Josh with some more interesting thoughts on "post-postmodern pastoral", etc.

Interesting that he starts the genealogy with Pound. You could think of epic, long-poem, and pastoral (the goal of epic?) as sharing a certain space. Pound thought of his long-poem as a "tale of the tribe" (see Michael Bernstein book on this).

When I started exploring this area for myself, back in the early 80s, I was still working as a VISTA volunteer for various community/activist groups in Providence. I had managed a food coop & community gardens, & a CETA project with high school kids, to build a "community solar greenhouse"*. I was finishing a M.A. in community organizing at Beacon College in Boston. This work influenced my literary outlook, too. The notion of a long poem for me had to do with forms of poetry which were able to connect with historical movements & narratives, and with a kind of ideal, at least, of "public speech".

So for me the notion of pastoral had (& still has) a populist-political cast. Just part of the general awareness or desire for a "sustainable" common life, in harmony with the world (with people & nature in general). The relationship between social justice, the common good, and a healthy integration with nature.

In the days of VISTA we had a sense that the right thing for young people to do, before they plunged into the private sector in one way or another, was to work in the public sector - to monitor and rein in private interests on behalf of the common good. We were young & naive enough to imagine we had a pretty clear & reasonable notion of what that common good was, and that there was a kind of heroic grassroots/everyday struggle going on, against business interests & corrupt pols, that grassroots people could get involved with.

Why this was the right thing to do was precisely because the common good, since it is so vast, amorphous, and future-oriented, really has few advocates - unlike the narrow & short-term interests of the private sector. And this amorphous ideal quality was akin to the interests of the poor, who also had few advocates. And young people, because of their relative freedom from narrow obligations, were in a position to be those advocates. There's something beautiful about this notion, almost romantic. During the course of the 80s and 90s, political advocacy expanded, sharpened, and professionalized to a great degree. Lines were drawn more sharply, and soft-romantic idealism was curtailed.

This is how I see (very vaguely, anyway), the process happening over the last few decades. But I think underlying the rather naive and perhaps arrogant worldview of those times (mid to late 70s), there is a kernel of truth, an unresolved goal. How so? Well, politics, social policy, social justice are basically about figuring out how to live together. And there is always going to be a necessary balancing-out, an equilibrium, between particular special/private interests (both economic & political), on the one hand, and government policy regarding the welfare of the whole (the common good), on the other.

If one recognizes that political participation means engaging with the project of fostering that equilibrium - and if one accepts the notion of a kind of social-historical poetry (epic/long-poem/pastoral) - one might see how in different ways these two activities intersect. Because an "achievable" or sustainable pastoral world is obviously a project of social justice, in the most general and inclusive sense (ie., all the multifarious ways people engage in beneficial social activity). So pastoral poetry would necessarily have a political aspect.

Language - and poetry - of course, cannot be channeled or directed from the outside, not by any political strategy, philosophy, or 5-yr plan. The force of language - lyric, dramatic, narrative, didactic, satirical, comic - manifests in autonomous and unpredictable fashion. Setting aside any purely aesthetic argument, poetic language is a manifestation of the freedom of the human spirit. The project of epic/long-poem, however - akin to similar efforts in other modes of literature - is to represent "social wholes" or shared realities; they are narratives which reach for wide public recognition and assent/dissent.

[*in the 2nd collage in Stubborn Grew, there's a little photo of me standing next to that greenhouse. The CETA project which built it was probably one of the more unusual in the history of federal programs. A 6-sided solar greenhouse, about 40 ft long and 20 ft tall, designed so its 6 points would touch the side of a "vesica", the geometrical figure formed by the intersection of two circles; length dimensions were drawn from British author John Michell's various books on ancient "sacred geometry". Constructed by Brown student volunteers & CETA high school kids from Fox Point. One of the Brown students, Mark Van Noppen, went on to become a leading builder of urban rehab housing in Providence.]

Mary Elvira Ravlin Gould, potter & flute-player, is of course a major background presence in my poems.

"Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay."

I grew up in the 50s in a little section between Hopkins & Edina (MN) called Mendelssohn, named so by some young settlers (1870s?) who were professional musicians with the Minnesota Symphony. I've written a children's story & a novella, both (in part) celebrations of that musical neighborhood. Both sadly unpublished. Any children's book people or fiction publishers out there, hey, get in touch with me!

