Bookends, fireworks

Finished book-length yodel Lanthanum 3 years ago today.  Here is the final entry for that.  4th of July something of a hinge for my poems.  The Coming-Forth-of-Julie.  Explosions in the hinterland.

They builded better than they knew

Have been re-reading the incomparable Architectonics of Humanism, by Lionel March. This is a profound exploration of ancient architectural methods (& their survivals in medieval & Renaissance eras), which involved the synthesis of math & geometry with the gematria, or numerology of words & names (back when ancient Greek & Hebrew alphabets & numerals were one & the same, and every word had a corresponding "number" - the Greeks called it the pythmen).

In a chapter investigating Roman architecture, he analyzes a (conceptual) building model described in Vitruvius - the basilica of Fano, & suggests not only that the full name of "Vitruvius" is encrypted in the dimensions of the building, but that Vitruvius might actually be a nom-de-plume of Roman polymath Varro, whose name is also encrypted, numerically & geometrically, in the design. Furthermore, March finds that the name of Julius Caesar - one of Varro's friends - is also memorialized in key elements of the building's design.

Now this I found especially interesting, because the pythmen, or root number by gematria, of Caesar's name, is the number 528. When I read this I almost fell off my chair. Because I've played a lot of number games, using names & dates etc., in my own poems (in this methods are a throwback to some very old bardic procedures). And the long poem Forth of July - especially the 3rd book, July - is quite involved with this number (528). July was finished on 5.28.2000. 5.28 is the date that William Blackstone, New England pioneer & a sort of "keystone" for the book, was buried on his property in Cumberland RI. July's chapters are also structured as 5 parts of 28 quatrains each. Moreover, one of the key verbal themes/games of the poem is a sort of turning inside-out of "Julius" (Caesar) to "July" (or Juliet, or jewel-eye, or "J", etc.) : which is intended in part to represent a kind of overturning of empire, militarism, "Iron Age" values (Caesar), & their replacement with "Golden Age" (or "Jubilee") values.

What I didn't realize, when I was "building" this poem, that the actual "number" of Caesar's name - & Vitruvius' symbolic building - is also encrypted in my poem...

Franciscan on St. Henry's Day

Today, July 15th, used to be a Catholic saint's day - St. Henry's Day (the celebration was moved to July 13th in the 1960s). On this date in 1999 I started the final volume of the long poem Forth of July (titled July). On this date in 1099, Geoffrey Bouillon & the Crusaders entered the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (after conquering the city with a bloody massacre).

I've been reading an interesting book by Mary Alexandra West, titled The cross that Dante bears : pilgrimage, crusade, and the cruciform church in the Divine Comedy (Univ. Press of Florida, 2005). All about how Dante "maps" his poem onto the medieval cartographical orientation of the world with Jerusalem in the center (with the East at the top of the map). She also focuses on the militant, "crusading" dimensions of Dante's poem.

These themes are not lacking in Forth of July. It was done consciously, in an indirect, imagistic fashion. "Henry", in that final book, goes on a pilgrimage of his own - but into the interior of America, & into the "spiritual interior" of the poetic word. He goes on a crusade of his own - but it's a march of puns - centered on July, Julius, Yule, Julie, Juliet, Jubilee, JL, and "jewel-eye"... which delivers a sort of Franciscan overturning of political force & violence ("Julius Caesar") by the spiritual power of the Word, or the Holy Spirit of wisdom ("jewel-eye"). The poem (July) progresses thus from St. Henry's Day, with all its crusader/Jerusalem connotations, to the Ides of March (8 months later - Caesar's downfall) and the Ides of April (Good Friday, Easter, death of Abraham Lincoln).*

I think the U.S. poetry world has been slow to pick up on the "major music" available to them in this & other poems of mine. But I'm pretty confident that day will come. I was looking over Forth of July again last night, under the instigation of some political commentary over at the Digital Emunction blog. My poetry may be complicated & evasive in some ways, but it's not autotelic, not hermetically-sealed-off from the world, & not meant to be. But it's meant to be poetry, not prose or commentary - & I serve a jealous Muse, who previously cohabited with Hart Crane & Osip Mandelstam, among others.

*for more on the Franciscan connection of all this with Joachim of Fiore, see here (especially the post on 4.3.07).

