Lanthanum, 7/4

Here's something from the 2nd volume of Lanthanum (drawing toward the center of the poem, now...). I'm only posting this because I can't imagine any magazine wanting to publish this very obscure passage... (p.s. "soul liberty" was a phrase Roger Williams used to characterize his notion of freedom of conscience. & the bit about "Cyrus" draws on Sir Thomas Browne's wonderful & justly famous numerological-botanical essay titled "The Garden of Cyrus". & "perfect rune"? Well, in a sense this refers to the number 28, the number of lines in this poem, which is a "perfect number", & has long been associated with the lunar calendar).

6.2

Quiet, all quiet... the
boom of last night's fireworks giving way
to sunny Sunday, 7/4. Soul liberty,
he said - only a single secret path through the

labyrinth. Its perfect rune, rhyming
with lofty, solitary moon (not white
not black, but dappled by limestone light
that shines before stars start wandering)...

one seven added to those fifty stars
that shimmer in the haze of history -
for sabbath-day, for Jubilee - really
one red & cardinal number (yours)

for wedding memory & justice (everywhere).
Cyrus planted a garden once, to celebrate
Earth's intricate flourishing (a quince quintet);
the center of the world, enclosèd there,

was calm (slight violet eye, beholding
hurricane). It was his grandmother, calling;
it was his grandfather, responsive, echoing;
before Cyrus was born, before Time began -

a wedding-song, a dream, a constancy.
An octave note, for makings of one family
from reconciling tribes, & tyrants finally
dethroned - bell-booming independency

on earth, as it is... in Cyrus's garden;
when the milky light at last reigns equally,
& fifty stars are seven sisters (really
one star, one limestone pentagon...). & then...

7.4.10

Part of the misconception that Jonathan & others seem to have of Henry & "Henry" as being way too self-absorbed & narcissicistic - which of course is true, as it is of many artists - is that it's as if this long poem is simply an ego project. I'm spending time & energy defending & explicating it here not so much because it's me or mine - but because it's something that happened to me. This is partly what I was describing to Kent, below.

I suppose this is not very believable. Anyway, I'm also defending it because of my crazy faith in its objective worth as poetry, which value jars with its objective (non)reception in the literary world.

What I like about it anyway is not so much "Henry" or the biographical material or the birthdays, etc., but the simple music of the lines, stanzas, cantos, books - the way it changes, the way it hangs together.

Kent Johnson emailed me the following question, & suggested I post it with my response here. I'm doing so, despite misgivings : I don't like using the word "shit" in public (or private, actually). But according to such august authorities as Yeats & Akhmatova, this is where poems come from. . .

Henry, so all these connections and layers-- layers connecting and connections 
layering... You seem to be able to verify it all and with impressive empirical 
aplomb. 
> 
>  
Did you plan it all out, or did it just happen? 
> 
> 
 (A bit of both, I suspect, but could you talk about how all these tropic and 
allegorical interweavings were woofed on the warp and vice versa? You might 
consider this a follow up question to our interview at Jacket.)
> 
>  
Kent

 
Hi Kent,

 
it's hard to explain, because as you know writing happens in sort of a liminal 
area.

 
I remember a key moment when I was reading the Mandelstam Voronezh poems again, 
about "black earth". I have a feeling for that kind of landscape, coming from 
where I do. Who knows, maybe on a certain freudian level it's all just playing 
with shit (like the kid in the poem I published today, playing with mud between 
her legs)!!

 
But there was a moment when I was identifying with the sound & imagery of that 
rural place which OM was evoking, & I linked it with "letting go", & going into 
the earth, & somehow retrieving all the broken things in my life from the past & 
dealing with them (unrequited love, divorce, Julie's suicide, etc.) - & doing 
this through the Orpheus thing. all that plus actively "mimicking" a certain 
sound I thought I heard in the Voronezh poems.

 
At that moment, when I think of it, I was at a point where all my somewhat 
unsuccessful efforts were behind me, as PRACTICE & preparation, & something new 
was about to unfold.   The best way I can describe it, is that it happened - all 
those layers & connections - the way an algorithm works. A fairly simple 
combination creates a certain energy-stimulus : and that energy AUTOMATICALLY 
starts to spiral & complexify. That's what it felt like to me. Those 3 yrs or 
so writing this poem, I was exploding with connective energy.  It wouldn't let 
me go. I certainly didn't "plan" it all. when I finished Stubborn Grew, I 
thought it was done. Then when I finished Grassblade, I thought it was done. 
But only a few days after finishing each book, the next book would come at me 
like a giant WAVE. I felt a kind of dread when that happened because I knew how 
much time & energy it would involve, totally absorbing. "one thing led to 
another".

stay warm,
Henry

almost pointless to take snippets from the Dream Songs. the whole thing is a commentary on Forth of July - or I should say, vice versa is the case.


from # 103:

I consider a song will be as a humming-bird
swift, down-light, missile-metal-hard, & strange
as the world of anti-matter
where they are wondering: does time run backward -
which the poet thought was true; Scarlatti-supple;
but can Henry write it?

