standing on a very narrow, marginal, & maybe obsolete theological/confessional set of beliefs.

I hope the reader would be freed from such assumptions by simply encountering some of the poems themselves.  The life of any poetry is deeply bound up with improvisation, contingency, surprise : as Whitman said of Leaves of Grass, it's a kind of language experiment.  Perhaps paradoxically, poetic language (as Osip Mandelstam argued) is much more primal & "raw" than prose.  It is "the cry of its occasion" (Wallace Stevens).  It is a kind of verbal embodiment or model of actuality (the closest linguistic approximation to "incarnation").  Thus, within the dramatic entity which is the poem, any & all kinds of verbal signs, propositions and abstractions are tested in the (poetic) field.  It doesn't matter, in the end, what the argument is, what the doctrine, what the theology, what the cultural tradition - if it doesn't manifest as actual poetry.

So part of the "drama" of what I'm trying to do here is the suspense of a geste.  The poet takes on a difficult task : & can she do it?  Can she make it work?  Can she cross Mandelstam's "two strands" of the "poetic material" - the subject-matter with the verbal medium itself?

What I'm attempting - & have been working at for a long time (say about 35 years) - is an adventure in vastness, enormity, & grandeur.  The long, long, long poem, the epic.  Melville's American "anti-Bible" (Moby Dick) - Pound's "tale of the tribe" (The Cantos) - these are models.  Ravenna Diagram was preceded by a number of earlier such works from my hand : In RI, Island Road, Stubborn Grew, Lanthanum, et al.

Thus there is a genre, a mode, a literary context, and a history (a tradition, you might say) which helps to place what I'm trying to do.  There are many other poets working this vein, in one way or another.  (Robin Coste Lewis' "Voyage of the Sable Venus" is a recent, celebrated example.)

But what spurs me on?  Is it some kind of character flaw - obsessive-compulsive behavior?  Megalomania?  Competitive, rivalrous overdrive?

Not really, I think.  The motive gets back to the question of the "argument" or the over-arching theme.  A work of literature has a specific gravity - heavy or light, depending on the poet's skill and the gravitas of the theme.  The Idea, the First Idea.  The one who attempts the epic must have something to say, something urgent to get across.

At root, poetry is a spiritual activity.  "A Tear is an Intellectual Thing / And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King" (Blake).  Spirit and conscience guide the creative freedom of the artist.  As such - as a spiritual activity - the poet & the poem make absolute claims about the "nature of things."  Thus I have harped repeatedly, on this blog, in many different ways, that poetry is the most adequate (& thus accurate) verbal representation of Reality as a whole, as a wholeness.

These notions lay a burden of obligation - a "burden which is light."  The inherent suspense, the drama of the poet's geste, is to prove worthy of these claims, in the fulfillment of the work.  What is your definition of poetry? the interrogator asked Mandelstam, hoping to catch him in some kind of Soviet fallacy.  The poet's sense of being right, he replied.  You can actually hear Mandelstam's conscience speaking there - his feeling of obligation to express the inner rightness of his vision.

So no, with Ravenna Diagram I am not filling out a simple pre-ordained ideological pattern.  Rather, I'm exploring a mystery - trying to express what little I can see of the underlying nature of things.  That this involves an historical sense seems basic to my own interest.

If one is proposing a metaphysical or theological way of interpreting experience, then one can sketch out a plain model of vectors or intersecting lines of force : history, time, the divine (the spiritual), the personal (subjectivity), poetry, and the history of poetry (tradition).  & if one is willing to conceive of Jesus (in the manner of David Jones) as the point in timespace where Man (humankind) and the Divine intersect "in the order of signs"... as the living template or paradigm of every human person - then "the historical Jesus" - or the "Jesus of poetry" - is where all these vectors coincide.  Obviously, not every reader of poetry is going to be prepared thus to conceive the nature of things!  But that's part of the joy & thrill & suspense of the enterprise : how the strange encounter is tested & plays out in the poem itself.  One need not accept the doctrine (inchoate, mysterious & confused as it is) in order to enjoy the song.

The Labarum

Noticed Anny B.'s post of Monday 1/24, titled "An exotic disease". The disease in question is probably less exotic, more epidemic. At least I can identify with the feeling she describes, anyway. The carnival glitter-glare of globalized computer motoring, vs. our own old-homey worked-out vernacular trudge & frustrations.

Felt apropos too, considering my current nosing around David Jones again (see link posted ye'day). There was one struggling, depressed, spoiled, reactionary, pessimistic... yet very vital "handmade" original maker. Unusual (Blake-like) writer-artist.

In my way of thinking, the dedicated, gifted artist is a kind of local sign or signature of the free creative Spirit. Through those eyes and hands all things are re-ordered, refreshed, brought to meaning, made new. Call it a witness or shadow of Incarnation. Draw close (through its manifestations of beauty - fragile, partial, vital, authentic) to the principle of spiritual renewal, the secret victory over death, time and evil.

Mandelshtam's unfinished essay "Pushkin and Scriabin" points in this direction too.

Reading some David Jones again. Trying to get out of my rut (trench?).

Along with some Ross McDonald potboilers from the 60s. Funny writer. A lot of self-parody.



He smiled with conscious charm. But the charm he was conscious of, if it had ever existed, had dried up and blown away. His front teeth glared at me like a pair of chisels.

I got out my black book and made a note of the Cadillac's license number. It had California plates.
"What are you writing?"
"A poem."
He reached through the open window for my notebook. "Let's see it," he said in a loud unimpressive voice. His eyes were anxious.
"I never show work in progress."
I closed the book and put it back in my inside breast pocket. Then I started to turn up the window on his arm.

(from Black Money, 1965)

& 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.)

Dale Smith wins the award for the most conflicted review of Gabriel Gudding's Defense of Poetry. If you're confused, Coast-wise insiders, here's the explanation: this is a Minnesota/Texas thing. Ever since Humphrey/Johnson, North Star/Lone Star. . . Yank/Reb. Pickett's Charge & the 3rd Minnesota.

p.s. go straight from "Quintus Laberius Durus" to David Jones, The Roman Quarry. Do not stop at eode.