Speaking of Renaissance poetics... I am back deep into ancient/medieval number symbolism & gematria again. Might help me get out of my creative slump. I am reminded, reading things like Medieval Numerology (ed. Surles; Garland Press, 1993), of some things I was up to in Forth of July & earlier work. Influence of books by the likes of Alastair Fowler, John Michell.

Mathematics can actually advance composition. The symbolic symmetries of numbers. This is a huge dimension of pre-modern poetics, which we have simply buried out of sight. One of the most exciting discoveries of writing poetry, for me. It's in Melville (see Viola Sachs' book, Game of Creation). It's in my work! I'm not sure where else. (I'm sure it's in Crane.)

Forth of July is possibly the beginning of a kind of medieval push-back or resurgence of some kind. Maybe someday it will be understood as such. A labyrinthine-baroque cathedral, a counter-modern-American architectural wonder... meant to be seen as distinct from what anyone else is doing these days...

essentially an Acmeist project (Mandelstam : poet as builder). In fact I originally got into Alastair Fowler et al. by way of a study of ring-structures in Mandelstam's odes.

Thinking this morning about the long poem, Forth of July. Finished 8 years ago.

The poem was written within the context of other American long poems - Paterson, Maximus, "A", Cantos, The Bridge... and also with older epics in mind.

Maybe one of the distinctive qualities of Forth of J is how it conveys an impression of vastness. I don't think you find this so much in the other poems, despite their wealth of allusions & references. Pound writes with a kind of notation, a lightning-like shorthand. Maximus, perhaps, has something vast in quality, but Olson retains that sort of Heraclitean gnomic notation-style he gets from Pound. & Zukofsky displays a kind of incantatory music... but my poem has a different sense of space. A midwestern, Great Plains, oceanic sense...

I am sort of proud of this. The three "books" of the poem - Stubborn Grew, The Grassblade Light, July - are 3 distinct large panels, but they circle back & around each other; there's a directional flow as well. The middle book, Grassblade, is made with 7 chapters - like enormous singing frescoes, each one unique, but fitting together.

This oceanic vastness, this sort of singing joy... this is what I wanted to convey. It's a big vast happy poem. July, the 3rd book, is a sort of galactic explosion (fireworks).

*

I think at the root of what I am trying to do in poetry, over all these years, is an effort to express a special kind of spiritual joy, or joy in the spirit - and point toward its origins or foundations. It was a joy or exuberance I recognized immediately in Mandelstam, who has been like the Virgilian guide to me over decades. But it has its true origins in mysterious Christian charismatic experiences stretching back almost 40 years now.

I am trying to provide, in my poetry, both a literary-artistic model and a kind of poetic-rational-historical basis or argument or explanation or defense, for a way of understanding life. The spiritual joy has to do with a belief in the divine presence and work in the world and in history : the kind of brotherly-sisterly joy and charity which has its root in God, in Christ. A belief in the drama of earthly history as a whole : which is a kind of heroic-georgic restoration of the earth and mankind to a right relationship with God, the source, the creator. A belief in the ultimately personal, conscious and unified character of this dream we call life. In this view, God is Person, not in a sense that limits the divine to what we experience in an ordinary human sense - but rather in a way that lifts our own conception of what the personal and the Person might be to a higher, inter-personal, trans-personal, relational, spiritual and mysterious level. The fundamental work of this Person is compassionate healing, forgiveness & restoration - lifting us from our scattered narrow desires toward wholeness, the integration & healing of life as a whole. And history is the working-out of the restoration of the earth by the dramatic intervention of the "divine" in history. The confidence in this dramatic play-script of history is one of the streams feeding that sense of spiritual joy.

This is not to say, by any means, that the poem, Forth of July, is just some kind of religious tract... In fact the reader may find it difficult to square my general statements of purpose with the actuality of the poems. In my view, that's all to the good - since the work is primarily a record of artistic making, a grappling with poetry itself.

Out of the blue, amid all the usual anxieties, chores, rejection slips, & so on, I actually received an enthusiastic response to Stubborn Grew, Forth of July. Someone found a copy of the 2000 Spuyten Duyvil issue of Stubborn, in that classic arcadia, a used bookstore, & started reading, & contacted me.

I certainly hope it's the beginning of a trend. This reader sent me back to the poem myself (I know, it may seem like I've never left...). It would be nice if people began to read it for pleasure, not as a chore ("gotta get through to p. 750 tonight..."). It was meant to be a pleasure. It was a joy to write.