HGpoetics readers might well be bewildered by all this emphasis on dates, birthdays, numbers. etc. What's the point?

I go back to something I mentioned at the beginning of this present run of blog entries on the long poem : that Forth of July is built on a kind of analogical thinking. The myth of Orpheus - the original poet, who brings stones & trees & animals to life with song, & goes singing into Hades to retrieve his wife Eurydice - this myth, in Forth of July, "narrates" a poetics, or a philosophy of poetry, in which the poetic word is in turn analogous (A = A) to the creative Word of Love, which - intervening - renews, resurrects, recreates life itself.

"Henry" - & I use the quote marks consistently, out of a sense that I, Henry Gould, author, am sort of dramatized/translated in the process of the poem into something else, a figure in the song, "Henry" - re-enacts the orphic myth through what I described earlier as a process of "decomposition" - a simultaneous unveiling, unearthing, & exploration, combining personal & historical realities within a "song-framework". Thus the experience of mortality is reconfigured by song (5.29 mingled with 7.4 and 1.6, and with everything those dates (& others) come to represent) into a pattern of confession, hope, renewal, victory, and a kind of cosmic image of reality shaped by the Word. "Birth-days" marked by death & hopelessness (Juliet Ravlin's father's birthday & her own dying-day; John Ravlin's birthday/John Berryman's dying-day) are gathered in memoriam into a new day, a new shape of time. This is the reproduction of the orphic action which is the poem itself (Juliet to jewel-eye, or J-ley...).

One can analyze & talk about it forever, yet only the poem alone can justify itself, in itself, by itself, being what it is, a song. As the old poem from Way Stations has it:

The poet is monotonous, his head
resting on her empty sleeve,
his voice out of the mineshaft
muttering rumors of precious gems.

 
And stars shine in the black sky,
peacefully, released at last
from that deep unspoken gloom
by his aimless, undying lament.

Another structural note: noticeable, the design of Grassblade Light, based on 7 panels each containing 28 sections of 28 lines, 4 x 7 = 28 : 7 quatrains of 4 lines each : title of book is Forth of July, ie. 7.4 : the "coming forth of Julie, jewel-eye, Bluejay...".

Forth of July is "incarnational", ie. grounded by numbers & letters & places & persons & names & dates.

5.29 intersects with another pattern of dates, around Epiphany (Jan 6th). Several sequences from the opening of Stubborn Grew initiate this complex. The "narrative" element of Stubborn Grew actually opens with an elegy for James Ravlin, "Henry's" maternal uncle, father of Juliet Ravlin:

6

                 
                  i.m. James Ravlin, 1912-1997

 
Light quick mosquitos speed flitter
and slide at latter-day angle easily
mounting every corniced ingle and
fuming, spuming, better, better and better.

 
Mosquitoes there were in Saskatchewan,
where you were born, between
Granddad's grain
elevators, Grandma's steel-eyed span.

 
Those clever, clever lips hovered
in camel smoke
like a Cheshire hookah, smiled.
And tumbled out an accent stranger

 
and stranger. What flute
troubled earth to bear him?
The bare tongue-footed ague of him?
The sweet-eyed flourish, the high note

 
of his Viennese liner?  Where now,
sailor-man, handsome PT-boat boy-o?
He sleeps in his long canoe.  He is
scattered... a late Minnesota snow.

 
Unmoored from the height of land,
drifting from Lawrentian divide,
blueberry, pine, air-filled
cliff, the taste of iron.

 
The cherry trees and the dogwood
bloom now in this sinner-town.
Pale green sprays tender
over the graveyard.

 
Soon come the clever mosquitoes,
the new swarms.  I inch along.
A snail, with prairie on my tongue.
Hesitant, grieving, stubborn grew, the rose.

Proceeding directly after this poem comes the first invocation of Juliet Ravlin, "Henry's" cousin, daughter of James Ravlin, & the presiding spirit of the orphic "ghost dance" at the center of Forth of July. Juliet committed suicide off the Golden Gate bridge at the age of 19, on her father's birthday.

James Ravlin's father, John Ravlin, engineer builder of bridges & grain elevators, was born on Jan. 7th (1889, I believe). On Jan. 7th, John Berryman leaped from a bridge into the Mississippi River, down the block from & within sight of John Ravlin's home on River Road. "Henry" has been recounting these strange birthday stories ever since. From the 2nd chapter of Stubborn Grew, titled "Ancient Light":

Bruegel.  Adoration of the Kings.  1564.
In the National Gallery in the heart of London
in the hands of black Balthasar in a green
conch on a gold nef.  Is that a monkey there?

