I had a long chat about religion & UFOs with this chap. Laissez les bons temps rouler.

My God, my God, my whole weird life has pivoted on this hair's-breadth. I am not kidding, nay, not one bit.

The poetry of Shakespeare & the Bible drove me out of college into the wilderness. The poetry of the NY School got me into college (Ted Berrigan imitations : he grew up a couple miles from my alma mater).

Zen & the Art of Information Maintenance.

voice/text
art/knowledge

Gospel: Jesus (the Nazir - not the "Nazarene", but the Nazir, the ecstatic singer-prophet) - speaking of the future, says, offhandedly: "Knowledge shall increase." Oh, heart/mind. Logos/pathos/ethos. Mimesis vs. analysis.

One of the best books I've ever received was a gift from a carpenter-photographer high school friend, who dropped out of college in the early 70s & came to NY to get into the art scene: The Nazarene : Studies in New Testament Exegesis, by Eugenio Zolli, Univ. of Rome (publ. Herder, 1950). On the Hebrew/Aramaic context of the poetics of the parables.

Catalogue of Comedic Novelties : a good title for 20th-cent. poetics. I've met Lev Rubinstein a few times, & heard him perform at the Hoboken conferences (Russ-Amer poetry). He's quite slight, like a baby bird, about 5 ' tall. Elena Shvarts' twin, actually. (They don't eat enough over there, sadly, & they smoke too much.) Remember the two of them walking together up the NJ sidewalk in close conversation, like a couple of pigeons.

As Shvarts & Rubinstein, so Acmeism & Futurism. Not one without the other. (Stravinsky & Shostakovich?)

When I practiced piano on the old upright in the ancient blue-green living room, my back was directly facing the screen door (mentioned in previous poem). Heidi Johnson (blonde daughter of chicken farmer Dale) would usually be practicing too, across the street: sometimes we sent each other musical signals.

Profound discouragement. Must take deep breath & continue making same mistakes.

In a black mood lately. Trying to think positively about this: maybe it's the sign of a new direction. This has happened before.

The poems written in the last month, for the most part, are well-meaning & workmanlike, but also quite stuffy, stodgy, giving the impression of forced effort. With a couple weeks' distance they feel alien & clunky.

Seems like I've lived several lives in poetry already. Sometimes the mountain seems too large & cold to move.

When I'm in this mood it's better for me not to observe the "scene" at all.

It's a good thing I can play some music. Five of us now: piano, guitar, fiddle, accordion, harmonica, jaw harp, saw (yes, saw), kazoo, jug, washboard, bass (have started playing bass, finding it fun). We're sounding very jug-zydeco-afro-pop.

Though this too is just a distraction... "nobody knows the trouble I've been."

Unable to write for the past couple of weeks, after an enthusiastic spell before that. Maybe, at my advanced age, I'm starting to become slightly conscious of my own creative patterns(?). Early enthusiasm, followed by spate of disillusionment & boredom with my plainness, obviousness, my prosaic style. Some of the more formalist poems in Way Stations came out of similar periods of enthusiasm (technical tours-de-force).

The strong interest in Mandelstam & Montale, especially, for their hermetic qualities: the inward curve of the imagery, the self-sustaining roundedness, the indirection.

The strong interest in long poems for their "learned" qualities: the way an arcane or highly-involved subject-matter folds the poetry into its own sphere of indirections.

So maybe these two interests arose partly out of desire to compensate for my own ordinariness. (I guess I'll just have to quit being ordinary!)

OK, enough confession. "Unable to write," I'm going back to writing...

