whispering the news

NESTED BRANCHES

When the Eternal comes, says the Rabbi,

& what does he mean?

May be the Ghost behind the scene;

the tear with grain of Ocean in your eye.

The truth is whole, the truth is one –

& what does this mean?

That Love’s criterion

is rectitude, in every human situation.

Gumilev, that Petersburg poet,

called it chaste vision –

welded like dew at dawn

to blades of grass, the spark of holy Paraclete.

The infant acorn was King of the Wood.

The leaves bent, whispering the news

through Ariadne’s arbor… (hers

the thread – her nested branches overhead).

The Rabbi is a child of God!

cried Mary Magdalen.

He dies on this occasion

since he bears the prophet’s spiral rod

twirling from heaven as from nothingness.

His smile defies your gravitation;

he will come again

after three days of stony sleepiness

like Jonah sprang from salty Milky Way;

the rule of theft & violence,

of Minotaur’s demonic fraudulence

is coming to an end.  Truth shines like day.

4.2.20

like a small town playground

LIGHT GOLD

The restoration of all things…

what’s it about this phrase

corrals my shifty gaze?

Some infant stimulus it brings?

As at the source of vast rivers

(Mississippi, Danube)

a baby spring’s hubbub

purls out of ground… shimmers

in bitter February air & light.

The restoration of a truth

too plain, too clear, to booth

as Peter would (its glare so bright).

Universal constant, Einstein’s measure;

flexible cinch-thread

of muttering light gold

sent to bind man, through rose embrasure.

Power’s byzantine – but truth Franciscan.

Peaceable polity

is founded in equality

chaste as a child’s eye (Petersburgian).

The restoration of the human world

is like a small town playground,

where the rusty sound

of an ancient iron swing is curled

within your inner ear.  You heard it

years ago, once… now,

again.  No one knows how

the goldfinch’s tricolor obsignat.

2.16.20

like that chaste vision

SERPENT-SPINE

Those Tuscan hills he hymned of, once

in rainy Voronezh.

Winter sunshine flashes

over the Mississippi’s muted bronze.

The exile hums of exiles, like a goldfinch

memorizes Europe;

watch her spectrum envelope

a furious alchemy of wingstrokes (inch

by inch).  So the flappable epileptic

witnesses drab depredations

from his almond branch –

Pope, Emperor… a sick

republic, riven by self-seeking men;

yet the silver line of the river

reminds him of forever

after (law of Righteous One).

Roger, with left hand floating

over the empty void

of a Providence hillside,

preaches the liberty of everything

like that chaste vision Nikolai proclaimed

(equalized humble

multitudes of tumble-

down small shining blooms) – & Osip framed;

& the river, like a serpent-spine

glints across graphite winter –

pencil from the hinter-

lands, crust of salty bread & wine.

2.8.20

the sense of being right

GREEN EYE

The sense of being right, said Mandelstam

confronted by the Kremlin

goons.  Gumilev’s vision

of sweet radiance (chaste equilibrium

of morning dew).  The restoration

of all things might not be

some dystopic unreality

but a balancing of earth & heaven –

the way a canoe takes wing downstream

like feathery kayak

or golden bubble-track

across the sky (the Ocean River of your dream).

Kennedy, Jack.  A 4-leaf clover

assassinated every day

along with brother Bobby, &

King, Martin Luther (justice-lover).

A green eye floats, engraved over

the pyramid.  I calibrate

the shifting angles of a late

Atlantis – one heartbroken sky-rover

whose tears will magnify an Iris

in transit, like Venus

(from luxuria to lux

aeternam).  She was born for this –

to be the eye-in-hand of muddy clay

transmitting Jonah to Columbia;

to launch a hallelujah

from Monk’s Mound to D.C. (U.S.A.).

11.17.19

slow boat to Atlantis

archaic Mississippian ware (Minneapolis Institute of Art)

ADAMANT ACORN

The steady quiet of the river leads me,

& these monarchs afloat

toward Mexico.  Mote

of black-orange sail, tacking across a sea

of green... like a jasper flag of Jonah

(flickering calm coral

pinned over equatorial

squall).  Sextant from Alexandria,

sunken Heracleion – lamp from Atlantis

beaming through night sea;

matrix of Milky Way,

your Isis-canoe... assembling Osiris

from slow-roiling flatlands (Mississippian).

So Wolfram’s grail-witness

(ineffable justice

planted in lovingkindness) branches on

through Osip’s, Nikolai’s chaste vision –

adamant acorn of creation

(shining emerald of redemption

framed by buoyant casket-stone).

The red muscle pulses into veins.

A wheel turns versus gravity

rowing time to eternity;

the melancholy of Ravenna cranes,

the mortified forsaken innocence

of flighty Juliet

my filmy safety net

hugs tight – lifts up to cedar salience.

