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

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...

...decided (finally) to put out Forth of July in one volume, after I picked up Mary Douglas's book Thinking in Circles (about ring-structures in the Bible, Homer, Tristram Shandy, etc). Started looking again at the symmetries in my own poem. & seeing it (the poem) in a somewhat different light.

As I've written elsewhere, there's a great deal of ring-structure or mirror-symmetry in this poem, beginning with the "ABBA" rhyme of each quatrain, all the way up to the macro-structure. And there are a number of rings-within-rings. The technique was a lot like weaving : I would write parallel quatrains, or sections, or books on either side of a central pivot.

But Mary Douglas describes "classic" or ancient ring-structure as a means of (1) establishing firm meaning (by such parallels) and (2) creating a clear narrative structure (leading to a central turning-point and closing with a kind of resolution paired with the beginning).

In Forth of July, often enough, the narrator/protagonist is unaware of his real destination (Bluejay, his "guide", explicitly tells him this, repeatedly). The introductory poems of the prologue foreshadow the major concerns of the pivotal center - and then the poem veers off in a new direction, a deeper level. Yet "Bluejay" warns "Henry" of this from the beginning.

Furthermore, behind the narrator/protagonist stands a more shadowy - yet also pivotal - character, the meditative William Blackstone.

Not without reason the central chapter of the poem is titled "Ghost Dance". The poem represents ghoulish, garrulous Henry surrounded by ghosts (Bluejay, Blackstone, Juliet... & the mysterious "J").

The long poem Forth of July (previously published separately as Stubborn Grew, The Grassblade Light, July and The Rose, etc.), now available in one volume.

The Great American Caterwaul !!!

Interesting article by William Dalrymple ("Homer in India") in this week's New Yorker about persistent survival of oral epic poetry among some regions and castes of India. Traveling bard-shamans, dedicated to and invoking the power of a particular Hindu god, memorize poems thousands of lines long, and perform them in all-night sessions which can last for days or weeks.

A few years before Milman Parry went to Yugoslavia, recorded hundreds of hours of surviving epic performances, and basically invented an entire scholarly discipline, American anthropologists were recording the myths and songs of Native Americans. Much of my own (unknown) 700+pp. poem, Forth of July, draws on that material, from the character of "Bluejay" & the stories he tells, to the "ring-structured" passages (centered on the Mississippi River and the Ojibwa culture of the upper midwest) in the two sequels to Stubborn Grew (Grassblade Light and July).

(As I may have mentioned on occasion, all of this unknown long poem is available in print, as well as in inexpensive downloadable pdf format. Disclaimer : I do not possess an MFA in Creative Writing, nor am I associated with any academic Writing Program. I am, furthermore, not affiliated with the "New York", "Language", "post-avant", "New American", or any other "school" of poetry.)

I'm very conscious of the fact that in the context of our political life today my poetry is at best irrelevant, and at worst self-indulgent, deluded. I'm getting there, I'm getting there (I hope). Someday.

Auden, "September, 1939". Vallejo, "Spain, Take this Cup from Me" (or how it goes).

We live in a time of verbal-ideological-utilitarian-Machiavellian pyrotechnics (rhetoric). So my poetry affords me a space to be simply myself - free, simple, stupid. I have a system of knowledge & belief which I will gladly share - it has to do with the 7th Day of Creation. Hobo Frank is interested.

Am reading Ernst Kantorowicz's (1931 publ.) bizarre (Hitlerian?) symphonic hero-worshipping biography of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (St. Francis' contemporary and strange alter ego).

My poem Grassblade Light (part of Forth of July) was designed numerically on one of Fred's castles in southern Italy. Huh.

What were we talkin' about?

Reading (ie., trying to read) Pushkin's Eugene Onegin in Russian, with help from a couple translations (including Nabokov's).

Learned that Pushkin began writing it in Kishinev in the 1820s, on a May 28th. A very important date in the longy-long poem Stubborn Grew/The Rose - for one thing, the poem was finished on May 28th. (Stubborn's story begins with a Halloween search for a lost cat named Pushkin, and the 3rd main vol. (July) peters out with allusions to Pushkin's story The Queen of Spades.)

I finished Forth of July (about a 3-yr project) the day before my 48th birthday. So I was no spring chicken while writing that. In fact one way to look at the poem's combination of love/poetry/renewal - the Orpheus romance - is that, at my (sort of) middle age, I was self-consciously experiencing the ability to write the poem, as a kind of renewal. I was undergoing my own internal renaissance, which really began with the Island Road sonnets. "The Muse" and love and writing were synchronizing - after several years of frustration & difficulties.