Forth of July has a big spacy shape, a sort of singing quality, sort of light & jolly in most places... there's a consistency to it, amid the changes & labyrinthine processes... it tries to say things which cannot be said so literally, discursively... it's a poem... & I'm trying to say that poetry offers a distinct (& necessary) harmonic recapitulation of experience... Mandelstam's slanting, mysterious imagery & courageous, hopeful spirit is the reigning presence in the background... like a boat or a building, it's built on a tripod, the two lateral parts lean inward & outward from the central part...

While I was in Sugar Hill, NH (literally just down the hill from Robert Frost's place), I read Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" for the first time. It took a while to get into it, but once I did, it was a very good read...

- reminded me of the "Indian" sections of Crane's The Bridge. I mean Crane must have been aware of what Longfellow had done. Both poems are narratives, with beginning middle end (unlike Pound, WCW, Olson). Not really fair here to Pound, WCW, Olson... but, even though all three actually have these 3 parts (beg, mid, end), the parts are overwhelmed (unlike in Crane or Longfellow) by the melodrama of the (Whitmanian-Dantean) speaker-poet... Crane & Longfellow, in this regard, are closer to Chaucer, the Ur-Poet...

Longfellow was actually in touch with an Ojibwa poet at the time of writing - Kah-ge-gah-bowh or George Copway. "Song of Hiawatha" publ. in 1855 - same year as Song of Myself. Longfellow went to meet Whitman in Camden NJ, in 1876 (when Longfellow was 75). Something interesting could be done with the "binary" relation between the poetry of these two men. Whitman treated the wounded soldiers during Civil War; Longfellow's son was wounded in same. (Longfellow's wife died, in harrowing circumstances (her dress caught fire), 3 months after the war began.) The meeting between Longfellow & Whitman. Link between 19th & 20th cent. Amer. poetry. The complementarity of the two. The resolution of dualities. (With Poe as 3rd party, witness au contraire, devil's advocate.)

Balance Longfellow's acute erudition (ie. the amazing parallel between Ojibwa song and Finnish Kalevala), with Whitman's acute ear for the colloquial, the actual... & note Hart Crane's amalgam of all three (Longfellow, Whitman, Poe). (Marianne Moore said she liked Crane, in part because he was so erudite...)

My mother had her first drink in the Longfellow house in Portland, Maine (she was 13 yrs old; the drink was sherry). (It was a momentous occasion, since my maternal grandparents were both teetotallers.) She was best friends, & near next-door neighbors at the time, with Longfellow's great-granddaughter (whose grandmother was the famous "Laughing Allegra") - both families lived along River Road, in Minneapolis - about 3 blocks from where John Berryman jumped to his death.

Thus my mother tagged along once on the Longfellow family summer vacation to the Maine coast.

My father - a fairly unpoetic fellow, in some (not all) respects - used to recite bits of Longfellow ("By the shores of Gitchee Gumee..." or "This is the forest primeval"...) - Longfellow was required reading in his day. Besides which, a replica of the Longfellow House (from Cambridge Mass.) was built near the celebrated Minnehaha Falls, down the road... & many towns & lakes in Minnesota are named after people & places in Longfellow's famous poem.

Actually, reading the well-researched, etymologically-subtle "Song of Hiawatha", I was reminded of parts of In RI, full of Narragansett vocabulary. & both Hiawatha and Forth of July owe a debt to the Finnish epic, the Kalevala...

Up in NH was also reading Charles Mann's very interesting best-seller, 1491. Had a curious effect on me... speaking of Columbus Day... maybe someday Crane's Bridge will be understood as a sort of bridge (one among many) between old (Eurocentric) civilization, & yet-to-be-understood or recognized "prehistory" of New World... there are also a lot of "premonitions" in my poetry in this regard... things I wrote, the significance of which I didn't understand completely... ie. the theme of clay, the peacepipe (calumet - Pipestone, MN)... "Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay" (ie., the peacepipe) -

Like this bit from July (by way of Herodotus, Longfellow, Mark Twain, & David Treuer) -

 The secret of the Upper Midwest   under
 the cold winter snow   and by the lakes of summer
 is a cozy   gemutlichkeit   familial   merciful
 and so I remember your red nose,