8.29.19

beamed into a barn corner

LEVEL PLAIN

When all the structures are dismantled,

the fabulous bright makings

woven by spider-kings

undone, what remains untold?

In Mendelssohn, I handed a dandelion

through the wooden fence

to golden Heidi, once –

old flame of infancy, first Valentine.

Her mop of hair colored like wheat

framing chaste happiness –

Gumilev’s compass,

calm charity for all (transparent,

sweet).  The shadow of the martyrs

like myrtle in the graveyard

darkens, green.  The bard

of America recalls through tears

the gentle captains taken from us

like matryoshka dolls –

god-like mortals

molting in dilapidated silos

like shimmering snowfields of wheat-

crystals.  So their presence

in aromatic silence

weights like ballast of a sea-casket

each holiday – all history

compacted in the oval

trace of one primeval

prophet’s kiss.  O mystery

                *

of your mandorla – crumbling wall!

Like Jonah from the sea

come whispering to me –

dark almond, ministering honey-gall!

Your tiny grain of wheat must die

in the heart of Everywoman,

Everyman... becoming stone;

stone reddened in Rhode Island eye

not purchased by price nor money

but only by love.

So that Liberty-dove

became Columbia, for buried Henry –

Astraea beamed into a barn corner

& Virgo spread her sheaf

of compassionate relief

in a sparkling surf of harvest air.

So your soaring icon in a mandala

hovers over Ravenna;

so Dante’s antenna

transmits in spectral panorama

the rainbow’s interlocking rings

framing that child-king

set upon humbling

all earthly dominion – til everything’s

remolded to a level plain

or playing-field; clay

children romp all day

within your carpentry’s domain.

2.14.19

Walking around Ravenna Diagram

Ravenna Diagram, the project I've been engaged with for the last few years, begins with a poem called "Potter's Whirl".  That poem was set in motion by small ceramic plate my mother made many years ago, featuring a pale pink starfish with a background of stars & rays - sort of a cosmic little dish.

You could say this poem is an introductory pointer toward the shape of Ravenna Diagram as a whole.  The "diagram" in question is actually a kind of Venn diagram, with two interlocking spheres centered, respectively, on the contemporary here & now, and on Dante Alighieri's presence at the end of his life among the Byzantine structures & mosaics of Ravenna (Dante completed his Divina Commedia there, and is buried in Ravenna).

It's meant to be a kind of juxtaposition of Modern & Medieval mind & culture, or a synthesis.  The Venn diagram also points to the underlying worldview of the western Middle Ages : a concept of Incarnation, which is itself a sort of Venn diagram, melding the human and the divine.  In the poem, this worldview or philosophy is represented in part by the figure of Maximus the Confessor, a Byzantine monk whose writings on the Trinity had a deep impact on the thought-world of the 12th-cent. French cathedral-builders, as well as on the Byzantine Orthodox church itself (see Otto von Simson's monograph The Gothic Cathedral for more on this).

I think of my Dante juxtaposition as a sort of 90-degree tweak.  While the Divine Commedia climbs vertically (up & down the ladder from Earth to Heaven), Ravenna Diagram works on the horizontal - set upon the "flat plate" of the American Midwest, & seeking this-world ramifications and consequences of a spiritual worldview (the eschatological meaning of "Providence", for example).

I sense that the poem actually gathers mass & energy in the same way that my mother shaped her plates and bowls from lumps of wet clay turned on a potter's wheel.  The making of ancient, medieval and Renaissance poetry was enmeshed in such "ring structures" - their unity welded by numerologically-concentric rings of design.  This process is something I've been pursuing over several long poems & several decades of work.  The chapters & books of Ravenna Diagram turn on their own centers, which in turn are linked by motifs surfacing in the corresponding or parallel "numbers" (ie. the 14th poem in Book 1 will find echoes in the 14th & nearby poems of Books 2-9+).

One of the strange effects for me of this process is that the individual units or poems will foreshadow each other in advance.  Here's how it happens.  My general method is to read through the aligned or corresponding "numbers" of the previous books before setting out on the next poem.  Thus if I'm writing # 27 in Book 10, I will read through the previous #27s in Books 1-9, seeking a general orientation.  Then I will proceed to write #27.  The odd thing is this : when I then turn to composing #28, and proceed to read all the previous #28s, I discover that what I'm reading has already been foreshadowed by what I've just written (#27).  It's sort of a double motion, planned/unplanned.

If this sounds convoluted, my apologies : the basic idea is that the large poem is structured on a series of rings, growing slowly outward, like a tree.  It's a massive ceramic plate - shaped by clay lips (a sort of "whisper gallery").  Or a maze, a labyrinth - a slow, spiraling pilgrimage one has to walk.

