Greyhound to Galilee

SWEET CHARIOT

You rode the midnight Greyhound

through American backwaters.

Past hobo squatters

inside their high lonesome vault (profound

infinite firefly field).  No one

forgets their bent magnetic

North, your epileptic

adolescence (endlessness).  The sun,

the moon, the Pope, the Emperor...

some bright Hiawatha rider,

beaming father-figure –

Federigo in Jerusalem, hugging an Emir...

History slides by on billboards,

Burma-Shave proverbs.

The Greyhound hums, curves

down Vanishing Road – the Lord’s

a baby buffalo.  Around the track

the sprinters skim – a blear

of fog machines, the air

nine tenebrae.  One shady (humpback)

tesseract glides into Galilee –

Gödel infinity

or Miriam smile (she

saw her tall cousin suggest a V);

the mirror of authority

in heaven & on earth

wells supernatural mirth –

sweet chariot of Lady Liberty.

8.11.16

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

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

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

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

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

What were we talkin' about?

Fred's Castel del Monte has a total of 56 facets (8 walls, with 48 sides on the 8 corner towers). He also died at age 56.

A man's his castle. (Birthday numbers... my poem's full of 'em.)

Each little section or canto of The Grassblade Light can be likened to an image, like a coin, cast in a mold. Not only are there 8 (in 7) parts : each part contains 28 (+ 1) sections; each section contains 28 lines (7 quatrain stanzas). (This is the template, anyway; there are some meaningful variations in the pattern). The central "+1" or 29th section of each part is designed as 4 x 4 quatrain stanzas (or 64 - 8x8 - lines).

28 x 2 = 56.

(One obvious pitfall of this kind of form is the temptation to fill in the pattern (with filler). Did I avoid that? Dunno... maybe.)

This is my goulden coinage of poetic value, Mandelstam's "gold coins of humanism". It's worth one penny, Penelope.

Castel del Monte is on the verso of the (Italian) euro 1-cent coin:

It turns out Emperor Frederick II & my mother share the same birthday (different years). Gosh, that explains a lot.

The emperor grew up in Palermo, a Sicilian-Norman-Arabic blend of cultures.

He was attired for burial in a mixture of Cistercian & Arabic robes.

He was interested in mathematics : he sponsored & encouraged the famous Fibonacci.

He wrote a treatise on falconry which is still cited.

Castel del Monte is a weird, unusual place, sort of like my poem.

"Poets, envy the crystallographers!" (Mandelstam)

(I'm finding some of these facts in a book by Heinz Gotze, Castel del Monte.)

I too try to "embody the word", in a poetry way. Here's an inkling of the "number, weight & measure" involved. (I'm sorry to repeat myself again on this blog - but I'm trying to outline a particular personal framework for poetic "embodiment".)

I wrote Forth of July in Rhode Island. The guiding spirit of this place is Roger Williams, founder of Providence; RI is considered the first political entity founded explicitly on the separation of Church & State.

Williams' worldview rhymes (roughly, an off-rhyme) with Dante's perspective, in the Divina Commedia and the essay De Monarchia. Dante believed that the Holy Spirit provided a legitimate role for secular humanity, secular government, in the providential historical process leading toward the renewal of the earth, the "Earthly Paradise", corrupted since the Fall. Rome, and the Holy Roman Emperor, he considered the true authority under which this renovation would occur. At the end of the Commedia, in the Paradiso, in the center of the heavenly Rose, Dante placed an empty throne, destined for the messianic Emperor who would oppose Papal pretentions to secular authority, restoring Italy, the Empire, and thus the whole world - Emperor Henry VII.

As Stubborn Grew/The Rose moves into its central volume, a certain numerical structure crystallizes (and then expands in the following volumes), based on 7/4 (4th of July), 5/28, and 5/29. The central volume (Grassblade Light) consists of 7 chapters (actually 8 panels - the center chapter containing a double panel). Each chapter is made up of 28 poems, each poem containing 28 lines (7 quatrains). At the center of the 28 is a 29th poem with a kind of square structure (16 quatrains total). (This is the template - & though there are slight variations in some chapters, the total line count for each chapt. is almost exactly the same.)