I too, friends, shoveled much snow. First the driveway, then the path to the compost box. Then the church sidewalk. Then I collapsed into a Patriots game. Being a true-blue Vikings fan, I have to say that this kind of snow reminds me of normal all-winter conditions in the old days in Minneysota. No big sweat (I am writing this from my hospital gurney). (just kidding)

Those old days were pretty heavy-duty, actually. I remember delivering the Minneapolis Tribune through chest-high drifts. The man across the street, in old Mendelssohn, had a heart attack after shoveling, once. He later went on to write the I'm OK, You're OK series of pop-psych books, & became very wealthy. I guess he was OK.

I'm thinking of writing a book on the new miracle health regime, snow shoveling. Soon people will have artificial snow machines just for their own driveways. & I will be a millionaire & will quit my day job. I'll write poetry under the pseudonym "Robin Snow" - things that start like, "Something there is that does love a shovel."

Nedge #3 cover. Old railroad bridge over Mississippi at St. Anthony Falls, with train going over it. Picture was taken for my grandfather's (the g'pa mentioned in poem posted today, his b-day) engineering firm, which had a hand (I believe) in putting up those Pillsbury grain elevators in the background.

Chagall, "The Poet". Remember seeing this in Minneapolis Art Institute. Wrote a poem about it once back in 70s on a manual typewriter. Haven't been able to find the poem for a long vremya.

p.s. 5.22.07 : still haven't located that early poem. I wanted to send it to the Art Institute to see if they could use it for a poster. This may be a task for future scholars : find Henry's lost poem about Chagall's "The Poet"!

"Blake test" has a very special meaning for me. I attended Blake School, grades 4-12. (So did Allen Grossman, 10 yrs before).

(My kids attended the same middle school as Clark Coolidge did, here in Providence. No wonder I can't figure what they're talking about sometimes.)

Really interesting review by John Updike in this week's New Yorker of a new translation of the 5 Mosaic Books (by Robert Alter), in the course of which Updike talks about his own youthful encounter with the Bible. Also quotes two short passages from Auerbach's Mimesis, which felt (to me) like commentaries on my "Midnight Knock" travail.

Justice Bramhall writes (in an opinion lodged as part of his "tributary 2004" brief):

"I also wonder about the surety artists have about their own work and what it is 'doing'. as if intent (even as far as one can know one's own intent) translated directly to practice. "

The wonder of it all is what grows unexpectedly out of certain ambitions, intentions (or stubborn allegiances, habits). So in my own explanatory-para-poetics anthill, the labyrinth of meaning is always seen in retrospect. I'm surprised by what coheres.

So if you, expert legal surveyor, go over here to Alephoebooks & re-read the two adjacent panels ("Midnight Knock" & the trip-to-London/sonnet fandango), I think you will agree with me that there is a kind of rhyme linking a manic "Shakespeare episode" in the mid-70s, a wayward rock n'roll adventure of the same period, and a NY-Schoolish/Berrymanish/Shakespearish sonnet-gumbo sequence written over 20 years later. In other words, the focus on Shakespeare doesn't go away, but it gets filtered through the lens of a much later time in life.

Did I plan this then, intentionally? No. Not guilty.

After returning to the US from my year in London, I went back to school, finally (3 yrs later), to finish my senior year. The hangover from my wanderings, a combination of scruples & exhaustion, led me to a new, somewhat firmer renunciation of literature. I needed to do something social & impersonal. At Brown I did a year's independent study of local RI agriculture, and after graduation, I turned a small health food store near campus into a food cooperative (this is a very Minnesota thing, by the way).

5 years later, in the early '80s, my life was quite different. I was married, a parent, a VISTA volunteer working with community organizations in downtown Providence.

Gradually, too, I had been developing what was, for me, a somewhat new approach to poetry. The charismatic-ecstatic-egotistical adventures of the 70s were in a sense projected, vicariously, onto the sacrificial-paradigmatic career of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. I had happened upon a volume of his work (Selected Poems, trans. David McDuff; NY: FSG, 1973) & liked it immediately, which led me to his wife Nadezhda's 2-vol set of memoirs (Hope Against Hope; Hope Abandoned). & this led me back to other poets, with renewed interest: Anna Akhmatova, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale, Ezra Pound...

How to describe my new sense of what poetry was about? I would say I was developing a perspective in which poetry was, as Stevens calls it, "the sanction of life". How so?

I began to think of poetry as a mode of communication which represents, better than any other verbal mode, the actuality of things and experience. What gives poetry this special role is its creative/aesthetic self-sufficiency, its reflexivity. Because poetry is "good in itself", because its language is not simply a delivery-system for something else, but a (partial) end in itself - as such, therefore, poetry reflects or shines forth the "glory" of reality, its inner creative meaning, its character as "creation".

I began to identify with the sacred/sacrificial, the incarnational quality of the vocation itself, as embodied in the lives, and the exalted claims, of poets like Mandelstam, Celan, Dante, Whitman, Crane.

