A few notes regarding the obscurities of previous post (& other excerpts like it), for anyone interested. July is 3rd penultimate vol. of long long poem Forth of July (4th vol. is brief coda, called Blackstone's Day-Book, published with Island Road). Poem in previous blog entry of today is from 2nd, final section of July, called "The Green Constellation".

"G.C." is kind of ecstatic conclusion to whole poem, following 1st part of July, titled "Upstream, Down", which is kind of an imaginary "journey into the interior", down & up the Ms., paralleling the center of previous vol. Grassblade Light (Grassblade is centered on source of Mississippi; July is centered on the Delta).

Anyway, "G.C." was composed in four equal parts (24 poems each), sort of balancing the 1st 4 chapters of the 1st book (Stubborn Grew). Though the 4 parts are printed consecutively (I-II-III-IV), they were written "across", ie. I wrote them in this order: I.1, II.1, III.1, IV.1, I.2, II.2, III.2... etc. (each poem is dated, so the reader can read it "across or down"). The idea was to create this big sort of echoing square, thinking in part of the effect of Russian bells (cacaphonous-harmonious). As you get toward the end (I.24 etc), 4 letters standing for 4 bell-tones become more pronounced : D, F-sharp, A, E - the simple door-chime tones - except I inverted them to spell "F-A-D-E". You can see that the previous poem is from the "D" section.

The spanish quote in this poem from from Vallejo's "Poemas Humanas". Among other things, the section threads together various motifs from earlier in the work, including the balance of Caesar/Cesar (Vallejo), Julius (Caesar)/Juliet/Jubilee etc, March 15th (Ides of March) and April 15th (Good Friday - death of Vallejo & Abraham Lincoln), e-mpire and e-quality (under the shadow of the "W" &/or the gold doubloon nailed to the mast at the center of the Pequod (in Moby-Dick), from Quito, Ecuador (e-quator). The "Forth of July" figures the emergence of a "jubilee-bee" or butterfly from the husk or cicada shell or military shield of Julius (empire) - basically a sort of magic letter-game. What was an orphic "Romeo" search for a ghostly "Juliet" in Grassblade Light becomes a kind of spiritual image of metamorphosis on a cultural level in July. All this was oddly & shamanistically "predicted" by the Hermes/Orpheus-figure of "Bluejay" in Stubborn Grew.

I'll post another poem from the "Green Constellation" section which points toward the Russian bell phenomena. Incidentally, the penultimate section of the sonnet sequence Island Road (1996) is titled "To the Green Constellation". (The "Green Constellation", among other things, was actually the brand name of simple Sears typewriter, lent to me by Francesca Tagliabue, on which many of my early poems were written.)

"Mammon Lujius", in FW: MMLJ, Matthew Mark Luke John. "Lujius" an inversion (as is rhyme-scheme in Forth of July a.k.a. Stubborn Grew/The Rose book 3, July) - an inversion of "Julius". July begins on 7/15 - St. Henry's Day or St. Swithins' - the date on which in 1099 the crusaders entered the Holy Sepulchre. 33 years later (age of Christ): 1132, Joyce's motif date in FW : birthdate of Joachim of Fiore, theorist of the Age of the Holy Spirit. Christ-Finnegan wakes from the sepulchre (time-age reversal) after 33 years (1132). July plays verbally & thematically with inversion of Caesar & Caesarism throughout - going from July 15 toward Ides of March & April 15 (death of CESAR Vallejo & Abraham Lincoln on Good Friday). Julius to Jewel-eye to (trickster) jew-lie to J-muse. Recapitulation/inversion of western history.

(note recurrent motif of "132" in Stubborn & sequels: 1-3-2, the waltz-step. Number of rooms in the white house. Number of acres in North Main Cemetery (Providence). Square footage of Grace Church (center of downtown Providence). Number of Beethoven's greatest string quartet. Address of Francesca Tagliabue. a-one and a. . . )

something more from toward the end of July :


6

The little green house at the corner (132)
of Sixth and Rooster floats a silhouette
like an allegorical cut-glass tessellation
of a burly Flemish bull's-eye (some urnic

ox marks the spot) where the force
of your green-fused stupidity flowed
through the flowers so eminently flawed
with pickled contingency the surf

of an unspoken spidery silver web
that fibrillates this yet deeper grain
of your sure-gesso'd scenes
(full-staffed and bottomfished)

where you offended one whose forebearance
yet fares forward sans your maladjusted
dike of unclad guesses at the banquet sans
your make-amendments robed in fortitude.

