ten years ago

I finished Forth of July (about a 3-yr project) the day before my 48th birthday. So I was no spring chicken while writing that. In fact one way to look at the poem's combination of love/poetry/renewal - the Orpheus romance - is that, at my (sort of) middle age, I was self-consciously experiencing the ability to write the poem, as a kind of renewal. I was undergoing my own internal renaissance, which really began with the Island Road sonnets. "The Muse" and love and writing were synchronizing - after several years of frustration & difficulties.

old seasonal poem

have a good weekend in Costaguana

Elena Shvarts' memoir, Vidimaia Starona Zhizni, is made up of little 1-2 page sections. According to my Slavicist pal Tom Epstein, there's a section toward the middle about me. I'm a little nervous about reading it (I identify with those graphomaniac failed playwrights whose scripts her mother used to find hilarious) so I'm starting the book at the beginning, in Russian, which with me is pretty slow going.

The book was published in Petersburg a few years ago. It's a nice little red paperback. It took me a while to find a copy, through a Russ bkstore in Boston (Petropol).

Tom says Elena has also written a short story in which there's a character who resembles me named "Henry Silver". Then there's the poem about the seagulls meeting over the Atlantic, which I posted here in translation many moons ago.

So it's been a bit of a Russ-American literary game, when you think of all the versified epistles (epiphanies) I've sent her way.

St. Petersburg was modelled on Amsterdam (after a trip there by the young Czar Peter, incognito). E. Shvarts writes quite a bit about Venice & other diked locations. (thinking of the strange juxtaposition of the floodish poem just posted, & the tsunami.)

It's Everywoman, Everyman. It's you, me, it's Berkeley in Paradise... the Son of Man, the Imago. It's All Souls' Eve (& Happy Halloween).

Halloween is coming.

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.

& everywhere this Love comes home to me!
as every island road leads to the sea.

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

a Rhode Island road


Autumn, 1975. Gerald Ford is President. I am 23. Living illegally in London. My valiant attempt to replace Mick Taylor as Rolling Stones guitarist has ended in failure. My grandfather Ravlin, back in Minneapolis, is not doing well.

I've been playing music, doing a few gigs, with some loveable Irish & Brit guys I met through work, at the dear aristocrats' ex-import/plant watering business (around the corner from the Royal Court theatre). I've moved to a drab apartment across the street from Wandsworth prison. I've gotten involved with a Brazilian-Lebanese singer, a former pop star & TV personality, who's singing with our band. I had met her in a shabby squat apartment, where I was applying for a guitar position with another band. She's fallen on bad times, moves in heroin/drug circles (all her friends are addicts). Her Brit husband is across the street, in Wandsworth, for dealing. This rather accentuates my qualms about the affair (wasn't I here in London on an exalted spiritual mission?).

Our little band plays a gig at one of the members' church. A Halloween party for the youth group. We play them old Beatles songs, they're just kids. Yellow leaves are falling around the grey stone arches, into the green yard outside the windows. A sweet Middle-Ages feeling.

My year in England was wonderful & lonely. I had foresworn poetry a couple years earlier, after a series of charismatic/psychic upheavals which I have described elsewhere (Shakespeare in spirit, the Sonnets, etc.). My life now was music and mission. But one shouldn't have the impression of a single-minded packed & sorted sort of person. I spent a lot of time in tattered London 2nd-hand bookstores (having no money to speak of). I read the Bible, I read other obscure books, mostly I listened to my own thoughts & ruminated, puzzled over mysteries of Time, God, Incarnation, History, Destiny. I drew odd diagrams, pictures which attempted to clear up the geometry of person, spirit, God. I played my instruments & wrote songs. (Once I traveled out to Stonehenge and Glastonbury, taking time to announce to the gathered Euro hippies that Babylon Has Fallen. I remember beautiful old country lanes, leaves falling against stone walls, my solitude & hunger.) Then I began skipping work, to be with Alma. Finally one day the gentle aristocrats told me, apologetically, that they had to let me go. This was in November, getting very chilly there. I spent a few difficult weeks wandering the streets, delivering flyers for small change, searching the gutters for coins. I thought I could find something eventually, but was beginning to have doubts. I didn't want to be in London if my grandfather passed away. Finally I called home. My father wired me a plane ticket. I was home for Christmas. By January I was back in school.

I've added a new barnacle to the bow of HG Poetics.

That's Roger Williams, for those of you who just arrived here. A WPA statue from the 1930s, he's gazing (from Prospect Park) over the town he founded, Providence. Providence is a theological concept. This was written down by the river. Hobo-man, Dark Lady in mind. (in many ways, these poems are glosses on the poetics of the name "Henry", as it appears in Berryman, Shakespeare, Dante, and, of course, throughout the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.)

& what was it that set me gallivanting through the wild West & East, like a holy fool "Henry Hankovitch, con geat"? - some personal experience of a power which seems to carry moral authority with it. (cf. below)

Maybe the most concise literary image of those days is this.

Spiritual Charity is the real motor of social change. Lovingkindness - unselfish, not proud, not greedy, based on pure natural supernatural affection & devotion - the spiritual force adumbrated most eloquently in Paul's epistle - this is the force behind the betterment of life everywhere on earth, in all its facets and modes.