My constant companion in this seemingly endless project is a shadow of doubt & frustration.  There is no acknowledgement in the literary world for what I'm engaged with here.  The silence is absolute.  It's like I'm traveling in a separate or private universe, on an irrational fool's errand.  There is a vast chasm between creation & publication.  I have no prestige, no powerful advocates.  Ravenna Diagram goes out there on HG Poetics, with occasional forays into literary magazines (for which I'm extremely grateful).

I've written before about the motivations for blogging the poem. Basically I find that the blog is an appropriate way to present a long, serial, diaristic, processual work, which sometimes interacts with signal holidays or public events.  But the disadvantages are many.  Moreover, I have a very old & very bad habit of self-publication - which doesn't sit well with many people, especially prestigious academics, book reviewers & editors.  This greatly limits my access to the larger literary scene.

But I want to suggest that there is another, more fundamental dimension to this poetry thing I am acting out at such great length.  & that is that I am attempting to express a radical worldview, a sort of philosophy with my work.  The intellectual pivot of all these poetic ring structures is a challenge to the modern & postmodern era as a whole (an intellectual challenge).

One might see this coming with a poem structured on a parallel to Dante.  Eliot & Pound, in their own ways, did something similar.   But I'm not at all a neoconservative or revolutionary-authoritarian Modern, as they were.  My intellectual allegiance (if I have to choose models) is closer to Hart Crane & James Joyce.  Or to some of the visionary dimensions in Mandelstam & Yeats.

I believe in a new Age of Faith : but one in which faith itself is understood also in a new way.

Poetry, in my view, is a mode of expressing the vitality, goodness & beauty of Reality as a whole : as an End, as a Creation, as a living, breathing multivalent Sign of a supreme loving Consciousness.  This view need contradict neither human free will nor scientific objective reason (theory & evidence).  But it is rooted in this sense of faith : this joyful apprehension of a benevolent purpose in cosmic nature (call it divine "Providence").

I can only call it Faith, because it is incommensurate with simple verbal arguments or logical verifications.  But I do think this is what Jesus meant when he spoke of "going back to the beginning", or about faith as the root of all active accomplishment, or when he characterized God the Creator as Love.   This faith is really not that different from the "primitive" faith of archaic human cultures - that all goodness descends from the One Great Spirit, from the "Manitou" who is the source of all blessings.  We are talking about the root meaning of the general social-behavioral attitude we call "good faith", "good will".

This way of putting things will strike many as not "new" at all.  I agree : I'm not up to the task here in prose.  Hence the need for poetry.  Ravenna Diagram is circling very slowly around a new sense of "Incarnation" - something emerging presently, out of the here & now, out of the clay of Big Muddy, like an infant emerging from the womb, or Jonah from the whale.  An Incarnation which expresses and confirms (forever) an inherent thankfulness-for-being; a celebration of its own existence, a happy end-in-itself.

The foregoing sketches out a vision - not unrelated to that of the Russian Acmeist poet Nikolai Gumilev.  A "chaste" vision, of the inherent beauty & blessedness of all things; of the harmony of the cosmos as one fundamental, & fundamentally victorious, Dream-reality.

Martin Luther King's home town

Sarah & I just got back from a 3-day trip to Atlanta, visiting relatives.  Martin Luther King's town, Jimmy Carter's town (even FDR's town, in a way).

Trying to come to grips with the Donald Trump reality.  Perhaps one good thing that might emerge, out of Arturo Ui's resistible rise, would be a reconnection with fundamentals of American democratic government.  As a matter of survival.

My first thought : Trump has one primary, subliminal, unconscious agenda.  Which would be : 1) to corrode institutions of democracy through administrative chaos, the flouting of legal and cultural norms; 2) to impose authoritarian tyranny, in order to bring "order" out of said chaos.

This is the playbook of Hitler and Putin.

Subliminal because Trump gives every sign of being a sleepwalker, a narcissist, a creature of show biz for its (his) own sake, a puppet of impersonal power-surges.  Or perhaps that's just his schtick, and he's a man of infinite guile.  Either way he is not a friend, he is the implacable enemy of liberal democracy.  If it's not his own design, he is subject to the designs of other, similarly dark forces.

How to oppose these forces?

40+ years ago, in 1972-73, I had a vocational crisis, a personal crisis, a nervous breakdown.  I was in college, at Brown University.  I was becoming a poet, and couldn't deal with it.  Moreover, I was morally/psychologically shattered - unable to orient the religious values instilled from childhood, with the 19-yr-old late-60s collegiate artiste I had become.

I survived this impasse.  I dropped out, wandered America and England, came back.  But what finally helped me to integrate the moral and the aesthetic, the spiritual and the poetic, was an encounter with a Russian poet of the early 20th century, Osip Mandelstam.

Mandelstam offered the model of a new synthesis.  I was drawn to the echoes of Rimbaud in his dense, wild, riddling stanzas; yet, by way of his wife Nadezhda's memoirs, and his own critical essays, I absorbed the rational cast of his mind, underlying the lyricism.