 13

  
 The sound-seed fell from high
 like a sharp effigy   in the frozen air
 a figurehead forced   through the narrows
 of cliff-clay   and it tolls for thee, Henry

  
 (copperhead stretched out for   seven
 years of seven years from   charlie horse
 to roundhead) and   Cuánto catorce
 ha habido en la existenca!  When

  
 you enter into eternity   without a garment
 in my beginning is   a Lincoln sheep
 my end   the long Canadian geese-chase
 from a faux point   to   the true target:

  
 as a man with an enormous bleak millstone
 wrapped like Ouroboros around his neck
 is cast into the sea   (do you ken
 yet, Charlie Brown?)   for offending

  
 the little green one   Qué deber,
 qué cortar y qué taju   de memoria
 a memoria   en la pestana!
 Your endless shield like a rabid

  
 Caesar   that rings like brass
 without harmony   when you enter
 into eternity   it tolls for thee   so turn
 again and turn   Charlie   from Barabbas

  
 toward   the other Caesar   (Atahuallpa
 on the scaffold   like curled-up   Orpheus,
 your father)   to the green cap   furling
 hidden from roundheads in   the palace

  
 of an oak curling   from Charles to Charles
 and from brown to delta clay   a sound
 seed   planted   on a pinpoint spearhead
 green   for growing   scroll   to   scroll

       
                                   2.14.2000

I can't really abstract a perfect illustration for my comments of yesterday. It's a poem or caterwaul that goes in a lot of directions. (Remember the photos Jonathan posted of Vallejo/Lincoln?) Here's something from near the end of July:

 12

  
 Deep drone of train   or iron cicada
 across an infinite prairie   steppe or
 taiga   and where do the past
 and future   of these parallels   ascend?

  
 Accompanied by mute organ-pipes
 in Voronezh   or an anti-telephone
 in Moscow   (making superluminescent
 waves)   or just my new triangle on the barn

  
 banging and banging like an old tin can?
 The rapture of the universe   is on
 the radio tonight   everybody knows
 it   (even the D.A.R., Grandma)   it’s Marion

  
 singing there   in Washington
 under the Depression   and the shadowy
 long hands   long face still   washed
 with kindness   twinkling like a star

  
 his homely lonesomeness
 is in her voice also tonight  a silky
 charity-chariot   with   malice toward
 none   we’ll ride it home Bluejay   forget

  
 the bondage of the 44   rail-split and
 quartered in a milky map
 rivers and forests in your palm
 life-lines and   spirit-trails

  
 deep into tracklessness   a limber
 timbered   everlasting habitat
 we’ll make it home   to bathe
 again   in that spring water   Abraham

  
 as the drone rises   to the tops of the oaks
 in an arc of praises   love and liberty
 are married there   a tribal tree of
 tribulations   crowned   a little school of J

      
                                      2.8.2000

Would like to follow up some of the comments of last few days.

In Stubborn Grew, and the 3 books of The Rose (all of which make up Forth of July), I tried to make such a frame. Part of that totalizing epic impulse. & not something I learned from Northrop Frye or other scholars, some abstract idea of genre - but an impulse going back to the Shakespeare thing, a need to articulate experience in a holistic way.

(My apologies to those of you for whom I may be sort of repeating myself, again.)

I wanted to "finish", to my own satisfaction, what seems like the unfinished business of the "long poem" in America.

In effect, this poem takes a very long psychic-poetic trip. The poet, the "speaker", wavers between autobiography, and history, and "pure" poetry, and parody, and lyric singing, and romance, and symbolic narratives, and documentary, and collage...

however, whatever the literary-emblematic, symbolic, political-historical ramifications of it all, the sum toto, when I reflect on it now, seems like self-portraiture. This may be due, largely, to the emphasis on memory (reverie) as the basic source of inspiration, the instigator.

I tried in several ways to "generalize" the poem's subjectivity. But this is a very problematic and paradoxical region of art-making. In some ways the subjectivity of the creative artist is exactly what the artist is about - the substance of art's message. The very ability to "muse" & write is dependent on the personal & private to a great extent.

I'm reading another (short) book by Giuseppe Mazzotta - Cosmopoiesis - on aspects of "world-making" in Renaissance literature. He writes in the intro about the traditional distinctions between Medieval and Renaissance : the former is theological, the latter is humanist; the former is vita contemplativa, the latter is vita activa.

