SELF-PORTRAIT

 
In the uplifted forehead, a winged
suggestion.  But the coat looks awkward.
There's a hideout of pure impulse
in closed eyes, an arm's repose.

 
Here is one who floats and chants -
his word become ductile flame
in order to overcome inborn
clumsiness with innate rhythm.

- Osip Mandelstam (1931).
(provisional trans. by yrs truly)

(M. wrote some variations on this, in a series of little poems addressed to a goldfinch - kind of a personal emblem.)

I'd like to write an essay about musicality in verse.

Diction plays a part in it. Also, the mysterious (to me) space around lines, phrases, stanzas. Space created by emotional intensity, or the obliquity of meaning.

Silence. Rest note. ("Rest Note" - good book title. copyright HG)

Music in poetry like color &/or spatial design in painting(?)

A potential weakness in American poetry : this framing space gets lost when the poet gropes for expansiveness, running-on, getting-it-all-said, tumbling from one joke to the next, "windy discoursing".

Then the poem sounds too much like talk.

The space of traditional metrics & rhyme was a kind of template for spatial (musical) control.

We got bored with it.

But complexity & resistance add interest.

I can no longer read poems that only sound like somebody "talking clever" at me.

But there are as many difficulties & pitfalls with "musicality". Falling in love with the sound of your own fricatives. Close reading of the "e" vowels. Mantic yammer.

Ominous, portentous ponderosa. The three word line, dropped like a tong of bricks.

*

Is it possible to speak of the "music" of an image?

That's what stopped me in my tracks when I picked up a book of Mandelstam (in translation, no less - & not the Merwin versions). The verbal image carried across its music - in a language with a completely different alphabet & sound.

Fred's Castel del Monte has a total of 56 facets (8 walls, with 48 sides on the 8 corner towers). He also died at age 56.

A man's his castle. (Birthday numbers... my poem's full of 'em.)

Each little section or canto of The Grassblade Light can be likened to an image, like a coin, cast in a mold. Not only are there 8 (in 7) parts : each part contains 28 (+ 1) sections; each section contains 28 lines (7 quatrain stanzas). (This is the template, anyway; there are some meaningful variations in the pattern). The central "+1" or 29th section of each part is designed as 4 x 4 quatrain stanzas (or 64 - 8x8 - lines).

28 x 2 = 56.

(One obvious pitfall of this kind of form is the temptation to fill in the pattern (with filler). Did I avoid that? Dunno... maybe.)

This is my goulden coinage of poetic value, Mandelstam's "gold coins of humanism". It's worth one penny, Penelope.

It turns out Emperor Frederick II & my mother share the same birthday (different years). Gosh, that explains a lot.

The emperor grew up in Palermo, a Sicilian-Norman-Arabic blend of cultures.

He was attired for burial in a mixture of Cistercian & Arabic robes.

He was interested in mathematics : he sponsored & encouraged the famous Fibonacci.

He wrote a treatise on falconry which is still cited.

Castel del Monte is a weird, unusual place, sort of like my poem.

"Poets, envy the crystallographers!" (Mandelstam)

(I'm finding some of these facts in a book by Heinz Gotze, Castel del Monte.)

Maybe I have time to do a little more mental mountain climbing (or digital finger-slalom) this morning.

Continuing with the Turing biography. "turing" makes me think of a lathe; but apparently the family name stemmed from "Turin", Italy. A.T. was certainly an Olympics-class mental climber.

He's in college, & getting into mathematics, & Russell's Paradox ("the set of all sets, which contains itself", etc.). "'Normally,", wrote Russell, 'a class is not a member of itself. Mankind, for example, is not a man.'"

(Aye, there's the rub.)

Georg Cantor's infinity [of infinities] research.

The fractal spiral of self-reflective patterns [the J! the J! the blue J!]. Art's resonant echo-chamber.

But let's get back to poetry. I have a hunch this Russell Paradox can be applied, in some kind of analogy, both to literary style ("what do we do after MODERNISM???"}, and on a more basic level, to the relationship between text (written symbols) and real experience; AND, on a more cryptic level, to certain theological notions.

I won't try to cover all this in one lecture.

On coffee break, I'm reading about Turing, and I'm watching college students go by, umbilically attached to cellphones, I-pods. & I read, "This lack of any simple connection between mathematical symbols and the world of actual objects fascinated Alan." I'm watching the students go by, I'm slurping my coffee, & I'm thinking about the relationship between text and person, and between poetic text and vocal recital, dramatic performance.