So the hermetic-ekphrastic imagery of Mandelstam & Celan fascinated me, as different expressions of this kind of claim. So the "authoritative", communal poetics of the long poem began to absorb my interest through the 1980s and early 90s, and many experiments in writing followed.

& maybe one can glimpse how my playing with the "incarnational", with the name of Berryman's "Henry", fit into this development out of both the adventures of the 70s and the deeper reading of the 80s.

But does any of this make an impression, relate in any way, to the literary history of American poetry & poetics of those same decades? Where does a poem like this fit in to the "canon"?

Again, this poem seems like the clearest summation of the tumultuous travels just described here.

I've copied the Shakespeare-encounter saga over to AlephoeBooks, with the sections in numerical order.

Relentless caper for all those who step
The legend of their youth into the noon.

[p.s. 5.21.07 : since deleted from Alephoebooks]

5

I'm not making this up; my little traveling clock read midnight. I got up, shaking and quivering; I went to the door, yelling "This is the bravest thing I've ever done!" I thought Satan had come for me. I was raving mad.

It was the dorm advisor, Prof. Arnold Weinstein. Someone had notified him of my condition and asked him to check on me. I asked him, "are you related to Alexander Weinstein, up in Boston (old family friend, retired geneticist at Harvard)?" "Why, yes, he's my brother," Arnold Weinstein replied. He invited me down to his apartment to talk. (As it turned out, Arnold's brother was another Alex W. in Boston.) I thought, later, that God, rather than delivering me to the Devil, had brought me a "winecup" (Weinstein).

My panic subsided, but my paranoia was not over. On the advice of school officials, it was decided I should go home for a few days (classes hadn't even started yet), and speak to a psychiatrist. I agreed to this, but was secretly afraid that in my absence, Harry Howe would break into my room and steal my poems! Over the next few days in Minneapolis, I devised a terrible test. While convincing the psychiatrist that I was OK, I was secretly plotting & calculating what I had to do. (When I showed the doctor one of my recent poems, which was a narrative about the Hamilton/Burr duel, not very flattering with regard to Burr, I was surprised at his response. He said, "Well, actually, I'm a direct descendant of Aaron Burr.")

You have to understand that, to my mind, the fate of the world was at stake. I was living in a realm of spiritual forces, not everyday common sense. I went and bought a revolver. If (and only if: this was a weird sort of test of my own paranoia), when I returned at Brown, Harry had stolen my poems, I would shoot him and myself. ("Religious gunman", indeed - cf. Crane's "For the Marriage of Faustus & Helen".)

On my last night in Minneapolis, I was overcome with sadness. I felt myself regressing to a childhood state. In my basement room, I lay on my bed, weeping. I remember so clearly, my father coming downstairs that night, laying his hand on my forehead, telling me gently that everything would be all right.

Early the next morning, as I was waking up, I had the strangest experience of all.

Just as I was waking, I "heard" a voice. It was coming from my chest, from my heart. It was not my own. It was reciting the Lord's Prayer. "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

I was feeling more calm and peaceful; nevertheless, the gun was in my suitcase. Arriving back at Brown, I discovered, to my relief, that no one had broken into my room. I threw the gun in the Providence River.

For a few weeks, I tried to resume classes as usual. But it was impossible for me. In early November I packed my bag, took my guitar, threw away my record collection(!), and headed out into the country.

4

Harry Howe was a classmate of mine; a fellow poet, also a sculptor. He was old Boston, with a deeper literary education than mine (Eliot, Lowell, etc.); but he took to admiring what I wrote and encouraging me. He was tall, favoring heavy riding boots & black outfits, liked to carry an iron rod around as a walking stick. Really a gentle person, there was something a little intimidating about his violent persona & attitudes. (It was with Harry & his girlfriend, a RISD sculptor named Marcia Pels, that I heard John Ashbery - my hero then, in my glorious freshman year - read his poetry, up at Amherst.)

The next phase of my breakdown was paranoia. I suddenly took the notion that Harry would steal my new poems, and through them, HE would become this worldly-literary-deceiver - would hold the demonic place that I so vainly had thought was intended for me - the Antichrist!

I spent a few days trying to destroy all evidence of my work, so that this would not happen! I went to Edwin Honig's home and practically ransacked his study for the poems, without success. His wife said he was up in Boston. Immediately I hopped a bus and, merely on a hunch, headed for the Grolier Bookstore. On my arrival, the redheaded owner told me Edwin was due there in a half an hour. I sat down to wait. When he appeared, with another professor, I poured out my tale, weeping, panicky. Where were those poems? Edwin, kind & patient, assured me they would be returned. He and his friend ended up having their dinner with me, at a local medical clinic, where they had taken me. After I calmed down somewhat, they saw me off to the bus back to Providence. (I've never forgotten Edwin's graciousness that day.)