Mandelstam, the Acmeist, the Petersburg poet, the student of Gumilev, defended the Enlightenment values of Pushkin, of Chaadev - both rational and liberal, both Classical & Romantic.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [people] are created equal... endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights... among these being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..."

Two centuries of struggle - between the vision of Lincoln, Whitman, and the Founding Fathers, on the one hand, and the forces of greed, fraud, pride, intellectual vanity, ideology, violence, and oppression, on the other - have battered and weakened the power of this egalitarian vision, which lies at the root of Western democratic politics.

What I found in Mandelstam's writings and example was a foundation even deeper - going back, through Christianity, with Christianity, to its origins in Hebraic iconoclasm (Moses' people against the dominion of Pharaoh) - the very same spirit infusing the message of Martin Luther King.

Mandelstam's notion of the Redemption (sketchily outlined in his unfinished essay "Pushkin & Scriabin") parallels themes in his essay on Chaadev.  Both are concerned with human freedom : both come to the same conclusion.  Human (political) freedom is grounded ultimately in a fundamental spiritual (eternal) dimension.  The freedom we look for, hope for, & recognize in our secular systems of government, is an expression of sacred (eternal) soul liberty.

There is a poetic dimension to Enlightenment ideals : Chaadev & Gumilev, Wordsworth & Blake, bore witness to the philosophical concept of the dignity of Man (as imago of God).  Such dignity entails equality, and (inalienable) human rights; the very thing - the notion of a common, universal human Good - that autocrats and plutocrats hate & fear the most (it is their personal nemesis).

Roger Williams - the apostle of soul liberty, the student of Edward Coke (the lawful rights of Englishmen) and forerunner of John Locke (lawful government is popular sovereignty) - understood all these things 100 years before the American Revolution; articulated them in his foundation of the first civil government on the principles of religious tolerance and political democracy (the Colony of Rhode Island).

One of my gr-gr-etc-uncles, Thomas Gould, was a friend of Roger Williams; he rented Roger a portion of Gould Island (in Narragansett Bay) for planting a hay crop.

I haven't expressed myself too clearly.  I guess this is a rant or screed in the manner of Williams' "Fox Digg'd from his Burrow" etc.  But the basic idea is, that the Modern concept of liberal democracy is not at odds with the Reformation notion of soul liberty, nor with the Medieval notion (ala Mandelstam) of the Redemption : these things are rhymes.

God is not mocked.  The splendor & creative power of humankind (imago of Creator) entails her (our) human rights.  Government is the servant of these human rights; otherwise those who claim its authority, actually have none - are frauds, imposters, usurpers, despots, tyrants.  They must be cast down - cast down by the people.

old American poet in Atlanta

Henry Bard has second thoughts

The ghost of Edgar Allan Poe troubled my sleep, and I awoke feeling reservations about the gaudy bardic proclamations of previous post.  Perhaps there are two deep currents in 20th and 21st-century poetry : 1) the urge toward engagement, fellowship, judgement, passionate witness; and 2) the urge toward imperturbable detachment, disinterested objectivity, the autonomous perfection of the art work.  You could say Whitman is representative of the first impulse, and Poe of the second.  David Jones across the Atlantic, another great modern exemplar of the long poem, wrote some wonderful essays in defense of the absolute freedom of the artist - as artist - from social/political requirements.  Art has a moral purpose, and forwards human freedom and dignity, simply by fulfilling itself, by working out its own quest toward integral beauty, in free association with the manual arts, applied technology and useful crafts.

It seems clear to me that I have wavered through my writing life between these two poles, between Whitman and Poe.  It's why my favorite American "bard" has always been, not Ezra Pound, but Hart Crane.  Crane's Bridge is a national paean to American culture : yet the poem is so dense and "overdetermined" with pure poetic resonance that it is always more than whatever abstract or paraphrase is applied to it.  The Bridge is multidimensional and recursive, self-referential : you could say the poem radiates the free-standing beauty of an achieved work of art, an "end-in-itself".

Also the serene formulae of the early-modern poetic movement of Russian Acmeism gave me examples of possible integrations of these two poles (call them the aesthetic and the political, or the communal and the individual...).  Gumilev and Mandelstam found a mediation between revolutionary Futurism and reactionary or detached Symbolism : by making poetic works of integral, pure and free art, by following, revising and fulfilling artistic traditions they had inherited, the Acmeists produced an art of and for the people.  "The Word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of flesh and bread : suffering" (Mandelstam, from the essay "Word and Culture").

Yin & yang, systole, diastole... the poet goes out singing, and comes back again - to work late, & in secret, at the smithy of the integral poem.

