I first read the Bible in 1972, on a ranch in Wyoming, where I was working with my brother stacking haybales. I read it straight through, Revised Standard Version.

Think of the different ways that Yeats, DH Lawrence, Pound, Eliot received the Bible, as literature.

I had been brought up Episcopalian, a lapsed via media, but the Bible struck me : the most powerful reading experience of my life.

Introduction to History

CHAPTER ONE

History is a battle of the books.

Wonder what a Calvin Coolidge blog would sound like.

"The blog of America is blogging."

Grandpa Gould wrote him a letter once in the 1920s informing him we were related. Never heard back. Typical Gould. I mean Silent Cal.

Grandpa was Captain of Battery B in WW I. Fired the last shot of the war, he said. He had the brass casing around the apartment. I heard later that a lot of artillerymen did that - waited a few minutes after Armistice, then shot off one more, just for the memory.

He pulled out one of my loose teeth once. He said, "come over here, Henry, I just want to have a look." Then yanked it right out, & sat there grinning at me with his big front teeth. O, Grandpa. (He was good at that sort of thing, being an avid fisherman.)

He was City Assessor for Minneapolis for over 30 years. (Probably had to do a lot of fishing around there, too.)

When I interviewed him for my 6th-grade history paper on WW I, he showed me his prayer-book full of shrapnel. His tent had taken a direct hit while he was visiting the latrine.

Vladimir Nabokov was born on April 23rd, Shakespeare's birthday, just 100 years after Pushkin's birth (April 23 is also St. George's Day, St. George being the traditional patron saint of both Russia and England). The first language he learned to read & write was English, though Russian was the spoken language. This background casts a curious light on his last novel in Russian, Invitation to a Beheading, a surreal tale about an artist-figure imprisoned in a fake totalitarian world which employs a hermetic token language, allowing no deviations, by means of which each person already "understands" what is being said, even before the "words" are spoken.

Nabokov's fiction often displays or plays up themes of alien intrusion or the clashing of disjunctive worlds.

There was a period, during the 60s, when my mother was slightly obsessed with Nabokov. She named a favorite campsite in the north woods (the north woods of Minnesota - of birch trees & pine, much like Siberia) "Mnemosyne Point", using one of the novelist's key words. The obsession spread to me; the last short story I wrote in high school was a Nabokovian pastiche of school memories & word games.

My absorption with Mandelstam was probably an echo of that earlier experience. The elegiac "ring" I attempted to close in the poem in memory of Joseph Brodsky (see hgpoetics archives for 1.9.03) - the ring of elegies beginning with Auden's for Yeats, echoed by Brodsky's for Eliot - was actually a revision of an earlier poem in which I recounted my adolescent effort to "become" Nabokov. The 3rd part of that poem - about the boy and the moth - fuses the two: it's based on a Brodsky poem on the same subject, which in turn was drawn from a Nabokov short story.

I haven't been blogging much lately because I'm trying to work on a novel - & reading Nabokov again. I feel sometimes like a character in some Nabokov parody of American life - or a smudged mirror-image of that Russian, who carried around an alien infusion of English since childhood. In the "post-avant" world of subcultural poetics, sometimes I feel like the protagonist (Cincinnatus) in Invitation to a Beheading.

The "plot", you may recall, of Stubborn Grew, is triggered by a search for a lost black cat named Pushkin, & leads to a "CATabasis", or journey to the underworld - the underworld of American "POEtics".

My poems are a river, and my Poem is ABOUT the river beside which I was born & raised. Get used to it, folks : I AM the "mainstream"!

Perhaps a brief & partial literary timeline will reveal to some extent why I feel puzzled & alienated by the epiphenomena of New American jumbo shrimp, leading to various collisions of the late 90s on the Buffalo Poetics List.

HG Timeline

5.29.1952 - born in Minneapolis. Spends 1st year & a half in grandparents' apt. on Oak St., near U of M campus on Mississippi River.

ca. 1956 - recites first poem, for (workaholic) father, who writes it down on a key tag. Mother saves it:

Play, play,
it's time to play!
Play all day,
that's what I say!
Your work is done,
come out in the sun!
Play, play, play!

