I sent poet Gabriel Gudding a poem written a few years ago. I thought he might like it because he has a Providence connection, & because it involves a mysterious someone named "Clio" - which is his daughter's name too.
Lo & behold - it turns out these two Clios were most likely one and the same !
I'm amazed... it's as if three writers were playing a game of secret messages...
(re-affirms my faith in a "special providence" of poets - a belief (superstition?) instilled years ago as I read Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir, Hope Against Hope...)
Showing posts with label Mandelstam2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mandelstam2. Show all posts
5.10.2007
5.09.2007
Mandelstam : "an arch appears in my muttering".
For me, this is one of the most concise & precise characterizations of the poetic process.
Artists testify to the creative experience as a moment which begins when the art-work coalesces, forms an integral whole. Sometimes the poet intuits this process in advance. It's an act of imagination and synthesis. This is the point : the art work is some kind of organic-conceptual whole.
The poem fits together : its sound, its imagery, its plot, its meaning(s). A new invention, a little world unto itself.
Paintings fit together, novels fit together, musical compositions fit together... & poems - rhythmic incantations - also fit together.
This fitness & integrity of the unique art-work - within its very particular and specific mode - prose narrative, drama, music, visual art, poetry - this wholeness - is its ruling characteristic, without which the work does not really exist.
Of course there will be crossings and shadings between verse and prose, narrative and lyric, lyric and dramatic. Novels & plays will be written in verse, prose will intrude into poems, etc. But this does not negate the primary requirement of aesthetic wholeness, whatever the specific genre or rhetorical mode.
If you start with wholeness, and then look at the particulars of diction and style, you might be able to distinguish more precisely the difference between the achieved poem and the merely textual discourse, scribble, speech, imitation, or harangue.
For me, this is one of the most concise & precise characterizations of the poetic process.
Artists testify to the creative experience as a moment which begins when the art-work coalesces, forms an integral whole. Sometimes the poet intuits this process in advance. It's an act of imagination and synthesis. This is the point : the art work is some kind of organic-conceptual whole.
The poem fits together : its sound, its imagery, its plot, its meaning(s). A new invention, a little world unto itself.
Paintings fit together, novels fit together, musical compositions fit together... & poems - rhythmic incantations - also fit together.
This fitness & integrity of the unique art-work - within its very particular and specific mode - prose narrative, drama, music, visual art, poetry - this wholeness - is its ruling characteristic, without which the work does not really exist.
Of course there will be crossings and shadings between verse and prose, narrative and lyric, lyric and dramatic. Novels & plays will be written in verse, prose will intrude into poems, etc. But this does not negate the primary requirement of aesthetic wholeness, whatever the specific genre or rhetorical mode.
If you start with wholeness, and then look at the particulars of diction and style, you might be able to distinguish more precisely the difference between the achieved poem and the merely textual discourse, scribble, speech, imitation, or harangue.
4.29.2003
Reading an interesting book about the mathematician Georg Cantor, of infinity & set theory fame. Proved that any point, numbered on a grid of any dimension (2, 3, 4, 5 dimensions...), can also be located on a line (1 dimension). Not sure why this was so shocking and revolutionary back in the 1880s, since a point is defined as dimensionless, hence you could locate infinite points anywhere. But I'm not a mathematician.
But it makes me think of poetics of Mandelstam & Joyce. Mandelstam describing poetry as an art whose humble exterior disguises a multidimensional reality of "terrifying density". Omry Ronen, in his book Approach to Mandelstam, took him at his word, and in a huge book analyzing just two poems, gives them an image of allusive INFINITY : each LINE bearing so much weight of fused & transmuted literary echoes & other references. Joyce does something similar in the prose of Ulysses & FW.
And of course verbal art in general is a process of compressing multidimensional reality into a near-dimensionless medium.
But it makes me think of poetics of Mandelstam & Joyce. Mandelstam describing poetry as an art whose humble exterior disguises a multidimensional reality of "terrifying density". Omry Ronen, in his book Approach to Mandelstam, took him at his word, and in a huge book analyzing just two poems, gives them an image of allusive INFINITY : each LINE bearing so much weight of fused & transmuted literary echoes & other references. Joyce does something similar in the prose of Ulysses & FW.
And of course verbal art in general is a process of compressing multidimensional reality into a near-dimensionless medium.
4.24.2003
Theme of "domestic hellenism" in Mandelstam's essays. Poetics of celebration of mankind "at home" in this world - ecology of civilization.
Eden Again.
from India Point
8
The winter mist, the angles of rooftops,
the shadowy academies, the swoop
of wren between the dripping
trees. Odysseus, wrestling Cyclops
far from home, remembers the kitchen stove.
From the low barn in the farmyard
starting out and returning, a star-word
points the bricks toward unbounded love
and the subtle flicker of a snakeskin
(in and out of the muddy ground) portends
another springtime (umbilical, endless).
A morris-dance in every Troy-town
coils around its secret law. A cold iron
ring (forged in starlight) turns molten gold.
*
You turn your face toward the truth
like a grandmother gazing at the hearth.
Unbending law under a dogwood branch
swaying in the early wind of March.
Bead on the level. Night-watch
on horizon-line. Gyro (unchangeable) -
what seemed fatal (Time's unfolding,
imperturbable). Donated to chance,
equilibrium - beyond remonstrance
seemingly - Darwinian - til holding
only held (mold or death-mask) -
far light outlining final shape.
Oval of your murmuring lips,
a lofty, graceful arabesque.
12.31.02
Eden Again.
from India Point
8
The winter mist, the angles of rooftops,
the shadowy academies, the swoop
of wren between the dripping
trees. Odysseus, wrestling Cyclops
far from home, remembers the kitchen stove.
From the low barn in the farmyard
starting out and returning, a star-word
points the bricks toward unbounded love
and the subtle flicker of a snakeskin
(in and out of the muddy ground) portends
another springtime (umbilical, endless).
A morris-dance in every Troy-town
coils around its secret law. A cold iron
ring (forged in starlight) turns molten gold.
*
You turn your face toward the truth
like a grandmother gazing at the hearth.
Unbending law under a dogwood branch
swaying in the early wind of March.
Bead on the level. Night-watch
on horizon-line. Gyro (unchangeable) -
what seemed fatal (Time's unfolding,
imperturbable). Donated to chance,
equilibrium - beyond remonstrance
seemingly - Darwinian - til holding
only held (mold or death-mask) -
far light outlining final shape.
Oval of your murmuring lips,
a lofty, graceful arabesque.
12.31.02
4.15.2003
Responding to David & Josh : is poetry "words" or "imagination"? I think people get caught in such debates because poetry is a unique amalgam, a fusion, a monstrous birth.
First of all, poetry begins, not as words, but as "speech". Speech, language, as Wilhelm von Humboldt argued back in the 19th century, is made of sentence-streams, not individual words. It's essentially MOTIVATED, impulsive - motivated by sense-experience, visions, desires-impulses which are pre-verbal or meta-verbal.
But in the process of becoming poetry, this speech-impulse does indeed become ALL WORDS : poetry has a fundamental ordering or aesthetic motor which rounds out or includes or shapes all these impulses into a coherent, finished work of art. The finished product, like Keats' urn or Eliot's chinese vase, is a magical verbal container for the initial impulse(s). Maybe it could be conceived as a kind of energy-transfer packet.
The langpos mocked the "uncritical" speech-motivation of mainstream poetics, with their technique of isolating the verbal texture from any clear motivation. But this scrambling was obviously symbiotic/parasitical with that which it criticized; elliptical langpo was folded, doubled over "straight" poetics. Moreover, langpo's impulse to discourse was just as "motivated" as the ordinary poetic impulse - though it was an impulse of reaction or negation or separation or alienation or distinction : it's just that the speech-impulse was programmatically scrambled.
In my view individual words themselves are bundles of potential motivation, potential energy. The imagination is a kind of binding capability, inherent in the mind - creating vision, order, coherence, awareness, clarity, observation, etc. When the receptive faculties of the imagination are motivated to respond, to articulate, to give back - then we have the poetic impulse.