This may be another partial explanation for my marginal presence on the contemporary scene.  I've been too busy working at the forge.  My massive unread poems are an effort, in part, to bring the American long-poem enterprise to some kind of artistic, integral fulfillment, on the model of Crane's Bridge and Osip Mandelstam's life-work.  Island Road, Stubborn Grew, Forth of July, Lanthanum, Ravenna Diagram...  It would be somewhat ironic if someday critical reception picks up on the idea that the American national epic has been fulfilled by a contribution from Soviet Russia.  But don't call Putin or Trump : Mandelstam and Gumilev speak from a completely other Russia, the Russia of Pushkin, Chaadev, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova.  The spiritually-free Russian psyche, so radiant with balletic grace and deep chords of solemn harmony.

Gateway Arch Monument, St. Louis

radical carrot

PACIFIC GATES

All the dry seeds go back

into the clay, like these

on their wand of wheatgrass

(like a gold cattail against a black

park bench).  A nut curves over the sky

for this brown recluse (Hobo

on his own West Branch).  So

a midnight Isis took her milky way –

a stone skipped into Petersburg to say

all things are equally beloved

in the chaste eye (earth-

shaked adamant Columbiad of Liberté).

The hungry crowd rages for opportune

justice – the pumpkin man

bugling Promised Land –

& like the ravenous orange trumpet-vine

we cling to dreams of Mendelssohn

& good old days...  So let

the radical carrot

root deep in Galilee – a love so alien

& corny, only Beats & donkeys

out on Frisco Bay can see;

for you just as for me –

as for Akhmed, Aunt Bea & Weldon Kees,

each everyone – this equity applies.

Let go the superflux!

yawps Lear, & let the buck

stop here – behold Pacific Gates arise.

11.10.16

music of ordinary things

AERIE-FEAST

Music of ordinary things...

happiness at work,

when things go OK –

when the work is good, & skill brings

flowers to fruition; then at dusk

heading home, to family

& friends, where kids play

beneath a sturdy roof (hard task

fulfilled with courteous precision)...

plain telos of humanity,

pleroma of reality,

continuum of beauty’s diapason.

Grandfather’s house of rusty brick

along the River Road –

an engineer’s abode,

who loved an opera (Elvira’s cheek)...

One high lone raven corkscrews toward

the Pole.  This pillager

is Eli’s forager –

his black-hole fleece ties ragged

knots, makes nest for bread & wine.

Look how the prophet-priest

exalts his aerie-feast

where Time peals to a finish line,

B-flat – è FIAT... è finit.

Apollinaire smiles

in the wings – miles

overhead his plane lifts (azure, infinite).

9.28.16

Memory is full of Providence

FALL STEPS

                           i.m. Henry Shelton

Fall steps softly to the door

beside the river now.

Memory, somehow

is full of Providence today – your

little hideaway of brave

adorable & free

spirits, whom to thee

were given – opening, wave on wave

sea-gates of joy & liberty.

Like that dear one

on Petersburg pontoon

floated to town – Elena, she

of the midnight sun – as if an emerald

kamen-ring of Gumilev

(tattooed ghost-brave)

stood there, incarnate – held

my hand, like Word made Flesh – began

to dance & sing; as if

Columba on his acorn skiff

arrived in New York harbor – shine,

Franco-Irish lantern – beam

your torch around the globe!

Moss-copper robe

whose folds encompass freedom’s dream

whose web of mutuality

is wind-blown sail

on cosmic Ocean trail

chaste vision of equality

                 *

tall northern pine who will prevail

like massive cedar tree

in Puget Sound   like she

who danced the Shaker upland trail

to soul freedom, with John Slocum

or Henry Shelton in

Rhode Eye   Franciscan

mule of social justice   plumb

spine of Blackstone’s Catholic Oak

or Williams’ open hand

give me your poor... stand

in my healing shade... Manitou spoke

on Wisdom’s dancing-wheel of joy!

& my hoarse scar-tattoo

on Queequeg’s silver-blue

casket – my burbled Jaybird cry,

confessional – only an ochre scratch

on earliest cave-wall;

only a golden ball

of Ariadne-wool, wet sheepish match

balled-up by selfishness.  Who lit out

for that stony kingdom –

ancient Big Rock Mountain,

deeper firmament, beneath the shout

of pokey politics – that Cosmosphere

of lovingkindness, where

the soul finds Primavera air

& breathes... & sighs... & lives forever.

9.23.16

4th of July, Providence harbor

bronze mood of river

MAGNANIMOUS WING

The crickets’ eerie premonition.

The bronze mood of snaking

river, mirrored in

cottonwood’s heart-shaped fallen

shield.  Identity’s an equal sign

in autumn – twin banks

the Mississippi makes

to fringe the tender almonds of a span

darken toward evening, of a year.

