"hide & seek with the Father" (or Mother, or Other) - this little phrase disguises a very profound idea, about the human person's inner or spiritual orientation toward divine or metaphysical Personhood... "humanism", indeed.

In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam repeatedly evokes something she calls "humanism", or "traditional humanism", by which (I think) she means the basic ordinary values underlying normative civil society and social life, basic human kindliness and sense of mutual responsibility, sanity, "piety" in the old sense, natural law, the golden rule, simple good nature, the "love your neighbor" ethic... - which she records being systematically wiped out under Stalin, and which she found in paradoxical places (not so much among the intelligentsia, as among the humblest & poorest workers & displaced peasants, who helped the Mandelstams on their hard road).

It seems to me that - with respect to this sense of "humanism" - M.'s notion of the cultural meaning of Redemption - as sketched in the unfinished essay "Pushkin & Scriabin" - is enormously rich in implications & possibilities.

As I noted before here, his idea that the once-&-for-all Redemption sets culture & art free, for spiritual play - "hide & seek with the Father", as he puts it - could be aligned with a sort of classicism. This is so because any concept of Redemption is underwritten by a certain certainty about the divine purpose : the Redemption is a showing-forth of divine providential wisdom & plan. Such belief in divine plan is not solely Christian, but structures most ancient religious thought & culture. One can see it in the Stoic's acceptance of destiny, the amor fati. One can see it in all kinds of fatalistic determinism, religious & philosophical. One of the hallmarks of "classicism" in art is its expressive awareness & representation of "the way things are", the way things cannot otherwise be.

(Simone Weil wrote some penetrating essays on this topic, which offer an interesting parallel to Mandelstam's orientation. She focused on ancient Greek concepts of beauty, necessity, and mediation - and their analogues in Christian concepts of nature and grace.)

But there is something else going on with Mandelstam & his neo-classical Acmeism, something which actually opposes fatalism & any kind of indifference. M. likened the poet or artist to the "grateful guest" in the beautiful & tremendous "palace" of the earth, nature, Creation. This is one expression of the specifically Christian grounding of the idea of Providence in the love-relationship between creature & Creator. The artist - & the human being generally - fulfills his or her nature most completely, by embracing this playful relationship of love & trust between the human and the divine. Life here is given complete meaning within the circle defined by the radius of relation between creature & Creator. This is indeed a specifically religious (as well as philosophical) way or means of understanding the nature of the cosmos & our experience of life. (If our ultimate understanding of experience is shaped by a loving relation between creature and Creator - well, there are implications here not only about fate & destiny & plan, but also about (playful) freedom - the spiritual freedom of the children of God, in the Pauline sense.)

My own interest, for a while now, has been to explore how such a worldview can be synthesized with the specific powers & qualities of making my poems, & with poetry in general (how, in this context, the manner & discourse of poetry relates/contrasts to other forms of human expression). Along with recognizing the human (and personal) limitations on any such verbal formulae or "explanations" of experience : since there is always a deeper level, oftentimes shunted aside or avoided - a more acute angle of perception, a blindspot...

The Redemption, you might say, is one of the consequences of the interpenetration of divine and human things. Mandelstam (in "Pushkin and Scriabin") sketches it as the act which "saves" the world, sets it fundamentally right : and since this has been definitively accomplished, once and for all, there is no need to re-invent the wheel, so to speak : the artist can simply be grateful for what has been done, and set to work (playfully) to celebrate that redeemed world.

It's a funny idea, easy to criticize from several angles. (There's a kind of underlying classicism to it, which maybe M. soaked up from Pushkin, Gumilev, Annensky, Soloviev... something Petersburgian. I don't know.)

But if we accept that there might be a grain of truth in it, what follows? If we say that the central dispute in American poetry has been between Memory and Invention, what would be the effect of Mandelstam's formula on this situation?

In order to accept or understand the notion of an act of divine Redemption in human history, we would have to be able, logically, to reconcile passing human experience with a kind of Absolute. Time with Eternity - the pleroma, the "fulness of Time". (Sounds like T.S. Eliot a little bit. I am curious now to read an Eliot biography - find out something about his reliigous conversion(? or return) in the 20s. There's Berryman, too, toward the end of his life...)

Perhaps an intellectual reconciliation of history with eternity would lay the groundwork for, would be one of the contributing factors toward, a reconciliation of memory and invention in art. Tradition and the new. The creative Now with its matrix, its context in Memory.

The underlying give-&-take in American poetry : Memory and Invention.

Since Emerson, Invention has taken 1st place. The New American is a New Adam in a New World. Imagination creates its own History.

& there is some philosophical or theological validity to this perspective. For example, it is possible to interpret the sacred books of Christianity to support such a view, with one caveat : the "newness" of the New Adam was only made possible by one ineradicable historical event : the Redemption.

Obviously this particular caveat imposes a crux of dissonance or disagreement. But see Mandelstam's essay "Pushkin and Scriabin", which - at least in its own terms - resolves this problem (the problem or crux which divided Eliot from Pound, WC Williams and Stevens, in variant ways).

The mother of the Muses is Memory, according to the ancient Greeks. In the old days, poets were the professional rememberers, the technicians of mnemonics. But what is the American poet called upon to remember? I believe this is a philosophical & theological question. (Eliot raised it, in a deliberately provocative way - as a traditionalist... But I don't think traditionalism for its own sake is the answer. One has to rethink the issues in every era.)