Mandelstam, in his theoretical writings, talked about poetry as the intertwining of two strands : the verbal material and the impulse. I think a poetics ought to keep both in mind, & recognize how the impulse creates verbal coherences or contained "light", in the finished work. Ultimately this dual sense of poetry, it seems to me anyway, has more relevance for the social-political role of poetry in a culture at large, than a dialectical spin on the verbal material alone (as in langpo).
Language poetry shouldn't be singled out in isolation, though. There's a much broader stream running from Pound through Williams & the Objectivists & others which tries to avoid the "lyric subject" through inclusion of chance items, found objects, documentary material, reportage. Elizabeth Willis's essay on Lorine Niedecker (linked here a few days ago) deals interestingly with this.
First of all, poetry begins, not as words, but as "speech". Speech, language, as Wilhelm von Humboldt argued back in the 19th century, is made of sentence-streams, not individual words. It's essentially MOTIVATED, impulsive - motivated by sense-experience, visions, desires-impulses which are pre-verbal or meta-verbal.
But in the process of becoming poetry, this speech-impulse does indeed become ALL WORDS : poetry has a fundamental ordering or aesthetic motor which rounds out or includes or shapes all these impulses into a coherent, finished work of art. The finished product, like Keats' urn or Eliot's chinese vase, is a magical verbal container for the initial impulse(s). Maybe it could be conceived as a kind of energy-transfer packet.
The langpos mocked the "uncritical" speech-motivation of mainstream poetics, with their technique of isolating the verbal texture from any clear motivation. But this scrambling was obviously symbiotic/parasitical with that which it criticized; elliptical langpo was folded, doubled over "straight" poetics. Moreover, langpo's impulse to discourse was just as "motivated" as the ordinary poetic impulse - though it was an impulse of reaction or negation or separation or alienation or distinction : it's just that the speech-impulse was programmatically scrambled.
In my view individual words themselves are bundles of potential motivation, potential energy. The imagination is a kind of binding capability, inherent in the mind - creating vision, order, coherence, awareness, clarity, observation, etc. When the receptive faculties of the imagination are motivated to respond, to articulate, to give back - then we have the poetic impulse.
Mandelstam, in his theoretical writings, talked about poetry as the intertwining of two strands : the verbal material and the impulse. I think a poetics ought to keep both in mind, & recognize how the impulse creates verbal coherences or contained "light", in the finished work. Ultimately this dual sense of poetry, it seems to me anyway, has more relevance for the social-political role of poetry in a culture at large, than a dialectical spin on the verbal material alone (as in langpo).
Language poetry shouldn't be singled out in isolation, though. There's a much broader stream running from Pound through Williams & the Objectivists & others which tries to avoid the "lyric subject" through inclusion of chance items, found objects, documentary material, reportage. Elizabeth Willis's essay on Lorine Niedecker (linked here a few days ago) deals interestingly with this.
4.11.2003
Jordan feeling feisty this morning.
I have the best of both worlds: make real arguments, experience eerie silence.
I see different critical talents, here & there in blogworld. Ability to characterize with precision & understanding, sometimes. Articulate. Not so partisan, clubbish; not so ready to spray cliches & beery nostrums from the political Bladder. Readers with real ears.
This split between mainstream & oppositional bugs me. Too many abstract counters, categories, pigeonholes. Seems to short-circuit synthetic energies necessary for solid critical perception; thus it stymies reception to some extent. Why not just fageddabaddit, & read the things on their own terms, & respond to them on your own terms, personally, as if you picked them up in a 2nd-hand bkstore in Tashkent.
So I create this imaginary St. Petersburg, where Gumilev & Akhmatova & Mandelstam & Tsvetaeva & Pasternak discover how to make past poetries their own (individual craft); speak about their traditions (education); engage in polemics while recognizing talent in the other's camp (culture). Russian ark.
& I can empathize with Mandelstam's notion that we write for an imaginary interlocutor from the future. (In fact I must say I sometimes I feel like a figment of his imagination in that sense.) Have I reduced a great Russian poet to the status of a reverse image of my own "professional" nonentity, by removing him from his proper context (his contemporary Russian audience)? So that he serves as sort of an icon/imaginary friend on the mantle for Everyman-Nobodypoet? That's part of it, I suppose. My context is this small city in Rhode Island, where I live & screw up & leave behind a sort of hodge-podge of inscriptions stored in the John Hay Library archives. When I'm underground over there in the 132 acres of North Main Cemetery, my poems will assume a different tincture, as the paper dries & the ink fades.
I want to write more topical report poems, up-to-the-minute Audenesque, & have them published in the New Yorker & in the paper of record in St. Petersburg, Florida.
& of course I could always read more poetry myself. . .
I have the best of both worlds: make real arguments, experience eerie silence.
I see different critical talents, here & there in blogworld. Ability to characterize with precision & understanding, sometimes. Articulate. Not so partisan, clubbish; not so ready to spray cliches & beery nostrums from the political Bladder. Readers with real ears.
This split between mainstream & oppositional bugs me. Too many abstract counters, categories, pigeonholes. Seems to short-circuit synthetic energies necessary for solid critical perception; thus it stymies reception to some extent. Why not just fageddabaddit, & read the things on their own terms, & respond to them on your own terms, personally, as if you picked them up in a 2nd-hand bkstore in Tashkent.
So I create this imaginary St. Petersburg, where Gumilev & Akhmatova & Mandelstam & Tsvetaeva & Pasternak discover how to make past poetries their own (individual craft); speak about their traditions (education); engage in polemics while recognizing talent in the other's camp (culture). Russian ark.
& I can empathize with Mandelstam's notion that we write for an imaginary interlocutor from the future. (In fact I must say I sometimes I feel like a figment of his imagination in that sense.) Have I reduced a great Russian poet to the status of a reverse image of my own "professional" nonentity, by removing him from his proper context (his contemporary Russian audience)? So that he serves as sort of an icon/imaginary friend on the mantle for Everyman-Nobodypoet? That's part of it, I suppose. My context is this small city in Rhode Island, where I live & screw up & leave behind a sort of hodge-podge of inscriptions stored in the John Hay Library archives. When I'm underground over there in the 132 acres of North Main Cemetery, my poems will assume a different tincture, as the paper dries & the ink fades.
I want to write more topical report poems, up-to-the-minute Audenesque, & have them published in the New Yorker & in the paper of record in St. Petersburg, Florida.
& of course I could always read more poetry myself. . .
4.09.2003
Shakespeare out of mystery plays performed on carts from village to village. Ethos. Poet & power : Westminster & Globe Theatre. (West Wig)
David, Bathsheba & the prophet's curse.
Stalin & Mandelstam :
("His decrees like horseshoes
flung at the head & the neck"
or something like that - the poem that got him sent to Siberia)
David, Bathsheba & the prophet's curse.
Stalin & Mandelstam :
("His decrees like horseshoes
flung at the head & the neck"
or something like that - the poem that got him sent to Siberia)
3.21.2003
"I will say it once more : the poem is an Egyptian barge of the dead, loaded with everything necessary for life." - Mandelstam
(In other words the language of poetry is seeded with death - but only in this way is it capable of bearing everything. . .)
Time, if it's a living entity of some kind, would have to trump death - because that appears to be the obvious terminus. Maybe time is a game we're playing - a play (it would have to be a miracle play).
(In other words the language of poetry is seeded with death - but only in this way is it capable of bearing everything. . .)
Time, if it's a living entity of some kind, would have to trump death - because that appears to be the obvious terminus. Maybe time is a game we're playing - a play (it would have to be a miracle play).
2.28.2003
There was a poem in the New Yorker not long ago I found completely adequate, & now, dagnab it all, I can't remember her name exactly, can't find it. . . Linda Biehrl? Teaches at Univ of WA Seattle? The poem was called "1934". I read & reacted very strongly : Mandelshtamian.
It worked unlike the CK Williams poem by not over-reaching? I can understand Grenier's "I hate speech" - because it's so dang hard in poetry, at the border between rhetoric & art. The Biehrl[?] poem maintained aesthetic distance - very pronounced reserve - created an inner world, an architecture of sound, self-sufficient. Probably to write a "public poem" [occasional] is more difficult to do successfully.
Inner architecture lost to rhetoric.