I feel sort of on the cusp of this divide (as I guess everyone is, really). The poet-as-poet experiences originality - world-making, life-made-anew - in a very concrete way. But the fragile symbiosis of subjective & objective, person & world, is hard (if even possible at all) to "fix".

Reality is mysteriously in flux, in process - a theologian (on a good day) might describe this as an aspect of the divine gift of human freedom, power, & self-determination. Artists understand this - experience this - as the sudden coalescence of their imaginative projects.

In my "posthumous" creative life of the last 5 years or so, I seem to be struggling to find a mode of expression which is more objective, less autobiographical, less caught up with my interior psychodrama.

Or at least find a way to make that personal experience more informed by the objective present.

Forth of July is full of obscure symbolic structures & meanings. The 3rd volume, July, tried to go in two directions at once : to break out of the nostalgic-memorial element of the previous volume (Grassblade Light), and at the same time to create a more autonomous artistic structure (ie. Forth of July issues in, seeks its own telos, in July.)

I started writing it on July 15th - traditionally, "St. Henry's Day" - the day in 1199 when the Crusaders formally invested the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. I aimed to end it between March 15th - the Ides of March - and April 14th - around Easter/Lincoln's assassination/Vallejo's death.

There were a lot of ideas circling around in my head about these symbolic dates. The notion of "Henry going to Jerusalem", for one (a reference to Henry the IV's ironic speech to Prince Hal in the "Jerusalem Chamber" in Shakespeare's H. IV).

There was the Judaic-Christian concept of "Jubilee", which is a kind of messianic/utopian hopeful idea about world justice & peace. In order to symbolize this element I played a lot of word games - reversing the "shell" of an armored (military) Julius Caesar - world political power - through the "coming-forth" of Juliet, or the ark of Jubilee.

Thus the Christian sacrifice evoked by the sepulchre - & resurrection-hope - is linked in the poem (& to America) via Lincoln/Vallejo.

It all sounds very schematic, but it was shaped through a kind of whacky (psychic) journey to New Orleans - through American history - up & down the Mississippi, via Crane, Melville, Whitman, Twain... (& the mysterious Bluejay - who returns after his disappearance at the end of Stubborn Grew.)

The octagonal shape of Frederick II's Castel del Monte (discussed a few days ago) was modelled (some have argued) on the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, which Frederick may have encountered in the course of negotiating the (peaceful - & very short-lived) return of Jerusalem to Western control. The octagon is also symbolic of the renewal of the world (the "eighth day" of creation).

Anyway, happy Ides of March.

It's a rule : all big poems have to be modelled mathematically on the architecture of a building (or part of a building). For Dante it was the mosaics in the chapel in the Ravenna cathedral (there's a good book on the numerology of this). For Pound it was the Malatesta crypt. For Crane, of course, it was... you know.

I modelled the middle book of Forth of July (The Grassblade Light) on the Castel del Monte.

(Frederick II had many negative qualities. But in my poem he & his Castel represent a principle which both Dante & Roger Williams stood for : the separate, dual & independent spheres of church & state.)

... bringing me to the diagram with which I began the previous post.

What might a "neo-medieval" reading of Stubborn Grew/The Rose (Forth of July) involve?

ut pictura poiesis. Most of my long poems have paintings all through them. (My mother is an artist - I grew up with the smell of turpentine & canvases.)

Think of poetry as occupying a middle ground between painting and the unrepresentable (God's name, Simone Weil's "decreation"). Ekphrasis : in two directions at once.

Chinese characters/brush strokes.

Stubborn begins and ends with "J". (Bluejay : the bird, the man; Juliet, Jonah ["dove", sister-dove], Julie, July, Jubilee, Jerusalem...)

"J", the letter, comes from "i", iota, jot, yhod : the smallest letter of the Hebrew script, maybe going back to Egyptian/Phoenician pictograph for "hand" or "arm". In Hebrew, it's the 10th letter, the smallest letter (jot or tittle), a little dot or black wing-stroke or swirl. A J-swirl.

The whole poem can be understood as an ekphrasis-expansion from the letter J. (When I was beginning to write it, I was heavily influenced by a particular Melville study, titled Game of Creation, by Viola Sachs, which goes into the scriptorial letter-symbolism deeply encrypted into Moby Dick.) A Book of J.

This practice is maybe a new-old kind of neo-medieval classicism : in which the individual imagination is not stifled by dogma, but tempered by the necessary impossibility of representing the Invisible, the Unspeakable.

Working like a maniac to edit & re-format Stubborn Grew for a new Lulu edition. Had to scan it from scratch.