Lent this salt of scented losing
this light ill-starred epiphany
take from my hands this paltry gift
of dead bees of honey into sun.

A tiny clover vesica stern as the crossroad
where Saint Loser's moldy Nilbred swims
bare into the starry brine of promised land
mend your way before a last crux of sorrow

calls from your long-distant home because
this green equation of the evening light
this liminal cupola te deum tiled
with grief is proven miniscule stone aspic

molded for each heart's red huffer like
the widow's mite the coral verdigris the
piper's penny paid each humble harvester
each able baby linking alms in a cloverleaf

1.24.2000

Not on strike, yet anyway. Another shot from toward the end of July:


6

The Negus is king at the sources of the Nile
and as you watched the last light
glimmer through the black oaks and the steel
span glinted (through the wavering lines

of cigarette smoke spiralling idly
from the mou of a Petersburg Pawnee)
down the River Road wan bishops
and white knights looked on amazed lady

as the smoke stirred like steam
over a winter font and thick curtains
of the god of chance obscured your tracks
but today I know what you want: the massed

bells toll faintly distant across the river
their high Sophie argot a glassy lalala
in the frozen box of myrrh Lena
your magna vox my stem of reverie

is Hope anchored in a tiny throaty clef of
clay overalls an infancy cup-map of those
all-human hills so clear in Tuscany so the
Lenten font is tenderly wrapt in a cloverleaf

with the fiery lightweight tongues of the nef
of bluedom's Jonah azure aquamarine
and the beginnings of a North Star's requiem
are yoked with lastful measure in the marshy fen

where an arcing Yule of lincoln logs emblazons
a Jubilee return-ship rocked in Armenian
cupolas and a myrrh-leaf catches the singing ray
re-framed refraining reigning in your eye-of-palm

centennial and Florentine the man with you
resists and wins the trophy of the solitary vigil
his the power to oppose to the burning-glass
that blinds the pawns your gaze of steel

1.24.2000

[p.s. my maternal grandmother's maiden name was Negus]

another section toward the end of July. (as usual there are missing spacings between some phrases. when the Opus Commodificopious is published, hopefully all will be corrected):


15

And when you forgive us our passion trees
as we forgive passing trees
planted o.k. steering
centered in the streaming Sophie

we will continue downriver
into the heart of the aleph into
the elephant ear the twin E
of summer Delphi a raven-ravined

mouth of dark lady's delta
the Southern Cross and
acorn of Africa scored
for thumb piano in delicate

palm of leaves of papyrus
we will float south upstream
toward Shebaa's sudden and mist-
wisteria'd swampland super-

saturated with seedlings and
Balthasar's handsome shadowy
handover to an infant she washed
and watched as she washed listen

for the cue of the alph-baton
in her vale of Captain Verde
an apple orchard unrevealed
where the fiduciary tablet of

the future lies in jewels of jade
and we will journey there again
ineffable, still unbaffled nugget
resting in the ruffled rustle of J-

shade beyond coppery way-rust
gone mossy Mississippi delta'd
into the Gulf and in Antarctica
everything turns left (leaf-stirred)

2.17.2000

from toward the conclusion of Forth of July (imagine some spacings between some phrases, which I can't manage in this system):


