Reading "The Kid", by Conrad Aiken. Poem in several sections, a kind of "American myth" poem. Interesting to me in its affinities with Crane's Bridge, and its focus on William Blacksone, the "maverick" early settler, preacher, scholar, orchardist (Boston and Rhode Island). A lot of WB in my poems. The epigraph to "The Lost Notebooks" (opening chapter of Grassblade Light) is from Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano :

"– "Talking of corpses," – the Consul poured himself another whiskey and was signing a chit book with a somewhat steadier hand while Yvonne sauntered toward the door –"personally I'd like to be buried next to William Blackstone –" He pushed the book back for Fernando, to whom mercifully he had not attempted to introduce her. "The man who went to live among the Indians. You know who he was, of course?" The Consul stood half toward her, doubtfully regarding this new drink he had not picked up."

I found out later that Lowry had been a student of Aiken's.

Doing some reading in Alexandrian "bucolic" poetry - Theocritus et al., & Virgil's Eclogues. Also interesting study, Pipes of Pan, by Thos. Hubbard, on "intertextuality" in pastoral poetry.

The librarian-poets of Alexandria. Bookish scholars transposing epic to something less grand, more scribal and allusive. "Bucolic" poetry as not so much about rural vs. urban or nostalgia for the countryside, as allegories of actual poets' rivalries, their shared (intertextual, allusive) meanings. The contests of the "shepherds".

Sometimes I read things like this through the lens of what I've already written. Somebody someday might see Forth of July through an "Alexandrian" lens. Grassblade Light, the middle book, might be set beside Theocritus' 1st Idyll, about the Adonis-like dead shepherd, Daphnis, and the "Sicilian songs" sung by the rural shepherds. Grassblade enacts a sort of "ghost dance"/Ojibwa/shamanic resurrection ceremony for "dead shepherds" Hart Crane and John Berryman (along with the mysterious Juliet). It transposes its own "epic" narrative into a series of "songs", lyrics, "dream songs". And it's modeled, structurally, on a castle built by Emperor Frederick II, the ruler of the Kingdom of Sicily (Castel del Monte).

I guess it's a stretch. But nevertheless its one of the ways those who should be reading me could read me!

Happy Crazy Eights Day...

The long poem Forth of July comes in 3 volumes. Vols. 1 and 3 each have 4 chapters. Vol. 2 (The Grassblade Light) has 7 chapters - but the center chapter is doubled, making (numerically) 8 chapters.

Each of Grassblade's sections contains 28 poems, each poem having 28 lines (with variations).

The "plot" of Grassblade is a kind of "ghost dance" search (by way of Russia) for the poet's cousin Juliet.

Last fall, the Soviet Russian submarine Julietta 484 sank in Providence harbor during a storm. Just last week it was finally brough back to the surface for repairs.

These are the numbers of our lives.

The (ancient) idea mentioned a couple days ago, ie. Love = Cosmic Constant (ground of all trust & good will - unchanging principle of steadfast devotion) - this is certainly reflected in Shakespeare's sonnet. It's also reflected in the numerical center of Forth of July :

28


 
As the whirring shape of a hummingbird
like a miniature bluejay overhead or
bee suspended over the clover
whispered

 
Love is our North Star high up above

 
I heard and
(as the rustling of that honey-mover
swelled across a grass-clay sheep-door)
lay in the sweet soil listening for your word.


     
                                 4.10.99