"The poem lives through an inner image, that ringing mold of form which anticipates the written poem. There is not yet a single word, but the poem can already be heard. This is the sound of the inner image, this is the poet's ear touching it." [O.M., "Word & Culture", 1921]
Elena Glazov-Corrigan (Mandelshtam's Poetics) repeatedly emphasizes the duality in all Mandelshtam's statements on poetics: material/impulse, inner form/manifestation, etc. But the belief that the poetic Word turns on its own center of gravity, its own architecture, is never in doubt. To believe that such an autonomous activity nevertheless participates meaningfully in the world at large, is to believe that poetry neither denies nor succumbs to Necessity, but engages it on its own terms. This is a statement of faith in poetry's universality, its "categorical" presence.
It worked unlike the CK Williams poem by not over-reaching? I can understand Grenier's "I hate speech" - because it's so dang hard in poetry, at the border between rhetoric & art. The Biehrl[?] poem maintained aesthetic distance - very pronounced reserve - created an inner world, an architecture of sound, self-sufficient. Probably to write a "public poem" [occasional] is more difficult to do successfully.
Inner architecture lost to rhetoric.
"The poem lives through an inner image, that ringing mold of form which anticipates the written poem. There is not yet a single word, but the poem can already be heard. This is the sound of the inner image, this is the poet's ear touching it." [O.M., "Word & Culture", 1921]
Elena Glazov-Corrigan (Mandelshtam's Poetics) repeatedly emphasizes the duality in all Mandelshtam's statements on poetics: material/impulse, inner form/manifestation, etc. But the belief that the poetic Word turns on its own center of gravity, its own architecture, is never in doubt. To believe that such an autonomous activity nevertheless participates meaningfully in the world at large, is to believe that poetry neither denies nor succumbs to Necessity, but engages it on its own terms. This is a statement of faith in poetry's universality, its "categorical" presence.
2.27.2003
From Mandelstam's essay "The Word & Culture" (1921):
"Cultural values ornament the State, endowing it with color, form and, if you will, even gender. Inscriptions on State buildings, tombs and gateways insure the state against the ravages of time.
Poetry is the plow that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface."
With that in mind, some curious political-poetical correlations & my Forth of July: "poema" or long poem as a reflection of the "state". "the father of his country". Dubya, & the "W" etched into the East Side hillside, mirroring the eagle-eye "M" of Justitia in Dante's heaven (of Mars?). Inscriptions withstanding the corrosion of time. M & W forming cat's eyes. Pushkin the lost black cat, lost in Petersburg, lost in the Kremlin, lost (in Stubborn Grew) on Halloween & leading into the "catabasis" narrative. & who is the lost Pushkin, the lost black cat, the lost African elephant? The lost "W" in the heavens is Cassiopeia, the daughter of the Ethiopian queen. Ethiopia, "home of the lost ark of the covenant". Black-talk, Delta-talk in Forth of July, redman-talk, rus-talk. Primordial origins. Origin & end in the ark of Jubilee, Eden & Paradise. What is Jubilee? My politics: holiday, equilibrium, liberation, justice, equality, sanctioned by the time-warp ineffable intervening Ethiopian-Hebraic ark-word we don't yet comprehend.
Nutty Nile-notes.
"Cultural values ornament the State, endowing it with color, form and, if you will, even gender. Inscriptions on State buildings, tombs and gateways insure the state against the ravages of time.
Poetry is the plow that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface."
With that in mind, some curious political-poetical correlations & my Forth of July: "poema" or long poem as a reflection of the "state". "the father of his country". Dubya, & the "W" etched into the East Side hillside, mirroring the eagle-eye "M" of Justitia in Dante's heaven (of Mars?). Inscriptions withstanding the corrosion of time. M & W forming cat's eyes. Pushkin the lost black cat, lost in Petersburg, lost in the Kremlin, lost (in Stubborn Grew) on Halloween & leading into the "catabasis" narrative. & who is the lost Pushkin, the lost black cat, the lost African elephant? The lost "W" in the heavens is Cassiopeia, the daughter of the Ethiopian queen. Ethiopia, "home of the lost ark of the covenant". Black-talk, Delta-talk in Forth of July, redman-talk, rus-talk. Primordial origins. Origin & end in the ark of Jubilee, Eden & Paradise. What is Jubilee? My politics: holiday, equilibrium, liberation, justice, equality, sanctioned by the time-warp ineffable intervening Ethiopian-Hebraic ark-word we don't yet comprehend.
Nutty Nile-notes.
2.04.2003
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".
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".
2.03.2003
On Saturday, thanks to Tom Epstein, I was able to get a ticket for the 2nd night of Russian poetry at Alice Tully, in the Rose reading room (a beautiful auditorium at night - 2 walls of windows, low lighting on stage, high ceilings - you felt like you were in a planetarium or outside).
Had dinner at Poona on 72nd St beforehand with Tom & Elena Shvarts. Telling them about the lecture on Russian "underground" poetry of 70s-90s given earlier in the day by Mikhaill Iampolski. Very clear well-organized presentation; he talked about the Petersburg poets, the Moscow poets; the "keepers of the (high culture poetry) flame" and the egalitarian, anti-tradition, anti-"art" postmodernist conceptualists, the "idiot school" of poetry. Very interesting, & he confessed his bias toward the latter end of the spectrum.
Told Elena what he had said about her reading Fri. night (which I missed) & her poem "Cardinal Points", where she maps out the cosmos on/through her body. She said (all in Russian, Tom patiently translating) that she had a new understanding of that poem while she read it Friday. Said something about how in this life we are destined to be torn to pieces in the "4 directions" leaving only one direction of access, straight up...
which was strange, since none of us at the point had heard about the Challenger crash - we went from dinner to the reading, & Joseph Brodsky's widow (Maria Brodsky) opened the program with a brief eulogy - quoted some apropos lines from Dante (Inferno XXVI l. 112):
Brothers, I said, o you who having crossed
a hundred thousand dangers, reach the west,
to this brief waking-time that still is left
unto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled.
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.
During the reading they played recordings of Pasternak, mandelstam & Tsvetaeva (? or a reader) reciting. Never heard Mandelstam's voice before. Like a brave piping little bird - sort of a comic-brave intonation - Chaplinesque, it seemed! But similar to Pasternak in that the grid of meter & rhyme like a cage for this really wild musical recitation - inherent in the language but so different from the flat intonation of American poets - more like old recordings I've heard of Pound & yeats, but more varied pitch.
The quality of the poems - I mean the three old recordings - you understand M's notion that poetry is a visceral healing force - what Whitman must have sounded like sometimes. Hard to explain : it's the voice of poetry HUMANIZING reality - through shared/transcended suffering & happiness - turning it into song & art. The notion that a person personalizes reality - a Proust-world, a Whitman-world, an Akhmatova-world - & this personal cosmos comes through in the voice - but as it becomes Everyperson, universal - not one or the other but both.
This universalizing of the poetry image or statement must have a name - Aristotle I guess thought it was what differentiated poetry from history - the universal in the particular. But it's not an abstract thing - it's the universal through the personal human voice achieving a particular poetic statment like a victory against inimical forces. & people understand it immediately, share it as an experience known. It is an EVENT, not chit-chat; it is selfless experience, or an emptying, not "motivated". Dante's notion that poetry is renunciation.
The distance necessary to evoke/imagine/invent/be inspired this kind of special speech. Silence & inwardness.
Talking & thinking are not the same. Poetry & club talk are 2 different things. It was good to go to Russia for an evening.
Had dinner at Poona on 72nd St beforehand with Tom & Elena Shvarts. Telling them about the lecture on Russian "underground" poetry of 70s-90s given earlier in the day by Mikhaill Iampolski. Very clear well-organized presentation; he talked about the Petersburg poets, the Moscow poets; the "keepers of the (high culture poetry) flame" and the egalitarian, anti-tradition, anti-"art" postmodernist conceptualists, the "idiot school" of poetry. Very interesting, & he confessed his bias toward the latter end of the spectrum.
