The whole race is a poet

The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.
                 - Wallace Stevens

My wife Sarah & I have been enmeshed in a drawn-out campaign to pack our belongings & sell our house & make a move out of Rhode Island, back to my home town (Minneapolis).  We're vacating this place & buying my mother's house.

"Home to his Mother's house private return'd."  So ends Milton's mini-epic sequel to Paradise Lost (that is, Paradise Regain'd).

His mother's house.  Milton's Jesus goes home, after his confrontation with Satan - back again, out of poetry & mythology, to his mother's familiar house, encrypted somewhere in the archaeological past, in the disputed chronology of an actual, historical Nazareth...

In an interesting study first published in 1950, titled The Nazarene, Eugenio Zolli traces this epithet for Jesus not so much to his native village, but to the term "Nazir" - which he refers not only to the sect of holy men called Nazirites, but also, etymologically, to one of its meanings in Hebrew : "singer, poet".

The past many months have been relatively changeful & tumultuous for me, the meek little library worker inured to Brown-mouse quiet, books, walks, silence, routine.  I made these choices at least 25 years ago.  I didn't want to teach.  I didn't want to be an activist anymore.  I didn't want a high-energy job.  I wanted to read & write.

Did I have the moral-political grounds to make this choice, to have such an option?  I don't know.  I was responding to what felt like a calling, a vocation.

The fact that I'm even sitting here noodling these ruminations is due to the aforementioned disruptions of my usual mode.  I'm trying to revive the productive state of mind, which I've been unable to do for a couple weeks at least.

It really is a kind of trance state.  Not so much irrational as sponge-like, responsive - yet focused on certain landmarks or compass-readings.  Ravenna Diagram, the big canvas I'm working at, does indeed have its own sort of structural foundation or center of gravity.  The "trance" process is aligned with that.  "The way, when we climb a mountain, / Vermont throws itself together." (Stevens)

I don't yet understand my fate, in Stevens' sense (see epigraph above).  Maybe I'm blind, a sleepwalker.  Maybe I inhabit a solipsistic ego-bubble.  But I don't think so (at least not quite yet).  It is hard to avoid the doubts, the undermining of self-confidence, when the reception for one's labors seems effectively nil, sums up to zero.  Is this evidence of my mistake?

I try to grasp the self-designed blockades to such reception.  There are all sorts of personality issues as well as problems related to the work itself.  Regarding the former, I haven't helped myself.  I am introverted & shy.  I over-compensate with an internet poet-persona I started to manifest in the late 1990s - often annoying, iconoclastic, provocative.  I do not swim with the schools, I don't "network" very well.  I do not teach writing.  Yet I have become something of the typical online self-promoter - self-publishing book after book... understandably, this does not sit well with fellow poets & editors.

But I have tried to get published in journals.  It has been an uphill battle.  It seems likely that, with regard to reception, the issues with the work itself are the more determinative.

I've been writing poetry for nearly 50 years!  The hegemonic critical mantra about "two American poetries" - mainstream and postmodern/avant-garde - has always been a waste of time.  I've liked neither Language Poetry nor New Formalism.  I've been engaged longtemps with the long poem - as Berryman was, & others.  Berryman is not considered part of the "experimental" wing, which seems ridiculous to me (see Brendan Cooper's book, Dark Airs, on this whole question).

Unlike Berryman, in the early 1980s I got absorbed into a mode of elliptical "telling it slant", sourced in the radiant music of Osip Mandelstam.  I found analogues for this approach in both Pound and Hart Crane.  It took me 20 years to elaborate my own manner in this general field.

Such obscurity & obliquity is probably one of the rocks piled on my personal blockade to reception.

Probably a bigger rock, though, has to do with the worldview, the preconceptions.

But enough about me!  Let's get back to the trance state.  What is my trance?  Who is my "muse"?

I think maybe my writing telegraphs on a frequency out of range for many.  The preconceptions & background are too abstruse or occluded.

Why am I writing about "Ravenna" (if I am, even)?  Ravenna was an outpost of Byzantium.  It is a nest of amazing mosaics, towering icons - an outlier from Hagia Sophia and Byzantine Orthodoxy.  But for me, in my poetry, this is a kind of meta-icon for something else.  It leads back to the "Russian" roots - in Mandelstam, in Acmeism.

But those roots too are like the upper layer of a psychic puzzle-box.  Why Mandelstam?  Why Acmeism?  Why Nabokov?

Orthodox Christianity - one aspect of which includes "iconophilia" - is bound up in my mind with the purposes of art, for one thing.  It is incarnational.  The theological dimension includes a commitment to the divine embodiment in the human - their fusion in the process of overall cosmic purpose, the "plan" of the whole.  Art is a limb of Creation in general - a bloom, the flower of flowerings.