That wavy, sooty smudge

afloat below the bridge

no raven now, but King-bird, here –

old Balder Will, majestic, serene

sailing with the wind

downstream.  You’ll find

his imago, dispersed, unseen –

scattered in brown eddies, copper jags...

the soft green lichen

of anonymous kin-

folk.  King Who-He-Who-She brags

like Pharaoh, but it’s all a masque –

autumnal Shakespeare,

smiling through the year-

dregs... tears toward Phoenix-Pasque.

Chaste vision is an equal sign.

Justice like rain – drifting

magnanimous wing

from Cosmosphere, where all things shine.

9.21.16

bald eagle in flight, reflected below bridge

A nighttime sun

If my own experience in poetry is reflected in, or has any bearing on, the common culture of our times, then I would have to insist that the obscure mirror or skeleton key to understanding our times is to be found in that obviously & oddly unfinished fragment of an essay by Osip Mandelstam, "Pushkin & Scriabin".  It was first published outside Russia, long after the poet's death; but scholars believe it was written about a century ago, probably in 1915.

The unfinished character of this text is like an open invitation -  pregnant with future (exploratory) life.  It's been for me what they used to call a touchstone : a word, a gospel, a message - a voice that keeps coming back, recurrent, at unpredictable intervals.

Mandelstam is writing about Pushkin, and about Scriabin - but the words are prophetic in their weird self-portraiture.  He himself is foreshadowed in Pushkin's & Scriabin's exemplary suffering.  "They served as an example of a collective Russian demise, they died a full death... their personality, while dying, extended itself to a symbol of the whole people, and the sun-heart of the dying remained forever at the zenith of suffering and glory." [tr. Sidney Monas]

This is only in the opening paragraph!

M. sketches out a symbiotic contrast between the two culture heroes, with Scriabin as a sign of Russia's cultural regression from the wholeness and integrity of the "Christian chronology".   Pushkin is the perfect icon of an "encrypted" Christian sacrifice for the whole people; Scriabin is the sign of its dissipation or betrayal.  Yet watch how Mandelstam refuses to descend into some kind of elegiac complaint!  He himself is enmeshed in both Pushkin's chaste clarity (the whole essay is rooted in prior Acmeist insights & formulations of his martyr-friend Nikolai Gumilev) and in the "Hellenic" (revolutionary) frenzy of Scriabin - the Dionysian element of the Greek dyad (Dionysus/Apollo).

But the substantial, the quintessential nectar embedded in this garbled fragment is sketched out in Mandelstam's vision of the relation between Christianity - as the fulness of God's free & loving redemption of the whole cosmos - and the soul and personality of the individual artist.  It is this "logic" of soul freedom and integrity - again, foreshadowed in Pushkin and Gumilev in particular, along with Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Nadezhda Mandelstam, so many others - as actually a result of the divine gift of free grace & redemption - which, for Mandelstam, explains the vitality, wholeness, and integrity of Western art in general.

"Christian art is free.  It is, in the full meaning of the phrase, 'art for art's sake'.  No necessity of any kind, even the highest, clouds its bright inner freedom, for its prototype, that which it imitates, is the very redemption of the world by Christ.  And so, not sacrifice, not redemption in art, but the free and joyful imitation of Christ - that is the keystone of Christian esthetics.  Art cannot be sacrifice, for a sacrifice has already been made; cannot be redemption, for the world along with the artist has already been redeemed."

"What then is left?  A joyful commerce with the divine, like a game played by the Father with his children, a hide-&-seek of the spirit!"

Mandelstam does something here akin to one of his 19th-cent. heroes, Chaadev.  He distinguishes clearly between religion and art, in order to illuminate the actual relationship between the two.

"Nourishing art, giving art of its flesh, offering it in the way of a sturdy metaphysical foundation the most real fact of redemption, Christianity demanded nothing in return."

This is a very fascinating formulation.  But for contemporary Western culture, it sounds like some arcane, indecipherable mathematical equation.  This too, however, is foreshadowed here (Russia has a strange way in general of foreshadowing & echoing cultural phenomena in the West).  Mandelstam talks about the contemporary regression from "the Christian calendar", the sense of history under the sign of a metaphysical Redemption.  There is no spiritual light at the end of the tunnel.  We have forgotten, or forsaken, or bowdlerized, the pure affirmation of the message upon which our culture was built.

"O ye of little faith!  Verily, if you say, lift up this mountain & toss it into the sea, & ye have faith, it shall be done for you!"

What is the meaning here?  It is not to declare that any one of us can perform weird magic tricks at any time of our choosing.  It is to say : The Son of Man is coming with Power, on the clouds of heaven.  The Earth has already been redeemed, by the manifestation - the incarnation - the sacrifice - & the heroic victory - of perfect Love.

This is a kind of pure Christian Classicism.  It can be heard in the taut moral scales of Shakespeare.  It can be heard in the ineffable organ-music of Donne.  It can be heard in the melody of Andrew Marvell.  It can even be heard lifting under the anxious heartbeat of John Keats.