Told Elena what he had said about her reading Fri. night (which I missed) & her poem "Cardinal Points", where she maps out the cosmos on/through her body. She said (all in Russian, Tom patiently translating) that she had a new understanding of that poem while she read it Friday. Said something about how in this life we are destined to be torn to pieces in the "4 directions" leaving only one direction of access, straight up...
which was strange, since none of us at the point had heard about the Challenger crash - we went from dinner to the reading, & Joseph Brodsky's widow (Maria Brodsky) opened the program with a brief eulogy - quoted some apropos lines from Dante (Inferno XXVI l. 112):
Brothers, I said, o you who having crossed
a hundred thousand dangers, reach the west,
to this brief waking-time that still is left
unto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled.
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.
During the reading they played recordings of Pasternak, mandelstam & Tsvetaeva (? or a reader) reciting. Never heard Mandelstam's voice before. Like a brave piping little bird - sort of a comic-brave intonation - Chaplinesque, it seemed! But similar to Pasternak in that the grid of meter & rhyme like a cage for this really wild musical recitation - inherent in the language but so different from the flat intonation of American poets - more like old recordings I've heard of Pound & yeats, but more varied pitch.
The quality of the poems - I mean the three old recordings - you understand M's notion that poetry is a visceral healing force - what Whitman must have sounded like sometimes. Hard to explain : it's the voice of poetry HUMANIZING reality - through shared/transcended suffering & happiness - turning it into song & art. The notion that a person personalizes reality - a Proust-world, a Whitman-world, an Akhmatova-world - & this personal cosmos comes through in the voice - but as it becomes Everyperson, universal - not one or the other but both.
This universalizing of the poetry image or statement must have a name - Aristotle I guess thought it was what differentiated poetry from history - the universal in the particular. But it's not an abstract thing - it's the universal through the personal human voice achieving a particular poetic statment like a victory against inimical forces. & people understand it immediately, share it as an experience known. It is an EVENT, not chit-chat; it is selfless experience, or an emptying, not "motivated". Dante's notion that poetry is renunciation.
The distance necessary to evoke/imagine/invent/be inspired this kind of special speech. Silence & inwardness.
Talking & thinking are not the same. Poetry & club talk are 2 different things. It was good to go to Russia for an evening.
1.31.2003
Heading to NYC this afternoon to see Elena Shvarts et al. at the Russian poetry festival, Lincoln Center. I hear it's sold out & I don't have a ticket. Hope I can get in.
Pasternak (very roughly): "Poetry - our ticket to the good seats."
Mandelstam was angered by that poem - he read it as complacent, considering the times & the conditions (Stalin). "The apartment is quiet as paper. . ."
so, until we blog again. . .
Pasternak (very roughly): "Poetry - our ticket to the good seats."
Mandelstam was angered by that poem - he read it as complacent, considering the times & the conditions (Stalin). "The apartment is quiet as paper. . ."
so, until we blog again. . .
Hybrid form. The plot of Proust's supreme prose work is riveted to a poetic notion: the return of past time (via an unaccountable, involuntary impulse) to a receptive, responsive Now.
I guess the metaform of this blog is similar: the re-emergence of old poems in a retrospective context. Recapitulation. Mandelstam's "incarnational" take on biology (quoting Darwin or Lamarck, I suppose): "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny".
Recapitulation, ontology, teleology. Acmeism's "nostalgia for world culture", the "gold coins of the global humanism of the future": founded on the notion of the Person as microcosm, telos.
I guess the metaform of this blog is similar: the re-emergence of old poems in a retrospective context. Recapitulation. Mandelstam's "incarnational" take on biology (quoting Darwin or Lamarck, I suppose): "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny".
Recapitulation, ontology, teleology. Acmeism's "nostalgia for world culture", the "gold coins of the global humanism of the future": founded on the notion of the Person as microcosm, telos.
1.30.2003
Mandelstam in one of his essays talks about poetry as the crossing of two strands: the verbal material & the impulse. Or sound & sense, to simplify. (Elena Corrigan's interesting book "Mandelshtam's Poetics" goes in depth into this concept.)
Achieved or received lyric forms add a third level, since these forms create signals of their own, another semiotic dimension. S.K. Heninger (in "Proportion Poetical") describes how the early sonnet form was designed as a replica or microcosm of cosmic creation (the 7 days in 14 lines). The coils of the sestina supply an undertone or overtone to the verbal statements.
So these received forms can act as invitations to send complex messages. For the most part, though, in late 20th-cent. US poetry, the invitation has been turned down. The motivations have been varied. For one thing, the modernist practices of Pound, Marianne Moore, WC Williams, ee cummings extended technical innovation far beyond the limits of these medieval and Renaissance forms. The populist impulse of free verse gave them an outmoded image. And the multiple alienations and "makings-strange" of postmodernist poetry made illegal, so to speak, the communicative contract of the traditional forms; they represented a fallacious, naive harmony, just as did the uncomplicated egocentrism of "mainstream" free verse.
In the 80s & 90s I was on a different track. As described earlier in this blog, I was in the process of absorbing & integrating a religious/Hebraic/incarnational worldview with making poetry; in the effort Mandelstam & Acmeism were serving as models & guides. At the same time I was getting interested in the long poem, as a way of formulating some kind of comprehensive vision/message. For me the problems were not the one posed by postmodernist anti-metaphysics or the stylistic differentiations & alienations of the New Americans. For me the problems were simpler, in a way: the means toward the conceptualization & articulation of a message which energized me. Direction, not indirection, was the aim.
So for a while, before I could manage long poems, or as a way of taking a break from that issue, I played with some of the received lyric forms. What I liked to do was "cross" them with other strands. So for example in a series of sort of autobiographical poems called "Midwest Elegies", I interwove allusions to early anglo-saxon forms. I was crossing my personal origins with the origins of poetry in English. I wrote a dream-vision ("Grain Elevator": see archive for Jan. 9); I put down a subtext of a.-s. laments & elegies into some of my own; & I wrote this little poem, crossing Hart Crane with a particular a.-s. riddle, along with the Song of Songs:
RUSTY EXIT RAMP
How many spears, frozen in phalanxes,
how many iron hills circled the fathers'
hope - chained waters of enmity,
cars harnessed for a pathway through the sea -
when, with a jesting wave, philosophies
of unsettled pyramids the fluted palm
of your promise whispers toward autumn
beneath twin-risen towers, O City of Cities!
This is a poem about Crane & New York; it's also about the displacement of hatred & despair by some kind of metaphysical/poetic intervention. It has a strange sound to me after 9/11.
To reiterate: at the time I was interested in "crossing" the lyric received forms with opposing material. By sending a fairly direct, simple message, via the traditional over-determined envelope of received forms, I was really doing the opposite of the encrypted, hermetic, disjunctive approaches of the contemporary postmodernist poets. For example, I wrote the following sestina in the mid-80s, when mass homelessness was still a shocking anomaly, before we had become so inured to & complicit with this social evil. I wanted to cross a very sophisticated literary form with a very unsophisticated message. The closing stanza, however, can be interpreted in several different ways.
DOWNTOWN SESTINA
Downtown is gleaming, a nest of glass
scant refuge for the homeless and the poor
who trudge along under looming towers
hungry, frazzled, begging small change
and subject to the better sort of people
whose eyes reflect the glitter of the city
And so many circles animate the city
captured in the high gloss of the glass
what's taken for the playground of the people
erases every doorstep of the poor
in sprawling ellipses of loose change
under the stolid mystery of these towers
Under the bright conundrum of these towers
these measuring rods allotting every city
gyroscopes adjusting every change
by whirling speculation in the glass
the downward spirals of the ornery poor
set stirring turbid shadows in the people
And shuttling promotions of the people
forecast by divination in the towers
(who's growing rich and who remaining poor)
start dancing fevers in the chattering city
and snarl the artist in her broken glass
frail craft undone by overmastering change
When fortune is the favored end of change
suburbia the limbo of the people
and tender conscience faints before the glass
rocketing skyward in pretentious towers:
to serve the sleek imaginary city
or swell the sullen rancor of the poor
Meanwhile the rhetoricians of the poor
in campus pockets rummaging for change
inscribe the true authoritative city
and mint sterling mementos of the people
studies wherein the mind serenely towers
over safe specimens tacked up under glass
So let's raise a glass to the dizzy city -
a toast to towers, and all red-faced people!