I'm thinking about that relationship, because I'm trying to follow up on the previous post, the bit about poetry's serious side opens a space for its aesthetic reception.

This particular intellectual/emotional/spiritual pleasure & value, as we know it anyway, follows specifically from writing & reading, from texts.

But, paradoxically, the benchmarks, the classics, the models which make up the substance of an ongoing tradition in poetry - these originated in periods of revolutionary change : when 1) writing, printing & literacy spread far & wide, and 2) when the vast energies of vernacular languages were absorbed into poetry.

So the classics are packages of newly-grasped forms of energy (reading; new languages).

Our pleasure & learning - through reading & writing - draw on sources which are amalgams of spoken language & new writing tools.

I'm reminded of one of Mandelstam's most striking formulae : "Poetry is a plow which turns up the deep layers of Time, and spreads them on the surface." He's referring to contemporary, Acmeist poetry as he understands it & wants it to be : reaching back into those vital sources, those original amalgams of popular speech and writing technology (Dante, the classic of classic exemplars).

& it's close to Hart Crane's Nietzschean sense of poetry's potential to "reincarnate", to re-capitulate, archaic or eternal times (Marlowe, Pindar...).

"I don't want Ovid in translation; I want the living, breathing Ovid," Mandelstam wrote. (I'm quoting from memory.)

The forms taken suddenly by ancient poetry are springs or sources : fresh, eternal beauty. (This is a sort of classicism, I guess.) Why? Because they embody this symbiosis of text & speech, of symbol & actuality, of poem & person.

Not models or patterns; sources.

Russell's Paradox, which arose in the attempt to conceptualize the basic nature of mathematics, also applies, somehow, every time we read the "imitation of a speech act". It applies, somehow, to our concepts of rationality itself : what is the status of an abstraction, a metaphor, a word? What (if anything) grounds their logical architecture?

& what is "reality", then? Maybe Mankind, for example, is, indeed, a man...

[see, philosophes, the much-debated Aristotelian/Scholastic notion, that there are no universals, only individuals... nominalism loops into Berkeleyan idealism... & back into Peirce's futuristic, "thought-like" realism... & back into poetic quiddity, vivid particularity... ut pictura poiesis... I-am-That-I-Am, I-will-be-what-I-will-be, JHWH...]

and the poem & the person, and the text & the real, and the student & the mp3-player, inhabit this unpredictable borderland, where they flow back & forth...

I'm circling around a holistic conceptualization of art which includes personhood. Getting back to those dilemmas outlined in Carol Christ's book (Victorian & Modernist Poetics).

OK, class dismissed.

Hope to pull together an essay sometime on affinities between Bachelard, Mandelstam, Wallace Stevens.

M's Acmeism, humanism, "domestic hellenism", "teleological warmth". (Hellenism with a very Jewish warm kitchen feeling.)

The idea that poetry is part of the project to humanize and civilize the earth. Poetry breathing life into stony reality.

Steven's joy in the beautiful "idea" of a thing (or: the idea of Mankind).

Bachelard's lyric phenomenology.

Imago. Imago. Imago.

(I would toss an old Byzantine element into the mix. For me there is just one incandescent idea : imago Dei.)

To "pioneer", wherever you are.

Polish scholar Ryszard Przybylski expounds on some of this quite eloquently, in a book titled An essay on the poetry of Osip Mandelstam : God's grateful guest. (The subtitle an allusion to M's Acmeist credo - in one of his early essays.)

Joseph Brodsky, out of that (Petersburgian) tradition : "Mankind was put on earth for one purpose : to make civilization." [rough quote from memory]

So... I guess when I think about my own long poems & what I have tried to do, I fall somewhere in between the paths laid out by Crane & Eliot -

since I tried to carry on with Crane's affirmative-visionary stance, yet I share, in certain ways, Eliot's faith.

My whole poetry life has oscillated between, & tried to integrate, faith & imagination, faith & poetry - since the days of the "Shakespeare ghost" (1973).

& since it was my response to Mandelstam which set in motion the terms of that synthesis, he has remained the key to the "plot" of my long poems.

So... if somebody ever takes the trouble to read, seriously, Stubborn Grew, and The Rose, & the other things, they will find out what I am talking about. (All handy over there at Lulu !)

It has to do with seeing poetry as one door to inward or spiritual renewal, & the renewal of time & history in that light. & it has to do with an interpretation of faith which is in most ways diametrically opposite the stance taken by Eliot & Tate & the other conservative religionist-poets.