It's that to which Wallace Stevens alluded, perhaps unknowingly, as his desire to celebrate the "normal" (a hard thing to do).

The world is not "normal" now.  The world is undergoing the symphonic stress of global birth-pangs.  Yet the Redemption stretches out the warm spiritual hand of healing, reconciliation, sanity, wholeness, integrity, hope, joy, freedom & love.  The structural harmony of the world is - the Redemption itself.   This metaphysical-historical fact, according to Mandelstam, is the substance of the "poetic license" of artistic freedom & truth.

America has in some respects lost sight of its own cultural inheritance.  The arts, and society as a whole, are overwhelmed with a righteous, judgmental, Puritanical fervor - splintered into multifarious factions, partisans of subcultural identifications.  The soul seeks some kind of moral justification : but it's an anxious, deracinated search, akin to the Dionysian frenzy of Scriabin & the revolutionaries of 1915.  God is playing hide & seek; but no one knows where to look for release... & yet...

"I shall be released."

Nostalgia for world culture

Quick stray thoughts tonight... Osip Mandelstam once defined the impulse of the Acmeist movement (early 20th cent. Russian poetry) as "nostalgia for world culture."  Nostalgia for world culture.  Implying that "world culture" once existed (or still existed, elsewhere).  But then Acmeism also promoted a Bergsonian, anachronistic anti-sense of Time - what was deep in the past (Ovid, Dante) was actually calling to us from the future.  (In this he may have been attempting to one-up the contemporary Futurist movement, among other things.)

But what would be a real world culture?  A global culture, life-supporting, life-enhancing, humane, refined, playful.  Not the world as we know it today... but maybe an aspiration.

Then again one way of thinking of culture is as an inherently parasitic lichen-like growth.  Culture is opportunist.  For example, the culture of the "divine king", established around the world in various phases & formations - the culture of powerful rulers and autocrats, with their enormous suction machines for collecting & channeling the labor of millions of slaves (see : pyramids) - the culture of royal power might be seen as a defense mechanism of the kings themselves.  A survival mechanism, in other words, insinuated into society by the rulers, to protect themselves from being divided up and eaten, tossed about in communal games, by the whole peon mass of the tribe itself (see A.M. Hocart's Kings and Councillors for a consideration of such phenomena).

Then imagine that the speedy vine-growth of culture takes another world-historical bend, once the ziggurat of royal power & totalitarian government reaches its apex : I mean the turn toward apocalyptic messianism (see Norman Cohn's classic study of the Iranian-Zoroastrian roots of same, Cosmos, chaos & the world to come).  Here religious thinking happens upon a viral antidote to overweening political power : the idea of the return of the God-King - the uber-King, the "King of Kings", who will finally put the tyrants in their place (like Yurtle the Turtle, at the bottom of the pond).

I think of these parasitic culture-shifts as edge-phenomena, happening on the margins of something even deeper & more invisible & slow.  I'm thinking of the historical project of "species-Man", homo sapiens, seeking equilibrium.  Humankind is still building the conceptual house which is truly life-enhancing, lovable, livable.  This, as it happens, is another theme which turns up in Mandelstam's version of Acmeism : the idea that poetry has a role to play in the human project to "domesticate" life on earth.  "Domestic hellenism", he called it.

What would be a really "domestic" global culture?  Livable, lovable, familial, gemutlich?  It would have to involve the old English theme of liberty - the freedom from encroachment by tyrannical government.  But, on the other side, it would also have to involve something beyond pure individualism : the active engagement in the common good, the commonweal, the welfare of the whole community.  (These are, you may have noticed, the primal ideals, respectively, of the two major political parties in the U.S. - yet how sadly & stupidly & rigidly & uselessly & backwardly & corruptly & blindly & dogmatically & inflexibly they have worked themselves out in the electoral process.)

What's really needed in order to stimulate Mandelstam's "world culture" - what's required at the most basic level of conception - is a spiritual orientation.  Pope Francis, it seems to me, is saying some of the right things in that direction.  The "poor church" is the global house we share.  The spiritual attitude is one that sets aside narrow pleasures & greedy ambitions & haughty pride on behalf of a sense of wholeness : a "gratitude for existence" (another Brodskian, Gumilevian, Mandelshtamian theme).

How is this possible?  I'm not an advocate by any means of any kind of theocracy : don't get me wrong.  Rather I am talking about something much more basic, simple, and primitive - the kind of childlike faith represented by the original St. Francis.  How can we live in the global house if we cannot trust in the benevolent love of the Spirit that formed & created it all?  How can we build a future without a sense of being "at home" in the universe?  I think of Jesus, the first "son" of God, as playing the middle C on the piano, of a major chord of affirmation - of union with the source of Being.  Francis only echoed the same.  "Unless you turn & become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

Granted much of this will strike many as idiocy or ideology, or both.  So be it.  The poet represents a "nostalgia for world culture".  As such he or she represents a link in the spine of historical time - a time working itself out in the human sense of reality & possibility.  The poet's vision is grounded in harmony, triggered by a basic sense of wonder : of wonder at all that exists, majestically, from nothing at all.