That night, waves of anxiety and exhaustion washed over me. My heart was pounding; I was near total collapse. I thought to myself : I am Faust; I have lost the spiritual battle. Around midnight, I knelt down by my cot & prayed to God to forgive me, to protect me. At the stroke of midnight, there was a knock on my door.

3

Thrilling, frightening, fantastic (ridiculous, too) - the next few days would change me forever. All the symptoms were there: hyper-manic energy, megalomania, paranoia... - and something else, like a thread through the maze.

For my senior year, I had a dorm room of my own. On the first day there, right after unpacking, I flopped down on the bed and thought, "why not?" I picked up my copy of the Sonnets. It was as if, with my self-confidence and equilibrium somewhat restored, I was challenging the Bard to a duel - daring him to throw me again.

Will won; I lost. Slowly, gradually, as I read the melodious lines, it began happening once again, this time even more powerfully. It was as though the ghost of Shakespeare were hovering there as I read those sonnet-epistles addressed directly to me. Suddenly I was filled with a sense of manic power, poetic "fury", "divine afflatus". This was an hour of destiny. Will was the Bard of England; I would be his counterpart, the Genius of America!

Over the next few (sleepless) days and nights, I tried to prove my hunch in verse. I wrote long rhymed & metered (never having bothered with that before!) historical narratives; I began a series of 50 poems on the 50 states... and as soon as I had typed them up, I fired them off in the mail, or delivered them to friends and teachers (Prof. Edwin Honig, in particular). I was in a manic state: every thought was crystalline, clear, yet each one hit me like a sledgehammer.

Suddenly, in the midst of this, a sort of pendulum swung. I began to remember lines from the Bible. Ecclesiastes, in particular. And I saw that youth, the second one, and he was lord over all the people. And this, too, is a striving after wind.

I stopped in my tracks. A kind of Manichean duality took hold. Suddenly I saw myself in a Faustian light. What was poetry, but worldly vainglory? What was this Bardic "spirit", but demonic delusion? It was as though the high ground, the pinnacle I had ascended, was instantly swept away beneath my feet. The fright of hell & Satan took hold, gripped me.

I began racing about, trying to retrieve my poems, as a new wave of panic arrived.

2

The next 9 months were a gestation period for what proved to be a far more intense crisis. My memories of the time are sparse. I know that all through those first few years at college, I puzzled over the conundrum of the poet's role & vocation - the riddle of my future.

I don't remember exactly when I started reading the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, whether it was during that spring semester ('73), or later that summer. I do know I was reading it steadily, beginning to end, during the 5-6 weeks I spent with my brother Jim, working on a ranch in a remote section of Wyoming. After a strenuous day of haybaling, I would stretch out in the bunkhouse we shared with the rancher's feisty 14-yr old son, & read & read.

Looking back on it now, I think that the Bible compensated for my drought of literary reading over the previous several months. I was fascinated with it; I found the long saga's poetry/history/mystery utterly compelling. The Bible was not completely foreign to me, since I'd been brought up in the Episcopalian church; but it had been many years since my confirmation meant anything to me. Now I was soaking up the Good Book through my pores. Three literary effects come to mind as central then: the moral force, the sense of demand that runs through the Mosaic Books, the prophets, the New Testament; the sheer drama of some of the storytelling; and finally, the "chronicle" aspect - the sense that, spun & garbled as it might be, the Bible is a record of vast, so-ancient events.

I went back to school in September, to begin my senior year, feeling invigorated & newly-confident after my summer outdoors in Wyoming. Then the real crisis struck.

Kent Johnson sent a query to the comment-box of the previous post. I deleted it along with some ill-considered responses of my own, but it got me thinking about the "Shakespeare event" of 1973, a pivotal crisis in my life. So I'd like to try to address his question somewhat, and at the same time provide some context, as I see it, to that experience. I think I will have to do this in a sequence of posts. In the meantime, the "hypertext" Island Road post, below, has teleported over to my warehouse/distribution center, AlephoeBooks, for those who would like continued quick access to it (AlephoeBooks doesn't scroll so fast as HG Poetics).

So here goes.

1

In the fall of 1972, I was a junior at Brown Univ. Those were the heady days of "curricular reform", and I took full advantage of the lack of required courses, choosing mostly creative writing classes. In my freshman year, I won 3 literary contests offered by the English Dept., and had my first chapbook published. That was exciting. Of course, the war in Vietnam was on. I had applied for conscientious objector status, which angered & worried my father. But I had the student deferment, & got a high draft number. So I was lucky, and I didn't push my "objector" status to any substantial act of protest.