11

It's a narrow ford across the Jordan
a small cupola of water-light
and all our knowledge but a pond
a snoring frogpond madjayanine

when I go kigamanin I will give you
gocu surely gabizikamun what
you will wear widjiwiyun my courting
child if you go with me (the intervals

were sung glissando the metric is slow
and not rigidly maintained all the
Chippewa love songs somewhat rubato)
your little cuppa midway drum-waltz

to the clouds your mighty copper penny
is bronze s.o.s. unfolding as the bent
pole-stirrer of the clay my wee tugboat
alight musters that Julian draconian

taconite turning to caritas seed-jewel
before our eyes and if the bluish cloud
palm-shade Elijah's ravine-dulcimer
or Ezekiel's exact X-catenary wheels

are reels ambitious mother
then lucky Sophie dance!
And do a handstand
now with theremin

and soda (Scotch)
through golden Appalachia
flying the sunny disarray
(a coupla stingy wasps

are fighting bumblebees) (the bee
already master) where the yawning
oreship spreads dove-wings (yon Noah-
Jonah-craft) pshmwly (buzzing in Siberia)

2.8.2000

From Mandelstam's essay "The Word & Culture" (1921):

"Cultural values ornament the State, endowing it with color, form and, if you will, even gender. Inscriptions on State buildings, tombs and gateways insure the state against the ravages of time.
Poetry is the plow that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface."

With that in mind, some curious political-poetical correlations & my Forth of July: "poema" or long poem as a reflection of the "state". "the father of his country". Dubya, & the "W" etched into the East Side hillside, mirroring the eagle-eye "M" of Justitia in Dante's heaven (of Mars?). Inscriptions withstanding the corrosion of time. M & W forming cat's eyes. Pushkin the lost black cat, lost in Petersburg, lost in the Kremlin, lost (in Stubborn Grew) on Halloween & leading into the "catabasis" narrative. & who is the lost Pushkin, the lost black cat, the lost African elephant? The lost "W" in the heavens is Cassiopeia, the daughter of the Ethiopian queen. Ethiopia, "home of the lost ark of the covenant". Black-talk, Delta-talk in Forth of July, redman-talk, rus-talk. Primordial origins. Origin & end in the ark of Jubilee, Eden & Paradise. What is Jubilee? My politics: holiday, equilibrium, liberation, justice, equality, sanctioned by the time-warp ineffable intervening Ethiopian-Hebraic ark-word we don't yet comprehend.

Nutty Nile-notes.

Yes, & about that long poem (Stubborn Grew/The Rose - &/or Forth of July). I was looking out the library window this afternoon toward downtown Providence, trying to stay awake, thinking about the motivations which started back in the early 80s. Perhaps very big poems like the Divina Commedia really come from a similar impulse to the very brief poems, epigrams, Emily, Celan. The feeling that a prophet feels with words - Yeats' line, "speech after long silence". Facing the universe & trying to get it right this time, this once. Not so much an intellectual thing as an emotion, as when some serious music begins to take hold.

That was one aspect. Another motivation seems less exalted : a long poem allows you to dawdle, plan, cogitate, live with it - even when you're not ready to SPEAK that way. It's a way of getting old & set in your ways & unpoetic while remaining inside a POEMA (russian name for "long poem").

& the miracle was (at least from my biased experience) I got older & older & the poem(s) got younger. My early poems are older & creakier (I mean my early peoms from my SECOND phase. . . it gets complicated when you take a powder from poetry for almost 10 years).

The genre fascination, another aspect. There is a kind of hierarchy among the buildings. I mean the Bible & Dante are HUGE. . . & the American Long Poem (Pound/Crane/HD/Zuk/WCW/Olson et al.) bears a curious affinity to these ENCYCLOPEDIC works, these WORLD-CREATIONS. & this goes back to what I said above, about the motivation to say the absolute perfect thing, large or small. Pound: "who will lift the great acorn of light?" So it becomes a great game.