I designed this octagonal structure after the shape of a castle in southern Italy built by that great opponent of the Pope, (Holy Roman) Emperor Frederick II, which has 8 sides, and squarish towers at each angle.

The following volume, July, is designed as a mirror-image to the 1st vol., Stubborn Grew. It comes in 2 halves: the first half consists of 5 chapters, each containing 5 poems of 28 quatrains each. The 2nd half of the book has a very complicated structure (again using poems of 7 quatrains) which I won't get into here.

William Blackstone, RW's friend, Anglican preacher-in-exile, planter of the first known apple orchard in the New World (in Cumberland, RI), & figure in these poems, was buried on his property on 5.28.1675. His property ("Study Hill") was burned to the ground the next day, 5.29 (this was during King Philip's War).

5.29 is my birthday, and RI Statehood Day.

The entire poem (Forth of July) was finished on 5.28.2000, with this line :

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

I want to write a little more about the longo pome which took up so many years of my life (Stubborn Grew & its sequels).

In the early 90s rhyming became easy through a lot of practice. Should rhyming be easy? Probably not, but as any musician knows, momentum is important, & in my poetry it was compositional momentum which rhyming & repetitive stanza forms helped along. I was also very interested in Alastair Fowler's studies of numerical & ring structures in Renaissance poetry, & using these techniques became another way to keep momentum. These techniques give the poet permission to take a deep breath & really EXPAND the poem.

However, in my trial runs in the early 90s ("Spring Quartet") I discovered I'd written long stretches in which the techniques took over, leaving me with a sort of facile, tinny, superficial rhetoric. The same thing sometimes happened in shorter poems where I used a special form (pantoum, sestina, etc.) - but they were good practice.

When I came back to these methods in the later 90s I tried to be both more careful & less subservient to the techniques. But again, what triggered "Stubborn Grew", what really gave me entry, were Mandelstam's late poems (Moscow Notebooks, Voronezh Notebooks especially). Two things in particular appealed to me. First was the notion of drafts & sequences - short lyrics which were also parts of a larger set. That gave me the idea I could write "chapters" of a long poem based on this idea. The second, and more important, was something M. accomplished under duress, in the Voronezh poems. It was a conjunction of opposites he achieves in those brief, notational lyrics. In a word, they combine finality with contingency. On one hand they are brief, contingent, composed under conditions of extreme stress and suffering: they radiate the intense feeling of being "on the road". Yet on the other hand they PAUSE: the poems are contemplative moments of stasis and awareness. Actually the title of my book of short poems, "Way Stations", typifies this conjunction.

What this manner I found in the Voronezh poems gave me, was a means of starting out with "Stubborn". Rather than over-planning or calculating, I let the short poems come as they would, keeping in mind the general threads of where I was going. So the first "chapter" of the poem leads into the narrative by means of this sort of glancing notation. & I was really amazed, much later, to see how those early note-poems prefigured the larger structures & themes of the poem as a whole.

What also happened later was that the note form became formalized or stylized. By the time I was writing the first sequel to Stubborn ("Grassblade Light"), I was able to combine the same sort of aleatory approach to the individual units, with a much more articulated & formal set of ring-structures. "Grassblade" is a set of seven panel-chapters; each chapter laid out around a central section; the fourth (central) chapter is a double chapter (so in a numerical sense there are actually 8 sections). Each individual poem has 28 lines (7 rhymed quatrains). Each chapter has 28 poems with a central section (making 29). There are variations & planned "breaks" in this symmetry. & there are thematic elements & calendar dates (of composition) which relate to this symmetry (the design was actually modelled on an octagonal castle in southern Italy built by Emperor Frederick II. Sounds kind of silly but there it is). The 3rd sequel - "July" - revises this kind of patterning & takes it further. The final sequel - "Blackstone's Day-Book" - a brief coda, finished on anniversary of the day William Blackstone (Anglican hermit-pioneer-exile-scholar-preacher, who settled in RI before Roger Williams) died: 5.28.2000. Also the saint's day of an ancestor of mine, Guillem de Gellone, one of Charlemagne's generals turned monk - celebrated in the French chansons de geste (the Chansons de Guillaume d'Orange) (sounds kind of silly but there it is).