she is a mason too

FAMILIAR EYE

When the farmwoman goes out to sow

a scattering of cornseed

or fleurette africaine (dark weed

flung wide), she is a mason, too –

planting a cornerstone at dawn

to the northeast (between

the subtle nightshade of illusion

& nuanced elaborations of the sun).

Hope being the common denominator

of all our troubled labor

buried out there, somewhere.

Does language know?  Prickly pear,

prickly pear... where the shadow falls

across an exact location.

33 light-years... (someone

WW knew – at Kitty Hawk?).  Tiny candles

flicker in the hot wind from the crypt.

Presently details of the little

room emerge.  Her title

to the seasoned sailor, found amidships

after the ashes scattered like black raven-

doves into infinity –

where Mr. Sunborn’s akme

of knowledge curled its crown toward heaven.

This the mandala the builders left me.

Jenny with her Book of J – my

golden lamb of Ghent... familiar eye

peeled back, unvarnished (dyeing history).

1.30.20

& know the place for the first time

SOME PALLADIUM

Say we come back to the place of 4

paradisal rivers, & find

it’s a limestone seed-rind

west of St. Lou.  What’s left to explore?

& that grand, sane, towering grainy-mother

is closer, more real

than royal – more U.S. steel

than Byzantine gold (your equal sister-

brother).  How did we get here?

Some palladium of Lamb-

Seeker, out on a limb,

lean-to from Providence canoe... Roger –

halfsome Grain Elevator Song, mayhap

(May 29) – his Pentecost

a Rhody smoke-hole, tossed

southwest, southwest (tornado giddy-up).

Magnanimous hand, reaching toward sunset...

Solomon, seeking Sheba;

a concord St. Columba

spied, twirling Ionian Golden Gate.

Kernel of equal daughters, equal sons –

chaste Isis of West Branch,

Virgo-Astraea in a conch...

a coracle of oracles, lifting crane bones

to life within her almond carousel;

Ophelia & Juliet

transposed to Olivet,

Henry-Persephone retrieved from Hell.

2.22.19

the river is a strong brown god

AZTEC ALPHABET

The brazen serpent of the Mississippi

runs through my veins,

cantinnas Hobo (in vain).

How to tell my own (con version) story?

The antic disposition of these shelves

of incunabulae (obscure

revoluminous curious lore)

ripples off Norse keels – revolves

around my cranium (son of

McCain I am) – the worm

a canker, iced like berm

at Sutton Hoo (& strong as

love).  He will lift himself up

into his father’s affection

(this child of deflection)

at last, & be first in the stirrup

at the gates of his sly enemies –

he will be the son

who twists there (frozen

image of abjection) underneath greed-

seas of rifle-toting angels

(Cuzco school).  Spleen

of Hamlet, by the bedroom

screen – cunning de Kooning angles –

that Master of Gray, backed in a corner

of Ravenna – or raving

Coatlicue, stoning

the Consul in the dog-ravine (here,

                  *

Fido)... someone lurks in a mirror

with double doves (tin-

whistle Hobo-child of sin).

Abandona-donna’s abbatoir?

Some Aztec alphabête of yesteryear?

Hazel the moth-goddess

flits into brown recess

of brown recluse... (the spider’s... her).

The sacrifice of sacrifices –

hunters’ offering,

a shiny golden ring –

is like this image from ice-fisher’s

thing (icon of everything);

is like this light bread

Moses left for dead,

or Aaron molded into iron Sing-Sing –

a memory of Psyche-crimes

no one can heal,

nor break the lead seal

from the dark backyard (abysmal

time) until the flutter of a wing

like a mind from the sea

Hobo’s thirsty misery

slakes   or forsakes   a palm, circling

through the gray salt latitudes

like blistered sword

blessing   like sunshade

père-sol   ultramarine   (beatitudes)

9.25.17

as a Chinese jar

Bangladeshi New Year festival, Eagan, MN

What does it mean to assert that the poem is an end in itself?  In this season of crowds and anxious change, the assertion is controversial, maybe counter-productive.