(He never abandoned the themes or the late 19th-cent. "pseudo-limerick" style of this early work.)

1957 - suffers from severe case of Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a rare form of polio. Paralyzed up to neck for 2 months. Photo in Mpls Star Trib. upon recovery, in wheelchair, holding life-size Curious George monkey.

1959 - writes 1st short story, after hike in woods with Jamie Freeman & his older sister Mary. Short-story writing continues into high school.

1959-1969 - INTENSE, CONTINUAL reading of fiction. Favorites include Nabokov, Grass, Catch-22, many many. . .

1964 - Recites "Charge of the Light Brigade" from memory for 6th grade English class.

1966 - Reads "For a Gift of Watermelon Pickle", a popular poetry anthology. Memorizes ee cummings' "In Just- Spring"

1969-70 - edits high school lit magazine, Talisman. Inspired by Padgett/Shapiro NY School anthology, begins writing imitations of Berrigan, Ashbery, et al. Many many favorites. Transfers childhood fascination/fetishization with toy soldiers to these poetic objects.

1969 - applies for C.O. draft status; takes student deferment.

1970 - for Senior Speech in high school, recites narrative poem in the persona of an anti-war protestor. During long ride to March on Washington, protagonist is seduced by "Dark Lady" in the back of the bus; ends up as aging hippie guru isolated in Rocky Mountains, his children having become successful businesspeople.

1970 - Berrigan imitations & soccer playing win admission to Brown University (rejected by several other colleges).

early 70s - takes full advantage of Brown "New Curriculum" by pursuing creative writing courses as much as possible. Wins 3 poetry awards in sophomore year.

1972 - depression after suicide of cousin Juliet Ravlin. (Blurry photo of Henry, Julie & sister Cara, ca. 1968, here.) Vocational uncertainties, social disorientations.

Late 1972 - reads Shakespeare's Sonnets. Uncanny sense that the Bard is addressing him directly. Frightened by this, changes major to history, renounces writing.

Summer 1973 - reads Bible while working on ranch in Wyoming.

Fall 1973 to 1976 - During 1st days of senior year at Brown, re-reads Sonnets. Has sudden manic breakdown when ghost of Shakespeare again seems to be "present" in the room. Initiates week of spiritual turmoil, soul at war between Bible & Shakespeare, paranoia about literary fame conspiracy & demonic possession, purchases gun, throws gun in Seekonk River. (Story told more fully in Glass of Green Tea - With Honig). Goes home to recuperate for a week (while there, shows complex new narrative poem about A. Hamilton & Aaron Burr to psychiatrist. Psychiatrist says he may not be able to respond very objectively since he's a direct descendant of Aaron Burr). Returns to Brown; drops out one month later. Becomes wandering solitary "Jesus freak", working odd jobs, playing guitar, reading, meditating, occasionally writing, Providence-Minneapolis-Cora, Wyo.-Denver-Los Angeles-S.F.-New York-London-Providence.

1975 - London. Works under the table at odd jobs. Plays guitar & harmonica in pub band. Applies for Mick Taylor's former job w/Rolling Stones. Discusses Bible & Wm. Blake with Keith Richards; attempted employment & attempted conversion of K. Richards both unsuccessful.

1976 - returns from London upon illness of grandfather; re-enters Brown & finishes B.A.

1977 - discovers poetry of Mandelstam (in translation). Reads Nadezhda Mandelstam memoirs (Hope Against Hope, Hope Abandoned). Begins slow process of recovering poetic capability independent of religious fervor.

1978 - Organizes/manages Kneecap Food Coop, a storefront food coop. Manages CETA project construction of community solar greenhouse based on geometry of "vesica" designs, found in John Michell's popular studies of prehistoric architecture & numerology of "New Jerusalem". (Site eventually torn down by Brown University for housing project.)

1979 - Marries Francesca Tagliabue, daughter of Maine poet John Tagliabue.

