mountain crossroad

HIGH JUBILEE

As the flashy plumage of the peacocks

contrasts with the somber wall

of a hunchbacked cathedral… so

the worldly chit-chat of the literati mocks

the stark lofty simplicity

of a mountain crossroad –

where a mule bites goad

with gritted teeth (stubborn humility).

& I think of those high stony passes

of Armenia tonight

as I foot my way, right

back to bright horseplay of Itasca

primavera springs.  Up there, young

Ojibwe (generation after

generation) took the fast

of separation from the world (a brave-sprung

discipline) – & he awoke & found it truth.

So (as I inch toward the close

of my rheumy, 8-years’

rêve-glose) I want to emulate that youth

& drink the clear spring water, sing my fast

manifest the rabbit frame

these longish footprints form…

untwist my Huckleberry ruse at last.

Tell me what is a human soul & spirit

& you will say what I mean.

What they have always been –

a knot of everlasting life, the whit-

                  *

sun wedding of the nodding twain.

Theseus, Ariadne… Adam,

Eve… – til Jesus came

& lifted every limb to Paradise (again).

All’s figures.  Here’s a 4-leaf clover;

twirl it between your fingers.

See where Hobo lingers,

lost in his maze… only a cavernous nave

overhead (synagogue of Always-There).

Can you conceptualize

the structure of the Bible?  Is

your mind glazed yet, by the seven spare

sparks of Pentecost?  Has the Spirit

settled upon you as a dove

& vaulted you to eaves of love?

This is the salt that fires each aspirant

& burns away the dross around the urn –

kindling Dante, Roger Williams –

forging those adamant amalgams

melding heaven-earth, sacred-profane…

prophetic copper work of Providence.

For the covenant of God

with Man is happy seed-

grain of the common good – equivalence

of Golden Rule & last commitment;

liberty from tyranny

is predicated on glory… high

Jubilee of restoration (in a dreamer’s tent).

4.24.20

at the close of a year

JOVIAL STAR

The weathered flesh-tones of the Franklin Bridge

her twin brows arched with wonder

in the imperturbable splendor

of the winter sun.  You give me courage.

Not the one or the other, only

but the concord of the two

in three.  What ravels you

& me – kindling of Dove, or Bee.

Sophie brought me a handful of shells

& an acorn, from Rhode Island.

A child’s gift, out of sand –

at the year’s end, from sea-swells.

& it came to me, at the close of a year

that Earth itself is the ball of clay.

Your mother’s wheel, for a day

& a night... Time unfolding, free & clear.

That fortitude of Roger, in his Providence

was planted by one adamant law –

the human well of love & awe,

the infinite heart, your recompense.

The jovial star beams on its balance-point.

The sense of rightness Osip felt

comes like your sister-dove; eyes melt

frost with twin rays of hearth-fire.  Scent

of your presence, walking beside me, Hobo

intuits, hearkens, turns –

out of these graven Grecian urns

quick water voices, chorusing.  Lamps, glow.

12.31.19

golden autumn of the codgers

CHASTE EQUALITY

A synthesis of reality

is the poet’s quarry –

the whole serene array

sweeping like wind over the sea.

Not that irritable reaching

after fact & reason

but a subtler conviction –

life’s laughing dolphin, breaching.

So lips’ continuum of air

sustains your sea-sounding,

reverberates in rounding

surf (os-scintillating there).

The light stems from another realm.

A gravity so dense

you’re pulled beyond sense

to transcend...  Owlish Athena’s helm

shines like an emerald acorn cap

out from that wilderness

of native lovingkindness

(Williams’ mayday just a maple tap).

The Ocean State is what we seek.

The Providence of Roger-

Seeker... golden codger

settled in his freedom, meek

and bold.  Like admirable Edward

Coke, who founded

justice vs. his confounded

king – a chaste equality (rood-hoard).

11.1.18

Confessional blog post # 341

Greetings, fellow moles.  I've lost the habit of conversational blogging.  The old Brown University Library (the Rock) was my Alexandria, my table-talk slab : now I'm way out here in the high lonesome, like a rolling stump (off Highway 61).

Apparently we inhabit these digital knowledge-canals.  Robots remember things for us, bots remind us, etc.  I've gone out of fashion (about 10 years ago) as bloggentator (aka Mr. Potato-head).