And drink for a change among the homespun poor.
3.16.86
Again, after 9/11, the poem has a strange feel.
Achieved or received lyric forms add a third level, since these forms create signals of their own, another semiotic dimension. S.K. Heninger (in "Proportion Poetical") describes how the early sonnet form was designed as a replica or microcosm of cosmic creation (the 7 days in 14 lines). The coils of the sestina supply an undertone or overtone to the verbal statements.
So these received forms can act as invitations to send complex messages. For the most part, though, in late 20th-cent. US poetry, the invitation has been turned down. The motivations have been varied. For one thing, the modernist practices of Pound, Marianne Moore, WC Williams, ee cummings extended technical innovation far beyond the limits of these medieval and Renaissance forms. The populist impulse of free verse gave them an outmoded image. And the multiple alienations and "makings-strange" of postmodernist poetry made illegal, so to speak, the communicative contract of the traditional forms; they represented a fallacious, naive harmony, just as did the uncomplicated egocentrism of "mainstream" free verse.
In the 80s & 90s I was on a different track. As described earlier in this blog, I was in the process of absorbing & integrating a religious/Hebraic/incarnational worldview with making poetry; in the effort Mandelstam & Acmeism were serving as models & guides. At the same time I was getting interested in the long poem, as a way of formulating some kind of comprehensive vision/message. For me the problems were not the one posed by postmodernist anti-metaphysics or the stylistic differentiations & alienations of the New Americans. For me the problems were simpler, in a way: the means toward the conceptualization & articulation of a message which energized me. Direction, not indirection, was the aim.
So for a while, before I could manage long poems, or as a way of taking a break from that issue, I played with some of the received lyric forms. What I liked to do was "cross" them with other strands. So for example in a series of sort of autobiographical poems called "Midwest Elegies", I interwove allusions to early anglo-saxon forms. I was crossing my personal origins with the origins of poetry in English. I wrote a dream-vision ("Grain Elevator": see archive for Jan. 9); I put down a subtext of a.-s. laments & elegies into some of my own; & I wrote this little poem, crossing Hart Crane with a particular a.-s. riddle, along with the Song of Songs:
RUSTY EXIT RAMP
How many spears, frozen in phalanxes,
how many iron hills circled the fathers'
hope - chained waters of enmity,
cars harnessed for a pathway through the sea -
when, with a jesting wave, philosophies
of unsettled pyramids the fluted palm
of your promise whispers toward autumn
beneath twin-risen towers, O City of Cities!
This is a poem about Crane & New York; it's also about the displacement of hatred & despair by some kind of metaphysical/poetic intervention. It has a strange sound to me after 9/11.
To reiterate: at the time I was interested in "crossing" the lyric received forms with opposing material. By sending a fairly direct, simple message, via the traditional over-determined envelope of received forms, I was really doing the opposite of the encrypted, hermetic, disjunctive approaches of the contemporary postmodernist poets. For example, I wrote the following sestina in the mid-80s, when mass homelessness was still a shocking anomaly, before we had become so inured to & complicit with this social evil. I wanted to cross a very sophisticated literary form with a very unsophisticated message. The closing stanza, however, can be interpreted in several different ways.
DOWNTOWN SESTINA
Downtown is gleaming, a nest of glass
scant refuge for the homeless and the poor
who trudge along under looming towers
hungry, frazzled, begging small change
and subject to the better sort of people
whose eyes reflect the glitter of the city
And so many circles animate the city
captured in the high gloss of the glass
what's taken for the playground of the people
erases every doorstep of the poor
in sprawling ellipses of loose change
under the stolid mystery of these towers
Under the bright conundrum of these towers
these measuring rods allotting every city
gyroscopes adjusting every change
by whirling speculation in the glass
the downward spirals of the ornery poor
set stirring turbid shadows in the people
And shuttling promotions of the people
forecast by divination in the towers
(who's growing rich and who remaining poor)
start dancing fevers in the chattering city
and snarl the artist in her broken glass
frail craft undone by overmastering change
When fortune is the favored end of change
suburbia the limbo of the people
and tender conscience faints before the glass
rocketing skyward in pretentious towers:
to serve the sleek imaginary city
or swell the sullen rancor of the poor
Meanwhile the rhetoricians of the poor
in campus pockets rummaging for change
inscribe the true authoritative city
and mint sterling mementos of the people
studies wherein the mind serenely towers
over safe specimens tacked up under glass
So let's raise a glass to the dizzy city -
a toast to towers, and all red-faced people!
And drink for a change among the homespun poor.
3.16.86
Again, after 9/11, the poem has a strange feel.
1.19.2003
OSIP MANDELSTAM
The priest, with melting intonation,
bridal sighs, deep shade
of bays, abandoned recesses -
the beardless one, the son
lifts high the censer, scans
the exacting responsorial.
And the difficult - the impossible
sweetness is born once more -
harmony's arrow touches home -
O to be lifted forever
in the resonant ark,
your salt-stung aria!
6.24.89
WAY STATIONS
The child honoring you in dreams,
embrasure of innocence, tender shoots
of early radiance - your figure
landscape, unfamiliar town, scent
of May lilacs along a worn road.
Not to be known yet,
only a heavy cloud pregnant
with summer rain
(iron mortality, rust
of decline not yet to be);
gathering up your skirts
you find your way, slow path
beyond the jealous decorations,
fever of scorn, offended pride,
dry branches crackling - a bonfire.
[& one very old poem:]
SUMMER
The child knows clouds,
and lies in the green yards
as they fill the empty sky,
make it round, looming down,
shying away, or drifting off.
There are no mountains.
On the porch a sleeping cat
rolls over, into the sunlight.
Flies buzz. Around noon
he looks in a window,
a piano leans against a wall
of the blue-green room.
The priest, with melting intonation,
bridal sighs, deep shade
of bays, abandoned recesses -
the beardless one, the son
lifts high the censer, scans
the exacting responsorial.
And the difficult - the impossible
sweetness is born once more -
harmony's arrow touches home -
O to be lifted forever
in the resonant ark,
your salt-stung aria!
6.24.89
WAY STATIONS
The child honoring you in dreams,
embrasure of innocence, tender shoots
of early radiance - your figure
landscape, unfamiliar town, scent
of May lilacs along a worn road.
Not to be known yet,
only a heavy cloud pregnant
with summer rain
(iron mortality, rust
of decline not yet to be);
gathering up your skirts
you find your way, slow path
beyond the jealous decorations,
fever of scorn, offended pride,
dry branches crackling - a bonfire.
[& one very old poem:]
SUMMER
The child knows clouds,
and lies in the green yards
as they fill the empty sky,
make it round, looming down,
shying away, or drifting off.
There are no mountains.
On the porch a sleeping cat
rolls over, into the sunlight.
Flies buzz. Around noon
he looks in a window,
a piano leans against a wall
of the blue-green room.
1.13.2003
I want to write a little more about the longo pome which took up so many years of my life (Stubborn Grew & its sequels).
In the early 90s rhyming became easy through a lot of practice. Should rhyming be easy? Probably not, but as any musician knows, momentum is important, & in my poetry it was compositional momentum which rhyming & repetitive stanza forms helped along. I was also very interested in Alastair Fowler's studies of numerical & ring structures in Renaissance poetry, & using these techniques became another way to keep momentum. These techniques give the poet permission to take a deep breath & really EXPAND the poem.
However, in my trial runs in the early 90s ("Spring Quartet") I discovered I'd written long stretches in which the techniques took over, leaving me with a sort of facile, tinny, superficial rhetoric. The same thing sometimes happened in shorter poems where I used a special form (pantoum, sestina, etc.) - but they were good practice.
When I came back to these methods in the later 90s I tried to be both more careful & less subservient to the techniques. But again, what triggered "Stubborn Grew", what really gave me entry, were Mandelstam's late poems (Moscow Notebooks, Voronezh Notebooks especially). Two things in particular appealed to me. First was the notion of drafts & sequences - short lyrics which were also parts of a larger set. That gave me the idea I could write "chapters" of a long poem based on this idea. The second, and more important, was something M. accomplished under duress, in the Voronezh poems. It was a conjunction of opposites he achieves in those brief, notational lyrics. In a word, they combine finality with contingency. On one hand they are brief, contingent, composed under conditions of extreme stress and suffering: they radiate the intense feeling of being "on the road". Yet on the other hand they PAUSE: the poems are contemplative moments of stasis and awareness. Actually the title of my book of short poems, "Way Stations", typifies this conjunction.