(... & inevitably, when I look back at my own development in poetry over 30 years, I witness the acting-out of these principles: from early attraction to & imitation of the NY School poets, to absorption (to the point of psychological breakdown) with Shakespeare's sonnets, to complete immersion in the language of the Bible, to a return to poetry-making through the unpredictable influence of Mandelstam (leading, after a long time, to the "literary encounter" with Elena Shvarts), to the long-drawn-out exploration of modernist poetry & the long poem, to the recurrent return to Mandelstam as to a first principle of inspiration. Glazov-Corrigan [p. 146]:

"We can now begin to see why Mandelshtam speaks about Dante's writing as a 'bird's mating call', a fife. 'The fife is nearly always sent forth to scout ahead.' Dante's poetry does not transmit a message: it awakens, stretches out, and develops a response. It is a generative principle of literature.... the poem awakens into writing a generation of writers to come. It precontains, as it were, its subsequent history: 'The miracle-ship left the shipyard with barnacles adhering to its hull.'")

I see Abolone was just in AZ too. How come we missed each other? I think the coyotes had a conference over behind the saguaro, but I was further north, or something.

Back from a week in Arizona, to attend wedding w/side trip to Grand Canyon. First time in Southwest. Also read Emily Dickinson in sustained way for 1st time. A good combination.

The Canyon appears to absorb all time & space, & reflect it back in spectra & vast perspectives. The river digs down to igneous layer, 1.8 billion years old or so. Visitors seemed immediately joyful & relaxed, even though you walk continually along the edge of dangerous immense cliffs. (but you knew this already. saw Man feeding Coyote from car window along highway 64 at dusk. saw condor with 9.5 ft wingspan floating below me. there are only 8 of them in the park, currently : along the rim, met a ranger carrying bulky antenna equipment - he tracks their position by transmitter.)

The Times really watered down my letter to the editor about Al Franken. Took out most of the funny stuff, I thought. Al was not a great wrestler. He was a great all-around theater guy. He and Tom Davis took one of my short stories & produced it as a one-act play, which was a high point for me in high school.

How strange to read about old classmate Al Franken in the NY Times Magazine. The whole article structured on the theme of wrestling (didn't they do that with Rummy, & Jesse Ventura too, a while back?). I wrote them a letter about it.

name, grad. class     weight class

Jim Gould, '71             95
Henry Gould, '70          112
Al Franken, '69           120
Chris Kraemer, '70        133

Jim & Chris were the really good wrestlers.

What bothers me about the liberal talk radio schtick is that it imitates Rush Limbaugh's project : macho-aggressive- ressentiment-parlayed-into-political-influence. & which reminds me of the role of hate radio in the Rwandan genocide. (I guess I shouldn't take it so seriously.)

As I've often repeated, almost all of Forth of July is an address to, a conversation with, the spirit of Russian poetry, as manifested particularly in Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, & Elena Shvarts. Why is this? Or where does it come from?

I trace it back to the mid- to late-1970s, when I first encountered the dual presence of Osip Mandelstam's poetry (in the early David McDuff translation), and the memoirs of his wife Nadezhda. At the time I was slowly groping my way back into writing, after having renounced it in the early 70s (the aftermath of a psychological-spiritual crisis, which I have described somewhat in an essay in the memoir for Edwin Honig, A Glass of Green Tea).

The work of this pair of writers - the poet & his survivor & memoirist - had what I would call a very powerful "normative" effect on my thinking. Mandelstam's inspired, gorgeous & mysterious poetry is situated, put in context, by his wife's astonishing, razor-sharp, humane, cultured, & resolute literary response to the terrifying era of Lenin, Stalin & their followers, from the 20s to the 60s.

To a young person experiencing extremes of spiritual dislocation & homelessness in 70s America, along with alienation from his own writing talent, these writers came as enlightenment, saving grace. I was able to reconnect to American poetry through them. & the result was, I could no longer respond to the American tradition I was exploring (Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Crane, Williams, Olson, et al.) without hearing these poets through a Mandelstamian lens. The era of 20th-century poetry was a different assemblage of Eliotic "tradition" due to this Russian influence.