Dante is buried in Ravenna.  Pound is buried in Venice.  Rimini sits on the Italian coast between these two.  The complex here is a way of symbolizing something perpetual in poetry - something tying together Dante & medieval Italy with Pound and contemporary America (by way of the "long poem").

But why do this?  Here we get down to another layer of the archaeological dig.

Why Christianity?  Why incarnational, etc.?  This is the 21st century, after all!

Jesus, the "nazir", the poet, the singer, may be the eternal 2nd Person of the Trinity : I'm not going to go into that here.  My focus is on the "Jesus of history" - the real individual who acted and spoke & made claims & taught, suffered, died.

Jesus had charisma.  I think it was founded on his confidence in the divine goodness.  No one, ever, has expressed more serene joy & love for the "Author" of life, the source.  St. Francis tried to replicate this spirit, & perhaps came closer than anyone else.  But Jesus expressed it first and most firmly.

"Home to his Mother's house private return'd."  What shall we say is represented by "his mother's house"?  I would say Judaism itself, the historical people & faith.  The Jews are & have been many things, but perhaps most signally they have been a people of the Word.  Poets.  The Psalmist & prophets sang of the promises of their God - promises of a land of milk & honey, of an era of peace & safety & abundance.  These words were crystallized in writings, encased like scarabs or butterflies in exact & exacting speech, which drills through centuries & eras like the point of a diamond - the hardest thing on earth.

Literalists & fundamentalists & sectarians (of many Abrahamic strains) try to reduce it to their own stingy formulae.  They don't understand, they do not grasp the message.  It is a global human message, representing the whole earth, Earth as a whole.

So, Henry!  Here we go with another preacherly rant.  No wonder you have no readership as a poet!

The matrix of Ravenna Diagram is a Venn diagram.  It is Henry, the American poet, writing in America, now, at one point of the Venn design (of double circles).  It is Jesus, the Jewish poet, singing in Galilee & Judea, at the center of the second circle.  The mandorla in which they overlap (the middle of the Venn diagram) is poetry itself - epic poetry, long poems, on the track of Dante (who finished his Paradiso in Ravenna).

Poetry is one mode of spiritual metamorphosis, of transfiguration.  In this case the epic poem is a vehicle for transmuting history into an expression of divine purpose.  Reality is henceforth framed by the personal : that is, by the human person, who experiences & interprets the given & its meanings.  Prose is the "objective" and impersonal : poetry is the ecstatic and personal.

Poetry is essentially affirmation, the praise song of the "nazir".

Obviously this is far too much baggage for most readers, editors.  It certainly has to be proven by the work itself : no amount of explanation will suffice.

Why must Henry pile Pelion on Ossa to establish such a Baroque or Gothic superstructure for poor little ol' poetry?  My enthusiasm must scare people.  Literary folks like to sit back & evaluate, which is only right.

It's simple, really.  I had an encounter with "the Word", back around 1972.  I was around 20 years old.  I was burned, I was branded, by Gospel fire.  The Word sinks its tongs into you - the word of the old desert, going back to prehistory.  The proverbs, the parables drive like nails into your conscience.  Yet the meaning proves true.  It is enough to transfigure life on earth - it is Milton's "divine Providence".  For poetry has its lion-claws, too - digging down through the sediment of time & shifting cultures, of languages and nations.  They might be one & the same, these nails, these claws.

design by Joachim of Fiore

Jesus Thoughts in Elkhart

I'm passing through Elkhart once again, writing this from motel.  This is Amish country.  The Elkhart visitor center is across the street; they have an exhibit of quilts there.  Turns out both quilts & quilt gardens are a tradition in Elkhart county.  (There is something quilt-like about Ravenna Diagram, which I will have to investigate.  Quilts are mosaics and lattices of sorts.  Lattice within lattices, if you think of the cloth fibers.)

Being quaintly or unusually Christian is as American as hot dogs.  I was raised in the Episcopal Church, but my spiritual history is as distinct as anybody else's in the great awakening around these parts.

Sometimes driving the Buick across these vast farmlands I try to focus my thoughts, turn off the radio.  Open up to possible new vistas of the old, or old vistas of the new.