Good for me to see it again, in pre-book form. Struck by how monumentally silly this poem is. Especially as it warms up, in the beginning : those thumpingly obvious rhymes... the scramble for a shtick...

No wonder nobody has seen fit to review it. It's very much out of every loop I, at least, can think of. Like a James Merrill play-acting at populism, so it starts out... I mean the whole tone of the thing, the goofiness. But the tone changes in the different chapters - gets better, relaxes, settles in... then spirals out of control...

Surprised again at the internal logic - I mean the way it forecasts the future (the future of the poem, mostly).

the beginning of July:

 1 
  
  
 Gray skies on a late spring day.  A start.  
 In the parking lot.  Pawtucket?  Cumberland.
 Sound of someone hammering – what?
 Iron.  Waiting for my daughter there,

  
 her tennis lessons.  Nowhere.  Somewhere.
 Out in the open.  Gray skies, hollow
 hammering.  A hole.  A whole
 world (of lonesome rune-moss).

  
 Armor.  Wheel.  Hubcap.  Sky-
 scraper.  Redmen in moccasins
 on rooftops – cashmere
 lamb's quarters and yaks –

  
 kayaks – stitched all around again?
 Like a lake in a corral – your
 coracle – row, row, row
 we go.  I'd like to... snag

  
 you, elbow room.  A Huckleberry
 getaway somewhere.  Wide grass
 where the hurt surges – surges
 like active vitamin – Buick

  
 in high gear.  I leaned back
 against the health club wall.
 Low sub-suburb, lawless.
 Clouds moving, carboniferous.

  
 Spaces for eyes.  Flag in yard
 beside white aluminum siding.
 Farmhouse hemmed inside
 clutter.  Derelict, dreary.

  
 But that hammering was happy.
 I was going into the meadows
 again – lose myself for good.
 So long, Julius.  So long, Pap.

     
                         7.15.99 (St. Henry's Day)
 
             *

 
 Upstream from Egypt or New Orleans, 
 north or south.  Colors on a raft 
 blend – snow, or Afro-cat. 
 Coffin for Ishmael.  Snore awhile  

 
 on board, then wake with another start 
 or vociferous snort – was it a dream? 
 Blackstone, with feet in cow-merde
 of New World – slow golden apple-taster –

  
 or Berkeley, testing all ten toes
 on reality stones – and the air so
 gentle, and the noise so seldom – soar,
 dream...  no machine, but a knotted

  
 meeting, under the apple trees and
 sweet grape vines.  Arbor day behind
 the cottage where LaFarge, Degas
 hibernated – downstream, tender

  
 colors merging, a harmony
 of many at the brown delta, singing.
 A Niger of negritude,
 or tunes of an old rhyme nomad –

  
 tapping feet while they waited there
 for the beginning and the end.
 Laden ship in the Nile den-
 mouth – moon-moth wreath –

  
 so diaphanous, yet overlaid
 like a tablet of the future law
 or tables carven in the wall
 of every hut.  Love-dreidle,

  
 homespun doodle.  A shadow
 gouache from treelimbs all at once:
 a see-saw operation of the sun
 or evening ocean on a beachhead.

       
                         7.16.99

My poems are a river, and my Poem is ABOUT the river beside which I was born & raised. Get used to it, folks : I AM the "mainstream"!

HGpoiesis. A Marsden-Hartleyan, feline-Pushkinian, topogenetic, geometrical landscaping, elaborated in >Stubborn Grew & The Rose (ie. Forth of July). Here's the math problem:

Florida, the St. P. of America, drips Seaman HHC, spread-eagled, off S.S. Orizaba into Vortex near Cube. His body, recovered by Herman the Merman, is delivered to WW in the Delta (under the sigla MM, Bride of J). The coffdropped one miraculously swims upstream & is nursed back to health by Seaman HHG at Lake Itasca, aboard the S.S. Abbazero. Can you square this circle, using only one honeycomb? You may have to consult a Russian chess whiz.

What does all this have to do with "The Matrix"? (haven't seen it) Build a fake real using pomo white holes?