 
And the scrawny peasants and the bourgeois tubs
staring at all that gold and frankincense, miraculous!
O clever, clever, clever calculation - and finesse, too!
The has-been, burnt-out Wise Men ignore the rubes

 
meanwhile - have eyes only for the grinning pug
hidden in swaths of shrinking violet or
marigold blue (I can't remember)... for He
shall Rule the Nations - snug as a bug in a rug.

                     
                          *

 
And Henry... what about Henry?  Is he ever
coming around again?  I wonder.
Around Epiphany, his mind began to wander,
they said.  Still have a Q in his quiver?

 
On Twelfth Night he remembered his grandfather's
birthday.  Granddad, Builder of Grain Elevator,
pere apparent of his mother - of the
grainstock of generations, ruler.

 
Hardy pioneer, flower grower.
Opera lover.
Mother's middle name - Elvira.
Clay vine of Ravlin violin - e vero.

 
The higher you go the more grain implodes.
Spontaneous combustion fertilizer
mounts to flood tide and none the wiser,
the straight line of inheritance erodes

 
and out of stumped Henry begins to drift
an example of poor penmanship.  Bark
of a splintered retriever out of work
and out of time in London's night shift.

 
So many neighborhoods of rotisserie syllables!
Nobody needs your babytalk victories, your
bosky driftwood, boy.  Work another hour -
or metro enthused back homeless to Minneapolis!

Forth of July turns calendar dates & birthdays into structural numbers. Thus May 29th : "Henry's" birthday, also RI Statehood Day, JFK birthday, day after Blackstone's burial, day after saint's day of Guillem de Gellone, Black Wednesday (5.29.1453), etc.

A bald list of such conjunctions seems rather meaningless. But the calendrical "rhymes" are elements in the construction of a narrative & thematic whole : "a 28 / nestled in 29". "Henry" represents the poet in a pattern of orphic returns or resurrections, a "ghost dance" for the American long poem, for the poet-suicides (Crane, Berryman - the author of the "Henry" Dream Songs), for Juliet (the poem is a "coming-forth of Julie"). That the entire poem is completed on 5.28 "fixes" the conjunction Blackstone/Henry/Rhode Island ("the rose" of Stubborn Grew/The Rose).

The structure of the central book of Forth of July, Grassblade Light, consists of 8-in-7 large chapter-panels, each consisting (with variations) of 28 sections of 28 lines each (7 quatrains), centered on a 29th section of 4x4 or 16 stanzas. The entire book is centered on a single stanza at the center of the doubled panel "Ghost Dance", in the following section:

28

 
As the whirring shape of a hummingbird
like a miniature bluejay overhead or
bee suspended over the clover
whispered

 
Love is our North Star high up above

 
I heard and
(as the rustling of that honey-mover
swelled across a grass-clay sheep-door)
lay in the sweet soil listening for your word.

                    
                        4.10.99 [note: Stubborn Grew, the previous book, 
                    was completed on 4.10.98, the year before]

Thus the entire poem is oriented at its center on the "North Star" (in Minnesota, the "North Star State", at the headwaters of the Mississippi) - which as this 28th section relates, represents the "tautology" (A = A) - Love/Word/Cosmos (explained a few days ago on this blog).

As I've often repeated, almost all of Forth of July is an address to, a conversation with, the spirit of Russian poetry, as manifested particularly in Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, & Elena Shvarts. Why is this? Or where does it come from?

I trace it back to the mid- to late-1970s, when I first encountered the dual presence of Osip Mandelstam's poetry (in the early David McDuff translation), and the memoirs of his wife Nadezhda. At the time I was slowly groping my way back into writing, after having renounced it in the early 70s (the aftermath of a psychological-spiritual crisis, which I have described somewhat in an essay in the memoir for Edwin Honig, A Glass of Green Tea).

The work of this pair of writers - the poet & his survivor & memoirist - had what I would call a very powerful "normative" effect on my thinking. Mandelstam's inspired, gorgeous & mysterious poetry is situated, put in context, by his wife's astonishing, razor-sharp, humane, cultured, & resolute literary response to the terrifying era of Lenin, Stalin & their followers, from the 20s to the 60s.

To a young person experiencing extremes of spiritual dislocation & homelessness in 70s America, along with alienation from his own writing talent, these writers came as enlightenment, saving grace. I was able to reconnect to American poetry through them. & the result was, I could no longer respond to the American tradition I was exploring (Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Crane, Williams, Olson, et al.) without hearing these poets through a Mandelstamian lens. The era of 20th-century poetry was a different assemblage of Eliotic "tradition" due to this Russian influence.