& it was a great game! Chess masters manuever within a nexus of thousands of moves. It began to feel that way, after I accepted the procedure I first caught from Mandelstam : the idea of a sequence of DRAFTS or variations on a theme. Many-in-one. It was a very simple idea which grows complexity. & it really worked for me. One thing you can see if you look for it in Forth of July is a progression from the opening chapter made up of very short distinct lyrics, to the next chapter in which the individual poems are linked more closely, to the next chapter in which they are linked less by narrative & more thematically, to the next chapter which pulls all of these together into an uber-narrative (Bluejay/Orpheus). . . to the 2nd half of the book which makes a larger, tighter amalgam in this vein, to the 2nd book (Grassblade Light) which crystallizes & formalizes the balance between whole & part, to the 3rd book (July), which subjects this crystal to SPEED & FLOW. . . There is a distinct progression from specificity & localness & narrative at the start of the poem to music & universality & indirection at the end. The narrative is there but it's part of a very elusive/allusive net toward the end, a sort of cabala of alphabetic characters & significant anniversaries. Under the sign of Orpheus & the shadow of William Blackstone & the light of "J" (Bluejay/Juliet/July/Jubilee/J). Overall the process of thematic variation or many-in-one begins to take on a life of its own as it unifies & draws taut its own materials even as it absorbs & swallows up an increasingly larger range of materials - the BLOB ! It must be this process itself which gives the sense of acceleration. Acceleration toward the past, the springtime, the Jubilee, the Eternal - a time machine. As I've already suggested in this blog somewhere, the notion of a time-warp or ark-machine or J-nave-ship is central to the "historical argument" of this long poem (one more of its motivations being to suggest something slightly different in the way of History than as provided by the other long-poem makers : not COMPLETELY different, but a variation (there are intimations of renovated time or life-renewal in Crane, Zukofsky, Pound, Olson. . . but I place the emphasis in my own way).

It will never be the Divina Commedia, which is the Mozart of poetry, the perfect crystal. But it is a kind of singing HG Sophia!

Valentine's Day & DATES. More about birthdays & dying days. More dissertation fodder for the 900 pp. poem Forth of July follows.

The poem ("Forth. . .") puns on the "birthday" of the USA.

Each of the 3 large books took close to 9 months to write. Gestation.

The poem's form & themes were sprung or triggered by a short elegy written for my maternal uncle James Ravlin which appears in the opening pages of Stubborn Grew. The section immediately following is a short elegy for my cousin Juliet Ravlin who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge on her father's birthday in 1972. Juliet becomes one of the Orphic figures : in a sense the poem is a "coming-forth of Julie".

Stubborn Grew ends on 4.10 - Good Friday. The short central section of the entire poem (#28 in Book 2 - Grassblade Light) was written on 4.10.

Grassblade Light is made up of seven chapters: each chapter (save the central one) containing 28 parts plus a central part; the central chapter is a double chapter with 2 halves of 28 parts each, centered (as noted above) on #28 of the 4th section. The 6th chapter, titled "Giants in the Earth", is kind of a microcosm/"underworld journey" of the entire book 2, and was written on 5.28.

5.28 is the date of the death of both William Blackstone & the knight/monk/ancestor St. Guillem de Gellone (discussed earlier in this blog). 5.29 is my birthday & also "Black Wednesday", the date of the fall of Byzantium. The "Russian theme" in the poem can be read in some ways as revisiting of Byzantium/Orthodoxy via Mandelstam, E. Shvarts, et al.

The entire poem (Forth of July or Stubborn Grew/The Rose) was finished on 5.28.

Book 3 (July) begins on 7.15 (St. Henry's Day; St. Swithin's Day). One of the themes running through this book is death/resurrection, empire/Jubilee. 7.15.1099 the Crusaders after taking Jerusalem visited the Holy Sepulchre for the 1st time. "July" (the month) named for Julius Caesar; the poem moves toward & alludes to both 3.15 and 4.15 - Ides of March (Caesar's death) and the Good Friday on which both Lincoln & Vallejo died. This transformation is thematized as a kind of chrysalis (empire/Jubilee : Julius/Juliet). July was actually completed on 3.5 - date of death of both Stalin & Akhmatova (Julius/Juliet).

The poem as a whole begins with the words "Time flowers". The first stanza runs:

Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay.
A spring breeze flows through the branches on the terrace.
The city below flutters and flaps, roars
and drones like a resurrected bumblebee.

You could say that the birth/death/rebirth themes are encapsulated here. What is the meaning of this 900-pp muttering toward a birthday (5.28 to 5.29), while visiting dozens of other "holidays" along the way? In Stubborn Grew, the 2nd chapter, called "Ancient Light", serves as yet another miniature model of the entire poem (the title & the plot of this chapter revolve around a chance visit I made to a lovely Greek Orthodox church in London, where there was an old paint-chipped sign posted mysteriously high up on its wall : "Ancient Light"). It begins with a Breugel Epiphany scene & African wise man Balthasar (should be Melchior) offering his green-golden nef or toy boat as a birthday present to baby J. It ends with a christmas carol scene in a small London church shaped like a boat.