The impact of Mandelstam's revolutionary-yet-classic lyricism, his riddling imagery, led me back into my own poetry. This, combined with the impact of the epic thrust of the long-poems of Crane, Pound, Williams & Olson, fired my ambition to re-interpret, to re-shape Pound's "poem including history" according to my own, different, lights. These were the 2 fundamental motivations driving my effort - at least on the conscious level. But poetry works at a deeper-than-conscious level; and my experience of diving into the long long poem involved letting it bring forth its own shape & reveal its own expanded (both high & murky) motivations. Yes, "the plot thickens. . ."

Coffeeshop, on break, reading John Irwin Mystery to a Solution, on differential mirroring of opposites in chess (Borges strategy of mirroring Poe detective stories). The room cleared out, only two customers left, facing each other, reading, making notes, not looking at each other: Henry & CD Wright. (As I type this my department supervisor says with a chuckle to her supervisor, "I know I'm just a pawn in the chess game.")

SIMPLE HISTORY OF HENRY

In the 1960s I started writing poetry, & liked the NY School poets a lot.

In the 1970s I had religious experiences & long wild wanderings & played a lot of music.

In the late 70s & early 80s I did community organizing & started ever-so-slowly getting back into poetry. I wrote very short, cautious, spacy, inhibited, somewhat imitative poems. I was in love with Osip Mandelstam & his wife, his poetry, their story.

In the 1980s I got more involved with other poets, like Edwin Honig & others in the RI area, & John Tagliabue, my then-father-in-law, who was (& is) a very enthusiastic writer, reciter, & interpreter of poetry. I read more widely, working to try to expand my range. I got interested in the long poem as a way of bringing in more things. I got very interested in Eugenio Montale's & Hart Crane's poetry.

In the late 80s & early 90s I started writing longer poems - influenced by Montale, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Crane, Pound, Olson, Williams, & of course Mandelstam. I wrote several of these long extended poems, & also experimented with traditional forms.

In the late 80s & 90s I helped edit a literary magazine, Nedge, and was quite active in organizing readings at local galleries, coffee shops, etc. under the auspices of a nonprofit group called the Poetry Mission.

Also in the 90s I spent a ton of time co-editing a big anthology in honor of Edwin Honig, titled A Glass of Green Tea - With Honig, which came out very well (still available from Fordham Univ. Press). Also succeeded in getting Honig's Collected poems edited & published after years of work (Time & Again, available from XLibris). This is something I am proud of.

In the late 90s I wrote Island Road, a sonnet sequence, where for the first time I felt I was integrating something of my very early fascination with the NY School & my interest in Shakespeare's sonnets.

In the very late 90s I started writing my 3rd or 4th very long poem, which ended up being almost a 1000 pp long, called Forth of July. Some of it was published as Stubborn Grew; the sequels were self-published.

Also in the late 90s I got involved with discussions & controversies on the Buffalo Poetics internet list. I started turning my sense of dislocation with the prevailing modes of experimental poetry into a kind of polemic.

These polemics often drove me to a dialectical position-taking which was somewhat extreme, so that I began defending the notion of the poet's absolute independence from collectivities or social influences.

However, my deepest commitment goes to the notion that art is a means by which the imagination builds models of social relations and communities. I get the feeling that the source of my difficulties with the "experimental" community is twofold: first of all, I do not share the notion that avant-garde art and left-wing politics are simply 2 halves of a positive "progressive" phenomenon; secondly, I think perhaps I simply "hear" poetry - the poetry of the past & the near-present - in a different way; as something that has to be fully absorbed & appreciated before it can ever be tweaked, twisted, parodied or displaced. These two sources of my "difference" probably mean only one thing : I am simply more conservative than the poets whose milieu I attempt to invade.

I remember very clearly listening to my mother once, back in the late 60s, sitting on the couch saying "I don't believe in Time". She was a big Nabokov reader in those days.