Poetry shivers in the frisson of its immediacy, its grasp of The Cool - the shimmer of This, your slangy Now.  Behind lurks the power of the Word Itself - like an Old Master, like Big Daddy, with the moneybags (Universities Bank Here).  It Can Help You.  But the kids are nervous : that's how it goes (swimmingly).  The Academy of American Poets invites you to become an Associate Member (tote bag to follow); Poetry magazine hits monthly, like velvet lightning.  Jimi Hendrix reads us!

(It is really good, btw - especially the issue I was in, sometime last year.  Tonic verbs, with scattering of playdough... what is poetry, btw?)

I've lost, as I say, the hobbit of consternation.  Out of the gloop.

Still try to read books, now & then.  People may get the idea I've retreated into some kind of bizarre eccentric personal hut.  As John Keats once averred, "I am picked up and sorted to a pip.  My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk."

Yet my day is very scheduled (horae) - what with family industries, managing various major national crises, reading parts of a book or mag, and writing my Answer-To-Dante Poem...

As a matter of fact my personal mental space is so "Middle American" it's become exotic to many.  Recently I was subjected to a biting, sarcastic FB attack, by the accomplished young poet Phillip B. Williams - I guess because he felt I was some kind of Neanderthal.  Probably a generational thing (young guy knifes geezer).  You have to wear a digital sign on your head now to explain what appropriate medicines you are currently on in order to make you immune to the wrong purifications.

Am in the middle of this volume, American Covenant.  By another Philip - Philip Gorski (Princeton UP, 2017).  See, I can still find scholarly tomes!  This is a good one.

Do you know the difference between despotism, liberalism and republicanism?  Are you aware of the "civic religion" of These States?  Are you conscious of its binding presence in American history, and in your daily life?

It's a kind of hagiography, or demonology - from John Winthrop through Hannah Arendt, H.L. Mencken, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Lincoln, the Federalists, Roger Williams, many another.  Along the road you receive a blast of enlightening rational political science, theology, sociology... sorting to a pip the various strains of religious nationalism, radical secularism, libertarianism, neo-liberalism, democratic republicanism, etc etc - aside from the special orthodoxies of the Two Major Parties - which have framed the debate about American life since the Primal Dawn of Roger Williams' Canoe.  Umpt to Trump.

Gorski is searching for the spiritual-intellectual common ground : the forces moving American history.  I'm finding (right now) his commentary on Hannah Arendt quite stimulating : her concept of the "public happiness" - as she describes the revolutionary origins of the United States - having to do with a very concrete experience of democratic participation, a path to finding oneself-as-citizen, something wider and more liberating than oneself-as-private (economic) individual.  She gets at the root of the necessity for self-government, popular sovereignty : that we become content, energized, & deeply happy, as we engage with our neighbors on a basis of equality and justice.  Thus she redefines (or rediscovers) the Founders' meaning of "pursuit of happiness" : it's a public, civic thing.  So she asserts the authority of the forum, the commonweal, as a counterweight to merely private interest, the seductions of predatory Mammon (pure money).  Reading Gorski's interpretation I was reminded of my halcyon days with the VISTA program (established by JFK - the domestic Peace Corps) so long ago : community organizing for civic engagement, empowerment (by the scruffiest neighborhoods).

There are many sorts of poetry.  I'm following up some very ingrown toenails of personal obsessions, with me since the early 1970s (that's almost 50 years ago).  Problems with Shakespeare, Bible, Nabokov, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Hart Crane... Pound, Dante, Stevens, Eliot, et al...  - what to do with the Epic Poem?

I am aware that just because they are old obsessions doesn't mean they are interesting.  Coolness is a kind of polish - lemon wax.  You have to be able to speak to the moment... perhaps I've lost my touch, my Lemon Pledge (if I ever had it).

Too late now, I guess.  I'm an inveterate Blog Monster.

it depends

Quiet evening here in Minneapolis, along the River Road, by the U of M (no, this is not Garrison Keillor - he's retired).  Sarah is down with the flu (mild for now).  We spent the morning at the clinic.  I'm off the big poem momentarily (Ravenna Diagram).  The house was quiet & the world was calm (right).

Thinking tonight for some reason of Eugenio Montale.  The phrase "superior dilettantism" - from his groundbreaking essay "Style and Tradition" (I like Joseph Cary's translation of that particular passage much better than Jonathan Galassi's).

Montale was a librarian, as well as a journalist, critic & poet, so I feel some slight personal affinity there.  (Not that I was ever much of a librarian, or much of those other things either.)