The poem is about moving from the vessel of the womb to the ark of Jubilee: the nef or star or angelic UFO which re-winds reality & intervenes in historical time (so that "time flowers"). It's a very American poem about timespace flight (July ends with these words: "come fly. . ." The entire poem ends with these words:

the nef rows, rows. . .
palms, heartbeats, light.

5.28.2000)

(p.s. one theory for the etymology of "Russia" is that "Rus" comes from the name given to the Vikings who founded the Kievan empire: they were sailors, "rowers")

I'm writing my own bloggertation. . .

[p.p.s. click here to see a picture of Julie & my sister Cara (on trike) & me, Gull Lake, MN, ca. 1968 or 69]

my brother Bill's birthday today. the roll-call:

Bill - Lincoln
me - JFK
Cara - Constitution Day
Grandma - 4 July 1900


from my own Cornell box (July):


5

With fog in rearview mirror end
of the span ahead lost in blast
of X-ray light (darkness visible? M.
Purrly's frwcks greenhorde lunge-dragn

tales?) Mississippian suppositories are
homing devices I will triangulate
some December with a Florentine
grandmother and a Negus-ancestral

mother of millenniums MOM grand
on the far side of blindness at the head
of the dinner table in the ancient
apartment off River Rd (or Niger?)

swirl of communal clay chert
deciphered only dimly and a little
child at the table with Lafayette
dancing in the painting in the country

of his father looking on after a late war
D.A.R. Florence Ainsworth 7.4.1900
cardinal pts of a maternal Negus
feeder reddening unraveling on

the other other side (these variable
sublimitations mean I need a M.A.P.
(relief if possible) or Nazca poem
(excellent, Ray!) visible over the Iowa barn)

raison d'état and Inca terraces (mirth-
impervious) in foiled embossments of
rain-porous Thursday's stunned pain's
cup of sorrow (vale JVL you're through)

and it's Marian Anderson Peru out of your
flaming dream from Indiana to the tall
Andes from musical tomahawk to capitol
steps up to the microphone and I am a poor. . .

1.21.2000

More sidelights on the "W" theme, for anyone still following these obscure trails: from Grassblade Light, a chapter titled "Of W.B." (referring to William Blackstone, the Anglican pioneer-hermit who set up a library/orchard ("Study Hill") in Cumberland, north of Providence; credited with producing the first American apple (the Yellow Sweeting). [once again some spacing between words is lost in this format, unfortunately]

19


A downy W
star ached over
the lakeside beehive-
city buried in melody

where flighty
figures and green
clover-lovers ran
to the puppet-play:

here comes Federico
the toreador weighted
down with sword and
finery here comes Gago

the Golden Calf bell-
withered vain swung
on a chain of long
green Jealousy and now

the bull strikes Federico
on his head! He falls
the strings are broken
a slow tear wells

in Boca Reina's eye
ay me
ay me
woe am I

she falls cries See!
as the whole bee-
town lifts the bier
of solid air into the sea


5.22.99


21


Fallen pollen
yellow me this
mellow day must
to your mini-donjon

in the prairie my
Stephen's Gate Ist
ein bully byzbyz nest!
halloos St. Giddy-

up doubleyoudoubleyou
galloping into his leafy
micro-chasm take me too
far down above and up below

my dove
my sistrum
my harp-hum
of struck piano-

voluminous black hills of
Sheba milky w-veined gold
- a mass of canonical rolled
skyland red cardinal suet hove-

ring within a tiny Armenian X-
cathedra chrysalis above Turkish
trucker's gardens of Magda-Kurdish
Yahweh-wayout zebra-flipped King lex-

acorns. Inside a Blackstone.
Where was Abraham most-urlieste-
mourning-doveliest lovecake-teste-
calculate-continous-crow Jack Robinson.