I first read Elena Shvarts in "Paradise", a translation of selected poems published by Bloodaxe. I was intrigued to discover a Petersburg poet, coming 2 generations after Mandelstam & Akhmatova, whom one could imagine standing in kinship with them. I wrote a short poem in response, and not long after discovered that my friend Tom Epstein, a Slavist and translator, knew Shvarts personally. Tom offered to hand-deliver the poem to Shvarts on his next visit to Russia.

About 9 months later I had the opportunity to meet Elena in person, at a Russian-American poetry conference in Hoboken (an encounter described in an article in Witz). Not long after, she visited Providence, and that encounter led to 2 more short poems, which I combined with my first one in a "triptych" - a form favored by the proto-Acmeist Petersburg poet Innokenty Annensky, and his admirer Anna Akhmatova. The center poem, a take-off on Mandelstam, now seems rather campy & parodic; but I still like the 1st and 3rd sections. Here is the poem:

Triptych for Elena Shvarts


I

Some words floated toward me.
Trailed over oceans,
an ice-locked sea.
Your words, that once

ran beneath your tongue
from canvas near your heart.
(Whiff of cigarettes. Rat dung.
Wrong from the start.)

Aloft, to waver in smoke
at hobo altitude -
an image (hard to make!)
of God. In a bad mood.

Image nonetheless,
with blemishes.
And if he can lose himself
up where it vanishes,

among red leaves,
over nerve-streams,
bent, like a sheaf
in a Joseph dream. . .

I puff the mirage
back in your direction,
translated - world-image;
coracle; orb of affection.

10.4.95

II
after O.M.

I see the lame-foot masquers gathering
on a winter's night in the ancient capital.
Heirs and heiresses of royalty.
Blood of kings - and Sheba's parasol.

I hear it - midnight - toneless rumbling.
Ears razored by the rustling of ice.
So let the heart dilate. When eyes go blind
there comes a scattering of Paradise.

Golden fleece, where are you, golden fleece?
Behind the mast at an inhuman pitch
sirens weave the locks of Berenice, while
cautious Fates unbind - slowly! - the bloody stitch.

We shall be gathered with them, murmuring.
Snow will burn; offbeat hearts
rehearse sun's night. . . while stuttering
Time - Osiris, Pharaoh. . . beat a slow. . . retreat.

5.29.96

III (Sham Death of a Minor Shakespearean)


"I die for the glory of the light and
the majesty of Apollo!" - he cried
- drifting slowly, fastidiously,
to the floorboard bedside.

Head flat against the hard oak
neither he nor audience could tell
if it was by his own hand
or by another's, that he fell.

Only that the heavy thunder, the light ringing
washing through his skull was not applause,
but penetrating phantom fingers
of the black - sable - nurse of darkness.

5.27.96

So I focused, during most of the 1990s, on trying to write epic or long poems. I filled lots of notebooks & wrote lots of rejected drafts. Only small bits saw the light of publication: a section from the poem "In RI" appeared in apex of the M; I published a section of "Spring Quartet" in Nedge (titled "In the Darkroom"). I privately printed a lot of chapbooks, which are now in the Harris Collection at the Brown University Library (and not many other places besides my cardboard boxes at home).

What was I thinking, what were my choices then? It's all a little fuzzy in memory now, but I want to try to recall. It seems like the fundamental issue for me was finding an authentic or authoritative style for the inchoate "matter" I wanted to write about, which circled around only a few basic subjects. So I looked to the models, the previous patterns. And the issue of style seemed to hinge on the spine of subjectivity/objectivity. Poetry seems inherently personal, "characteristic": but then how does one avoid the pitfalls of an irrelevant solipsism or narcissism, on the one hand, and a simplistic, evasive, journalistic reportage/narration, on the other?

Pound seemed remarkably capable of turning "facts" into incantation; yet the Cantos seem glaringly, eccentrically arbitrary in both form & topics - despite the arguments for "ring structure" in individual cantos or the Whitmanic quality of diaristic drama (the poem of a life).