1980-83 - works as VISTA volunteer for various Providence community organizations. Continues attempts at writing; deepens interest in 20th-century moderns Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Eugenio Montale, et al. Sustained study of Mandelstam's style, poetics, worldview as counter-weight to American traditions.

- to be continued (maybe) -

1983 - After partial dismantling of the VISTA program by the Reagan Admin., spent 10 mos. working as a "professional resume writer". Fired after not charging enough for resumes. Finds job at Brown U. Library (Door Guard). Begins posthumous literary life.

- to be continued again (???)

Good blog-in by Ron today. Food for thought. The scramble for authority among different New American Poetry mullahs in 60s & 70s. Like a sport with fans & partisans. How can anybody write under these conditions? The desperate search for the right model among young wannabes. "Projectionism" should be the name for it. But of course it was exciting.

One of the best environments for poetry I ever encountered was a small group of poets who met off & on for a couple of years at Sylvia Moubayed's house in Providence. Edwin Honig, several local poets. It was not exactly a workshop; more like a round table. We'd take turns reading new poems & then comment on them. It wasn't perfect; but it was healthy. The poem is a toy, a self-contained work of art, an effort : it is symbiotic & inalienable both from the living poet who stands there & presents it, and also inalienable from the sympathetic, engaged, critical audience which listens & responds. The poem may have a history & a set of poetic choices & a projected ambition - but these remain in the background when it goes forth & has to stand up for itself & justify itself artistically in the presence of others.

Today is saint's day of Guillem de Gellone. One of Charlemagne's lieutenants, fought in Spain; memorialized in French chansons de geste. Entered religious order, founded monastery & school at Gellone, in southern France. According to some historians, descended from Jewish nobility from Baghdad who migrated to Narbonne. A distant relative, I think, I like to think.

William Blackstone was buried on Study Hill, Cumberland, RI on this date in 1675. The next day his property was burnt to the ground by a band of King Philip's men.

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

Malcolm Lowry lived in Vancouver. Yesterday digging through the files I found the first letter (I think) I ever received - a postcard from Vancouver, from my grandmother Ravlin. Colorized photo of twins in papooses. I was 14 months old. Tomorrow I'll be. . . sheesh.

Have been away in Minnesota for a few days.

May just stay away.

The Romans put a rose over the door to indicate "do not disturb" or secret, hence the term "sub rosa". I didn't know that when I wrote this old thing, back in the 70s.


HUE

Words kind as rain pour down
from mothers and fathers of gentle eye.

Bees have hidden in the hive's head
a little sunlight fallen on the field.

Small planets hover in the immense
blue Pacific of starlit. . .; morning

mumbles rustling branches of night
into morning glories, and a rose

resides, lightly bearded with snow,
on the ancient wall above your door.

*

My parents live near the River Road in Minneapolis, along the Mississippi, only a block or so from where they both grew up. Circles in nature.

The height of my novel-devouring period was when I was about 16. I loved the smell of a new paperback, lingered over its shape & size & lettering. Tin Drum, & . . .

May quit blogging & try to close that circle myself. Don't feel like this is my world, really, gang. Back in RI, sub Rhody, sub-sub-sub-librunque.

& then Henry wrote a fictional Providence microcosm [concluding in a Finneganesque infinity on Good Friday] about a character named "Henry" who was begotten in the orgone box of John Berryman, who jumped off the bridge down the road from the house his (Henry's) grandfather built, on River Road, by the Mississippi (John H. Ravlin, who was born on January 6 (Epiphany), the day that Georg Cantor died).

Haven't had much time to blog lately.

Readers probably put off by my para-religious discourse sometimes. I can't help it, sorry : it's part of me, ever since religio-psychological crisis here at old Brunonia in 1973, when I thought Shakespeare & Jesus were hovering around my dorm room.

My work in poetry a scrap heap of hesitant forays. Line from which the title came :
"Hesitant, grieving, stubborn grew, the rose."

Have been reading a lot about the ancient Greeks. Am interested in POETICS as an exploration of the borderline between different kinds of knowledge : philosophy, science, history, poetry. & poetry as means of presenting states of feeling & experience that are elusive, not so easily subject to definition & categorical discourse. Talking about this some in the Jacket interview with Kent Johnson.