5.22.99

Here is another, in the same vein, from near the end of Forth of July (unfortunately the formatting at this blog doesn't seem to allow for the extra spacing between some words, which is in the original):

IV.2

The crane bone flute of Omegal
Two-One-Zero in the zero zone of
Cassiopeia drifted off
the ink path (Andean, original

and vernal victory for the rusted
oarsmen-thieves out of Kiev
composting filtered hive-
head of scythe-grass-thundered

crust of prairie) a black-white
ms. up Nile and down a Pappy
Rus man lost at (nightmare) sea
a-mingling trans-plutonian planet

with a Sophie light fallen
Julian year's allowable error
into wheat your collimator
of quasi-uniform time meridian

transit dark-muttering and
eruptive star with secular stability
a photometric standard Mira Ceti
early type Trapezium guide star end-

running now a high velocity shooting
star P Cygni growing orange from Umbriel
meniscus transit's photographic zenith well
or true noon Triton tropopause a nautical ping-

twilight out of Blackstone comes
a retrograde vernier worm-wheeling line
wing a mourning J Septimanian Venusian
fluted steep sleep to deep life-forms (foaming

5.22.2000

& speaking of Eliot. . . here's the concluding section of my endless poem, Forth of July:


8

Old men should be explorers.


I lay on the tattered sofa
near Lucky. Her little clay
fisherman tested the Secchi
depth with a black-white O.

Feathered black in Voronezh,
an arrow flew from Muskovy
with a grain in its beak
like sun along a knife-edge.

*

In a garden of huge routes
I found a spear pivoting near
the ides of April. This is where
St. George pinned up the involuted

pattern: star to star,
Janus to July (your hand
plunged into the red wound
with clover, pennyroyal, myrrh).

*

I’ll be in Indiana
living in a shanty
shanty (grainy
boxcar–Hiawatha)

with a cloverleaf
for mercy seat–
red, white, violet
(el Bluejay’s nef ).

*

Fire licked the Rome
of your smile, indivisible
Petrogram–where RW
touches Jerusalem

and threads knot
above Las Cruces.
The nef rows, rows. . .
palms, heartbeats, light.


5.28.2000

Blackstone was born on March 5th. He was buried on May 28th. Blackstone serves as the genius loci or presiding spirit, Henry's Lenten "shriver" (Blackstone was an Anglican minister); this is "Blackstone's Law". Book 3, "July", ends on March 5th. Book 4, "Blackstone's Day-Book", ends on May 28. The basic unit of Book 2, "Grassblade Light", is the poem of 7 stanzas, or 28 lines. The basic unit of "July" is the poem of 28 stanzas. 28 is a "moon-number": silvery, reflective, hermetic. The structure of Forth of July is built on 28 and 29.

Both Anna Akhmatova & Joseph Stalin died on March 5th.

But I like to think & hope that all these rather pedantic calendrical-memorial-structural elements are subsumed by the main plot, which is also about return or rebirth. The Orpheus story: the narrative track of the flickering ghost of Bluejay-Juliet, the rose out of the clay of July-Jubilee. & Henry-redivivus, who "fulfills the (Dream Song) scriptures". (Dream songs were a form of Ojibwa midewe practice.) & the mysterious "nef" of J, hovering overhead & overshadowing them all.

The "occasional" aspect of this poem can be sketched out as follows: it was written on Nov. 22, the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. It is also the birthday of former longtime RI Senator Claiborne Pell. Pell lives in Newport, where JFK & Jackie Onassis were married. There is a "memorial" aspect built into Forth of July as a whole, around the numbers 28 & 29. The poem closes in various points on Good Friday, in particular April 15, the day of the year both Lincoln and Cesar Vallejo died. There are many more instances of this sort of calendrical design, a few of which I have already mentioned here: such as 5.28, the saint's day of Guillem de Gellone, & the day William Blackstone was buried - this being the day before 5.29, JFK's (& Henry-narrator's) birthday. The central poem of the entire book is titled "Ghost Dance", the implication being that the poem sort of scripts a re-birth or resurrection of all the ghosts it memorializes. Probably the most direct version of this is the carnivalizing of the name "Henry", which plays on the idea of John Berryman's "Henry" redivivus (Berryman, as I have mentioned, died within sight of my grandparent's home on River Road, along the Mississippi). (See this poem from the sonnet sequence Island Road.) All this play around ghosts, names, iconic figures from history, birthdays & dying days & saints days, is a way of presenting a carnivalesque image of Incarnation.