It's not easy to say anything new about Jesus Christ.  He has been pretty well covered by professional preachers, theologians, memoirists & historians.  The great spectrum of denominational & devotional Christian life, going back 2000+ years, has its own very deep traditions of scriptural interpretation, preaching, devotion, & shared ways of living.  Then of course there is the Jewish tradition, going back at least another 1000 years, on which all this Christianity is founded.  So it takes some moxie, some chutzpah, to try to say something new about Jesus.  What's more, words can only go so far in the plain detached public sphere, dislocated from any solid participative readership, any engaged reception.  It's one thing to listen to a sermon or an evangelical homily (you can find a lot of these - some very complex - on the radio around these parts) within a context of prior belief or experience.  It's another to come at a blog post, out of the blue.

What's more, I'm not sure I actually have anything new to say about Jesus.  But we will try.

An author has a worldview, a way of looking at things.  She tries to bring it across to the reader.  In the process, she has an implicit sense of the reader's reaction to whatever she writes.  This sense of a response conditions what is actually written - it's a sort of inherent dialectic.  You are there as a kind of potential interlocutor.  I have to try to convince you of what I think I see.  It's an effort of persuasion.

So I was driving along in the Buick yesterday, somewhere in Pennsylvania.  I was thinking as I often do in a vague way about the political meaning of kingship (having been reading a biography of Richard III, the one they found under the parking lot).  The monarch is a representative of tribal or collective leadership, among other things.  Humans live in groups : the king is an invention put together in response to a social problem  - how to live together amicably in a group.

The idea of the Messiah of Israel had a royal, a political dimension.  In one sense the Messiah was a cultural response to the fact that Israel was often a people in bondage to more powerful, and foreign, peoples.  The Messiah would be a "son of King David", who would restore the nation.

But there was more to the messianic idea in Israel.  At its root was a forecast that the Messiah to come would be "a prophet like Moses".  Moses was more than a king for Israel.  He was the ultimate "founding father", in a sense.  He was the prophet who bound Israel in its covenant with the Most High God - he was the servant of Yahweh, who stood before Him & spoke with Him.  This is a religious, priestly dimension, a category separate from kingship per se.  For Israel, in a sense, Yahweh is the ultimate King : Israel's kings are Yahweh's chosen servants.

Now it is with this sketch in the background that we call to mind the specific mission & message of Jesus.  The leadership role assumed by Jesus was mocked as "royal" by the Romans (at least as depicted in the Gospels), and then, later,  royal regalia & symbolism have been heaped upon him in the centuries of Christian tradition which followed.  Jesus is called "king of kings".  But it's important to keep in mind the distinction between "messiah" and king.  Jesus was attempting to do & say something on a distinctly different scale.

The difference - the fork in the path - which Jesus' message instigated has both spiritual & political consequences.  How so?  What is the crux of this message?  Let's cut to the chase, Henry.

I remembered driving along today an old study I read once, title I can't recall - about the themes of justice and mercy in the medieval English poem Piers Plowman.  The author detailed the medieval understanding of a sharp divide between earth and heaven, time & eternity.  Good deeds are not rewarded on earth; they are stored up for honor in heaven.  This is partly why people are instructed to give alms in secret.  It's not about vanity & worldly renown; it's not about the earthly self at all.  It redounds to the benefit of the eternal soul.

Let's say there are three central branches to the tree of Jesus' worldview : the living God; God's creation; and the eternal soul.  The Incarnation and the Resurrection are in a sense corollaries or consequences of two most basic things : God's power to create the cosmos, reality as we know it; and the fact that the soul is eternal and thus has the potential to "live" again, in any form or body or time or place which the Creator chooses.

Jesus is saying something even more radical & astounding.  He saying that he & the Creator are united, that they share one Spirit.  The personal Creator is "father" to Jesus as "son".  Comprehended from a certain angle, this is an astonishing proclamation of joy.  There is nothing to compare to the joy expressed here.  Jesus is saying he will live again, "with all the company of heaven" - among the ever-living spirits in God's company - & return again in the flesh to earth.  & he is suggesting that anyone who sees & understands this way of seeing things will also recognize their own ever-living soul, their own spiritual connection with that "company of heaven".

This is mind-boggling in a way - it's so upsetting to our everyday sense of mundane reality, the humdrum roll-along of time to old age & obliteration.  The "logical", "scientific" mind tends to reject such spiritual visions.

Yet there is a logic to the ancient & medieval worldview also.  I think of it as the logic of creation, or the logic of the beautiful.  We see the spiritual greatness of certain men & women, certain culture heroes - & we recognize something beautiful in the lives they have lived, in their spiritual victory over the pettiness & evils of human social life.  Then we start to notice the same beauty in the lives of ordinary unsung people too : we see the spiritual in nature, so to speak.  The logic of these examples relates back to the argument for creation : that the cosmos is too splendid & marvelous to be meaningless & empty; it has come from nothing out of some kind of powerful creative will-to-be, will-to-love.