The impact of Mandelstam's revolutionary-yet-classic lyricism, his riddling imagery, led me back into my own poetry. This, combined with the impact of the epic thrust of the long-poems of Crane, Pound, Williams & Olson, fired my ambition to re-interpret, to re-shape Pound's "poem including history" according to my own, different, lights. These were the 2 fundamental motivations driving my effort - at least on the conscious level. But poetry works at a deeper-than-conscious level; and my experience of diving into the long long poem involved letting it bring forth its own shape & reveal its own expanded (both high & murky) motivations. Yes, "the plot thickens. . ."

People want me to be clearer, more comprehensible, include lengthier selections of my poem. It seems to me I've posted quite a bit of Forth of July lately, along with links to longer passages.

Besides, I'm not here to make it easy for you : it's not easy for me! Why simplify a complex game, one which I've put my heart & soul into for years? My poetry is not a fast food franchise.

This is my "free time", provided free to anyone interested. You don't like my product, so long, das vidanya.

In the same way that Mandelstam/Aristotle's "law of identity" (A = A) marks the tautology of a universe in which Word=Love=Cosmos, the "Orpheus/Eurydice" romance adumbrates or narrates a reality brought back to life by song (Orpheus' lyre caused stones & lambs & lions etc. to sing together) : just as poetry invites its listener into a "Now" of loving creative play. So for the infinitely hungry "Henry" of Forth of July, Mandelstamian Russia is reborn, re-incarnated in the Petersburg (city of the "Midnight Sun") poet Elena Shvarts (etymologically, "shining black") - the heiress of Russia's "black sun" (cf. Mandelstam), Pushkin. The hunt for "Pushkin the black cat" leads through Bluejay back to Petersburg (by a roundabout route).

from the 2nd chapter of Grassblade Light, "Letters to Elena":

         10


  
         Pushkin's catgut stretches taut
 across the wood.  From here to there
 it's a walking game (your
 move, Beatrice).  Astigmatism taught

  
         you better than they knew : Jerusalem
 both here and there.  Many thousand gone,
         one just begun, my Lord.  Is just begun.
 Body and soul, tourist-pilgrim,

  
         heart-mind, lover-beloved,
 promise-desire, shroud-ark...
 Elena, nightmares of the shark
 will never shake your silhouetted

  
         chariot's erratic circuits over Venice
 (like a spiral J at sunset).  East
 to west.  Human-beast,
 animal-flower, water-stone.  Finis.

  
         And a wave-curve emerges
 continuously out of these
 reflections as
 the blurred eye sees

  
         and the blind eyes feel
 and in the adjacent niche
 the icon's eyes reach
 forward toward you... seal

  
         that endless enigma of longing
 sin remorse and imperfection.
 All is resurrection now – and
 a slow walk toward spring.


      
                                    1.25.99

[note: human-beast, animal-flower, etc., and the "circuits over Venice", refer to 3 famous Shvarts poems, "Elegy on the Cardinal Points", "Animal-Flower", and "The Virgin Rides on Venice, and I on Her Back", available in English in the Bloodaxe selection of her work, Paradise.)

The triple form of the argument or plot of Forth of July, as I've described it, gets back to question I mentioned a couple days ago : why does Bluejay disappear at the conclusion of the 1st part of Stubborn Grew? After leading Henry on what he thinks is an epic re-enactment of Dante's descensus inferos, into local Rhode Island history?

Bluejay disappears because Henry must undergo further descents & disintegrations before he can speak & recognize the truth; in the process, the truth becomes first "nationalized" (the dream-journey up & down the Mississippi, the encounter with Whitman, Lincoln, New Orleans, etc.), further "poeticized" (the Orphic drama of raising the dead Juliet & the suicide-poets Berryman & Crane), further universalized (the infiltration of Biblical, Russian, prehistoric-shamanistic, Vallejo-Peruvian, etc. elements), and further personalized (as the motivations, desires & actions of Henry are unveiled, the search for a "lost cat Pushkin" leads, at the end, to an identification with the villain in Pushkin's gambler tale Queen of Spades).

All these developments are prefigured in miniature in various sections of Stubborn Grew (the 2nd chapter, "Ancient Light", is a virtual microcosm of the entire poem); in the 2nd half of Stubborn, after Bluejay has disappeared, the poem subsumes both Pound's Cantos & Joyce's Finnegans Wake in paired parodies delimited by the Falstaffian "downfall" - & hinted recovery - of "Henry" at the very end of the book (finished on Good Friday evening). Before he leaves, Bluejay continually hints & predicts to Henry that he is still unaware of the deeper purposes of their trip.

