begin the Beguine

MINOR 7TH

There’s a baby high chair in the river

made of sycamore wood

(from Sycamore St., in old

Providence) – you could flip it over

& make a little car of it.

But the Miss is frozen solid –

can’t break the mold,

flow thru, maybe.  Love-seat

slung low.  The mood’s on Henry

sometimes, to be sittin’ there

– like Neptune, or Great Hare

the Leapin’ Dauphin (Huckleberry?) –

beyond the marina, where all the waters

congregate.  With Jeanne-

So-Dark of New Orleans,

the Cedar Queen (through the main door,

là.  La-la).  Her Rio never ends,

her rain is circulating

even now, hump King –

no matter which boar hounds, pretends.

Henry’s babble splinters echoes

down the ice.  Yet the flute

welds sheepskin & galoot

into a chord both Greeks & Hebrews

play (sustained diminished minor

7th, maybe, on

Ojibwan theremin).

Siddown – begin the Beguine, sailor.

2.3.17

Limestone Medusa

DOUBLE-WE

Something inherent in the stone,

the milky, the snow-seasoned

Winnebago (Indian mound).

A pregnant plot, expectant zone...

one-stringèd salt-shanty, or tent

of tentative meeting.

Limestone Mediterranean

USA, moon-galloping... unspent

Ethiopian Edith (double-we).

String’s stretch-to-break

(real Rimini headache)

loops through Persephone-tragedy –

Tiresias whispering mother-wit

or pock-marked moon

keening her Dionysus-loon

(rive-marine beyond yon Key West

jetty).  If the Greeks could see...

but it’s not necessary.

Stout military

Perseus will refract the sea

into a trillion dolphin-heaps;

Poseidon’s jealousy

toss Cassiopeia

upside to her throne (for keeps).

The circle of the sea (deep Circe)

revolves round Galilee –

Pygmalion will be

revived in thee, Pocahontas-B. 

10.6.15

may the circle be unbroken

new Sappho poem published (after 2600 yrs). Noted in NY Times here (you may have to register to open this). Poetry enters History again (on midsummer's day).

You for the fragrant-bosomed Muses' lovely gifts,

Be zealous, girls, and the clear melodious lyre:

But my once tender body old age now

Has seized; my hair's turned white instead of dark.

Reading lately: Matrix of Modernism, Sanford Schwartz. Interesting stuff on early 20th-cent. philosophy. Led me to start reading Auerbach's Mimesis again last night. & what a great read that is. How different cultures picture experience & reality in narrative. Contrast between Biblical & Homeric epic - fascinating stuff ("scar of Ulysses"). "The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending & representing things."

Got me thinking about writing & landscape. The hidden, furtive, shamanistic Yahweh, swathed in darkness & obscurity, background - a way that Hebrews responded to the established Middle Eastern powers all around them. Monotheism & the desert. A people so at one with their extremely simple, barren landscape that they are able to leave almost everything unspoken; implied depths. (ie. in Sacred Discontent, another great book.) The Greeks, in contrast - everything clean, out front, oversimplified. The response of close-knit mountain-steppe tribes scattered into a new terrain (always mapping out where everybody is - keeping everything in sight)? Confident, aristocratic power, masking a hidden fear of dislocation, being lost.

Which in turn got me thinking about Stubborn Grew, Forth of July. Melville influence at time of writing. Sense that the understory, Ur-story of this continent is the encounter with what is alien (wilderness, native tribes). Bluejay the shaman re-designs epic pattern. Poem repeatedly goes "into the interior" in various ways. Dislocating stories & vocabularies by way of blending, syncretism. Ojibwa undercurrent, Chippewa songs. Center of poem titled "Ghost Dance". Framing orphic pattern by way of Northwest Coast Bluejay stories.

Things are old, & poetry is a spiritual force.

Jonathan writes:
"We can't say we are getting to what the Greeks were really about: we can only
substitute another representation of Greekness for one we see as outmoded or
stereotypical."

But see Peter Murphy's essay cited below. Ionian polis/poiesis architecture, stemming from Hippodamus and others:
1) designed new city spaces (colonies) which allowed mingling of heterogeneous populations of strangers, because they were based on the universal "justice", or mathematical proportions, of the cosmos - creating the artifice of civilized life;
2) followed nature (phusis) not by simple imitation but by creative estrangement - the "truthful lie" - the lie that reveals both its genealogy & its dependence on something more fundamental than genealogy (these same cosmic proportions). The example here is civic architecture, in which marble pillars & other architectural forms are meant to resemble, without copying exactly, the elements of the simple wooden hut or original dwelling.