No, this blog post is not a resume, sorry.
No David H., I'm not a "projectivist". Too much magic thinking & mumbo-jumbo, not enough art.

But I AM recurrently interested, very much so, in the concepts circling around poetry and "polis", or city-making. It's a steady theme in Pound, WCW, Olson, Crane's long poems. It's something I've generally taken an interest in, having an M.A. & experience in neighborhood organizing, living in a little city-state, etc. No this is not a resume, sorry.

Poetry is not rational discourse. But it's not necessarily irrational. Wallace Stevens was so interested in this issue. It's not rational because underlying its organicness (sound & sense synthesis, animality) is a kind of a priori AFFIRMATION, prior to dialectics or discussion. It's an enunciation all by itself that creates a roundedness, a sense of pleroma, fulness. That a priori emphatic phatic speech - is that what worried the philosopher (Plato)?

Funny doubleness of poetry : dangerously solipsistic on the one hand; amazingly responsive to direct immediate particular reality, nature, thingness, emotion, experience, on the other. Consequence of the impulse to make sounds, prior to their "correctness", appropriateness (Dante ends Divina Commedia with imitation of baby talk).

Yet the art is about fitness & finish. Which also represent or reflect ethical qualities. Place in good poetry where technique, theme, inspiration coalesce. Cannot be willed or faked. Also often domesticated into permanent Boredom-world (I too dislike it).

Orphism represented "soul search" in Greek world of power-polis. World poetry, poetry in English, American poetry, New American subcultures - what a universe of Babble ! But poetry is an unaccountable synthesis, an appearance of talent, a rarity. & we sicken ourselves on rich food.

Here's an old poem (I know, I posted this back in Jan.):


at noon

Orpheus sings alone,
his lyre left in the wind
moaning in elliptical harmony.

Persephone sleeps, her head
hidden in her arms, and shadows
of clouds passing over her hair.

And John, in his prison, hears
dance music in the rooms above,
and the sound of an axe on stone.

[p.s. note to previous post/link: Green Constellation was a basic model Sears typewriter; Francesca Tagliabue gave me hers, it's next to my desk here.]

And for me, beneath all the archaeology & romance-disaster & sedimentation of Providence, lies another layer altogether, much deeper, sadder, distant, out in the midwest.

Blogging along for the past three months, I've been able to reflect back along the trail that began around 1965. I'm writing this from a place other blogriders will probably recognize, a tiny dusty cluttered corner room, with a big bulletin board, a 2-drawer file cabinet with a postcard of Ezra Pound's "Poet out of a Job" want-ad, ceiling-high books. I cleaned out the file cabinet a little this morning, a task which provides a special perspective on the tip-of-the-iceberg nature of a writer's public (me, public?) persona : all those old half-baked derivative sleepy weak poems, rejection notes, news clippings, records of little forays projects & endeavors, charming old letters, children's art work. . . the sweet derelicta of others' gestures, which I never acknowledged or loved enough, mixed in with my own.

It's been nice to mingle poems & precepts & so on, kind of a correlation of unrealized efforts; things I haven't mentioned, but might sometime, like what it meant to edit a micro-magazine (Nedge), or work on the Poetry Mission; the effervescence of the Green Tea project, with Susan & Tom (a high point : my son the 12-yr old composer, setting a poem of Edwin's to music, & then being able to perform it with the Grace Church children's choir at the book party, & publish the score); the abiding presence of Edwin Honig, and in a very different way my children's grandfather, John Tagliabue.

Shem the Penman makes a fuzzy, feeble scratch, a Hen-scratch in the spring mud-midden. I'd like to bury him in the midst of his fritterations, the proven dunce in his local Providence, between the cluttered study & the job at the library: 1132, 132, 11 Fisher. . . following

the signs that mock me as I go

London - my young Jesus freak days. Henry Hankovitch, con guitar. Thought the Stones might be useful for evangelization. (Now there's a new idea! Are you tuned in, Canterbury?) That was when I proclaimed the Fall of Babylon, in all seriousness, one midsummer day, to the hippies & potheads at Glastonbury Tor. Return of "the King".