The emotional affects or effects of this "descent-ascent" vary greatly - basically the whole poem is a set of ring-changes in various emotional & visionary keys - but here's just one sample from toward the end of the poem of the mingled sense of universality & personal displacement or journeying (from July):

         5

  
         You stole through the Hopkins cemetery   side-
 stepping the gravestones   while for 35 years
 you hid a pebble on your tongue   unsavory
 Bosch-man unsavior   unable to decipher

  
         the broad paths of the Republic   nor
 the narrow corridors   footprints of
 one sole's   limping history   interpretations
 of a colorful clan   shaded by particulars of

  
         unacknowledgeable shame   your private
 Halloween mocks you   dog star   a silver
 stake left (pointed, unconnable)   reveals
 a secret ski-pole star   black vapid revels

  
         of unlaminated Pushkin   the wager you bet
 unaware one night   against your neighbor
 and if forgiveness comes (your rubbery rosary
 well-said from sad well's   deep tab's tub)

  
         it must come from her who   rose   a stone
 from the depths   of your fire-tonged
 prison   Henry   for whom you return in
 ash-strewn flame and   a reverse nostos

  
         where the vernal jewel   of a summer submarine
 repels the magnetic pole   downward   toward
 the bull's eye   of your signful urn   (retarded
 twice-embossed   crossed-out   snaildrum)

  
         heart and   hope to die   the children swear
 over the grave   pregnant   beneath layers of
 ice-coated Qs   and endless lines of   wayfaring
 strangers   in a winded   anti-host-figure

  
         to that crossroad   mapped red-eye   trained
 on your heart   dead-central   lemon   a
 cup of green   Teo-Hiawathan T   the scent
 of death   steam-railing toward   a restoration

     
                                       1.22.2000

What is a long poem?

They come in a great variety of forms, obviously, but what interested me in the beginning was how its 20th-cent. American versions carried forward & revised the epic mode.

Northrop Frye wrote a useful summary of its generic attributes. Among them are the epic's encyclopedic & cosmogonic qualities, the aim to present an image of universality.

One of the contrasting or counterbalancing characteristics of 20th-cent. poetry, though, from Symbolism on, was a push toward aesthetic autonomy, self-sufficiency, singularity : the idiosyncratic charm of modernist poetry lies in its assertion of the humble-sturdy beauty of things in themselves, including poems-as-poems. The poem becomes a delightful & useless contraption, rather than a utilitarian medium for something else. This is a particularly American spin on the notion of "invention" - & it goes somewhat against the grain of America's own iron laws of practical & useful enterprise.

& I think this idiosyncratic autonomy is what differentiates my own poem (Forth of July), contra Jonathan, from the prosaic medium of traditionalist narrative long poems.

Forth of July, as a form of late modernist epic, presents an encyclopedic cosmogony of sorts; & I think this was probably the underlying motive propelling its construction. Moreover, it's a cosmogony founded on a strictly poetic equation. A better phrase for this would be "poetic axiom", or poetic given : which, in any realm other than poetry, would probably be considered a tautology. As Milton understood, the frame & plot of epic is built on its "argument"; but in the 20th century, the age of autonomy & self-reflexivity, art focused more than ever before on the notion that its best, perhaps only, "argument", is its ability simply to be : all the assertions and denials which proceed from that are merely corollaries of an irreducible & complex manifestation.

A tautology is a kind of "ring structure", the primordial form of traditional epic poetry; we might liken it also to Mandelstam's (contra Symbolism) "law of identity" : "A = A".

Readers may be surprised at how postmodernist my discourse here is tending. Yet this tautological law of identity is more radical than standard postmodernism allows. Underlying the law of identity is an assertion of unity and universality, ie, "A = A" includes the universe (whereas in postmodern thought, "all" is "nought", and identity is an illusion with totalitarian implications).

The fact that a contemporary long poem has an argument of any kind, no matter how obscured, confused, and tautological, points up a distinction between (at least one aspect of) modern & postmodern; the corollaries of an argument for "identity" (A = A) lead to unities of form & construction which postmodern literature denies. I think this distinction is part at least, of the challenge my poem offers to the contemporary climate.

But can I be more explicit about the argument underlying Forth of July? How is it a strictly "poetic axiom", a tautology?

The argument of Forth of July can be likened, with reservations, to the controversial "anthropic principle" in physics (itself a kind of tautology). The epic journey-story of narrator "Henry" - with the help of spirit-guide "Bluejay" and wisdom-spirit "Blackstone" - does three coordinated things simultaneously. It unveils the layered roots of desire motivating the experiences of personal history ("Henry's confessions"); it unveils the roots of local, national, & strictly literary history as a story of repressed & denied realities (Bluejay's "basement" narration of Rhode Island & United States from the perspective of a homeless black/native American crazed ghost of ambivalent sexual proclivities); and it asserts that global history itself pivots on a mysterious "intervention" in human time & affairs of a Word of Love, analogous to poetry itself.