But I want to bring this all back to the idea of the Messiah.  The Messiah of Israel is distinct from a king; yet the message of Jesus, as messiah, has real political repercussions.  The Good News of our eternal soul, and its place in an eternal, heavenly realm, applies to every man and woman on earth.  Suddenly our moral, ethical, social existence is not chained to a particular place and time or a particular form of government or economy.  Ethics has been universalized.  Morality has been universalized.  Our own spiritual future has been universalized.  We are members of an eternal association, the "company of heaven".  As Dante put it in the Divina Commedia (to paraphrase from memory), he looks forward to that day when he will be "citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman".

The notion that I have an eternal soul - that a priestly messiah-figure, one Jesus, has called me to recognize this fact & participate in a newly-visible, eternal community, a universal polity - is the kind of powerful message of hope & liberation capable of shaping a new way of life.  As Jesus says in the Gospels, "you must be born again".  You who were a child of human parents, here in a particular spot & time on earth, are being invited to become a "child of God".

We have to imagine - to conceptualize - & then to recognize, that Jesus with this message of soul freedom is re-shaping the political & social, as well as the spiritual, identity of every human being on earth.  We are getting our eternal life back.  This kind of moral liberation has political consequences, historical consequences.  It affects persons living under every form of human social regime & political polity.

Roger Williams, the Rhode Island pioneer & radical thinker, called himself a "Seeker".  He was trying to understand the right relation between spiritual life and social, political life in the world.  & he became a powerful advocate for what he called "soul liberty" or "liberty of conscience".  In this way he was a kind of sponsor for all the wild & different experimental Christian sects which sprang up in 18th & 19th century America.  But at the base of his own thinking was this old medieval sense of a "realm", a "kingdom", slightly different from this present world.  It was the same sense underlying the moral algebra of Piers Plowman : some kind of secret exchange between earth & heaven, time & eternity.

Critics of Christianity have condemned this two-tiered picture of reality as escapist, otherworldly, quietist, detached.  But all these critiques are based on a superficial misreading of Jesus' message.  The Incarnation is the ultimate expression of the joining, the wedding, of these two dimensions.  The "providence" of the plan of Jesus' "heavenly father" is a work involving, first, the liberation of the person, through a recognition of eternal life; and second, the redemption & repair of the whole creation - as a result of the joy instilled by this very liberation.  The message of the new Pope Francis (along with the old St. Francis) is certainly in line with this concept.  Humankind is called upon to restore the right relation to the beautiful creation.

I've rambled on longer than I wanted to here.  But Henry the old Plantagenet feels a deep kinship with the poet's joy of Dante, & the poet's elation in Mandelstam (a Dante reader), & the spiritual cheer & brimming good fellowship I find in that Messiah's words & gestures, this vision of vitality & personhood which has the victory over Time & Death.  This Israel is real to me.  May it be for you, too, whoever you are - out there beyond Elkhart or in Elkhart, inside or beyond this green wide Amish-land.

the old Plantagenet pops up in Elkhart again

Jesus Thoughts (28) : the numerology of 28

Friends, this is a diary, a journal, a record of stray thoughts, not some kind of formal essay or academic discourse.  I guess that's obvious to everyone... I just want to reiterate this apologia, since today I might really wander in my ramblings.

 Tomorrow, 12.21.2012, the ancient, subtle Mayan calendar goes into rewind.  But the world ended last week for 28 people - children, teachers, a mother, and one young suicidal murderer.  A whole town and nation have been draped in mourning black.  Tomorrow the bells of the National Cathedral in Washington (epicenter of a new gun-control movement) will ring 28 times - once for each person, once for each of these violent deaths.

Maybe - we can only hope - this traumatic event will signal a new era, marked by stronger curbs on these killing machines.

Forgive me now for a seemingly detached, arcane aside.  The number 28 became important to me this year, in the course of composing and finally finishing a long poem, Lanthanum.

Numbers in ancient times and cultures had a symbolic, even aesthetic value, which has been replaced in the modern era by an emphasis on pure calculation (mathematical, scientific, statistical...).  But poetry is (or can be) a kind of throwback to old days - when "numbers" was a synonym or term of art for verse, when counting and rhythm were essential to poetry and mnemonics.  In the early '90s my own work was inspired by Alastair Fowler's studies of numerology in ancient, medieval and renaissance poetry.  I became fascinated with the symbolic/artistic potential of the "architectural" design of poetry.  The process of number-design seemed to go hand-in-hand with the other elements involved in writing a long poem (theme, plot, etc.).