What this manner I found in the Voronezh poems gave me, was a means of starting out with "Stubborn". Rather than over-planning or calculating, I let the short poems come as they would, keeping in mind the general threads of where I was going. So the first "chapter" of the poem leads into the narrative by means of this sort of glancing notation. & I was really amazed, much later, to see how those early note-poems prefigured the larger structures & themes of the poem as a whole.
What also happened later was that the note form became formalized or stylized. By the time I was writing the first sequel to Stubborn ("Grassblade Light"), I was able to combine the same sort of aleatory approach to the individual units, with a much more articulated & formal set of ring-structures. "Grassblade" is a set of seven panel-chapters; each chapter laid out around a central section; the fourth (central) chapter is a double chapter (so in a numerical sense there are actually 8 sections). Each individual poem has 28 lines (7 rhymed quatrains). Each chapter has 28 poems with a central section (making 29). There are variations & planned "breaks" in this symmetry. & there are thematic elements & calendar dates (of composition) which relate to this symmetry (the design was actually modelled on an octagonal castle in southern Italy built by Emperor Frederick II. Sounds kind of silly but there it is). The 3rd sequel - "July" - revises this kind of patterning & takes it further. The final sequel - "Blackstone's Day-Book" - a brief coda, finished on anniversary of the day William Blackstone (Anglican hermit-pioneer-exile-scholar-preacher, who settled in RI before Roger Williams) died: 5.28.2000. Also the saint's day of an ancestor of mine, Guillem de Gellone, one of Charlemagne's generals turned monk - celebrated in the French chansons de geste (the Chansons de Guillaume d'Orange) (sounds kind of silly but there it is).
In the early 90s rhyming became easy through a lot of practice. Should rhyming be easy? Probably not, but as any musician knows, momentum is important, & in my poetry it was compositional momentum which rhyming & repetitive stanza forms helped along. I was also very interested in Alastair Fowler's studies of numerical & ring structures in Renaissance poetry, & using these techniques became another way to keep momentum. These techniques give the poet permission to take a deep breath & really EXPAND the poem.
However, in my trial runs in the early 90s ("Spring Quartet") I discovered I'd written long stretches in which the techniques took over, leaving me with a sort of facile, tinny, superficial rhetoric. The same thing sometimes happened in shorter poems where I used a special form (pantoum, sestina, etc.) - but they were good practice.
When I came back to these methods in the later 90s I tried to be both more careful & less subservient to the techniques. But again, what triggered "Stubborn Grew", what really gave me entry, were Mandelstam's late poems (Moscow Notebooks, Voronezh Notebooks especially). Two things in particular appealed to me. First was the notion of drafts & sequences - short lyrics which were also parts of a larger set. That gave me the idea I could write "chapters" of a long poem based on this idea. The second, and more important, was something M. accomplished under duress, in the Voronezh poems. It was a conjunction of opposites he achieves in those brief, notational lyrics. In a word, they combine finality with contingency. On one hand they are brief, contingent, composed under conditions of extreme stress and suffering: they radiate the intense feeling of being "on the road". Yet on the other hand they PAUSE: the poems are contemplative moments of stasis and awareness. Actually the title of my book of short poems, "Way Stations", typifies this conjunction.
What this manner I found in the Voronezh poems gave me, was a means of starting out with "Stubborn". Rather than over-planning or calculating, I let the short poems come as they would, keeping in mind the general threads of where I was going. So the first "chapter" of the poem leads into the narrative by means of this sort of glancing notation. & I was really amazed, much later, to see how those early note-poems prefigured the larger structures & themes of the poem as a whole.
What also happened later was that the note form became formalized or stylized. By the time I was writing the first sequel to Stubborn ("Grassblade Light"), I was able to combine the same sort of aleatory approach to the individual units, with a much more articulated & formal set of ring-structures. "Grassblade" is a set of seven panel-chapters; each chapter laid out around a central section; the fourth (central) chapter is a double chapter (so in a numerical sense there are actually 8 sections). Each individual poem has 28 lines (7 rhymed quatrains). Each chapter has 28 poems with a central section (making 29). There are variations & planned "breaks" in this symmetry. & there are thematic elements & calendar dates (of composition) which relate to this symmetry (the design was actually modelled on an octagonal castle in southern Italy built by Emperor Frederick II. Sounds kind of silly but there it is). The 3rd sequel - "July" - revises this kind of patterning & takes it further. The final sequel - "Blackstone's Day-Book" - a brief coda, finished on anniversary of the day William Blackstone (Anglican hermit-pioneer-exile-scholar-preacher, who settled in RI before Roger Williams) died: 5.28.2000. Also the saint's day of an ancestor of mine, Guillem de Gellone, one of Charlemagne's generals turned monk - celebrated in the French chansons de geste (the Chansons de Guillaume d'Orange) (sounds kind of silly but there it is).
1.09.2003
Mandelstam's influence on my writing happens on several levels. He represents a figure of wholeness (Hebraic-Hellenic): a sort of psychopomp, as I've described in earlier posts here. Acmeism - the loose grouping of poets with which he was affiliated and whose poetics he helped define - emphasized, on the one hand, cultural continuity (M. once defined it as "longing for world culture"), and on the other hand, realism and craft - a celebration of this world as opposed to the other worlds of Symbolism.
But this "world culture" for Mandelstam was not, as some have assumed, rooted in traditionalism or conservatism. M's Acmeist "domestic hellenism" was a future-directed cultural norm, a kind of radiant humanism (see his "the gold coin of the future global humanism"). Poetry was rooted in this larger cultural continuity with Europe, with the ancient Mediterranean, and through them with the world at large.
I discovered that Mandelstam's world-view seemed to counterbalance some shortcomings in the great Moderns, Pound & Eliot & Williams & Stevens et al. All of them share points of affinity with Mandelstam and Acmeism, yet Pound's irascible fanaticism, Eliot's otherworldly pessimism & conservatism, the parochialism of some of the others, left me dissatisfied. Only Hart Crane (& Montale, & Joyce, & Proust) among those moderns, won as deep an assent - or as deep a sense of personal affinity - from me, as did Mandelstam. This sense of affinity had a lot to do with the approaches and trial runs I took in the late 80s and 90s around the long poem (or "poema", as they are called in Russia).
And in the mid-90s I was intrigued to discover that many of the Language poets had traveled to Russia about the same time I was discovering Mandelstam, and that their affinities lay more with the Russian Futurists of the early 20th century, and, among critics, the Russian Formalists, than with Acmeism. Futurism and Acmeism can be seen as dual, antithetical outgrowths from Symbolism. And it seemed curious to me that in the 2nd half of the 90s I was (at least in my own mind) replaying those rivalries (between acmeist continuity and postmodern futurism) in my debates with poets affiliated with Language Poetry and the NY School (in venues such as the Buffalo Poetics List).
I've written more about these things in a couple essays in Mudlark. I try to see my polemics as forming some sort of holistic world-view. The cultural continuity of Acmeism, I relate to the idea of a "tradition-at-large" within which oppositional, idiomatic styles subsist. And on a philosophical or spiritual level, I relate this tradition-at-large to what I see as the telos or purpose of poetry in general. In a philosophical sense, wholeness is the search for the Good, the whole of goodness or God - within which or whom all lesser, partial goods are absorbed. This is the ancient concept of philo-logos, the ordering principle of the wise or just person, Wisdom or Justice, which subsumes passion to the contemplation of the Good in itself, and seeks to reflect it in radiant good works.
But this "world culture" for Mandelstam was not, as some have assumed, rooted in traditionalism or conservatism. M's Acmeist "domestic hellenism" was a future-directed cultural norm, a kind of radiant humanism (see his "the gold coin of the future global humanism"). Poetry was rooted in this larger cultural continuity with Europe, with the ancient Mediterranean, and through them with the world at large.