To say the poem is an end in itself is a way of saying that beauty is an end in itself.  Beauty is self-sufficient; the poem is self-sufficient.  The poem justifies itself, merely as poem.  Beauty is what it is.

But what is beautiful about a poem?  We have a sense of what is meant by a beautiful face, a beautiful act, a beautiful life... not by any means always the same thing.  What makes a beautiful poem?  What makes a poem beautiful?

There are infinite paths in and out of poetry; infinite occasions for the right, the perfect poem.  I've witnessed them, heard them, countless times, in countless places, over the last 50 years.  So what is their common denominator, with respect to the beautiful?  Beauty itself shows many faces, many dimensions - but the common form, the universal factor is this :

the poem is an end in itself.

The poem is its own fulfillment : a kind of pleroma of time & experience.  A breathing, living, perfect, indestructible entity.

An icon, in other words.  A representation of something metaphysical - the transcendence of time, death & change.  A heart-stopping stroke of lightning.  A stillness still moving, living, breathing (Eliot's "Chinese jar" in Four Quartets).

This is the perfection of the poem.  Every poem bears some trace of it.

But the really confusing, paradoxical thing is : the beautiful is everywhere.  Poetry draws its materials out of the most ordinary, impoverished, grotesque, pathetic, banal, & recalcitrant places & episodes in human experience.  The metaphysical diamond is made out of coal dust.  & moreover : the coal dust itself is beautiful (the haze over the grubby railroad tracks, the derelict abandoned bleak junkyards).

The beautiful poem is simply a gesture toward the beautiful poem of reality ("the Kingdom of Heaven is in your midst, but men do not see it", chants the Nazir-poet Jesus).

A gesture.  A geste.  An act in words.

The poetry I enjoy & admire is steeped in an awareness that these perfections and gestures are already complete & finished for us.  Their presence is tacit and unassuming, but it is there : the work of the poets who came before.

This is one of the dimensions of the early 20th-cent. Russian poetic tendency known as Acmeism : an acknowledgement and receptivity toward the past.  Not a groveling imitation, but a sense of kinship - as opposed to the Futurists, who advocated a rejection of the past as a basis for the future.

There are no revolutions in poetry, because the beautiful is inherently integral.  It is a whole, a wholeness.  This is not to deny the validity of other kinds of revolution (political, social, personal).  It's only to say that poetry (as opposed to prose) is (ultimately, somehow) in touch with something beyond change, something perennial.  Rhythm, harmony, music... the beautiful.

Good to keep in mind during wartime.

we were there at the opening

Minnesota Symphony (head in the dear lights)

SACRE DU PRINTEMPS
                                                  if a Greek could see our games...

Stravinsky, Sacre du Printemps.

We were there at the opening,

brimming Finn conducting

momentum – thunderclaps & stomps

revive   tired 20th century

Apollinaire   in wings

puffing peace pipe rings

heart-knots   knock-knock (really

Thunderburnt acceleration).

Sacajawea, limping

the cornfield, keening

high lonesome   milky halcyon

mother-of-pearl   a sacrifice

of Mendelssohn   &

pirouettes   rose islands of

melodious romance   (deep ice

instead).  The violence inbred

in Gothic bones   Poe’s

charnel House of Horrors

under clerestory lines   All dead,

alas   Jessie   Ophelia

sweet dark-eyed river-

daughter   (Prospero,

Moses)   a scent   selah

shelled corn   shellacked

by hangrin’ guilty guile

in lime   hid   laid   Ile

fit you   Why?   Hack’d

               *

be the hackers   ice cracking

at the end   some munster

python swallowing your

Sonny Man (ut one thug lacking)...