The "abba" rhyme quatrain of Stubborn Grew & its sequels is the smallest ring structure. I varied it, especially in "July", where I tried to turn the rhymes inside-out or backwards. The most-articulated design is in the center poem, "Grassblade Light": there each chapter has a centered symmetry (ring structure), as does the book as a whole, which is balanced on a single separated line. It is framed by books 1 & 3 (Stubborn & July), each of which have two large parts which are designed to mirror each other. So the whole thing is circular, like a bowl, the way I describe Providence in the early sections of Stubborn (1st line: "Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay.") The 4th book, "Blackstone's Day-Book", sprouts off as a short coda.

The design in some ways impelled the narrative. You travel to the center & back out again, you breathe in, you breathe out. This static design is crossed by the variation in the rhetorical SPEED of each book.

Another aspect has to do with the "occasional" quality of many parts - the poems relate to specific dates of the year. I'll try to post an example of what I mean.

p.s. I wrote here about the 3rd vol. of the poem, July, as dominated by speed. The poem exhibits a verbal acceleration analogous to flight (the last phrase of the vol. is "come fly"). The manifestation poem=land (as I described it in previous note) is subject to sort of a time & space warp. This relates back to what I mentioned before about needing, in my own long poem, to distinguish a different sense of time & history from that found in other US long poems. The concept of "Jubilee", for me, is that of a historical-cultural change which takes place as a result of the intervention of an "unspeakable" otherness, which actually folds time and history into a feedback loop. An epiphany. Jubilee, in the poem, is linked to the motif of the ark or "nef" (toy/ritual boat), which reappears in many forms, beginning initially with the "Breugel-Epiphany" section, which opens the 2nd chapter of Stubborn Grew. So the entire poem, Forth of July, could be seen as a mandala, or way-pointer, or icon, of this intervening otherness - analogous to the otherness of poetry itself.

You could say that this speed/flight theme is prefigured in the "Cape Hatteras" section of Crane's Bridge.

Arriving at work this morning I look at the poetry blogs, & see Kasey Mohammad's has this:

"In order to live completely with poetry, one must gradually learn to meet it as an Other. It comes to one on its terms, which one is powerless to negotiate. If one does negotiate these terms, the results may be skillful, amusing, beautiful, intricate, ad nauseam, but they will not be recognized by the poet, in her secret self-confessions, as poetry."

I was thinking about something like this walking in today (down Morris Ave, along Hope St - which runs between the posh prep school on one side & the "struggling" public Hope High on the other), as I was wondering what to say here this morning. . .

They say an artist shouldn't talk too much about their own work, but none of the hoary maxims seem to apply anyway when no one else talks about it either! So I'll try to say a little more about my long poem. Earlier on this blog I said something about poetry or art in general as a search for wholeness. I don't really buy the various doctrinal psychological &/or religious explanations that have been offered for this, but in my experience anyway something along those lines does seem to be the case. What seems least dubious to me, anyway, is a general philosophical notion of the Good or God as a goodness containing all things, and this is what we hunger for as an integral aspect of our nature, beneath particular satisfactions desires & consolations. A contemplative goal.

Anyway, how does this relate to Stubborn Grew & following? One way to approach this is to ask, who is this guy Bluejay?

Bluejay is a character in the narrative of Stubborn Grew. He epitomizes the marginal, the outcast, the rejected, and the powerful. He's a ghost &/or a man; he's African- or Native American or Cajun. He's Hermes to Henry's Orpheus or Virgil to Henry's Dante : at one point he retells (briefly) one of the "Bluejay" complex of tales from NW Coast tribes which are Orphic in nature (journeys to retrieve the living from the dead). (Bluejay is a trickster figure similar to Coyote on the NW Pacific Coast.)

In the process of "guiding" Henry, Bluejay serves to re-order the signals of epic. He plants an otherness there which parallels the imaginative "shape" of the world the epic represents (the culture & landscape of North America).