Williams (in Paterson) is very fun to read; but for me the weak point of his mosaic method (quoting snips of newspaper articles, etc.) is that in the verse sections, his diction is just not that interesting; the derivative allusions to Pound & Eliot are too obvious. Perhaps deep down he didn't trust his vision enough? He comes across as a poet with passionate, smart, and sometimes right OPINIONS - but maybe they're not passionate enough - they often seem like table-thumping rather than integrated vision.

Crane seems the most successful, because his aesthetic sense is most acute - he doesn't overreach, his epic The Bridge has a formal sweep & flow & finish, despite the weak (bombastic) sections. So it became an element of what I was trying to do to "bring forward" Crane in my own work, because I think his epic, among the others, has been unfairly slighted by the critics.

Zukofsky has an incredibly acute ear, his versification is splendid in places, but he seemed to foreshadow US postmodern poetics' over-emphasis on sound values. I haven't given him a careful reading yet, though; I found something off-putting in the cryptic quality, the dissolving of statement into Mallarmean-pure versification. I admit I'm probably missing something there.

Olson has many appealing traits; many parts of Maximus Poems are engrossing reading. But again I found some off-putting qualities which prevented me from giving him very careful study. I don't like his pretentiousness, his violence, his egocentrism, or his substitution of notation for musical form.

So during the 90s I was seesawing back and forth between a prosaic, Olsonian, grab-bag approach ("In RI") and a rhymed, versified Hart Cranian one ("Spring Quartet") - and turning back from both in frustration to shorter poems & sequences. "Spring Quartet" was first; and despite my initial absorption, when it was done I felt I had not really found a way to unite subjective/objective, personal/historical. The biographical elements did not jive with the historico-literary frameworks. I bounced from there to the more prosaic, quotational "In RI" - but its lack of versification & formal interest bored me; again there was a blank spot between personal narration and social vision which I seemed unable to resolve convincingly.

Toward the end of the 90s I had two breakthroughs. One was when, in turning in frustration away from epic writing, I started a neo-sonnet sequence called Island Road. Suddenly I was writing in a new way, more slangy and informal, but it seemed to work, and it still mostly does. The second happened a year or so later (late 1990s). I began reading Mandelstam's late lyrics ("Voronezh Notebook"); simultaneously I felt suddenly that I could re-frame the Orpheus story as a means of giving voice to that blank area between personal & historical: ie. "Orpheus" would de-personalize the narrator without complete erasure (as tends to happen in the "grab-bag" quotational method). Mandelstam, once again, was the source of a stylistic confidence: the rueful, informal, heartfelt sound of the Voronezh poems served as a kind of Russian equivalent to the sound I had heard in Berryman's Dream Songs & Ted Berrigan's Sonnets (& which helped trigger the "Island Road" sequence).

But I discovered - both in working on "Island Road", and the long poem which became Stubborn Grew and its sequels - that the focus on Orpheus was not just a technical matter. I was responding to a muse-relation, or love. At this point I would only say that - when Montale describes the relation between his poetry and his inspiration as Petrarchan, or "Dantesque, Dantesque!" - I now know to some extent what he's talking about.

Sometime in the later 1980s I began to take an interest in writing some kind of long poem. I became absorbed in the Cantos, The Bridge, the Maximus Poems, Paterson. I can't remember when exactly that started. As I look back on it now though I think there were several motivations at play. On this blog I have been talking about "idiomatic communities": & perhaps some of my animus toward them is a result of my own difficulty in finding a style. I know that through the 80s and early 90s I was really struggling with a kind of imbalance between the voice & perspective I wanted to project, and the actual audience for my poetry. I would be writing "serious" poems which in the context of (little or no) audience sounded unintentionally comic. These "old" poems from Way Stations which I have been posting here, and the longer work I've been doing since the late 1990s, bracket a period in which I struggled to find a tone or level of address.