I discovered that Mandelstam's world-view seemed to counterbalance some shortcomings in the great Moderns, Pound & Eliot & Williams & Stevens et al. All of them share points of affinity with Mandelstam and Acmeism, yet Pound's irascible fanaticism, Eliot's otherworldly pessimism & conservatism, the parochialism of some of the others, left me dissatisfied. Only Hart Crane (& Montale, & Joyce, & Proust) among those moderns, won as deep an assent - or as deep a sense of personal affinity - from me, as did Mandelstam. This sense of affinity had a lot to do with the approaches and trial runs I took in the late 80s and 90s around the long poem (or "poema", as they are called in Russia).
And in the mid-90s I was intrigued to discover that many of the Language poets had traveled to Russia about the same time I was discovering Mandelstam, and that their affinities lay more with the Russian Futurists of the early 20th century, and, among critics, the Russian Formalists, than with Acmeism. Futurism and Acmeism can be seen as dual, antithetical outgrowths from Symbolism. And it seemed curious to me that in the 2nd half of the 90s I was (at least in my own mind) replaying those rivalries (between acmeist continuity and postmodern futurism) in my debates with poets affiliated with Language Poetry and the NY School (in venues such as the Buffalo Poetics List).
I've written more about these things in a couple essays in Mudlark. I try to see my polemics as forming some sort of holistic world-view. The cultural continuity of Acmeism, I relate to the idea of a "tradition-at-large" within which oppositional, idiomatic styles subsist. And on a philosophical or spiritual level, I relate this tradition-at-large to what I see as the telos or purpose of poetry in general. In a philosophical sense, wholeness is the search for the Good, the whole of goodness or God - within which or whom all lesser, partial goods are absorbed. This is the ancient concept of philo-logos, the ordering principle of the wise or just person, Wisdom or Justice, which subsumes passion to the contemplation of the Good in itself, and seeks to reflect it in radiant good works.
The groundwork was laid for my interest in Mandelstam when I was in high school, in the 60s. Russian literature was Nabokov, Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky. The swampy, forested, birch-laden landscape of northern Minnesota, where I spent a lot of time then, was mirrored in this literary Russia. Nabokov was a favorite of my mother, & most of his books were on the shelves at home. Reading "Speak, Memory", Nabokov's childhood memoir, was an exercise in vicarious nostalgia (no one understands heartsickness for childhood like an adolescent). My high school prose writing included awkward Nabokovian echoes.
Once, much later, I wrote a 3-part poem exploring my absorption in Nabokov. Several years after that, I heard Joseph Brodsky give a stupendous reading at Brown (he recited his fairly long poems in both Russian and English, all from memory). The sloped auditorium was jammed. Brodsky took questions afterwards, & he raised a laugh when I asked if he had a favorite poem by Mandelstam. He said, "Yes, I do. Next question." After the reading, however, we talked. I apologized for "putting him on the spot" about Mandelstam. He was very charming and affable. He encouraged me to read more Auden. He even accepted a few of my poems, saying it would give him something to read back at his hotel.
When Brodsky died a few years later, I took the poem I had started about my obsession with Nabokov, and simply replaced the first section with a tribute to Brodsky. The last section (about the boy with the moth) worked very well - since Brodsky himself had written a poem based on this episode - which first appears in a short story by Nabokov. The Brodsky poem is also an echo of his tribute to Eliot, which was an echo of Auden's tribute to Yeats. I enjoyed adding another spoke to this elegiac cycle (English-Irish-American-Russian-American. . .). The poem was published on the op-ed page of the Providence Journal, the RI paper of record - where, incidentally, and curiously enough, Yeats himself had published a series of literary essays back in the 1890s.
Here is the poem:
JOSEPH BRODSKY
But each grave is the limit of the earth.
1
You died on a cold night in January.
It was Superbowl Sunday. A supine empire,
preoccupied with bread and circuses,
Land Rovers, stratagems of muscle-
bound heroes. Next day, fire
swallows the famous opera house in Venice.
Not with a bang - with a light rustle
of red silk, your heart passed the final
exam, black-sailed, in the science of farewells.
Snow falls on the fleeting moiré of the sea;
It falls on horsemen passing by, on the halfbacks
of the dolphins' curved smiles (in a mirror
of alien tribes). Snow falls on night grass
in the trackless pine forest; it falls with the stars
drifting down from unnumbered, shiftless heaven;
so it fell, and will fall, on those bronze eyelids.
A guarded glance, coiled in frozen hexagons;
shy cedar voice, immured in pyramids.
Snow mixed with tears signals a hearth somewhere.
Not in the street, not in this Byzantine air
of columns and cenotaphs - no. Just a home
by a river of marrying streams; a certain Rome
where tongues descend - ascending voices mingle
in companionable flame. This friendly fire
eats brotherly dusk, shakes fearful ether
into evening wine. . . one hawk's cry
screams - and melds into the Muse's profile.
2
Life's flimsy laundry, easily
unraveled. Transparent butterfly net,
wing of a moth, how slyly they
trap the hunter, iced on an alpine sheet.
You fight the droning in your head
with all the cunning you can muster;
turning its power against itself, you lead
a life Laertes would approve (bluster,
business laboring for acclaim)
only to drown the voice above the trees.
Relentless, impervious to shame,
it finds you out, brings you to your knees.
And like the heavy signet ring,
a chieftain's ring, that hidden in hand
sealed Hamlet's heart (O molten, circling sting) -
the droning issues forth its stark command.
You listened, followed. A shuttling pencil
in a nighthawk's beak - a spear in your side;
and a huge sea-moth with crossbone stencil
shattered your lamp. Died.
Summer ends, the droning subsides.
The ruthless tango of prose and poetry
is dead. Cicada shells, butterfly hides. . .
some leftover spider's ecstasy.
3
In the depths of the Soviet winter, in the ponderous cold
of Siberia, a boy cups an abandoned moth in his hands,
born - to die a few hours old -
into a false firewood springtime. Its delicate wings
are only an affront to the divine benevolence; he understands
nothing; his hands, like an insect coffin, bear the stings
of the nails themselves; like a dry cocoon, absently,
they drift to the shack wall, and the fingers fan,
in unison, a camouflaged figure in the pinewood pantry.
This tender sign. . . a tenderness snuffed out.
This heavy icon, then. . . true mimic of an action?
Or only the swollen, distorted wings of a parasite?
Or only the screech of broken chalk on slate?
Droning brittle wings, poets take their stations
at the edge of the cliff - their noise intuitive, innate. . .
The butterfly is gone. Its form was here, immaculate;
the hands tracing its flight, aimless, serpentine,
mimic its undetermined motion - late, late -
since that double-woven fountain, afloat with indirection,
surging, sparkling, translucent, seeks its mate
in a signal heaven - a camouflage beyond dissection.
2.2.96
Now when I re-read it, the solemn tone and the heavy allusions to other poems almost wreck it, maybe do wreck it; but the last section lifts it up & together again, or almost.
Once, much later, I wrote a 3-part poem exploring my absorption in Nabokov. Several years after that, I heard Joseph Brodsky give a stupendous reading at Brown (he recited his fairly long poems in both Russian and English, all from memory). The sloped auditorium was jammed. Brodsky took questions afterwards, & he raised a laugh when I asked if he had a favorite poem by Mandelstam. He said, "Yes, I do. Next question." After the reading, however, we talked. I apologized for "putting him on the spot" about Mandelstam. He was very charming and affable. He encouraged me to read more Auden. He even accepted a few of my poems, saying it would give him something to read back at his hotel.
When Brodsky died a few years later, I took the poem I had started about my obsession with Nabokov, and simply replaced the first section with a tribute to Brodsky. The last section (about the boy with the moth) worked very well - since Brodsky himself had written a poem based on this episode - which first appears in a short story by Nabokov. The Brodsky poem is also an echo of his tribute to Eliot, which was an echo of Auden's tribute to Yeats. I enjoyed adding another spoke to this elegiac cycle (English-Irish-American-Russian-American. . .). The poem was published on the op-ed page of the Providence Journal, the RI paper of record - where, incidentally, and curiously enough, Yeats himself had published a series of literary essays back in the 1890s.