In this third element lies the ring structure or tautological aspect of the epic argument. For if human time & history pivot or revolve on a Word of Love comprehended by humankind, then poetry is a manifestation or mimetic image of same. The "wildness" of poetry, the poetic license which spins objective realities into dream-speech & fiction, comes round again (the ultimate "ring structure"): turning, as Whitman knew, on the essential, the most fundamental purpose of speech in the first place : to build a home for human beings, through love-speech (mother-love, father-love) - to reconcile the child to the mortal world. Mandelstam called this "domestic hellenism".

Typical dismissive comment from Jonathan Mayhew. I'm very used to this sort of thing.

Forth of July is much closer to the long poems of either the "Pound" wing or the "Crane" wing than to Derek Walcott or most other contemporary-traditionalist narrative poems. But pigeonholes make thinking so quick n' easy...

This see-sawing back & forth between dramatic action & meditation is repeated through Forth of July, with growing intensity; thus, after the fireworks of July appears the visionary brief coda to the entire poem, titled Blackstone's Day-Book (published with the sonnet sequence Island Road; also in the complete sequel to Stubborn Grew, titled The Rose). Here is a sample from that section:

         7


  
         Your law shines from the depths, a stone
 of mutual promises, dropped ex caelis
 to the navel of the earth, at the sea's
 lair.  There it gathered your gravitons,

  
         gradually, from a massive rug of tangled
 superstrings – Love, from the height
 of night (through funnel of Amphitrite).
 The tiny strings thundered, wrangled –

  
         from the far-off realm of Prester John
 across horse-grass dominions (Scythia,
 Sarmatia) to labyrinthine Pythian
 Rhodes – it was inwound cornu,

  
         your love – sheath of dome,
 ark of Shittim wood – a 28
 nestled in 29, sword-blade
 bent straight again (Rome,

  
         roaming, Romany, along a knife-edge
 trimmed with fish-scales – serpentine,
 sly, undoing Knight and Amazon
 with quintessence of Negus-

  
         mystery).  Where stale steel of the Ossete
 meets tempered gaze of his twin-Tartar
 Amazon upon a span of tears – where
 a grain-bin swells, and sweetly

  
         soars (fluted in stone).  I hear, I hear
 ice breaking, underneath a bridge. . .
 in a land of whirring wings,
 beyond the rivers of Ethiopia.

      
                                   4.6.2000

Blackstone in Forth of July tends to emerge in the aftermath of action, out of the shadows. Thus Grassblade Light, the sequel to the tumultuous Stubborn Grew, begins with its first chapter-panel, "The Lost Notebooks", set in an autumnal-winter landscape with a meditative Blackstone at the center. (The book opens with an epigraph from Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano:

–"Talking of corpses,"– the Consul poured himself another whiskey  
and was signing a chit book with a somewhat steadier hand while Yvonne  
sauntered toward the door –"personally I'd like to be buried next to  
William Blackstone –"  He pushed the book back for Fernando, to whom  
mercifully he had not attempted to introduce her.  "The man who went to  
live among the Indians.  You know who he was, of course?"  The Consul  
stood half toward her, doubtfully regarding this new drink he had not picked up.

Then he emerges again, in the fifth panel ("Of W.B."), following the central double-sized panel ("Ghost Dance"), and before the final nekuia tour-de-force descent of "Giants In the Earth". He transmits elusive, visionary messages, links between the "American" epic of Henry, Bluejay & Juliet, with his own Mandelstamian-Biblical-global sources. Here's a sample from "Of W.B.":

         3
    
                       Heart be ashamed of heart,
               blent with life's foundation.

  
         You close your eyes when the wind blows,
 all ears.  And maybe we are Hagia Sophia
 with a million eyes, he said – a ganglion,
 or gong of ganglia.  Henry goes

  
         back to the school bus (surrounded
 by the profane indifferent gang) after
 the field trip to Symphony Hall.  Were
 they all so deaf, indeed?  Was he all alone?

  
         Heart soldered open by the solemn
 strings, he walked back slowly, hidden
 in that crowd of blasphemers.  A Stephen
 pacing toward his crown – toward Jerusalem.

  
         Each to his own idolatries – candles by night,
 a parasol by day – will fall (in the drift of wind's
 sly invisible eddies).  I labor toward a double-
 bind of iron, or some trans-manual sleight-

  
         of-hand:  earth's core, man's core, heart's coracle.
 Moored Sophie (high-prowed tugboat high
 above the clouds).  Rusty penny-gone-cowpie
 wheeling in the sky (transfixed, transrational).