Little mote, little penny, tiny

splinter in your eye

Ford Theatre   The King

Must Die   in Memphis   on a balcony

lowly motel   or mangy inn

It had to be done, someone

must’ve said   musty felon

or gypsy   jew-boy   coon

& we all in on it   even FBI

even Adlai Stevenson

some historical person

Hubert Humphrey (or I’ll be J)

– the pressure-cooker of The War

to End All   Wilson   Geraldine

Fitzgerald   Cymbeline

or Everybud   the boar-hound or

the bore   deflect the arrows of

your .44 (or .45)   Merved

orange Grifter   Vertigo

(the movie)   someone’s flic’v love

home run   9th inning   must be

some kinda way outa here

I don’t want to be the deer

in the headlights, Maggie   help me

3.30.17

it depends

Quiet evening here in Minneapolis, along the River Road, by the U of M (no, this is not Garrison Keillor - he's retired).  Sarah is down with the flu (mild for now).  We spent the morning at the clinic.  I'm off the big poem momentarily (Ravenna Diagram).  The house was quiet & the world was calm (right).

Thinking tonight for some reason of Eugenio Montale.  The phrase "superior dilettantism" - from his groundbreaking essay "Style and Tradition" (I like Joseph Cary's translation of that particular passage much better than Jonathan Galassi's).

Montale was a librarian, as well as a journalist, critic & poet, so I feel some slight personal affinity there.  (Not that I was ever much of a librarian, or much of those other things either.)

As person & poet he seems to emanate a good deal of something like Keats's negative capability.  He's sort of oblique.  He doesn't assert; he suggests, he implicates.  It's very sly, but also, strangely meek.  I'm speaking of his poetry.  Out of the literary blind alleys, undertones, non-sequiturs & jokes, you sense this emanation of a cherished & familiar landscape, a way of doing and not doing things.  A landscape of music, feeling.  Lacrimae rerum.

So he's very ancient & very present at the same time (Virgil, Dante, Bible).

He tightropes between the "aulic" & the ordinary, the colloquial.  (Maybe Benedetto Croce has something to do with this...)

& he sings.  Montale aspired to be an opera singer before he turned to poetry.  Let me repeat that : Montale aspired to be an opera singer before he turned to poetry.

Montale the poet is playful & subtle.  One of his striking images is that of the chess-playing woman in Firenze, somehow eking out a spiritual victory over the (Fascist) forces all around her : his muse.  I think he would have made a very good chess player, if he hadn't gone in for opera & poetry.

But I reiterate this idea of the landscape seeping up through the poetry.  The simple vernacular of the land - beautiful & troubled, suffering.  The "earth in labor", so to speak.  The artifice of pastoral yielding gracefully to the fatal wisdom of experience (rustic Adam & Eve, & all that followed).

Not sure where I'm going with this.  I'm surrounded by old books (I am a former librarian).  Montale's "dilettantism" appeals to me.  Not simply because I could be labeled a dilettante myself, but because the concept offers an opening to what Berryman called "the freedom of the poet".

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty..." spake the old vase, & the negatively-capable Keats.  There is something uncanny about the effect of the beautiful - the wholeness, the total impression of the complete work of art, however humble.

The rustic poet speaks quietly out of the landscape, out of experience... & we recognize the truth of those sounds.  We hear (with some trepidation) the implicit judgement of their rightness, their finality.

It's a certain way of responding to reality.  Distinct, that is, at least in some respects, from the scientific, the philosophical, the theological, or the political.  It's more raw, more colloquial - & more refined, more graceful.  Don't ask me why.  (Ends vs. means.  Reality vs. theory.  Innocence & Experience.)

Think of Robert Frost at Kennedy's inauguration.  Think about that for a while.  About what they both were trying to accomplish - & how it actually fell out (in an odd, unfinished, lovable, screwed-up way).

I'm perpetually obsessed with old texts, old words... I'm a librarian, I guess.  I started out as a very with-it (in my view) late-60's hipster poet.  It's how I managed to get into Brown University, back in 1970.  Basically I was following an impulse (by way of Rimbaud & Baudelaire & ee cummings & the New York School & all the 60s novels I was imbibing).  I was making poems.  But then I underwent a religious-psychological crisis, in 1973-74 (when I was about 19).  Not that different, I imagine, from what happened to T.S. Eliot - something deflected his river from its course, and so the waves rippled relentlessly through his life & poetry.