Here is the poem:
JOSEPH BRODSKY
But each grave is the limit of the earth.
1
You died on a cold night in January.
It was Superbowl Sunday. A supine empire,
preoccupied with bread and circuses,
Land Rovers, stratagems of muscle-
bound heroes. Next day, fire
swallows the famous opera house in Venice.
Not with a bang - with a light rustle
of red silk, your heart passed the final
exam, black-sailed, in the science of farewells.
Snow falls on the fleeting moiré of the sea;
It falls on horsemen passing by, on the halfbacks
of the dolphins' curved smiles (in a mirror
of alien tribes). Snow falls on night grass
in the trackless pine forest; it falls with the stars
drifting down from unnumbered, shiftless heaven;
so it fell, and will fall, on those bronze eyelids.
A guarded glance, coiled in frozen hexagons;
shy cedar voice, immured in pyramids.
Snow mixed with tears signals a hearth somewhere.
Not in the street, not in this Byzantine air
of columns and cenotaphs - no. Just a home
by a river of marrying streams; a certain Rome
where tongues descend - ascending voices mingle
in companionable flame. This friendly fire
eats brotherly dusk, shakes fearful ether
into evening wine. . . one hawk's cry
screams - and melds into the Muse's profile.
2
Life's flimsy laundry, easily
unraveled. Transparent butterfly net,
wing of a moth, how slyly they
trap the hunter, iced on an alpine sheet.
You fight the droning in your head
with all the cunning you can muster;
turning its power against itself, you lead
a life Laertes would approve (bluster,
business laboring for acclaim)
only to drown the voice above the trees.
Relentless, impervious to shame,
it finds you out, brings you to your knees.
And like the heavy signet ring,
a chieftain's ring, that hidden in hand
sealed Hamlet's heart (O molten, circling sting) -
the droning issues forth its stark command.
You listened, followed. A shuttling pencil
in a nighthawk's beak - a spear in your side;
and a huge sea-moth with crossbone stencil
shattered your lamp. Died.
Summer ends, the droning subsides.
The ruthless tango of prose and poetry
is dead. Cicada shells, butterfly hides. . .
some leftover spider's ecstasy.
3
In the depths of the Soviet winter, in the ponderous cold
of Siberia, a boy cups an abandoned moth in his hands,
born - to die a few hours old -
into a false firewood springtime. Its delicate wings
are only an affront to the divine benevolence; he understands
nothing; his hands, like an insect coffin, bear the stings
of the nails themselves; like a dry cocoon, absently,
they drift to the shack wall, and the fingers fan,
in unison, a camouflaged figure in the pinewood pantry.
This tender sign. . . a tenderness snuffed out.
This heavy icon, then. . . true mimic of an action?
Or only the swollen, distorted wings of a parasite?
Or only the screech of broken chalk on slate?
Droning brittle wings, poets take their stations
at the edge of the cliff - their noise intuitive, innate. . .
The butterfly is gone. Its form was here, immaculate;
the hands tracing its flight, aimless, serpentine,
mimic its undetermined motion - late, late -
since that double-woven fountain, afloat with indirection,
surging, sparkling, translucent, seeks its mate
in a signal heaven - a camouflage beyond dissection.
2.2.96
Now when I re-read it, the solemn tone and the heavy allusions to other poems almost wreck it, maybe do wreck it; but the last section lifts it up & together again, or almost.
1.07.2003
Why was Mandelstam so important to me?
It happened in two stages. First, I read the poems in the David McDuff translation (published in the early 70s), and was particularly interested in the imagery - its fusion of obscurity/concision/radiance. Then, I read Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir, "Hope Against Hope". . . and fell in love with both of them - both the poet-protagonist and the narrator-memoirist.
Aside from its greatness - the often-acknowledged spectacular, fascinating and moving quality of "Hope Against Hope" - for there are a number of great books around - why did it mean so much to me?
Poetry, as I started to say in a post from yesterday, is not, for me, simply a "thing in itself" : it's contaminated with, inseparable from, spiritual, intellectual, psychological realities. In the late 70s, Mandelstam served as a kind of imaginary friend or antithetical self, helping me integrate a deeply conflicted & confused (almost as confused as now!) sense of the world. He was a mediator or catalyst. I'm reminded of another book I read in the early 80s which served a similar role in a much more minor way, a study by Harold Fisch titled "Jerusalem and Albion : the Hebraic factor in 17th century English literature". The study focuses on the specific rhetorical functions of poetry in contrast to those of discourse or philosophy, and relates them to the debates over "Hebraism & Hellenism" from the Renaissance through Matthew Arnold.
Why did I need these intellectual "mediators" on different levels? Because I was involved in a decades-long search for resolution of an inner conflict which originated in about 1973, when I underwent a psychological/spiritual crisis at college. For those old enough to remember, this was the time of, among other phenomena, the "Jesus freaks". I suppose you could count me (as a quiet, introverted example) among their number. I was a "product" both of American Protestantism, and of an early enthusiasm for writing and poetry - and I had tremendous difficulty synthesizing the two, after undergoing an excruciating vocational crisis which included a manic breakdown & a renunciation of writing which lasted several years.
My writing experience seems to break into antithetical plateaus. In the late 60s I was enthralled with Ashbery & the NY School, and wrote quite a lot of imitative work in that vein. By the late 70s, after a hiatus from writing (& a long period of wandering, music-playing, community organizing, etc.) I was trying to rediscover my talent for it . Mandelstam & Russian poetry provided a kind of distant model universe, a heroic, lyrical, & integrative world-view - probably extremely simplistic, yet it gave me inspiration and confidence, and gave me a kind of perspective with which to re-approach the American traditions in my own way (it was only after reading Mandelstam that I was able to begin exploring Crane, Pound, Eliot, Olson, and other exemplary American poets).
It happened in two stages. First, I read the poems in the David McDuff translation (published in the early 70s), and was particularly interested in the imagery - its fusion of obscurity/concision/radiance. Then, I read Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir, "Hope Against Hope". . . and fell in love with both of them - both the poet-protagonist and the narrator-memoirist.
Aside from its greatness - the often-acknowledged spectacular, fascinating and moving quality of "Hope Against Hope" - for there are a number of great books around - why did it mean so much to me?
Poetry, as I started to say in a post from yesterday, is not, for me, simply a "thing in itself" : it's contaminated with, inseparable from, spiritual, intellectual, psychological realities. In the late 70s, Mandelstam served as a kind of imaginary friend or antithetical self, helping me integrate a deeply conflicted & confused (almost as confused as now!) sense of the world. He was a mediator or catalyst. I'm reminded of another book I read in the early 80s which served a similar role in a much more minor way, a study by Harold Fisch titled "Jerusalem and Albion : the Hebraic factor in 17th century English literature". The study focuses on the specific rhetorical functions of poetry in contrast to those of discourse or philosophy, and relates them to the debates over "Hebraism & Hellenism" from the Renaissance through Matthew Arnold.
Why did I need these intellectual "mediators" on different levels? Because I was involved in a decades-long search for resolution of an inner conflict which originated in about 1973, when I underwent a psychological/spiritual crisis at college. For those old enough to remember, this was the time of, among other phenomena, the "Jesus freaks". I suppose you could count me (as a quiet, introverted example) among their number. I was a "product" both of American Protestantism, and of an early enthusiasm for writing and poetry - and I had tremendous difficulty synthesizing the two, after undergoing an excruciating vocational crisis which included a manic breakdown & a renunciation of writing which lasted several years.
My writing experience seems to break into antithetical plateaus. In the late 60s I was enthralled with Ashbery & the NY School, and wrote quite a lot of imitative work in that vein. By the late 70s, after a hiatus from writing (& a long period of wandering, music-playing, community organizing, etc.) I was trying to rediscover my talent for it . Mandelstam & Russian poetry provided a kind of distant model universe, a heroic, lyrical, & integrative world-view - probably extremely simplistic, yet it gave me inspiration and confidence, and gave me a kind of perspective with which to re-approach the American traditions in my own way (it was only after reading Mandelstam that I was able to begin exploring Crane, Pound, Eliot, Olson, and other exemplary American poets).
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