These days I'm playing with Jim & Colette in a jug band, tentatively the K.C. Moaners. Old-timey, ragtime, blues, & some Canadienne fiddle-stomps. We're live at the No. Smithfield Public Library (I think) on March 22, if anybody's in town.

Playing doubles with Joe & Jordan:

Frames are games. Critical games with little round counters & a checkerboard. The yucky feeling of reviews, yes, most of the time; because the reviewer (me) is thinking "this is an easy assignment". The words are anybody's, without much commitment or authenticity.

But let's suppose somebody who can respond with feeling & intelligence & new insight. So criticism might be possible in that case. & if the frames are inadequate, can they be made to work more adequately? In reference to Joe's comments about globalism & war & all : is it legitimate to propose general ideas about how poetry in general responds meaningfully to the world in crises? I really don't know the answer to this.

I sent an email to a list recently complaining about the inadequacy of a CK Williams poem at the back page of this week's New Yorker. Inadequate to me, anyway. So why? I sensed a combination of complacency, vagueness, & cheap tricks ("fire" as a metaphor for general sense of doom & blame the gummint).

I remember with fear & trembling long harangues & debates on Buff List & SubSubpoetics over "general rules" (frames); that puts me in trepidation. But I'm tempted again to look for a way of asking for something of poetry - something between Ron's alternative dialect dialectic, & the typical sleight-of-hand of professional poets represented by the CK Williams poem. Authenticity? Complex engagement? Patience? Unwillingness to rhetorize a reality? What is this called in poetics?

Just blabbing, as usual, ever & anon. Maybe it has something to do with looking for poetry as opposed to the verbalized "positioning" of writers on different spots on the political scale. To focus on the resources of poetry so intensely that it begins to speak to ALL sides, without equivocation. Another idealized frame-up?

More leaven from Henry the blabbing fair-see.

My father, in his mid-70s, still plays poker with his friends from high school. The game-player. A lawyer, it was all about winning games. Now that he's retired, it's games all the time. Up & Down the River with my daughter. I remember the eternal Sunday afternoons, too quiet, us kids at loose ends, Mom & Dad & Aunt Martha & Grandma playing bridge, so quietly. Chuckling now & then. The Mississippi River down in its canyon across the street.

I read many of the poetry blogs every day, some of which are listed to the left.

The trip in fall 2000 to Tuscany with Sarah, Beth & Caroline (from Norwich CT), & Arnold (from Amersfoort). I was walking around in Florence, in the district with all the plaques commemorating Dante's early life - was across the street from the little church (at that time enveloped in construction) where for the 1st time he beheld Beatrice. Suddenly a young woman in a white bridal dress came around the corner, walking toward a young man, followed by a small crowd - they embraced in front of the church doors - a wedding in progress.

Vita Nuova. I have posted many an old poem on hgpoetics: here is a recent poem (written today, actually). Part of a woik in pwogwess titled Time Flowers: an effort to tie together unfinished strands in the long poem Forth of July. Some background might help here. Last Saturday morning I went to the Met to see the big exhibit of Leonardo da Vinci sketches. I left about 12:15; learned that evening that Elena Shvarts (see previous blog entries) had come to see the same show around noon (see her poem "Leonardo" in her Paradise (publ. by Bloodaxe Press). Anyway, the phrase "there (in Tuscany)" is an echo of Mandelstam's Voronezh poem, the last stanza of which (trans. by James Greene):

I'm ready to wander where I shall have more sky.
But that bright longing cannot release me now
From the still-young hills of Voronezh
To the bright, all-human ones of Tuscany.

(I still prefer the David McDuff versions, but these are pretty good. M's Voronezh ('raven-knife") a mirror image of Ojibwa midwest)

Now you have to refer back to blog of a couple days ago where I talked about the humanizing of reality through the microcosm (the Whitman-world, the Proust-world) and you have to understand that the impulse of the following section of Time Flowers (from a chapter called "At the Sign of Shakespeare's Head") was that I was pondering this idea of the Person humanizing with human warmth & idiosyncrasy the wholeness of reality - epitomized by Leonardo's immaculate, obsessive, open-minded SKETCHING, observation, handiwork.