I never liked Eliot, I couldn't stand him.  I actually reacted viscerally to the slimy sibilant sibylline sound of his verses. Some of this certainly must have been mere cultural conformism on my part (nobody liked Eliot back in the 20th century).  We can argue ad infinitum about TSE pro & con.  My point is, that despite my animus, my polar opposition to Eliot, it seems we underwent some kind of fairly similar psychological-cultural-religious crisis of conversion.

Why, oh why do I bring this up, right here in my Nobel lecture about Eugenio Montale?

I think poetry is something we don't really understand.  It comes from the deepest layers of the human psyche & spirit - dimensions that reach far backward & forward, from our very animal prehistory to a future we can't yet see.  Matthew Arnold's notion of "touchstones" gets at some clue of which he may have been unaware - something primordial, like a low iron tone or wooden knock or flute whistle through prehistoric bone.

So, if this is correct, the "vernacular" or the colloquial or the amateur or the unprofessional or the dilettantish or the rustic or the pastoral music of poetry might speak in its own way to the human condition... & possibly in such a charming manner as to reshape the public's conception of reality itself.

We need the old words right now, old words of faith & hope & charity, whether we believe them or not - because there are powers at work that deny the meaning of words per se.

My grandfather Edward S. Gould was a veteran of World War I, and led the veterans' Armistice parades through downtown Minneapolis during the 1920s.  He & my grandmother (Florence Ainsworth) lived in an apartment near the University of Minnesota, where I spent the first 18 months of my life.  Grandpa kept an old brass shell from the war in the corner of their apartment (he was an artillery captain), and over the dinner table hung a print of a famous painting, of George Washington & Lafayette, at a celebratory dance in Washington (Grandma was a member of the D.A.R.).

Grandpa & Grandma were part of the American historical panorama, the fabric.  They were ordinary people.  Grandpa would be called a racist today.  Grandma's beloved D.A.R. tried to keep Jewish refugees from Hitler out of America, and tried to stop Marian Anderson from singing at the Lincoln Memorial.  These are sad, absurd truths.

Yet what did that dance in Washington celebrate?  The experiment of American democracy; the experiment of a new people in a new land of equality.  Eventually Lafayette's dance would bump up against the reality of America's license to enslave, exploit and deceive (the America of Herman Melville's Confidence-Man).  And the Civil War would instill a pattern (freedom vs. slavery) which we have not yet resolved unto this day.

America is an experiment, an improvisation.  Yet the experiment is rooted in something quite deep : the legal concept of equity & justice, of the inalienable rights of human persons, going back before the Revolution to the jurist Edward Coke, and to his student, the pioneer-theologian-lawmaker Roger Williams.

There is something very grounded & rooted in this particular  legal concept.  It is a spiritual ground, a spiritual root.  It is the very ancient notion of Creation, of the realm of Spirit - the mantling wings of Manitou (the Thunderbird).  Martin Luther King's righteous web of mutuality... Black Elk's 6-directional diamond.

among four pines

ABSOLUTE ZERO

The grey coal cars thunder slowly

over the rust-orange bridge

again.  & I pledge

allegiance to their gravity,

to the stern trumpet of the train horn

as they go.  Down the street

Grandpa’s brick Paraclete

among four pines awaits the morn

(birthday, today).  That carpenter’s

clear eye – a level’s bubble –

gazes out (chaste, equable)

into the turbulence of Zoroaster’s

Peacock Star (Yezidi refugee).

& ours.  A world of tears.

Absolute zero sears

the riverbanks.  The Mississippi

plunges under ice.  The dead of winter

sleep in Resurrection

Cemetery – Berryman,

Henry... each petrified splinter.

Massed in the clouds, a stone mizzen.

From profound Black Sea

she strains so steadily

toward me... a limpid sail, a friend.

Is she life, or death?  Her vault

is mourning.  Yet her smile

is joy – raven diagonal

coursing toward dawn (where Magi halt).