If you look into my long poems, you'll see a "ghost dance", where the impulses & writings of Whitman, Melville, Twain, Poe (& others) are aligned with those of Crane, Mandelstam, Berryman (& others) to represent a sort of symbolic "epic America-Russia" (RUS-US), rooted in Crane's, Melville's & Whitman's awareness and acknowledgement of the American Outcast as the spiritual key to America. Where Eliot & Tate experience their faith as a kind of spiritual hierarchy, separating them from modern life, I understand the Biblical tradition as a prophetic framework, or verbal model, for human equality and mutuality. (Melville's Ecuadorian doubloon nailed to the mast of the Pequod; Mandelstam's "gold coins of humanism".)

But my long poems have yet to be read & taken seriously, I guess. I went into a tunnel for about 8 years in order to prepare for & write them. So that made it more difficult for me to write short poems, or interact, as poet, in the magazine culture.

"Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay." That's how it starts.

I wonder if that "pebble cabinet" I liked so much in the Guggenheim Russian show was, in part, a sly nod to Mandelstam. There are so many "stone" & pebble images & themes running through his poetry! The "stone fallen from heaven", the stones along the Black Sea shore, the "unloved grey pebble" (unknown soldier), the sand sifted from hand to hand (in the poem for Tsvetaeva), the stones of Roman builders & other architecture, the title of his first book (Kamen, "stone", acronym for AKME), and so on.

Sarah's German tutor (from Russia) gave us a box of (terrible) Voronezh chocolates for the holidays - she said "Henry will like them". Well, I liked the brand name. I asked Sarah to bring my copy of the Voronezh Notebooks to class tonight, & have her read the last poem out loud ("To Natasha Shtempel") in Russian. I hope it wasn't too much to ask.

...thus the appeal for me of Hart Crane, Anna Akhmatova, Mandelstam, some Stevens, some Yeats - as opposed to the jump-cut edginess of much modernism, post-modernism.

adagios of islands.

sunny sublimity.

the gesture, the understated signal, toward the vast, the calm.

We love words
and "form" is simply having fun with words.

Thus my Mandelstam obsession
is merely an expression of "nightingale fever"
(ie. the joy of speech for its own sake).

Ovid (et al.) frames the meaning of politics & social life
within a context of happy babbling.
That's what poets do.

". . . for lack of what is found there."

The great forms
are great imitations
of greater forms
(like fern leaves).

Mandelstam & Crane, in Henry's mind. Very old news to some of my blog & poetry-list interlocutors. Must seem like tunnel vision, combined with backward-looking reification/idolatry of a couple of Modern Masters.

But the summary here today is just that, a simplification of my perspective, & I make no apologies. Myriad paths crisscross in poetry land. The era can be read with different lenses : feminist, multicultural (shorthand for many perspectives). I've been drawn to & inspired by scores, hundreds maybe, of other 20th-cent. writers.

I'm writing here, rather, about a couple of 20th-cent. poets who (along with Akhmatova, Berryman, Berrigan, Shvarts, Honig, Stevens, Montale, Celan, Brodsky - a few others) exerted a special guiding or pivotal or modelling or inspirational effect on my own writing.

& why or how did they do that? By means of a fusion/combination of worldview & poetic expression. Poetry remakes - reinterprets - the world with its discoveries & commitments. & our homemade "pantheons" have motives & consequences.

the most thorough study of Mandelstam's critical writings that I know of, is Mandelshtam's Poetics, by Elena Corrigan. her book doesn't deal with M's famous tribulations under Stalin, or his poetry per se, but focuses on his theoretical prose and its relationship with contemporary poetics (postmodernism).

. . . then again, of course, in my poetry, the Byzantium effect is a subset of the Russian theme. . . with me everything begins, & begins again, with Mandelstam.

Attended RI Philharmonic last night. (knew Phil Harmonic & his brother Fred in high school. yeah.) Music by Berlioz, Prokofiev, Barber, Respighi.

Stirred by the emotional keys, later one of those thoughts occurred to me, the kind of thing we don't like to admit:

that our frenetic debates about poetics have missed something essential, which is that good poetry is emotionally expressive & expansive, in a way that touches the crowd, touches Everyperson, and that this elusive something is not measurable in terms of a political or aesthetic "position" nor by the minutiae of stylistic dissection. Thus the successful poets for the most part are elusive, evasive, noncommittal, &/or terse about "poetics", since it's a matter of an imponderable faculty outside the poet's control.

