Dante at 56

Little magazines, poetry publishers, the literary community... I say yes to all of them.  Heck, I co-edited & published a little magazine for 10 years (Nedge); I spent at least 5 years trying to promote a local literary non-profit (the Poetry Mission).  The fact that I put a lot of my poetry on this blog is not evidence that I am some naturally cantankerous, nay-saying misanthrope.  No way.  I may be a little feisty - I think I get this from my mother, who is very feisty.  I may at times be cutting & sarcastic (this is all me, not my mother).

But I do not avoid magazines on principle - in fact, I received another rejection notice just now!  No, I put out a lot of poetry on this blog because the kind of drivel I'm writing is in fact very suited to the blog set-up.  Ravenna Diagram, for example, is an ongoing serial poem, sometimes quite diaristic & occasional (ie. responding to the "occasions" of the day).

Today's entry is an example, as have been several posts of late.  Dante died on this day 694 years ago, in 1321, at the age of 56.  Some scholars (the jury is out) have taken a position which entails that Alighieri & I share a birthday (May 29th).  So I am already 7 years older (& almost 700 years later) than Dante was, when he died - having completed his Paradiso not long before.

I haven't completed any Paradise yet.  I have not "lifted the great acorn of light".  But Ravenna Diagram is a cat's-cradle all tangled up with Dante, among other things.  Here is today's report :

LATTICE-WORK

If we can shrink down small as Frisbee

the little leprechaun

from Arthur Street (in

Mendelssohn), we might just barely

wiggle through the lattice-work

of Erica’s Ferrara

cabinet (dove sta

memoria).  Such delicate

moss-green & gold!  Almost as bright

as your sea-iris – sun-

flecked, pregnant lens

of summer season (cave-light,

river-carved limestone... lakes

of glacier-deft sketches).

Time’s a yarn, that catches

history in quipu-knots.  Oak aches

for each acorn – the great light

diamondiale, that lifts

each person (infinite

è finit, unbreakable).  Slight

limp, unfinished manuscript...

slow clay, Mendelssohn

relief operation –

Berryman in Resurrection crypt

or Pound à Venice (perilous seat

in dolorous gondola)...

Dante sets down Ravenna

raven-feather (geste complete).

9.14.15

Tomb of Dante in Ravenna (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Where is this Fontegaia, the poem, a-goin'?

Who cares? Not Poetryland. Their loss.

It's not work, for me. It's play, though it takes some effort.

I'm trying to blend some things, some figures & ideas. I'm drawing toward a design & thematic crux of this long poem. (There is a numerical & sort of structural design, but I won't go into that.)

What's it all about? Well, I'm trying to establish some affinities - very tentative, very gradual, very indirect.

1) there's the link between, on the one hand, Siena, as a sort of aesthetic model of the "free city", with its art and natural surroundings (the hidden river Diana) - and, on the other hand, some of the spiritual roots which have a presence as part of that history : the cult of the Virgin as Patron of Siena; the background presence of St. Francis and the Franciscan ethos (poverty, brotherhood, love of nature), and the mystical-historical thinking of Joachim of Fiore & St. Bonaventure. The notion of the millennial "city coming down from heaven", the New World. The little model city which the Emperor offers to the Virgin, in the Byzantine mosaics.

2) & there's the affinity between those things & the ecstatic-visionary spirit of Walt Whitman - very "San Franciscan" - filtered partially through Hart Crane (the Bridge, the River, the hobos, the "key").

3) & there's the "river"/fountain motif... the mingling of Amazon-Nile-Mississippi-Jordan... the interest in the Ethiopian version of the "ark of the covenant".

4) & there's the mingling of several painters & their images - Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Martin Ramirez, Jasper Johns, et al. & their connections with Crane, with all these other themes, with Joachim's drawings - his (& Dante's) spiritual "geometry".

5) & there are personal & autobiographical impulses & references.

So slowly, partially, obscurely, indirectly, I'm concocting a sort of American elixir... drawing connections with old things & old poets, toward ideas and commitments which are still important for poetry & history & social life today.

(p.s. & who's this "Frisbee"? Well, Frisbee is the name my mother gave to an adventurous little Tom-Thumb character about whom she told stories, back in the 1950s - such as the one about Frisbee sailing his paper boat down the spring rainwater brooks in the dirt road called Arthur Street, where we lived. A few years later, "Frisbee" reappeared in my family history, as the name of the whirling disk produced by the Whammo company - the copyright for which my father, a lawyer, had something to do. I remember flying Frisbee prototypes around the yard with my brothers. I suppose I've already written about this, here.)

Writing a note in the comment box over at Josh Corey's blog got me putting 2 & 2 together.

My mother used to tell us bedtime stories (back in the 1950s) about a Tom Thumb character she called "Frisbee". Then, in the late 50s, my father, a lawyer, patented the first "Frisbee". Now I'm wondering if the two things are connected somehow.

My Dad brought home the protoype no-name frisbee one day - my brothers & I threw it around in the yard.

Perhaps this is all connected somehow with the pervasive occulted subtextual obsession - in my longish poems - with time travel, flying saucers, etc...

the Russians are coming!

*

& hey, this reminds me once again of one of my 1st published poems. (I know I've posted it before here.)

BEEP BEEP THE BABY'S UP

 
 
you can do anything you want.

 
the baby here is trying to decide

 
about growing up human.  he's rubbing

 
his double chin, he's a serious kid.

 
in a house on Arthur Street

 
a cap pistol is sitting on a desk

 
in the bedroom upstairs with the yellow

 
walls.  according to the kid here

 
it's supposedly waiting

 
for the little green men.

 
the sky gets closer

 
as it gets more blue,

 
and you can recall

 
the 4th of July

 
all the heat

 
and all those little flags

Like many of my generation (I will be 240 on March 33rd) a particular anthology sparked my interest: "Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle" (weird title!), ed. by Stephen Dunning. There I think I read ee cummings' "In Just- Spring" (from his Chansons Innocentes). "and the little lame BalloonMan whistles far and wee"

fresh air! tres charmante.

& I had to memorize & recite "Charge of the Light Brigade" for Mr. Close in 6th grade.

& my grandfather chanting his jokey Irish folk song. & my mother's improvisations: the adventures of Frisbee, the little Tomb Thumb chap who sailed his paper boat down the stream in the dirt road outside our house (Arthur St). Springtime in Mendelssohn (a section of Hopkins, MN settled by farmers & young musicians from Minneapolis).

& reading the complete Nabokov while still in the womb (a few months before March 33rd, 1753, that is.)