As person & poet he seems to emanate a good deal of something like Keats's negative capability.  He's sort of oblique.  He doesn't assert; he suggests, he implicates.  It's very sly, but also, strangely meek.  I'm speaking of his poetry.  Out of the literary blind alleys, undertones, non-sequiturs & jokes, you sense this emanation of a cherished & familiar landscape, a way of doing and not doing things.  A landscape of music, feeling.  Lacrimae rerum.

So he's very ancient & very present at the same time (Virgil, Dante, Bible).

He tightropes between the "aulic" & the ordinary, the colloquial.  (Maybe Benedetto Croce has something to do with this...)

& he sings.  Montale aspired to be an opera singer before he turned to poetry.  Let me repeat that : Montale aspired to be an opera singer before he turned to poetry.

Montale the poet is playful & subtle.  One of his striking images is that of the chess-playing woman in Firenze, somehow eking out a spiritual victory over the (Fascist) forces all around her : his muse.  I think he would have made a very good chess player, if he hadn't gone in for opera & poetry.

But I reiterate this idea of the landscape seeping up through the poetry.  The simple vernacular of the land - beautiful & troubled, suffering.  The "earth in labor", so to speak.  The artifice of pastoral yielding gracefully to the fatal wisdom of experience (rustic Adam & Eve, & all that followed).

Not sure where I'm going with this.  I'm surrounded by old books (I am a former librarian).  Montale's "dilettantism" appeals to me.  Not simply because I could be labeled a dilettante myself, but because the concept offers an opening to what Berryman called "the freedom of the poet".

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty..." spake the old vase, & the negatively-capable Keats.  There is something uncanny about the effect of the beautiful - the wholeness, the total impression of the complete work of art, however humble.

The rustic poet speaks quietly out of the landscape, out of experience... & we recognize the truth of those sounds.  We hear (with some trepidation) the implicit judgement of their rightness, their finality.

It's a certain way of responding to reality.  Distinct, that is, at least in some respects, from the scientific, the philosophical, the theological, or the political.  It's more raw, more colloquial - & more refined, more graceful.  Don't ask me why.  (Ends vs. means.  Reality vs. theory.  Innocence & Experience.)

Think of Robert Frost at Kennedy's inauguration.  Think about that for a while.  About what they both were trying to accomplish - & how it actually fell out (in an odd, unfinished, lovable, screwed-up way).

I'm perpetually obsessed with old texts, old words... I'm a librarian, I guess.  I started out as a very with-it (in my view) late-60's hipster poet.  It's how I managed to get into Brown University, back in 1970.  Basically I was following an impulse (by way of Rimbaud & Baudelaire & ee cummings & the New York School & all the 60s novels I was imbibing).  I was making poems.  But then I underwent a religious-psychological crisis, in 1973-74 (when I was about 19).  Not that different, I imagine, from what happened to T.S. Eliot - something deflected his river from its course, and so the waves rippled relentlessly through his life & poetry.

I never liked Eliot, I couldn't stand him.  I actually reacted viscerally to the slimy sibilant sibylline sound of his verses. Some of this certainly must have been mere cultural conformism on my part (nobody liked Eliot back in the 20th century).  We can argue ad infinitum about TSE pro & con.  My point is, that despite my animus, my polar opposition to Eliot, it seems we underwent some kind of fairly similar psychological-cultural-religious crisis of conversion.

Why, oh why do I bring this up, right here in my Nobel lecture about Eugenio Montale?

I think poetry is something we don't really understand.  It comes from the deepest layers of the human psyche & spirit - dimensions that reach far backward & forward, from our very animal prehistory to a future we can't yet see.  Matthew Arnold's notion of "touchstones" gets at some clue of which he may have been unaware - something primordial, like a low iron tone or wooden knock or flute whistle through prehistoric bone.

So, if this is correct, the "vernacular" or the colloquial or the amateur or the unprofessional or the dilettantish or the rustic or the pastoral music of poetry might speak in its own way to the human condition... & possibly in such a charming manner as to reshape the public's conception of reality itself.

We need the old words right now, old words of faith & hope & charity, whether we believe them or not - because there are powers at work that deny the meaning of words per se.