The personal, subjective & familial love we experience among ordinary friends, strangers, & family, might someday be echoed & reinforced by culture at large - & this might, actually, be a return to "Nature" itself - the natural cosmos stamped by the seal of divine Providence.  "The Son of Man is coming, & he will restore all things."  O ye of little faith!  Sursum corda.

Simone & Maximus & me

The French writer/philosopher/mystic Simone Weil appealed to me in the mid-1980s (still does).  Ascetic worker/dreamer; deep Biblical exegete.  I remember walking down to Seward's Folly bookshop, at the Fox Point end of Brook St., & asking Mr. Seward, the freewheeling eccentric bookseller & former Connecticut goat farmer, to look for a scarce book by her.  Seward threw up his hands.  "Simone Weil!  I adore that woman - but sometimes I want to grab her by the shoulders & give her a good shake!"

I can't remember much of what I read back then.  But I have a vague idea regarding some of her commentaries on the growth of the human soul.  How at a certain point the natural energies of the human person (like vegetation that runs out of water) wear themselves out; through mistakes & sufferings, the natural person reaches a psychic & physical limit.  Then only an infusion of supernatural grace can save the soul.

It meant something to me; I could identify with it.  I'd been there.

This is all by way of a lead-in to a second writer who (like Osip Mandelstam) has meant a lot to me, periodically, intermittently, over the years : the Byzantine theologian (& ordinary monk, & martyr) Maximus the Confessor.  I'm back again reading him, & about him (Microcosm & Mediator, by Lars Thunberg, is a magisterial study, a terrific book; Cosmic Liturgy, by Hans Urs von Balthasar, is another one).

My "professional" life in the vocation of poet has been a very strange & frustrating experience.  I think I speak for all poets when I say this (just kidding, sort of).  I'm absolutely sure that 99% of the mistakes along the way - moral, ethical, intellectual, aesthetic, etc. - have been my own.

But there is a kernel of strangeness in this overall experience - not so much strange, as uncanny - which I attribute to objective reality, rather than to my own quirks of psychology & moral turpitude.  This uncanny crux has something to do with Simone Weil's schema of the end of nature & the beginning of grace.

Maximus, I hazard to think, would trace Weil's divide back to the ur-distinction of his own theological vision : the difference between Creator and Creation.  What the worldview of brilliant Maximus does, however - with the suavity of Shakespeare & the incisiveness of Aristotle - is to reconcile this basic difference without blurring the distinction.  That is, he propounds a cosmic landscape, wherein the simple unknowable Oneness of the Creator is reconciled with the multitudinous Manyness of the Creation.  Incarnation is the name of that process by which the Many are harmonized with the One - by which all beings are united in creative Love, without losing their distinct identity & freedom as unique replicas of that original Creator.

I realize how hokey this sounds.  But it has a lot of resonance with the worldview of a poet who inherited - after many long centuries - the Orthodox legacy from Byzantium : Nikolai Gumilev, the founder of the Acmeist movement in Russian poetry, which Mandelstam & Akhmatova brought to full flower.  Gumilev adumbrated an underlying worldview for Acmeist poetics : he called it "chasteness".  It is something maybe akin to Walt Whitman's visionary sense of the "Union" of many equally beautiful things (small & great, humble & vast).  The idea is that poetry's moral purpose has to do with celebrating the "chasteness" - the inherent dignity - of all things on earth : because it (poetry) is a loving response - an echo - of the supernatural good will of their creative Origin.

This is a sort of mystical idea, I guess.  My own life as a poet is rooted, paradoxically, in a spiritual crisis & break from poetry.  I came to the end of my vegetable nature, so to speak (in Weil's sense), at the age of 19.  It was a common thing, & still is : a young person torn apart by the world's chaos, & by his or her own sense of betrayal (self-betrayal, betrayal of others).  The fanatic young enthusiasts of ISIS are not really that different.  They are Simone Weil's déracinés - the spiritually uprooted.  There but for the grace of God go I.

So I worked back slowly into poetry (thanks mostly to Stuart Blazer, John Tagliabue, Edwin Honig & Osip Mandelstam).  We are talking about things that happened 35 years ago, in the late 70s.  But these spiritual experiences marked me.  I have lived on the margins of "professional" poetry ever since.  There are many reasons for this, I admit, not all of them having to do with the present self-mythologizing.  But the central motive, the reason which keeps impelling me to write, is the theological one.  Once you have this salt of the realm of Jesus planted in you, it does not easily fade away.  It's a realm of supernatural joy : an infusion of saving grace : who would want to throw that away?