Mandelstam actually wrote several poems which address this conundrum of the "dream beyond reason" from various angles. From "Octets" (Moscow, 1934):

And Schubert on the water, and Mozart in the uproar of the birds,
and Goethe whistling on the winding path,
and Hamlet, thinking with fearful steps,
all felt the crowd's pulse and believed the crowd.
Perhaps my whisper was already borne before my lips,
the leaves whirled round in treelessness
and those to whom we dedicate our life's experience
before experience acquired their traits.

(trans. by David McDuff). this poem something like a Zen koan, to me anyway.

This is one of those late Mandelstam poems - one among so many - which come through for me even in translation.

He can still remember the wear and tear on his shoes,
and the worn grandeur of my soles.
I, in turn, remember him : his many voices,
his black hair, how close he lived to Mount David.

 
The pistachio-green houses on the foxhole streets
have been renovated with whitewash or white of egg;
balconies incline, horseshoes shine, horse - balcony,
the little oaks, the plane trees, the slow elms.

 
The feminine chain of curly letters
is intoxicating for eyes enveloped in light.
The city is so excessive and goes off into the timbered forest
and into the young-looking, aging summer.

Mandelstam, exiled in Voronezh, is remembering a fellow poet & Tiblisi, the capital of Georgia (near Mount David). (Resonates oddly for me, since John Tagliabue & his family lived a block down the hill from Mount David, a little hill in Lewiston, Maine.) The ordinariness of these lines is suffused with melancholy & loving memory. (Translated by Richard & Elizabeth McKane, from the Bloodaxe Bks edition of Voronezh Notebooks.)

I think the remarks in previous blog post (on Mandelstam's Redemption/free-play symbiosis) run parallel to some of WH Auden's discoursing. Also, I think the following excerpt from a poem titled "One Evening (Early Spring)" (which appeared in the Jacket interview) illustrates some of Paul Lake's comments on fractal-recursive order in poetry:

         7

  
         Around the synagogue in the evening light
 the houses cluster in their modest drab integrity.
 Walking through their vocations (under blight
 of a voracious contracting whirlpool city)
 the humble continue. . . gathering on holiday
 outside the bronze double doors of their temples.
 The writer (an unnoticed bystander) crumples
 a scrap of crosshatched paper and throws it away.

  
         And the wind lifts a corner of the scribbled page,
 not yet finished with the end of the universe.
 Over the brilliant dome a small cloud of rage
 disguises the sun – cries:  I will immerse
 in tears – I will burn with fire – I will erase. . .
 (– pretending once more deep within heaven
 not only to destroy all creation and then
 again rebuild the whole cracked edifice

  
         but to do all this in the manner of a scribe
 with one hand at his aching brow and one eye
 peering at a mossbound, moldy parchment –)
 and Lord, we have deserved your diatribe.
 The parched earth groans for a comet's finality.
 Your mortified heart stretches through space and
 swelling spreads (ubiquitous) the fiery ointment
 of your love, of your forgiveness, of your peace.


      
                                                3.26.97

I've been enjoying G.Gudding's adventures in conchology. Here's an early poem by Mandelstam, trans. by Clarence Brown. Last line reminds me of the old song from Twelfth Night.

THE SEASHELL

Perhaps I am not necessary to you,
Night; out of the universal gulf
Like a shell without pearls
I am cast up on your shore.

You froth the waves indifferently
And obstinately sing.
But you will love and know the worth
Of the lie of the useless shell.

You will lie down on the sand beside it
Will cover it with your chasuble
You will bind to it inseparably
The enormous bell of the billows.

And the walls of the fragile shell,
Like the house of an empty heart,
You will fill with the whispers of foam,
With fog, wind and the rain. . .

Mandelstam was my Virgil.

(& Beatrice is. . .)

I sense one of those desiccated debates looming, that leave everyone feeling burnt-out. Will be brief, anyway, responding to Tim.

1) The quote from McClatchy is revealing; his defensive dismissal of the language poets et al. assumes a readership that even knows who they are, a readership which is extremely tiny. The forces of PR & publication & renown on both the "official" & the marginal wings are hyper-miniscule; the internal debate only highlights the extremely minor role poetry plays in the culture we have. The forces of fame & publication on either side of the mirror operate in exactly the same way; in both cases their impact is negligible. In this context, the official/marginal binary is merely a distraction from the real difficulties of making poetry.

2) The idea of a center of humane values is only a "red herring" if you can't see that center. The fact is there is a very basic social contract operating in most countries : a collectivity so basic, so domestic, so in front of our noses, that we sometimes fail to notice it. It goes something like this : if you work hard, get an education, take care of yourself & your family, you will do well. This kind of comment of course will invite all kinds of outcries along the lines of, well, what about these social injustices? My assertion was not, "there is a center, therefore the problems are unimportant." Remember, my assertion was: "corrections of injustices will come from the center of humane values".