In those days, I think you could say I was on the edge of manic depression. I was often gloomy and withdrawn, shy of human contact. One romance had already ended, another was in trouble; the "sexual revolution" and my feelings of guilt & dislocation were in jarring contrast. On top of this, my writing was not going so well. My sophomore year was far more difficult than the previous one. I had, seemingly, already played out a sort of happy-go-lucky NY School (award-winning) persona; I was reading a lot of heavy-duty "masters" (Stevens, Rilke, et al.) and feeling unsure of myself.

In early December of that year, my cousin Juliet jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. I took this very hard. My own sense of psychological balance was fragile.

Later that month, I picked up Shakespeare's Sonnets for the first time. Suddenly I had the strangest sensation, totally new to me, simultaneously frightening & exhilarating. I thought that, by some unknown process, utterly anachronistic, Shakespeare was addressing me personally. The sonnets to the Young Man were written to me.

I'm fully aware that the literary history of responses to the Bard is chock full of eccentric episodes (such as Prof. Looney's theories of authorship, & far beyond). Even as it was happening, the irrationality of my experience was shocking to me. And shortly thereafter, I renounced poetry altogether. In a sense, this first "Bard episode" was the culmination of a downward spiral of depression. Dimly, I recognized the manic nature, the compensatory aspect, of my response to the Sonnets. I changed my major to History, and signed up for a completely "unliterary" spring semester.

it's all coming back to me...

Jeff & Tom (Davis) were deeply involved in Mpls version/spin-off of Merrie-Prankster acidhead scene. We're talking late 1960s, pre-draftage adolescent hippie-dream grungeworld angst paranoia nightmare, depicted/invented so faithfully in R. Crumb & Zap Comics. They staged a variety of anarchic "events" around town for their own delectation. Of course I admired them, but was too old-fashioned & cautious, too inhibited, to follow completely. I was captain of the soccer team, for crying out loud. At one of Jimi Hendrix's final concerts (in St. Paul) I came down with a bad case of pneumonia.

Am I doin' better than Bob Dylan here? see p. 784...

I started playing guitar when I was about 15, with the encouragement of a school friend, Jeff Greenspoon, who was already an accomplished jazz guitarist. (Had studied piano previously.) Jeff introduced me to a lot of music & musicians around the Twin Cities area. But in my first band, with the silly name Spur of the Moment, I played harmonica & a miniature stand-up piano which we miked. That band had a spangly Elvis-lookalike lead singer, and 2 blond guys from Wayzata who did the "Cream"-imitation endless guitar/bass solos. We played a lot of proms & frat parties. I remember we did the tune "Heat Wave" in Hinckley MN, a farm town mostly famous for the terrible Hinckley Fire in the 1880s or so. So we changed the wording of the song (instead of "heat wave.. heat wave... HEAT WAVE" it was "Hinckley..."). I know this is fascinating, everybody. Tom Davis, of Davis & Franken fame on Sat Night Live, was our groupie. The back of the van smelled strongly of marijuana, thanks to Tom. It was my dad's van so that worried me much of the time.

I learned harmonica the usual way, from old Sonny Boy Williamson & Sonny Terry records. Tony "Little Sun" Glover, of Koerner Ray & Glover, was based in Mpls; I studied the little purple handbook he wrote. (I am lucky to have heard the terrific Spider John Koerner in concert a few times.)

In college I didn't do much music. Getting back into it was part of my "missionary activity", in a way (but only in a way), after the mysterious-weird "Shakespeare/Bible flip-out" when I was around 19 yrs. (written up partially, as you know, in Glass of Green Tea). I was "full to bursting with the Spirit" in those days. The plan was actually to bring that message to/with the Rolling Stones (which is why I introduced Biblical studies into my conversation with Keith Richard). Can you believe this stuff?

In a way, though, getting back into music was liberating too. My newfound faith-visions gave me "permission" to drop out of college & wander around the country.

But I allus came back t'SCHOOL, fer some reason!!

I started playing again, after many music adventures in London, in the early 80s, with a country-blues guy named Jim Chapin. We have gone through several music formations since then. Jim was just given a cache of almost 100 old "Recordio" home recordings his father & family made in their kitchen back in the 50s (his dad also played guitar & mandolin). A treasure-trove of folk, country, popular music, some wonderful singing on there. The Smithsonian or somebody should take an interest.

I got the reminiscence blues today, sorry folks.