I was also remembering Elena's comments at dinner about her "mapping" poem (The Cardinal Points) & the shock of the Challenger crash, & quoting Maria Brodsky's quoting of Inferno xxvi, and Montale's repeated motif of the LP record of time & reality (see Arrowsmith notes to translation of Storm & Other Things on this) & the notion of angelic time as a continuous eternal re-enactment or re-viving in a different dimension, & Anastasios' comment about the isometric relation between Nacogdoches & Tigris/Euphrates. . .

from TIME FLOWERS

II - At the Sign of Shakespeare's Head

11

to E.S.

Left-handed Leonardo improvises,
a palimpsest of ink-scratches and quotes,
unfinished sketches. From those notes
(from lean-bent angel-Byzant faces)

virgin hills triangulate in flesh
inimitable features, there (in Tuscany).
From incommensurate to harmony
(estranged will and strangled wish,

ugly mug and evanescence)
eye and hand combine - unite;
so we imagine a distant star might
blossom like a planet's orbit (Venus) -

so we might hear a planet whisper,
or a dear star (empalmed in your ear).

*

All we needed, already seeded in Eden:
consider, foolish counselors - what then?

The tarada Columbia flares overhead,
seven burning souls (who left their mark
shaped like a tiger or a ewe) embark
to ineffable nether time (veiled, mangered) -

slight white scratch in the long LP
over the delta of the Nacogdoches,
microgroove in a nest of destinies,
children of immersions, buoyancy

not born for brutality, but virtue,
not fear, but trust and fortitude -
a bright star-seed (both goal and goad)
near farm in angel-time (come true).

2.3.03


further notes: "a planet's orbit": see bird's eye view of orbit of Venus in Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton's Principles, by James Ferguson (1799). the track of Venus' orbit looks like a flower blossom. "Tarada" is a kind of long canoe formerly used by the so-called "Swamp Arabs" at the delta of Tigris & Euphrates. "Foolish counselors": cf. the judgement on Ulysses (Inferno xxvi). Unable to do the accent grave over estranged & empalmed. Last line of 1st section should be read as "or a DEAR STAR" (affects rhythm). cf. again for the meaning of this poem Elena Shvarts' comment about her poem & the "only direction left" (up): in relation to the notion of angelic time as an actual time-warp in which angels reconstitute, recapitulate, resurrect, & relive human time, in some kind of continuum we don't yet understand. Fare forward, voyagers. "poetry is news".

This week's NYorker has a brief review of Marsden Hartley show in Hartford. "the master of Dogtown is having his day". Did Charles Olson notice? Hartley did a lot of painting in Dogtown.

"the middle voice". not elliptical. where on the Virgilian wheel is the impulse? see, simplify, speak. meter-making argument. sound & sense & pressure of experience. he paints a blue mountain.

My kids' mother Francesca born & raised in Lewiston, Hartley's home town.

"By the fragrant Androscoggin,
clogged with noise & smoke. . .
Lewiston High School. . ."

Numerological symbolism in his painting for Hart Crane ("Eight bells"). Eight bells means noon, time he jumped off the ship. 2, 9, 33.

Crane the other side of the coin from Eliot's alloy of traditional/modernist. the flip side.

Hartley & Max Beckmann. Painting in Minneapolis Art Institute ("The Departure").

Gary Sullivan's (Elsewhere) musical explorations. I feel like I'm back in the time of the Crusades, but there are peripatetic monks passing ms. around in Toledo or Edessa. The snob & the obsessive are not far apart ("crank" is the wrong word here). I like African electric guitar too. Out of the thumb piano tradition. There was a jazz underground in Mpls late 60s - Jeff Greenspoon & friends. Jeff gave me guitar & thumb piano lessons. I learned harmonica from a goofball named Eugene.