Basically Murphy argues that all the nationalistic & historicist neo-Classical revivals of the 19th century missed the point, both by asserting the tribe or nation as opposed to the civic & cosmopolitan, and by thinking that appropriating Greek style was a "historical" process, when the Greeks themselves showed that the Classical is an imitation of nature itself on a more basic level, the image of universal proportion evoked from opposing forces. The essay explores how the loss of "polis"-design has consequences for political formations (when politics devolves from free participation & creative collaboration into various forms of patronage & anomie ).

Anyway, the implications of the essay are that it MIGHT be possible, in a way, to get at what the Greeks were really about - because they were getting at aspects of civilization & civic life which are truly universal (in a sort of "physical", scientific, "urban planning" sense).

Jonathan's comment is, on the one hand, true in the Greek sense (of producing a "truthful lie" for a different historical era); on the other hand, if we produce a "truthful lie" based on universal creative design in nature, we ARE getting at what the Greeks were really about. Both and.

Greek epics & Bible radiate ethos (communal values).

Tragedy, Iliad, Odyssey - hubris & selfishness are actions/consequences which are transparent, in a certain sense : like forces of nature to the disinterested observer.

Solon translates ethos into democratic politics.

Ethos = mutual aid = balance = sobornost = peace & prosperity.

(Athens/Jerusalem) - ancient symbol of psychic wholeness. (AlephoeBooks : name of my "publishing house" : after the kids, Alex & Phoebe.) Human/divine coordination.

Reading: Agon, Logos, Polis : the Greek achievement and its aftermath, ed. by Johann Arnason (Steiner, 2001).

In ancient Greece, for reasons people are still trying to figure out, the oikos or household sense of communal responsibility got translated into democracy : the idea that within the small island or mountain polis everyone (male, anyway!), both rich & poor, baron & farmhand (excepting slaves!) had a SAY in the common good. The ethos of Homer Hesiod & the tragedies showed how individual hubris & greed brought on oppression, revolution, civil wars & destruction, by a kind of natural law of selfishness & irresponsibility. Solon was inspired to codify this ethos & establish political well-being on the "middle way" of the common good, the equanimity of barons & plebs both. Interestingly at the core of his lawmaking was the concept of release from debt - the same notion that underlies the Hebrew institution of Jubilee.

All around Greek democracy lay the authoritarian monoliths - divine kingship, monotheisms. History developed into a confrontation between Asian tyranny & Western democracy; this development overtaken by the Roman synthesis of Republican values & imperial ambition; this development overtaken in turn by the confrontation between Rome & Jerusalem, imperial authority confronting divine authority. Hebrew culture can be considered another kind of synthesis, of monothestic, Middle Eastern authority with the unaccountable, trickster-like behavior of Yahweh - a kind of anti-Emperor, intent on liberation from slavery & a government of Law rather than divine monarchy.
The Christian development of a new kind of oikos, the Church, dedicated to counter-imperial values (love of neighbor, servanthood, dignity of poverty), a religious-cultural development which changed Roman imperialism even as it was synthesized with it in turn (Constantine; Roman Papal authority).

These specifically political developments & historical turns are still with us: "the past is not even past". With respect to poetry, witness the epic variations of Pound, Zukofsky, Williams, & Olson (with his intense focus - not always egalitarian by any means - on polis & localism). With respect to contemporary conditions, just look at the debate over America's role in the world. I think the critics of Bush policy should begin to look at the threads connecting both authoritarian & opportunist strains in the administration to decisions made about post-war governance in Iraq. Is there collusion, among advisers to a President brought to power in a flawed election, to benefit from connections with the regime to be installed in custody of Iraq? How will Iraqis themselves decide who governs them?

How do we as poets in our cities re-invent & apply the "core values" we have inherited? How do we express them in our poetry? This need not simply echo Olson's tendencies. Auden is just as interesting as a political poet. Olson made a fascinating opening around these issues at the beginning of Maximus, but perhaps he got consequently lost in a mytho-ego-poetics. Perhaps my "epic" efforts exhibit some of the same problems & tendencies: Stubborn Grew does try to present a sort of time- & space- crosscutting of poet & "polis" : then it takes a deep & obscure dive into inner-orphic space, riding William Blackstone's bull into the green constellation. Maybe if such is ever to find a place among the American makings, I will have to work my way back to the "polis" myself.