Because spiritual Charity lends meaning to this familiar Gospel comment : "The greatest among you shall be your servant." That explains everything about both mercy and social justice.

Lookin fo de Day ob Jubilee.

Wallace Stevens' poetry is sometimes orotund, coinciding with the general repleteness & rotundity of WS, as in similar modus William Shakespeare offers a mighty graceful Globe;

and as WS oftentimes mentions the poetry to be found in philosophers,

so, I recommend Nicolaus Cusanus, or Nicholas of Cusa, whose interest in roundness surpasseth all others;

quotes to follow -

Therefore the edge of the world is not composed of points, but its edge
 is roundness [rotunditas], which consists in one point. 

 
Roundness cannot be composed out of points for, since a point is indivisible 
and does not have quantity or parts or a front and back or other differences,
it cannot be joined to another point.

 
Only length and width can be seen.  But in roundness nothing is long or wide
or straight.  Roundness is a kind of circumference, a certain convexity led
around from point to point whose top is everywhere.  And its top is the atom,
invisible because of its tininess.

 
The round world is not that roundness itself than which no roundness can be
greater, but that roundness than which nothing can actually be greater.
Absolute roundness is not of the nature of the roundness of the world, but is its
cause and exemplar; the absolute roundness of which the roundness of the world is
the image.  I see the image of eternity in a circle where there is neither a beginning
nor an end since there is no point in which it would be the beginning rather than
the end.  [italics mine]

Listen to this subtlety :

Moreover unity is more perfect and simple to the degree that it is more uniting.
Hence the Trinity, which is one in such a way that it is also in three persons, each of
which is one, is more perfect.  And unity would not be most perfect in any other way.

similarly :

Consequently you must open up the gaze of your mind, and you will see that God
is in all multitude because he is in the number one, and in every magnitude because he
is in the point.  From this it is established that divine simplicity is more subtle than the
number one and the point which gives the unfolding power of multitude and magnitude.
Hence God is a greater enfolding power than that enfolding power of the number one 
or of a point.

Edward J. Butterworth (rotund moniker) has a perfectly succinct essay in the book Nicholas of Cusa in Search of God and Wisdom (Brill, 1991), clarifying these concepts & relating them to the earlier Alan of Lille, who wrote : Deus est spaera intelligibilis, cuius centrum ubique, circumferentia nusquam. Moreover, Lille :

The creature is called the center because, as time, compared to eternity, is thought
a fleeting motion, so the creature, compared to God, is a central point.  Therefore, the
immensity of God is said to be the circumference, because it disposes all things in
such a way that it encompasses them and enfolds all things within its immensity.

It's possible to find only word games & rhetorical sleight of hand here. But not if you take into account Cusanus' commitment to the (negative-theological) absolute otherness of God. Mathematical terms are applied to simplicity, while concrete (physical) terms are applied to multiplicity (as in Alan of Lille). Yet otherness and the physical universe are joined, related to one another, by shared geometrical terms & analogies (in a relation of material actuality, on the one hand, and ineffable, invisible & infinite (yet intelligible) perfection, on the other). Alan of Lille's "Intelligible Sphere".

Leading (Butterworth illuminates, partly via Einstein) (& around again) to Cusanus' limpid, rotund contradiction :

Therefore the edge of the world is not composed of points,
but its edge is roundness, which consists in one point.

(All Cusanus quotes from
De Ludo Globi (The Game of Spheres))

what's that Dickinson line? "My circuit is circumference" [?]

in the pine trees. . . so try this (inching along, hesitant, grieving).

Yet another old sonnet from Island Road:

         28

    
                              near Norwich, by the Thames


  

         Trees merge with the darkness    coral, camouflaged
 above the river,    quiet, smooth and ceaseless.
 Hidden by nightfall,    stars, arranged
 in the heavens,    drift    reflected there.

  
         You tugged your sweater close around your dress
 & let me wrap an arm across your shoulder as
 the last of summer pulled us both downstream,
 so adamant, so casual, unvarying, and calm.

  
         Those fingers lifted to my shivering lips
 were hidden in the darkness too    & now
 my heartbeat mimics you
 & stained with all this darkness, steps
 toward some anonymous London afterlife,
 incognito (the ache    of universal grief).

[p.s. that's Norwich, CT]

Old poem from Island Road:

68    Henry's Sleep Report



  



         I saw a needle of strange fortitude
 bolt through the vault, like    a mosquito farming
 the blue    or unstable sable-yellow feathered
 hornet's trumpet vine's    metamaterial    barnstorming –

  
         an M    an S    whirled – miles over that tangled isle
 like a bull's-eye of assassinated    justice
 in the court of angels,    or    long-lost medal
 of stolen honor, or  incarnadine boomerang of unbound bliss –

  
         &      this tiny cantilevered carriage    pricked the skies
 across a verdant constellation –    binding the said
 sad impress,    blessing    with mourning eyes
 & pity,    spanning,    spinning across    with ruby thread –

  
         & so    your guileless disguise    prevailed    on high, as
 you unwound    your own    4th of July