  
         When the lamb sheds the last patches
 of Joseph's coat and limps toward
 the chimerical, histrionic ford
 (slowly).  Singing catches

  
         of Chippewa canoes, dream songs
 and rainbow trout flickering upstream.
 Furtive Sheba, Phoebe.  Off the dark limb
 of Lemba arrowroot (a lambent Iron Range).

     
                              5.11.99 [p.s. my daughter Phoebe's birthday;
                                          also date of founding of Constantinople]


 4


  
         To close your eyes and see,
 to sink back upstream into foam
 with Maximus, in Byzantium –
 eyeless, both his hands cut off.

  
         A cross-grained infinitesimal
 continuous bridge, salted
 with a mustard seed
 of fire.  Tall,

  
         leering, lowering, limping –
 mother-hearted fisherman-
 brother-father – blind
 in Gloucester (wintering

  
         over).  Toward infinite
 heaven in your palm –
 the coin of the realm.
         One penny (Whitman's

  
         Ringside Indian path) milks
 the galactic glide, sailing
 like iron filings drawn
 into a compass rose

  
         from dust (magnetic net
 threaded from a motherlode
 under the volcano).  And voila!
 the sweet delicate trap is set:

  
         where the meek and sheepish
 toreador tears the veil of terror
 from the red heart of Ferdinand's
 wind-world (snore. . . swish, snore. . .)


     
                                    5.12.99


  
         5


  
         I peer into the neglected garden womb.
 A book of roots, of infinitesimal
 problems.  Lucky to come
 up with something very

  
         small (but more than zero).
 Blackstone's lawbooks follow
 feisty Williams – like the shadow
 of a gnomon hugging a slow ewe

  
         out of the cyclopean cave.  Where
 the clay circulates in angry circles
 (each violent escape you crave reels
 echoing back (each little lever-

  
         tone swollen) on an unreal screen) –
 your children's school a missile site.
 So the tower of Salomé fell.  White
 foam, pigeon-platter.  Hush-bane.

  
         Sill, sileage, loam.  Humus, composted.
 Composed, posthumous.  Plowed by a blade
 like silver water now, continuous.  Wade
 in, break the surface.  Where you situated

  
         the reservoir (Blackstone's heavy book of
 Providence).  At the base of the mast.
 Where the doubloon gleams.  Past
 the greenhouse windows – love-

  
         penny, afloat below, full-fathomed now.
 Like the clear mirror of one New England
 cubic Arcadia salt-savor, world without end
 and all amended.  Mustered.  Beaded.  So (W).


      
                                           5.13.99

It would be pointless for me to pretend to be cognizant of & attuned to the threads in po-biz & blog chatter these days. I'm involved in a very slow process now of trying to orient my own writing & thinking in different directions. Part of that does involve looking back at the long-poem efforts which absorbed me for several years. I guess much of what I say about Forth of July here sounds about as obscure, eccentric & irrelevant as can be. But for anyone who feels like looking into it, these blog notes might offer glancing openings to it. So I'll try to continue to spend a little time each day reviewing my own efforts, for my own benefit & for possible readers too.

I think of Forth of July as working in part by analogy, a structure of thematic parallels. Thus the notion of resurrection, or retrieving a connection with the dead, translates a concept of poetry itself (as a kind of vital experience of creative awareness or imagination) into a theme or a proto-narrative. The attempt to revive or reshape the American long poem & its meanings mirrors or parallels a theory or concept of the meaning of life & history in general. You could compare the process, oddly enough, to a run for the Presidency, say Howard Dean, for example. A heroic narrative (the outsider challenger, the knight on horseback) becomes a vehicle for the articulation of a perspective on broader questions.

In Forth of July, this theme of resurrection is channeled through the Orpheus story. "Bluejay", the ghostly shaman-spirit guide [Bluejay is the Orpheus-like protagonist in Northwest Coast Native American folktales] , leads "Henry" into the world of the dead. What seems in Stubborn Grew to be an attempt to come to terms with a dying marriage, proves to be, in the central book (Grassblade Light), a different psychic process, of coming to terms with the death by suicide of "Juliet" ("Henry's" cousin, who leapt from the Golden Gate on her father's birthday).

The central "panel" of Grassblade Light, titled "Ghost Dance", welds together many of the thematic parallels, in a kind of shamanistic resurrection of dead poets & poetry (Hart Crane, John Berryman), the long poem itself, and at the center, Juliet, bringing them all into the spiritual "now" of the "living, breathing" poem.