3) Tim would like to portray my position as that of a deracinated aesthetician. I think it goes something more like this : politics is too important to be reduced to literary movement styles and phony frames of literary progress. By the same token, poetry is too essential to be subjected to the same partisan-ideological branding & feathering. In fact, poetry is too powerful to be confined by right-thinking intellectualizations or over-neat stylizations. It's powerful because rooted in experience, emotion and immediacy of perception; it's the working-out (through a desperate and often instinctive commitment to song) of conflicts which are too personal for abstract philosophical formulae; as Mandelstam emphasized, poetry is much more raw than prose. In making this argument I am leaving aside the most essential aspect, since raising it only instigates more arguments : poetry is an artistic activity, its effects operate on the aesthetic plane. Yes, the artist will be engaged in the social struggles which he or she inherits; yes, these will be reflected in the themes, styles, ethics of the art work; but, yet, & however, these social, political, philosophical beliefs and commitments, in the context of the art work, have no effect or meaning whatsoever, unless the art work is effective as art. How poetry works in this way is not something that can be explained by simple rules & instructions, or right-thinking ideological positions.*

*p.s. And these last two sentences, if you accept them, are the strongest argument for the poet's attention, not only to their private affinities, but to the tradition-at-large. The achievement of great poems is a general human achievement; they suffuse culture, take on a "second life", in Montale's sense; they are classics, in the sense that they open a door to general reception by means of their inherent quality. This general notion of classicism is perhaps something like what Mandelstam meant when he defined acmeism as "nostalgia for world culture". These classic achievements form a bond with that center of normative humane values which is civilization; the world culture Mandelstam wrote about in another place as that time when the worthless paper currency of the present (in his case, under Stalinism) is replaced by the ringing gold florins of a universal humanism, which will be passed from hand to hand. This same sense of wide, general heritage is what Brodsky was referring to when he wrote that "Man was put on the earth to make civilization."

. . . but again, why didn't Hart Crane "break the pentameter"? There was a positive reason : he could reshape the Elizabethan line, as in "For the Marriage of Faustus & Helen", and parts of The Bridge. In Crane the 1590s returned; he was Marlowe as W.Stevens was Shakespeare.

The Nietzschean idea of "eternal return" was in the air; the notion of cyclical time & the presence of the past. It was reflected in Eliot's recapitulation of Tradition, his Heraclitean sense of the conjunction of time & Eternity ("History is Now and England"); it was in Mandelstam's invocations of Ovid; it was in Joyce's overlap of Homer & Dublin; it was in Pound's mythologizing, & Yeats' gyres. Crane thought he could see the recurrence of ancient times, Atlantis/New York in the dentist's chair.

Where you won't find it is in the futurist wing of modernism; for the Futurists, whether Russian or Italian or Vorticist, the past was something to be obliterated for the sake of absolute Progress. They were too much the sophisticated, politicized materialists, to accept some version of neo-Platonic aesthetics. In Russian poetics it's formalized in the divide between Acmeism & Futurism. Total novelty obliterates the potential for the presence of past times, past forms, past poems.

Acmeism, on the other hand, or the eternal return, intimates the possibility of re-incarnation, of time travel, of the ghostly presence of dead avatars, of communion with the dead.

I don't want to repeat a mirror-image of Ron Silliman's simplistic binaries. The futurist Pound & his disciples Olson & Zukofsky certainly created their own very effective versions of the presence of the past (& sometimes of the pentameter, too). But they did so in the context of a radical distancing from ordinary speech & cultural norms. It takes a very refined taste to appreciate how these prodigal sons echoed that general culture by means of ultra-private idioms. Their uncompromising independence makes them culture heros, in a sense; but their choices are not the only option (witness again, for example, Stevens or Crane).

Here's a very old poem of mine. It was written in the 70s, after a visit to the Minneapolis Art Institute. Across the street, hidden among some fir trees, I found a statue of George Washington.


MEMORIAL DAY


Statue standing grey in summer rain,
wrinkled stone worn by many seasons,
brow, shoulders, backbone full of purpose,
memory shivering in the roar of battle,
emblem of endurance everlasting,
lasting now in peacetime summer rain.

Rising in the shadow of the trees,
mist of thoughts returning from the dead,
comes to life within the broken heart,
comes to join the living and the dead,
statue of the mystery of glory,
statue standing grey in summer rain.