In a sense, Bluejay opens a door, leading down to more primal imaginative shapes or world-picturings. Wholeness (in the form of a mandala, for example) describes a way, pictures a way. The door Bluejay opens for Henry-narrator allows him to magnify what began simply as a note or an occasional poem in the first section of Stubborn Grew. I had written a memorial poem for my maternal uncle, James Ravlin, and followed it with one for his daughter Juliet, who committed suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge on her father's birthday. When I wrote these sections I had not yet realized that the writing of this long poem was on a certain level integrating the Orpheus story with my own mourning for an adored cousin, and that the first sequel to Stubborn (Grassblade Light - described earlier here as an 8-sided formal structure) would take shape as a kind of healing mandala directed toward the suicides (Juliet; John Berryman - who died within sight of my grandparent's - Uncle Jim's parent's - house on the Mississippi; and Hart Crane). The mandala is also designed or ornamented as an Ojibwa midewe ceremony. The Ojibwa, living in the regions around the source of the Mississippi, developed this syncretic medicine ritual, incorporating songs & music, in the 18th-19th century. I adapted it in similar syncretic fashion to the form of the long poem.

These developments in the sequels to Stubborn Grew came as complete surprises to me. As I wrote earlier here on the blog, they were like the "rose" emerging out of the ashes of Stubborn. They were elaborations or flowerings of the orphic imbalance or disequilibrium - the love-relation as something lost or lacking. They parallel the "Russian" element in a different key. Each development - each new book in the long poem - strengthened or instigated what followed it. So that the 3rd large book of the poem - called "July" - incorporated all these elements in a textual vortex dominated by speed. "July" is a kind of symbolic manifestation of the poem as end-in-itself - the telos ("Forth of July" - the whole poem - is the coming-forth of "July") - as simultaneously analogous to the manifestation of the land, the continent, the nation (centered on the Mississippi River) - and leading, paradoxically, into a "Green Constellation" of deeper, more submerged levels of meaning & motivation.

These deeper levels - explored in the second part of "July" ("Green Constellation"), and in the gnomic coda to the entire poem (Book 4 - "Blackstone's Day-Book") related to the orphic journey in terms of both heaven & hell. On the "heavenly" level, the journey of Henry-narrator & Bluejay - from the Lenten un-building of Stubborn, to the Juliet-Beatrice-midewe medicine dance of Grassblade Light, to the continental instauration of July, leads toward a new manifestation of "J" - as Beatrice-figure, but also as Jerusalem & Jubilee. Jubilee is an image of world-renewal by means of divine justice or equilibrium. On the "hell" level, the closing parts of the poem intimate new sources and compulsions for the Lenten shriving "supervised" by Blackstone from the beginning. The poem in this way circles back on itself.

These notes, I suppose, appear garbled & arbitrary on the one hand, and overly-neat and -planned on the other, as well as irrelevant to anyone who hasn't read the poem. But the "plan" as described here is only an abstract. I haven't spoken about many other aspects, including perhaps the most important: the compositional process on the micro level of words & lines & stanzas. The "abba" quatrain provides a different matrix for approaching the whole experience & its possible meanings.

One thing to think of, in reading Stubborn Grew, is that it is just the first "book" in a 4-book poem called Stubborn Grew/The Rose, or Forth of July. & that in this first book I try to transumpt or subsume the entire notion of epic - fold it into a deeper, vaguer notion of a primal Orpheus-relation (or Eurydice- or Beatrice-relation). So in a sense Stubborn is an anti-epic. It's "hero" (Henry) never leaves the coffee table on Wickenden Street. His poem deconstructs rather than builds before his eyes. The first half is a parodic Dantesque "CATabasis" (journey to hell and back); the second half is bracketed by spoofs of The Cantos & Finnegans Wake, respectively. Why is Stubborn designed this way? Because on a certain para-literary level the first book of Forth of July is a Lenten act of repentance (overseen by William Blackstone); a "shriving" of the fictional distance between poet & "epic hero". It's a "carnivalization" of epic - followed by the romance-experiments of its sequels (The Rose out of the Lenten ashes).