Symbolically, 28 is a "moon" number - a pattern of the lunar (monthly) calendar.  This may partly explain the centrality of this number for some Native American tribes : Black Elk, for example, emphasized its importance, noting how the circular tepee used in Dakota Sun-Dance ceremonies was always constructed with 28 poles.

Quite a bit of my poetry has been influenced by Native American legends and concepts.  The cross-cultural amalgam, in the long poem Forth of July, of "Orpheus-Dante-Jesus-Bluejay-Juliet-J" was shaped to re-tell the story of a descent/ascent to hell/heaven, and a journey into the interior of both the mind and the American continent.  The "Jay" punningly combines Jesus, Juliet, and "Bluejay", an orphic trickster-figure from Northwest Coast Indian mythology.

Lanthanum carries on with many of these themes and symbols.  The poem culminates in a kind of Dantean "rose wheel" mandala-figure, shaped by the conjunction of two circles, forming the geometry of a mandorla, or vesica (often used in ancient and medieval art as an ornamental border or alcove-shape around Christ, Mary, or the saints).  The merging of 2 circles represents the wedding of contraries, the hieros gamos, the joining of earth & heaven, the synthesis of opposites : Lanthanum narrates or unfolds such a visionary process by way of both symbolic images and numbers.

Lanthanum is one of the elements of the atomic table - #57.  It is a rare earth (not actually so rare).  The poem Lanthanum is itself designed using this number, and its "factors" : ie. the basic building block of the poem is a strophe or section of 28 lines (the 4-line quatrain stanza, times 7).  The mandala design is built on a pattern of 28-1-28, with the "1" in the center representing the pivotal figure of synthesis (the "wedding number").  The climax of the poem is a visual (concrete) symbol of the mandorla, with the words "Jesus Christos" in a crosswise pattern inset within.  The shape also mimics the "catenary" arc of the Gateway Arch monument in St. Louis - ie., a mandorla prong rooted in the earth, at the center of the North American continent.  The same mandorla or vesica design, rendered as a 3-dimensional octahedron, outlines the form of a diamond shape - the same shape drawn by the traditional Native American ritual offering of the peace pipe to the six directions.

There are a lot of complex elaborations on this basic numerical design, in the poem Lanthanum.  Since finishing this long-term project, in July 2012, I have been struggling to find my creative bearings and direction for further poetry.  One of the paths I've begun to follow involves an intensification of the methods and patterns I've used before : ie. I'm working on a loose series of poems patterned on a quatrain stanza of 28 syllables, in poems of 7 stanzas (or 28 lines).

I am very aware how abstruse or pedantic all this might sound.  Where is all this symbolic numerology coming from?  To what exactly is it relevant?

In one sense, all this is an outgrowth of my own activity as a poet over the last 40 years.  And the process of welding personal, national, and religious symbols together in poems has roots in my own psychic/aesthetic experience.  In a way I look back on my life as one long, very slow, very incremental, very hesitant and halting, process of spiritual conversion.  Maybe it's my own sort of interior Dantean journey through hell, purgatory and paradise.  It began around 1972 : at age 20, I had already been a poet for several years.  In 1972-73 I went through a psychological breakdown and spiritual crisis - a "conversion experience" - which changed my whole moral orientation, yet which was also very intimately tied up with poetry (and the poetry of the Bible : the poetry of Jesus-the-poet, the Nazarene, the Nazir : chanting, proclaiming his original parables).  And the slow, incremental labor on these very extended, journey-like poems - their structuring around numerical-geometrical-symbolic numbers - can be seen as a creative process of drawing, or illustrating, or symbolizing the growth of a personal worldview of time, history - what is human and divine.  My poetry is a response to world history, and a response to my personal experience, and a response to the tradition of American literature - all in one.  Lanthanum, for example, is a kind of synthesis (welding, wedding) of America and Europe - centered in "St. Louis", between Melville & Crane on the one hand, and Henry Adams & T.S. Eliot on the other : between Notre Dame and the Gateway Arch.  And it attempts a renewal, a re-visioning, of Dante's effort - to weld together Man and God, earth and heaven.

The slow, stubborn constancy of this particular approach to poetry has not been taken seriously by my contemporaries.  But what can I do?  That's not my business.  I've basically lived in my creative workshop for the last 25 years.  I've disseminated and published my work as best I could, under the circumstances : it's here & there for anyone who takes an interest.  Maybe someday my work will gain a readership, and a place in the story of American poetry : I can't say.  I just keeping doing what I do, under antithetical conditions.

So concludes Jesus Thoughts (28) : my Jesus-poetics of the number 28.  (But there's much more to this, secretly squirreled away in my poems : numbers, dates.... 5.28, 5.29....)