1.6.17 

Natasha Stempel, Voronezh(?) ca. 1936

bard owl hoot-yawp

DARK MANDALA

A dark mandala, with its threads of gilt

glinting in sepulchral gloom.

Brown recluse home

or poison farm – Potemkin-built

for subtle, shady beast (forma

tricorporis umbra).

Yessir – USSR – Usura

rapt the hack machine – some worm

robbed all the banks in Hungary

– sincerely, your servant

left with Nada (she went

under).  One black-wreath memory

laurels a World War grave,

limed with gold streaks

of tears.  Leaf breaks

hearts; stubborn moth digs nave.

Infinitely gentle, infinitely

suffering thing... Rabbi,

rabbi, your symmetry

of gravity pulls toward a parapet

or pole-star magnet – anti-matter

mutter at the gate

of timespace (intricate

constellate icosahedron footpad

rabbit-patter).  Yellow gyroscope

for the lad in Ravenna,

wheeling through Gehenna

into turtleshell domicile – Hope

                   *

Diamond southern bells – milky

over Memphis, chanting

out of slave-haunt... (sling

your wide human boomerang, Psyche).

Fraud loops fey pebbles into flagging

factories, for vanity –

haughty coyote-

greed howls babble onto bragging

piles of glare – why do the notions rage?

Out of a quiet well,

a widow’s mite will tell

another rustic peony tale.  Osage

cheekbones of Lincoln-Logos shine

in the fiery human sun –

Rhodos-Colossus Woman

radars an omnipresent beryl-pine

from silver harbor.  The retrograde

cannot delay reality –

their bubble-polity

will burst (too much steel air) – a Maid

of Orleans, or Land o’Lakes

shall lead the ring-dance

in a crayon trance

& sketch a reciprocity

of snakes & ladders, golden eagles

& grey turtledoves.

The peacock fan of Love’s

dominion flares... green acorn-angles.

11.11.16

Drone chords from Beethoven Op. 132

Walk through the mirror

MINOR TEAR

Bleak winter shades... crows in the trees

beak-gnashing, rasping (caw-

caw, hawk-hawk).  Low

Earth, rotund silentium (dregs, lees).

Stillness of still-life – Brown Decades

(hoist Peto).  The Just Man

imago is just a man –

barely there, through simple glades

of green.  Mirror Lakes liked him,

in Mendelssohn.  Only

an infinitely gently-shivery

Rabbi, Hiawatha Honeybear – bro Jim,

our lunky logos (penny-loafing).

Who bears it all, past

He- or She-Cat’s paste-

up Geryon-masque (a scary nothing).

This maze contains a minor tear.

& through a crevice there

one Ariadne hair

leads you to almond-gold rain-bear.

Earth seethes with ziggurats of fraud

& blind men lash themselves

to violence (selva

oscura mitts gorilla code);

but it shall not be so with thee.

Bunny hikes one eye

& looks for wheeling Eli

to come by (benevolent memory).

3.3.16

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)

Someday my poetry, which builds on Crane, will help justify his work. Reviews like Kirsch's - despite his many positive & perceptive comments - are still designed on a logic of dismissal. Crane's work & life were not perfect, but that shouldn't be the main issue.

I would suggest going back to look at Crane's own logic & epic argument. Langdon Hammer's critical studies help in that direction. Crane's argument with Eliot's pessimism (about the world, about America) parallels the positions of WCW and Stevens, yet with a difference.

I look at Crane through the lenses of Mandelstam's practice - his elliptical, evocative imagery - as well as his debate with Russian Symbolism. The commitments of what the Russians called "Acmeism" (as practiced by Mandelstam, Gumilev, Akhmatova) had to do with an optimism about the earth and world, a grateful attitude toward temporal things, which opposed itself to the otherworldliness, pessimism & withdrawal of Symbolism, and offered grounds for epic-celebratory modes, which Crane also explored.

Deep into Geoffrey Hill. It will take me months, if not years, to come up with an adequate written response, if ever.

