Dance of the Giraffirmation

Periodically, in the course of writing Ravenna Diagram - as with many earlier poems - I fall into a sort of dancing fit.  This results in passages which evince a certain air of enthusiasm, an affinity with poets like Whitman and Vachel Lindsay (Hart Crane, sometimes).  It's not a popular or familiar mode today.  But it seems inevitable, built into my poems - a structural dimension, which emerges (usually near the end or at some pivotal point) in the form of these bubbles or bumps or saliences or Giant Red Spots upon the very evenly-distributed & lattice-like design of the whole.

Anyway, here goes.

SUNDANCE POLE

A poem might commence with this

little hawthorn tree

on Fisher St., fairly

overflowing with deep rose-red berries

like fireworks on the 4th of July

flaring & bursting in free

association – a liberty

of uncommon fiery wheels across midnight

sky – the pale stars in the background

steadfast lights, bespeaking

deep-down goodness (Hopkins,

maybe... Mendelssohn) – the silver sound

of a tender, melancholy trumpet

(memory of mourning dove,

her all-compassing love

that wanders wild, like autumn blade

of maple seed).  The streamlet of speech

emerges from wilderness

of your own soul – manifest

in scar-chronicles of flesh (we beseech

thee, YHWH, forgive our ingrained wrong);

the language snakes its way

along a jagged ray

of peace-pipe lightning (atlatl-prong

of brazen serpent) back to the source

rippling from limestone,

primordial marrow-bone –

a familiar voice, whose gentle force

you recognize from long before.

Comes with a question, like

a music teacher – Mike,

Jenny... will you try this score?

Do you know where you are?  Bright lens

(rose-red, white, blue) surrounds

her limpid lamp – sounds

stir from the keys – the earth sends

radiance from ground-bass depths

(a b-flat flint enchantment

striking flame – tent

flaring firelight toward the Great

Bear’s ring).  It is the sundance pole

that gathers every Morning

                    *

Star to Thanksgiving

from every tribe & people in the whole

wide Universe.  The Commonweal

of Cosmos-Wheel, the breeze

of Manitou through trees

in Lebanon, South Central

L.A. – a whisper through the pines

of Mississippi, Kansas,

California... Memphis

Tennessee... on any railroad lines

through space & time.  Even here

on Fisher Street, in Little

Rhody, her turtleshell

murmurs statutes of liberty (I hear

you, there).  Gray hawthorn branches

merge the black & white

of factional dispute,

pretentious politics – brace avalanches

of fanatics, stem the feuding tide;

her leaf-shades balance vision

with experience, precision

with that draft of lifeline magnitude –

fresh air of gratitude & calm

compassion (openness,

grace, charity).  Less

dogma, more enthusiasm –

where blossoming cities lift from soil

of civil equity,

brave ingenuity –

American can-do, granted to all

who will.  Old promise of a justice

overflowing, paid

in full – the freedom-chord,

rung with a joyful crash-caprice

of fife & drum, guitar & harp –

O let it roll down now!

That red berry you sow

in morning will be blooming bright C-sharp

by noon!  Song’s equilibrium

rests on her branch –

Love will enfranchise

multitudes (world freedom plumb).

10.16.15

Hawthorn on Fisher St.

Maybe the language poets' (or I should say Ron Silliman's historical version of same) reaction against "speech", and American anecdotal poetry, signalled a dissatisfaction with narrative and representation; but it seems predicated on an equally simplistic (ie. as simplistic as the prose realists') concept of representation. One sees a New-Critical emphasis on the technical analysis of the "verbal object", its autotelism - Clark Coolidge's "word-drumming".

The issue of representation-as-communication - as parable, if you will - is downplayed.

The Romantics understood inspiration as a progressive, purposeful movement of ecstatic vision : the sun is not a 1-inch bright disk in the sky, but a burning eye at the "top" of the visible world, an emblem of the fusing power of spiritual insight - the synthetic, imaginative intelligence. For Hopkins, each thing speaks itself, and in speaking, "selves" itself - communication is its essence; it mirrors the dark "speech" of its origins in the Logos.

These stances imply a cosmology, obviously! A particular interpretation of nature & experience.

Cloudy, misty, muggy in Providence. Back from lunchbreak dawdle down to India Point harbor.

Pondering personal writing dilemmas & conundra.

Enjoyed reading Hopkins poem at Chris Murray blog. Obligatory demurral of "single God" mentality. Hopkins' argument encapsulated in final lines of Divina Commedia : the light penetrates, and then shines, flares, blooms - reflected back in the joyful things of creation.

Not so simply single, though simple nevertheless. Imago, imago, imago. My Byzantium. Ancient Light. Triad & waltz. See Nicolas de Cusa for complete explication. Human approximations of the Infinite-Eternal, artefacts of a human cosmos; yet touched (at the limit, at the vortex, at the vanishing pt., at the matrix, at the center of the Last Supper) by redemption. The sign of Jonah is the only sign.

Musing again about difference between prose-narrative and poetry-lyric. Curious mimetic Now of representation (Proust & his Moment of recall), and on the other hand, the immediate Now of lyric recital, which gathers time into its enactment. Homer at the limit (poem/narrative). Bible (chronicle & psalm, or jeremiad).

The contemporary lyric artefact, unhinged from any "master" mastering mastered narrative, any plot, any story. The syntax-logic of an assertion, an argument, is also a mini-story. What do you bring to tell us? What good news?

What is it to read? What is a book? A splinter from the dark wood, from the forest of shades. A ship-message in a bottle thrown to the absent interlocutor. Since you're not here, I'll write it down. A borderland between here & there, life & death.

Eurydice, your absence takes on a mortal coloring. Time stops in your shade.

(& cf. Anastasios' comments on natural form & sound values of words in GM Hopkins & unity of being & English tradition over at Ineluctable.)