  
 Grandfather   today   on Epiphany (your
 birthday)   how you leaned over the Christmas
 fireplace   stiffly (past 70 years)   to stir the sparks
 of last year's evergreen   as the colored rays

  
 of the little lights   played   in your snowy hair
 and as the ghost of Mary Negus   dressed
 bright as a cardinal   drops deeper reds
 (Ethiopian   rubies and   sealed carnelians)

  
 across the snow   and as   the laughter of Florence
 Ainsworth   penetrates   like Minnehaha
 or mouth of Nile   through the endless   ach-ach
 peace pipesmoke   of Edward S.   (a censer-

  
 rifle)   and as the children gather by your feet
 they are ghostly now   as these ghosts gathering
 in my lines   when the front rolls in   like a wraith
 from the southwest   spreading a wide fan

  
 of shadows and rain   over the prairie
 maybe you'd be by the upstairs   window,
 looking out   through the big black bars
 of the oak tree   toward the gash   of the river

  
 moving there, hidden   between the steep slopes
 and Dad will get up   and put down the paper
 (ROOSEVELT SPEAKS TONIGHT)   where piano
 music   curls on the bench   and as rain   pulses

  
 down   and the storm finally breaks   maybe
 you'll see the strange   incandescence   the
 last light   burning through beneath
 the storm and   your face like a
  
 smaller star,   leaning there
 against the   clear pane –

    
              *

  
 Gemutlichkeit or no   it's the story of a star
 I'm just a poor   wayfaring stranger
 and   the people don't dream; they work
 a long, long way   from my home

  
 active, energetic, prosperous, practical
 the happy result is manifest all around in
 the substantial outside aspect of things,
 and the suggestions of wholesome life

  
 (but Marion City is an exception.
 Marion City has gone backward in
 a most unaccountable way.  Doubtless
 Marion City was too near to Quincy.)

  
 like Henry Clay Dean   if the ground had been
 sodded with greenbacks   scarecrow Dean
 in foxy shoes, down at the heels, socks of odd
 colors, relics of antiquity   a world too short

  
 small, stiff-brimmed soldier-cap hung on the
 corner of the bump of   a just audible ripple
 of merriment (forearm unprotected) which swept
 the sea of faces like   the wash of a wave

  
 and now the stranger stepped back one pace
 nobody listening, everybody laughing and
 whispering   (along here, somewhere
 on a black night   ran some exceedingly

  
 narrow and intricate island chutes
 by aid of the electric light.  Behind was
 solid blackness – a crackless bank of
 it   ahead   a narrow elbow of water, curving

  
 between dense walls of foliage   and here
 every individual leaf and every individual ripple
 stood out   flooded with a glare as of noonday)
 passed Prairie du Chien   after some hours

  
 progress   through varied and beautiful scenery
 reached La Crosse.  We noticed that above Dubuque
 the water of the Mississippi was olive-green
 rich and beautiful and semitransparent,
  
 with the sun on it.  And I remember Muscatine
 they use the broad smooth river as a canvas
 and painted on it every imaginable dream   it is
 the true Sunset Land   so good a right to the name.

  
 Go upstream   deeper into the green caverns
 as in all these Upper-River towns   the majestic
 bluffs   this region is new   blanketed with
 Indian tales and traditions   Draco

  
 and Romeo and Juliet of   White Bear Lake
 and the bear caught her   she and the blanket
 you get yourself all worked up about the
 blanket   snowed under   like a star in a Kali-

  
 black stoneboat   pivoting   he began life poor
 and without education   on the curbstone
 with his book   unconscious of the tramp of
 passing crowds   to let a dray pass

  
 unobstructed   there are many soothsayers
 in Scythia   but the class of effeminate persons
 called "Enarees"   use a different method
 take a piece of the inner bark of the lime-tree

  
 which they say was taught them by Aphrodite
 and cut it into three pieces   which they keep
 twisting and untwisting round their fingers
 as they prophesy when the king of Scythia

 
 falls sick   Lincoln had known only this quiet house
 he was six when his sister Irma flew in the door
 with the white man she announced   she was
 going to marry   "Later on"   Sioux

  
 Lincoln bolts   swoops   slams   out of the house.
 Until the unholy train comes tearing along
 ripping the sacred solitude to rags
 the locomotive is in sight from the deck

  
 of the steamboat   his clothes differed in no respect
 from a "wharf-rat's"   except they were raggeder
 they retreated to other city haunts in shame
 since it was launched in Minneapolis on May 29, 1935

  
 Lester and Vera approached the train unnoticed
 they boarded the broken steps of the sleeper car
 the errant lights of the yard bosses sprayed the
 side (their rusted hulk star-manger   Hiawatha)


      
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