My grandfather Edward S. Gould was a veteran of World War I, and led the veterans' Armistice parades through downtown Minneapolis during the 1920s.  He & my grandmother (Florence Ainsworth) lived in an apartment near the University of Minnesota, where I spent the first 18 months of my life.  Grandpa kept an old brass shell from the war in the corner of their apartment (he was an artillery captain), and over the dinner table hung a print of a famous painting, of George Washington & Lafayette, at a celebratory dance in Washington (Grandma was a member of the D.A.R.).

Grandpa & Grandma were part of the American historical panorama, the fabric.  They were ordinary people.  Grandpa would be called a racist today.  Grandma's beloved D.A.R. tried to keep Jewish refugees from Hitler out of America, and tried to stop Marian Anderson from singing at the Lincoln Memorial.  These are sad, absurd truths.

Yet what did that dance in Washington celebrate?  The experiment of American democracy; the experiment of a new people in a new land of equality.  Eventually Lafayette's dance would bump up against the reality of America's license to enslave, exploit and deceive (the America of Herman Melville's Confidence-Man).  And the Civil War would instill a pattern (freedom vs. slavery) which we have not yet resolved unto this day.

America is an experiment, an improvisation.  Yet the experiment is rooted in something quite deep : the legal concept of equity & justice, of the inalienable rights of human persons, going back before the Revolution to the jurist Edward Coke, and to his student, the pioneer-theologian-lawmaker Roger Williams.

There is something very grounded & rooted in this particular  legal concept.  It is a spiritual ground, a spiritual root.  It is the very ancient notion of Creation, of the realm of Spirit - the mantling wings of Manitou (the Thunderbird).  Martin Luther King's righteous web of mutuality... Black Elk's 6-directional diamond.

Janus-Faced Henryism

In my Janus-faced post of yesterday ("poetry is/is not a psychological double-bind"), I did not quite express the whole of the elusive notion which triggered the initial commentary.  Let me see if I can briefly get there now.

The notion itself was about doubleness : a sense that some kind of detachment or critical awareness is integral to creative art forms - including poetry - and the art-experience itself.

Pasternak once characterized Mandelstam's appearance on the Russian literary scene thus : "you entered a conversation which had already begun."  Many the poet & theorist (Plato, Lacan, Levinas come to mind) have emphasized the dialogic nature of poetry (and consciousness generally).  But the notion is perhaps idealized to some extent.  If art is a dialogue, it seems somewhat one-sided.  One partner speaks, the other listens.  One is expressive, the other is mute.  One is conscious, deliberate, rational - the other subconscious, intuitive, ineffable.  One is assertive, the other receptive.  Yin, yang.  The two halves of creation and reception play a subtle chess game : poets acknowledge dreams, intuition, inspiration, negative capability, or the Muse as the true source of their rational articulations, bringing into question : who is really speaking here?  Who listening?

Then the poet and reader (audience) replicate this original duality - another mirror of doubleness.  The poet recites; the reader listens, responds - is bored, is moved; is misled, is enlightened; is offended, is pleased...

And then, finally, the poet is also the reader.  New poetry grows from old poetry, as the complex emotional-intellectual receptors of the poet respond to achieved works of the past (impossible to overstate the chasm which lies between the poet giving birth to a new, as-yet unknown work of art, and the examples of finished poems, which represent the poet's benchmarks, models, and obstacles).

Moreover, the poet is famously characterized (Keats' negative capability) as the embodiment of receptivity : he or she "reads" not only prior literature and rival poets, but the "signs" emanating from nature and experience as a whole.

The sketch or pattern of the field we are presenting here - this notion of "detachment" as integral to creative expression - begins to appear less like a standard opposition between "poet & critic", or "intuition and intellect", and more like a dimension of aesthetic experience as a whole.

Which raises, in my mind, the question of value.  Taste, critical judgement, tradition : perhaps these are both tacit and fundamental to an era's literary culture.  What do I mean by this?  How does this follow from the previous?  I mean that if tacit reception is one half of art & poetry, as a dialogic duality, then there is more to poetic making than a simple 1-2 process of "create-disseminate".  Reception becomes a kind of fertile, intangible ground or atmosphere within which actual poems manifest.

American culture idealizes immediacy, production, re-invention.  "Make it new" becomes the paradigmatic shibboleth for the sales appeal of the stylish rebel, for the idealization of change per se.  It's a linear, one-way process.  Success = succession.  I think what I am proposing, indirectly, is a challenge to this standard arrangement.