Thinking about the multiplex ironies of American-British mutual influences & oppositions. The difficulties in interpreting "contextual" (cultural-historical) problems. Tones, motives.

Hill is like our Eliot, in reverse. Except no one is listening (as they listened to Eliot). Because we inhabit what is, for Hill, a national Romanticism - a self-enclosed universe of (poetic) discourse - Stevens on one end, Olson on another.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. & the analogy doesn't really work.

Hill is like another (Anglican) Auden who, in extremity (of alienation), has become an Eliot... (who sounds like Pound).

I'm getting way ahead of myself.

Responding in part to Robert A.'s interesting post on public/private manners & mannerisms:

Here's a passage from an essay that TS Eliot published in The Egoist in 1919 (& never republished):

"This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with a passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person...
...We may not be great lovers, but if we had a genuine affair with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love... We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition."

- this is quoted in Langdon Hammer's Hart Crane & Allen Tate, as part of his history of Crane/Tate/Eliot's ambiguous-subliminal erotic psychologies. Crane responded (as a gay man) to this early Eliot; Tate, on the other hand, to the reserved, impersonal, authoritative Eliot of "Tradition and the Individual Talent".

I post this to point to the contrast between this, on the one hand, and the informal, relaxed familiarity of the NY School approach (which RA describes). Poet-friendships, there, are not surrounded by an aura of ambiguity, romance & taboo.

This "demotic" attitude seems connected with the general relaxation (or vulgarization) of sexual mores : the taboos have broken down.

The idea that private name-dropping in poems, etc., impinges on the boundaries of traditional public speech is true in more ways than one.

I think it's possible to send private, personal messages & public messages - separately - in one and the same poem. The overuse of obviously private messages seems kind of slack, in a way. But it may also be a realistic acknowledgement of the limits of a poet's reach & impact. & it reflects, back to us, the quality of our own private lives.

Eliot's passage above, by the way, seems like a script for my own comically-representative experience (I mean Mandelstam's impact, & the "Shakespeare episode"). Shakespeare's ambiguously erotic & narcissistic sonnets literally knocked the wind out of me - & threw me back into the Biblical fold.

Oddly, Eliot here seems sane & healthy to me. He's talking about love, not "eros" or sex (hence his phrase, "we may not be great lovers" - funny). Love may involve passionate erotic energies, but it's not only that. Contemporary mores often simply reduce love to eros.

So... I guess when I think about my own long poems & what I have tried to do, I fall somewhere in between the paths laid out by Crane & Eliot -

since I tried to carry on with Crane's affirmative-visionary stance, yet I share, in certain ways, Eliot's faith.

My whole poetry life has oscillated between, & tried to integrate, faith & imagination, faith & poetry - since the days of the "Shakespeare ghost" (1973).

& since it was my response to Mandelstam which set in motion the terms of that synthesis, he has remained the key to the "plot" of my long poems.

So... if somebody ever takes the trouble to read, seriously, Stubborn Grew, and The Rose, & the other things, they will find out what I am talking about. (All handy over there at Lulu !)

It has to do with seeing poetry as one door to inward or spiritual renewal, & the renewal of time & history in that light. & it has to do with an interpretation of faith which is in most ways diametrically opposite the stance taken by Eliot & Tate & the other conservative religionist-poets.

If you look into my long poems, you'll see a "ghost dance", where the impulses & writings of Whitman, Melville, Twain, Poe (& others) are aligned with those of Crane, Mandelstam, Berryman (& others) to represent a sort of symbolic "epic America-Russia" (RUS-US), rooted in Crane's, Melville's & Whitman's awareness and acknowledgement of the American Outcast as the spiritual key to America. Where Eliot & Tate experience their faith as a kind of spiritual hierarchy, separating them from modern life, I understand the Biblical tradition as a prophetic framework, or verbal model, for human equality and mutuality. (Melville's Ecuadorian doubloon nailed to the mast of the Pequod; Mandelstam's "gold coins of humanism".)