No thanks - I have my own spiral jetty.
Go directly to J via St. Pete hidden @ P the G's florid navel. Do not stop at Go

something from the Orgone Box (of July) (with some spacings between phrases missing, as usual) for May Day :


4

Dr. Neil De Grasse Tyson is laughing
(kneeling in de grass) as he scampers down
a spiraling ramp of time in the renovated
heavens of the Hayden Planetarium (falls

the length of a football field at Victoria,
they say) (the ramp represents 13 billion
years of evolution) plucks a liberal
hair-width from his visitor’s head (cave

drawings to Now only one three-thousandth
of an inch on this walkway) but will
uncork a Chateau Latour 1900 (with a twinkle)
to celebrate the flow of time (south, north. . .)

as the Fidèle glides into St. Louee
with another boatload of Flying Fools
and the gyroscope oscillates between Wolof
Ndar (near the mouth of the Sénégal)

and that clay-clad fur-trading guest
at the mouth of a wild Missouri
(from Great Lakes to the Gulf) (we resume
on a raftered board of information, staggering

from Huck to Jim and back to Finn again)
and one lucky fellow from nearby St. Paul
debarks, he thinks, for Paris in 33 laps
a man in cream-colors sudden as a grinning

griffin doubly doubtful, you know
him best astride that albino fifth mare
riding into the incredible roll-call of the Ram-
rod ironclad hoarse hi-ho silvery clay-borne

moor. . . that sileage mariner or masked
moron who wins the day with a myrrh-bullet
that wounds but does not kill (tolerable well
I think you know him flighty Viking scam-

divine semi-bateau or smorgasbord)
his I.D. was an island donnybrook
for many a gnomon sheared from the corps
legion and foreign to us all, Cappy (Sargasso

is as good as mine, I guess) Swede?
Great Dane? Some serious kid on the lam?
With a side for existence (Bacon’s moll)?
Underneath the stones and ridicule? Deuce

or Jack? Demure, with marked cards on deck?
Dimly lit lying on a bed of ruses
severe (a little irritable devil –sure,
sometimes) still he wore the drastic keds

inside out, sprinting those finnish loins
around about a decade be-shipped at zee
spun back through a dawn-spout (easy)
countertop crisscrosswordwise (like a snail-

shell on a leash) and carrying the clay-
coated Mexicali canopy midnight to Monday
with one hand (an eyesore) One happy demon
parsed with another innocent city-of-lakes

gaudi-looped gondola our double-U
booted sunny dung-beetled scarabified
rosetta-scrolled Popeye-rusted fiber-
optickled ghoul on a bender

sabled and speared first to steal
forth from that gilded Juligan’s chest
of seven myrrh-dropped home-stretched
boxelder cicada shells upon the waters

and dance Babe the Blue Ox or Ruth
amid the corny aliens after a Homer run
(from big J-lie) (to Jubilee-rumor) (by
way of a tricksy prairie bee) to third.

And there through those heraldic bronze
St. Louis Cathedral western gateways
curled like swimming agates
inwards and signifying “monkeys”

my keys, my keys, O Mon through the
intolerable clashing of egos (and Mr. Gell-
Mann’s routine and obnoxious legendary
put-downs) through the seemingly

intractable symmetry-breaking dispersion
of theories and regular Regge poles and
so on on the throne experimenters (sloppily)
jockeying particle accelerators (up to 20 billion

electron-volts) and the cold fusion of wars
of words the privatical pride of little swords
and hoards of awards on family rudders
oared undergound the narrows of old saws

and sorrows of old Noah and all his waves
and drafty spoons in the inward parts
of the country through all the traps
and the satraps the unpropitiated vows

and the brown gods almost forgotten
implacable watching and waiting
there in the curl of two
crossed fiddleheads a target nef:

smaller and smaller in your palm
gleaming softly ruby and green
like a foursquared loop rung
from one ladder-stem and marbled

like the steps of Oz at the gates
of the Emerald City a handy green
houseboat toto in tornado and Grendel-
gloomed hidden and lucky as a stage-

coach for Atahuallpa on the 29th
slate footstep of the following month
(his octopus depth-grammar, submollified
and cupped for a last millwheel

in Cuzco) ah John John the piper’s son
playing his Andean crane bone
wingèd like a fluted nacreous nob
or happy cap of Shakespeare’s dad

a nonsense duo route of many-coated
rainbow ink across a sunny turtle’s back
aloft now Spirit of St. Louis Lucky’s toot
so sweet to Notre Dame decoded

ink incredible bibliothèque of farther queues
for young men should be old explorers, and
clovers, circling prairies of young bees
that’s my Danish nutshell, Socrates


12.31.99

Jordan blogues:

"Not for the righteous but for the sinners: a preacher on the A platform at 125 last Friday (Greek Good Friday) likened faith in God to the certainty when above the surface of the water that we will be able to breathe."

Baptism. Water & Fire. The Spanish name for the Mississippi River was Rio del Espiritu Santo. (In July, Bluejay at the nadir of the delta pulls Henry out of a well & puts a paper hat/boat on his head.)