The poem on the page is a kind of message in a bottle.  Sheer potentiality - nothing until it is found and opened and received and evaluated.  And the message itself may be in code; it may be meaningless until you find it out, you give it meaning.  It may also be allegorical - in disguise.  The obvious, the overt message may be meaningless in itself.  The poem lives in another dimension - a quintessence, a 5th element, active only in tacit reception.  The poem is, at heart, a riddle.

I guess I would like to imagine a somewhat different American poetic culture than the one we have at present.  There seems to be a kind of short-circuit driving the current machinery, which goes something like creation-dissemination-publicity-fame-awards-prestige.  What's left out here is the tacit "(reception)" bracketing both sides of the term "creation".  Maybe a healthier, simpler template for poetic culture would go something like this : (reception)-creation-(reception)-publication-(reception).  This model is not driven by ambition, professional interests, & prestige, by ulterior goals and motives.  If I were able to, I would display the latter, (reception) model as a circle.

bookstalls in Paris

bobbing like a robin's nest

OKIE STUMP

Out of a thousand painted threads,

Agnes, you warp a frame

for some belle dame

of sanded mercy.  Mounds of pebble-

heads, broken by force... the list

of useless tears... unspoken

outrage in the caravan...

the camel’s otfe-hump (if you insist).

Henrigold the river-god

bobbers oiled Jordan

with Lorelei (raison

d’étoile – mosaic mermaid).

It was the frame, Agnes, it was

the bloom, encircling

a gold bee-sting –

it was the Viennese princess

who rose from copper strands of wire –

who lifted bottlecaps,

ineffable mayhaps

into a mossy petroglyphic spire.

O spider-thread of nothingness

O Hamlet’s hesitation

Guillaume Bier creation

bobbing like a robin’s nest

around an Okie stump (of Manitou)

twin-man   twine sister-span

love’s Everywoman

Miriam   a   song in C major   (for you)

11.30.16

Hopalong Cassidy keeps hoppin' along in Fontegaia...

19

 
August now, the month of Palio.
The U-turn of those tender feet
quattropasso in Siena street -
echo of an old paint's hollow

 
thundering.  Imago of Everytown,
a rooster crest's unquenchable desire -
your nippled ring a roaring hemisphere,
rage welded into ceremony (such loco

 
renown).  Motionless in motion, this
parade of silks and garlands round
an altar green with laurel... Greyhound
Pastor!  Ex cathedra Pegasus!  Thus

 
Siena signs her crepuscule of history
and wills it bent (as testament)
into a duplex wreath : nine sent
skittering on horizontal - only

 
a rust-encrusted tenth (last call)
sounds (contrapuntal) from the tall
bell-tower.  Armillary, spherical...
a gyroscope.  Reverberant sundial.

 
And all we know is this double-ply
of blazoned passio, importunate light.
Bands of limestoned spectators
in the Campo (goddesses, mortal) sigh

 
as one toward yon singular suspense,
forevermore.  Deep in their scalloped
bosom of clay, rocked in a tempest
in Arcady - smiling Augustan-Etruscans.

I hate to generalize about this, but it seems to me that for many poets everything begins in early adolescence. (Maybe it's all a puberty rite.)

In early adolescence there are no sharp borders between poetry and other kinds of writing, or between poetry and experience in general, or between a writer and his or her comrades in writing.

Classicism(?)... we (or I) need a new word for this. Since the Romantic era youth has been lock-kneed, stereotyped, as rebellion. But the passion of young poets for literature has as much to do with a secret affinity for the voice of experience. Classicism should not simply be equated with realism or world-weariness (though these aspects cannot be denied, either). Think rather of the notion of hard-won experience. The voice of character & wisdom - of the veterans of spiritual battles, of living itself.

New forms of such classicism appear in every generation - the enthusiasm of young poets for their own literary discoveries, their delvings into the past, the obscure quaint voices of the ancients (or even just the previous generation) - which turn out to be unexpectedly familiar - clear & pungent.

Keats we think of as a Romantic... but he was also classic in this sense. The classiest of the classic.

Medievals : "beauty is truth is goodness"

Keats's urn (Romantics) : "beauty is truth, truth beauty"

Moderns : "beauty is beauty, truth is truth, goodness is goodness..."