But my long poems have yet to be read & taken seriously, I guess. I went into a tunnel for about 8 years in order to prepare for & write them. So that made it more difficult for me to write short poems, or interact, as poet, in the magazine culture.

"Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay." That's how it starts.

The profile on John Ashbery in this week's New Yorker.

I've said a lot of mean things about Ashbery, because he annoys me.

He looks so much like TS Eliot. Same bird type.

But I'll probably write a good essay on him one of these days, because his poetry had a mesmerizing effect on me, once upon a time, & I'm still intrigued by it all.

I note a lot of nostalgia in his writing, but maybe it's just my projection. I have a theory that the dialect of ordinariness, the overheard lingo, is actually a childhood memory of listening to his parents & grandparents talking.

Ashbery is doing a kind of sleep-prophecy, akin to Edgar Cayce. Purifying the mots of the tribu by channeling it through his tenderizer-hypno-voice.

Strange. Both Yeats & Joseph Brodsky died on this day, Jan. 28th. Strange, because Brodsky wrote a famous elegy (He died at the start of the year, in January...) for TS Eliot, which was an echo of Auden's famous elegy for Yeats.

(I learn things from my own archive. I tried to keep up the round-robin with that elegy for Brodsky (see archive for 1.30.04.)

Went up for a break to a 3rd-floor library carrel, thinking about previous Virgil comments. Opened up my RS Crane book, started reading. Looked up at the books on the carrel shelf - & found that the carrel's collection was entirely devoted to Virgil's poetics. Art thou with me, dolce padre?

Virgil's 4th Eclogue contains the famous messianic passage, predicting the "virgin birth" of the Child who will bring the return of the Golden Age. So his pastoral is tainted with "history". (& the eclogue is echoed later in the center of the Aeneid, in the lengthy apostrophe to Caesar Augustus.)

Dante, self-appointed heir to Virgil, places his pastoral earthly paradise in Purgatory, a way station to the final refuge in Paradise; but that Paradise is full of earthly history - the center of the final rose containing the empty chair for the coming of the messianic Holy Roman Emperor (Henry VII).

Milton, the revolutionary Protestant and advocate of regicide, sets aside any merely earthly political authority : his Adam & Eve, before their fall, in Eden, are taught directly by angel-shepherds, and after the fall, political authority on earth is described as under apocalyptic judgement.

Eliot(monarchist) & Pound(fascist) - political authoritarians both - looked to Dante, rather than Milton, as their model. But for Dante, divine & earthly (political) authority were counterbalanced. For Eliot & Pound, the (medieval) balance was broken : the feebleness, or complete lack, of a desired spiritual authority, made political authoritarians of them both.

The world is still dealing with these problems (imposed, politicized religious ideology; authoritarian politics; spiritual anomie & despair).

My personal concept of what a poet is & does, allows for a different definition of "reader, reading"... like the old medieval technical term, lectio, lector. A "reader (lecturer)" in theology, philosophy, etc. The poet as solitary, hermit - making poem, making book. The poetry reading as a late event in life or career.

No one wants to go back to that subdued era when poetry was limited to verses in print, & middle-aged profs mumbling at a lectern; nevertheless, I think the pendulum could afford to swing back a little now.

The term "poetry" covers an enormous range of activities & forms of writing/performing. I guess that theory of poetry appeals to me which sets the bar at the highest level of human doings, I mean just under prayer & acts of charity. Dante & Shakespeare & Dickinson & Whitman - their language art places them somewhere at the "brow of reality", so to speak - capable of engaging directly with, & on a par with, all the other forms of spiritual, intellectual & practical activity. Eliot was right when he said that this doesn't happen without the expenditure of great labor & devotion - no matter how much talent & facility the artist starts out with.

In this context I find something slightly jarring in the atmosphere which uses poetry as means to advance improv comedy acts, literary funfests, "scenes". Sorry, that's just how I see it. (I suppose I need to get out more. It's just that I find most poetry boring & narcissistic, & most artists vain & pretentious. & I include myself in that category.)

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