In SF at the Fillmore I was knocked to the ground by a huge fat Hell's Angel from NYC outside a Dead concert (circa 1974). One straight arm ringed with metal to the back of the head. They were having their national convention & had just stolen my $50. guitar for the offer to get me into the concert (I had no money). I was trying to give them a hard time. They did get me into the concert. I danced onstage (my high school friends Al Franken & Tom Davis - later comedians on SNL - had tickets). Asked Jerry Garcia during break if he could help me get the guitar back - he said "sorry, there's nothing I can do". He was covered with sweat but very gentlemanly about it.

O how boring, America! This is the journalism. How about Angel, the Puerto Rican orphan I met on the street, who could hardly speak english? Our hungry hitchhike from SF to Denver (almost killed by car thieves who picked us up in the mountains - our discussion about Jesus that got us off the hook?) The campfire in the cold in the desert outside Reno - "Henry, you are good, I hope you never turn bad." My flight from Denver - Angel's crusade TO FIND SASQUATCH???

Oh, music. . .

John Berryman had come up in discussion on the New Poetry list, & I promised to post this poem today. The scene takes place along the Mississippi, down the block from Berryman's fatal bridge. [Unfortunately I'm having trouble with the template here - 3 lines should be deeply indented ("maybe you'd be by the upstairs"; "and Dad will get up"; "ROOSEVELT SPEAKS TONIGHT"]:


THE FRONT


When the front rolls in from the southwest,
Spreading a wide fan of shadows and rain
Over the prairie, the towns anchored
Under the bulbs of the water tanks
And waiting for the downpour
To soak the fields, rinse
The machinery -
maybe you'd be by the upstairs
Window, looking out through the big black
Bars of the oak tree toward the gash
Of the river, moving there, hidden
Between the steep slopes, the skies
Quickly lowering.
And Dad will get up
And put down the paper
(ROOSEVELT SPEAKS TONIGHT)
Take off the hearing aid, and close
The south windows downstairs (near where
The piano music curls on the bench) -

And when the storm finally breaks
He'll watch for a while too, leaning
Against the mantle, thinking
Of Kanesville (swollen
Creek, fragile apple trees )-
While the rain storms down in sheets
On the grass, a silver wall
Between the river banks, and thunder
Rattles the blue chinaware, and Grandma
Lights the dinner candles,
And evening hustles out the day.

From the upstairs window
Maybe you'd see the strange
Incandescence, the last
Light burning through
Beneath the storm,
And your face like a
Smaller star, leaning there
Against the clear pane -

Marcel Proust was undoubtedly the greatest archaeologist, unearthing the model of a lost artifact, within another model (time's vast turtle-turns). 1979 seems like Pre-Cambrian era to a 50-yr old BOOMER. In that year my 2nd book appeared, titled "Stone", with a quotation from Mandelstam dedicated to Francesca Tagliabue (daughter of neo-Whitman & Ginsberg-contemporary John Tagliabue) and a photo by Aaron Siskind on the cover (Denny Moers, protege of Creeley & Siskind, spender of '78 Blizzard Weekend on my wife's couch while I was stranded in Boston, found it for me); published by Edwin Honig's & David Cloutier's Copper Beech Press. Time, the Greek gift, like language. That's why I was doubly gifted when I ran away from it for a while, like Jonah.

Here's another old poem in this vein:


INVOCATION


Twilight. Beyond the high school soccer fields
the green-bronze nipple of the Catholic Church
peeks up over Camp Street. Evening
earth immerses the pedestrian horizon,
nudges the last daylight into wine.

Soon it will snow. The trees nearly bare,
a tattered blaze against the pastel houses.
The air, chill. I whisper the lines
walking home from work - a spell,
an invocation, one shadow to another.

Star to star, flint to flint. . .
someone moves from village to village,
small tornado, vortex, unpredictable
- and in the councils, whirlwind
of uncomfortable affirmation.

A veteran, I wait here (in the tunnel
of a small town planted in space)
for these medallions of sundown. Lift
the dry cup to my lips, familiar.
Drink to your seashell breakers.

11.20.92