THE POETRY of earth is never dead:  
  When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,  
  And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run  
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;  
That is the Grasshopper’s — he takes the lead          
  In summer luxury, — he has never done  
  With his delights; for when tired out with fun  
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.  
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:  
  On a lone winter evening, when the frost         
    Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills  
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,  
  And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,  
    The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.


 
                              December 30, 1816. 

Examples of perfect, "seraphic" poets : Holderlin, Pushkin, Marvell, Keats, Donne, Rilke, Celan, Mandelstam, Whitman, Dickinson...

what makes them perfect? At their best, they make verse sing on all levels. Intellectual music. Going to the edge of the human (the upper limit).

Mystery of when & how nations & cultures evolve perfect poets. Dialect of the tribe; shared meanings & forms of play.

It can be argued that the age of science, enlightenment, & rationalism set poetry free to enter its proper sphere of pure play. & if you accept that play is a central & "serious" human activity, there is some truth to this. But if play/poetry/childhood is framed as part of a duality in which work/seriousness/reality-principle is the more important or essential half, then poetry has been assigned to a play-pen & will be coddled, tolerated, & held in fond contempt.

I would realign these relations, with the claim that science & rationalism cannot, & will never, provide an adequate description of reality. Philosophy reaches a little closer, but its discursive abstractions are still inadequately communicative. Only the arts provide a sufficiently vivid affective-intellectual image of experience & reality. Poetry can span the distance between philosophical concepts on the one hand, and dramatic immediacy & actuality on the other. (Philosophy for its part aspires toward the condition of dialogue & drama.)

I offer these admittedly unoriginal notions to follow up on previous posts. How can poetry assume its full powers, then? I would think one critical measure in this regard would be a poetry's expressive wholeness - its willingness to patiently present & clearly "argue" - or logically defend - its sensuous, affective, or experiential subject-matter & the underlying rhetoric of same. This is what I see, for example, in the tightly-knotted & expressive sentence-structures of Keats' sonnets and odes : these poems display a striking, a startling, fusion of song & statement. Expressive logic or wholeness - as opposed to the poetry of half-statement, deflection, intimation, pose, predetermined attitude, rhetorical inflation-for-effect.

Closer to our time, Wallace Stevens reaches in this direction, with his fusion of philosophical reflection & rhetorical play. Robert Lowell simultaneously argues & suffers with contemporary history. But these are just 2 examples among many, not meant as representative figures; my purpose is to focus on a way of interpreting poetic value.

Issues with a theory of poetry founded in "tautology", or analogy with metaphysical Love-Word:

1. Mental prison-house of identifying the divine or holy with our images of it, one of which is "God-as-Word". Bible itself gets around this in at least 2 ways : first, intense emphasis on God's ineffability, unaccountability in human terms, prohibition against images. 2nd (Christian approach), a kind of constructive formation (Trinity) in which different aspects are shared among Persons in a mysterious fashion (in a Mystery), ie. God-as-Manifest-Word is specifically Christ's incarnational role, not the Father's exactly or the Spirit's, exactly.

2. Word itself is an elusive entity : it can be understood as always dialectical, ie. a form of gesture toward or response to an other. Thus perhaps the most interesting poetry is also a form of reportage on some otherness, howsoever sophisticated or para-literary. Another way of considering this particular problem is in terms of the undeniable importance of Keats' negative capability : the poet as passive vessel for forces, responding to other forces.

Poetry cannot be some expression of boring self-revolving monism or unmotivated, self-satisfied unity. One cannot define love in these terms either. So perhaps there is hope for my poetics no matter how important a role is played by this medievalesque analogical "identity/tautology" which I described a few days ago. Because the other side of the "Orpheus" analogy reveals its hungry driven-ness, its unappeased desire, which propels the whole plot, which creates its duration.

Part of the political aspect of such "disequilibrium" or dynamism, which comes out more fully in the 3rd volume, July, has to do with the dialectic between empire & equality, between "Julius" (Caesar) and Bluejay/Jubilee. Of course this has historically been an inescapable theme for serious poetry & its "unacknowledged legislators" : to speak divine Equality to Power. (Mandelstam took very seriously his role as people's poet-vs-Czar, echoing Ovid vs. Augustus.) (Part of my attraction to Crane, as opposed to Pound, & my interest in "bringing him forward", was the absence (in Crane) of the nostalgic, reactionary, elitist, aristocratic, authoritarian delusions. . . - though of course it must be said that Pound was utterly divided against himself, & some of his best poetry narrates the destructive consequences of pride & power.)