The first long poem I attempted was written in the context of a "book"-sequence of poems I was trying to do called Midwest Elegies (mostly published now in Way Stations). The "sequence" or book was an attempt to find a means to solve the difficulty mentioned above - to develop a consistent style through the thematic unity of a sequence. I was deeply absorbed in Yeats & the Arrowsmith translations of Montale in those days (Montale remains one of my absolute favorites). The long poem was called "Grain Elevator" and was a kind of dream-vision (if I can manage it, I will post it here).

So I think that one of the motivations that led me toward long poems was a sense of stylistic impasse, related to a sense of the social irrelevance of what I was doing. I was coming back to poetry, in the 1980s, after a period of local community organizing and political activism. The long poem seemed to offer some means to include more social reality in my writing. But I think a more positive motivation, as I read more long poems and more critical work on the subject (for example Michael Andre Bernstein's study "Tale of the Tribe"), was the sense of an opening, an opportunity. The US long poem seemed like unfinished business; that is, its practicioners had not been able to equal the older epics (Milton, Dante, etc) on their own (American) ground. And as I continued to read them I came to the conclusion that the works of Pound, Williams, Olson, Crane were offering versions of history & reality which - while fascinating and engaging and impressive on their own ground - did not represent my own perspective. They did not get history right, ultimately (the way I saw it as "right", of course). Doing a long poem began to feel like a real adventure.

There is more table talk about Mandelstam, long poems, and the HG scheme of things in an interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket issue #10. My only regret about that interview is that I was a little contemptuous (& uninformed) about the New Formalists (not that I will ever be a New Formalist).

Why was Mandelstam so important to me?

It happened in two stages. First, I read the poems in the David McDuff translation (published in the early 70s), and was particularly interested in the imagery - its fusion of obscurity/concision/radiance. Then, I read Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir, "Hope Against Hope". . . and fell in love with both of them - both the poet-protagonist and the narrator-memoirist.

Aside from its greatness - the often-acknowledged spectacular, fascinating and moving quality of "Hope Against Hope" - for there are a number of great books around - why did it mean so much to me?

Poetry, as I started to say in a post from yesterday, is not, for me, simply a "thing in itself" : it's contaminated with, inseparable from, spiritual, intellectual, psychological realities. In the late 70s, Mandelstam served as a kind of imaginary friend or antithetical self, helping me integrate a deeply conflicted & confused (almost as confused as now!) sense of the world. He was a mediator or catalyst. I'm reminded of another book I read in the early 80s which served a similar role in a much more minor way, a study by Harold Fisch titled "Jerusalem and Albion : the Hebraic factor in 17th century English literature". The study focuses on the specific rhetorical functions of poetry in contrast to those of discourse or philosophy, and relates them to the debates over "Hebraism & Hellenism" from the Renaissance through Matthew Arnold.

Why did I need these intellectual "mediators" on different levels? Because I was involved in a decades-long search for resolution of an inner conflict which originated in about 1973, when I underwent a psychological/spiritual crisis at college. For those old enough to remember, this was the time of, among other phenomena, the "Jesus freaks". I suppose you could count me (as a quiet, introverted example) among their number. I was a "product" both of American Protestantism, and of an early enthusiasm for writing and poetry - and I had tremendous difficulty synthesizing the two, after undergoing an excruciating vocational crisis which included a manic breakdown & a renunciation of writing which lasted several years.

My writing experience seems to break into antithetical plateaus. In the late 60s I was enthralled with Ashbery & the NY School, and wrote quite a lot of imitative work in that vein. By the late 70s, after a hiatus from writing (& a long period of wandering, music-playing, community organizing, etc.) I was trying to rediscover my talent for it . Mandelstam & Russian poetry provided a kind of distant model universe, a heroic, lyrical, & integrative world-view - probably extremely simplistic, yet it gave me inspiration and confidence, and gave me a kind of perspective with which to re-approach the American traditions in my own way (it was only after reading Mandelstam that I was able to begin exploring Crane, Pound, Eliot, Olson, and other exemplary American poets).