July, the third book of the poem, in turn, reckons with the illusions & limitations of the romantic-iconic summoning of the dead found in Grassblade, & goes further into a kind of "pure poetry" of America, oddly shedding/transposing some of the personal elements, while discovering & probing still deeper motives for the effort.

Here's a section from the final panel of Grassblade, titled "Rite of Spring":

         6


  
         The garden seethes with rust.
 The king's litter (a dry canopy)
 transported around a pool.  See
 the young maiden dancing,

  
         as she must – arm lifted,
 hand waving forward
 like a figurehead
 for the delicate ship outfitted

  
         to carry her.  And the ship
 carried on a breath of wind
 this way, that – bound
 on azimuthal slope

  
         to the meridian (one
 angled M-turn
 swollen with
         dying men).

  
         Gnomon of your returning
 Magdalen – to a green gar-
 den (time has never been).
 There's no more dying then:

  
         for the slave is free – fear
 swallowed up in victory –
 your vessel a flowering fiery
 myrrh-box adrift on a tear

  
         forever.  Where the dance
 begins and ends.
 No more dying then:
 the garden seethes

  
         with –

 
                                6.4.99

["Rite of Spring", of course, an allusion to the Stravinsky ballet about an iconic dying maiden, a spring sacrifice, folds into the Russian parallels of the poem, its return to its "Russian origins" - the instigation of Mandelstam's work - as well as the "springing" origins of the narrator - since the Rite was first performed on May 29, 1913, and 5.29 is the poet's birthday, and the numerical structure of Grassblade as a whole pivots on the number 29 - 5.29 being both the date of JFK's birth ("return of the American Camelot king") & of "Black Wednesday", the fall of Byzantium, 499 years before the poet's birthday.]

Large shape of Forth of July. . .

burial
rebirth
take-off & return (counter-time)

Stubborn somewhat like a Finnegan-Wakean burial (the book ended, literally & figuratively, on Good Friday evening). The 7 large "panels" of Grassblade Light, like a slow & gradual rebirth out of death & winter. This section (from the second panel, "Letters to Elena") illustrates to some extent the "syncretic" amalgam of Crane/Russia/apocalyptic time-warp renewal:

         21


  
         An airborne bluejay chasing shadows
 augurs fever's end – a port-in-air
 ship in a purple jar –
 blue joy or sadness, luminous.

  
         Petersburg Mews – nine times around
 with cat in tow – tiptoeing cat-
 o-nines leashed to the bowsprit
 there, where Time swam aground –

  
         your skin warmblooded blond limestone
 uplifted toward one temperate curve
 echoing heaven once again.  I carve
 a window out of sanded syllables soon

  
         through an hourglass formed by one paw
 slipped into yours.  Sound of cello...
 textured... faraway Gabriel's piano,
 all G minor... empty flask, unporous now.

  
         The yardarm swings these shadows...
 as the groundswell of the deep wave combs
 my shears away all hands now comes
 the anchor like a diving kingfisher goes

  
         down toward never-Davy Jonas, and
 the wind turns ready about and hard a-
 loo blew V blue J a whack ralay raloo ra-
 lonniga-lubber galoo baleen – grand

  
         banks of whales above us blowsprit, spout
 brit, sprout out loud and lubricate that
 navigator's coughing chugboat – so
 zesty with taffeta – so transvested with trout!


       
                                 2.4.99

My disparate, desperate imaginary world (Rhode Island, Minnesota, Mississippi, Russia, Byzantium, native America, Ethiopia, London, etc.). . . tied together with puns & rhymes. Pappy Rus. Juliet, jewel-eye, jubilee, Blue-J.

another section from July:


10

Across the wide ms. River shedding dough
and papyrus and leaping from junk
to junk the lincoln logs nudge
through dislodged snow driftwood

and balsam leaves and patches
of wet birch scrolled by heartworms
glowing under the bark the storm-
blown shells of beaver's feverish scrap-

muddled shields this is the stripped
taiga icebreaking in early spring
not unlike what you glimpsed
through the frozen window pressed

against the glass across rays of evening
through the black oak limbs peace
of horizon after century and seeping century
of sleeping centurions a last bronze shell given

away like a gong, Grandpa for distant Florence
swaddled in the haze of Voronezh hills
as the cardinal heart of a wood-dove swells
under the wooden ribs under their rough-

riffled sheath or shield of Grandma's
steel-eyed span the bird like a grain
of wheat (hidden there in Grandad's
elevator beneath remorse of guards)

piano thread of Pushkin-pizzicato violins
at the end indeed given not for the dead
but for the living a small knot of dried
clover out of mortgaged left field

shared by forty fingers in quartet
(thundering from empty oildrum of
Caesar's steel band's josh rolled-out)
a stalwart convalescent sweet Q-root

2.7.2000