What we are called upon to remember is our relationship to God : ie., the nature of the Trinity. A reality which involves Incarnation : the Word made Flesh. This is a hard thing to understand, put baldly like this (believe me, I know).

The poet remembers reality - as a familial relationship of spiritual and physical Persons. And such a memory has logical consequences for every aspect of life : historical, social, political, philosophical, scientific...

A familial relationship... I am thinking of the unique capacity of poetry, along with the other arts, to imagine and conceptualize and evoke the special vitality and emotional resonance of existence - to clothe it in human meaning. No other form of expression seems capable of even approaching the unspoken familial-theological sense of Reality and Universe that we are addressing (with our blunt instruments of religious vocabulary...)

Mandelstam's life & fate take on a clearer resonance when you see that he was re-enacting, with some solemnity (as was Akhmatova), Pushkin's war of independence - for a free literary culture, for the dignity of the (raznocinets, un-privileged, non-elite, egalitarian) writer - for free literature, free speech... & his poems (Mandelstam's) meanwhile form a very special & complex Petersburgian isomorph or palimpsest interwoven with Pushkin's... (like Nabokov, in another key)...

(something addressed, sort of mock-epic fashion, in "Henry's" search for "Pushkin the cat", in Stubborn Grew...)

I'm re-reading Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir, Hope Against Hope, which I must have last (re-)read about 20 years ago. This book has always been my Bible (aside from the Bible).

It seems as if the simple power of this book sort of spoiled me for contemporary American poetry. The basic organizing factor of contemporary American poetry seems to me to have been the ignorance of this book. "Simple power" is a good phrase for it. Reading it is like drinking cold, clear water. After it, most things American seem too nervous, too baroque, too cynical, too ironic, too self-centered...

I guess my stance might be abjured for a number of reasons. It would be seen as either naive & irrelevant hero-worship, or self-serving one-upmanship. All I can do is refer back to the power of the book itself, and the impact it had on me, for the first time, around 1977.

Passages like this :

"M. told me that in his poem about the singer with the low voice there was a merging of two images: the woman from Leningrad and Marian Anderson [whom he'd heard singing on the radio]. On the day he was composing this poem, I didn't realize he was working, because he was lying quiet as a mouse. Restlessness was the first sign he was working on something, and the second was the moving of his lips. In one poem he says that his lips can never be taken away from him, and that they will still move when he is dead and buried. This has indeed happened."

[see the opening of Stubborn Grew. I don't think I was consciously thinking of Mandelstam when I wrote the first line : "Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay."]

Or this passage :

"The work of the poet, as the vehicle for world harmony, has a social character - that is, it is concerned with the doings of the poet's fellow men, among whom he lives and whose fate he shares. He does not speak 'for them', but with them, nor does he set himself apart from them : otherwise he would not be a source of truth.
"I was always struck by the absolute character of the urge to serve - with and among one's fellow men - as an instrument by which harmony reveals itself. I can understand Shevchenko's lament - which M. appreciated only too well - about the way his poetry would not leave him alone, bringing him nothing but misery and not allowing him to pursue his craft as a painter, the one thing that gave him pleasure. The urge ceases to be felt only when the poet's material begins to run out - that is, when his contact with the world at large is broken and he no longer hears his fellow men or lives with them. There can be no poetry without such contact, which is the source of the poet's sense of 'rightness'."

The "absolute character of the urge to serve" as an "instrument by which harmony reveals itself". Good will, in other words. Good will & the vocation of the poet. This is very simple & profound & 'right'. [quotes taken from translation by Max Hayward, edition publ. by Modern Library]

& I guess I was somewhat prepared for the simple power of this book by prior intensive reading (roughly 1973-1977) of... the Bible.

Yes, it's interesting to (boring old) me to think that the architectural-numerical dimension started also (along with so much else) with Mandelstam. He wrote several poems about buildings, and Omry Ronen (Approach to Mandelstam) outlined some of the complex internal architecture in two of his longer odes. This is what got me started down that path. It's such a big part of traditional writing, but 20th-cent. & contemporary poets don't seem to go there much.

In writing various long poems over the last 15 years I've found that the numerical calculations & structuring are very helpful, they become part of the thinking/planning process, they mesh with the subject-matter in various ways... I find these "rhymes", which serve to synthesize my own private experience with other things...

Music - architecture - poetry. Keeps the wrangling litter-world at bay.

I wrote a few days ago about seeing Forth of July as a sort of counterpoint to Pound's Cantos. Forth of July is actually an enormous bubble of rhyme-joy... full of oddities... one of which is a minor thread raveling together Scythia, Sarmatia, King Arthur, Mandelstam...

& as I was looking around while composing those comments to Stephen Burt's piece, I came upon this Wikipedia entry.

The "Scythian" theme is real in Petersburg poetry. Blok has a famous poem , "The Scythians", on the advent of the Revolution.

Ossetia, and the Ossetian language, descend from ancient Scythia, which Herodotus called "the land of the Gerrhi" (see modern day Gori, in Georgia, focus of recent headlines).

Mandelstam set himself "like flint" against Stalin. The priest-kings are still battling for the golden bough in the sacred wood. One of his poems identifies poetry with the free, full-throated song of horsemen bringing children to their wedding. His Stalin epigram, on the other hand, mocks the "barrel-chested Ossete". Here's a passage from July, the 3rd bk of Forth of July :

 He spoke awhile   and was quiet awhile
 and I heard a Scythian golden horde
 thundering in the distance  drone
 of trumpets   pounding hoofs   the tinkling

  
 of tiny earrings   rustling gowns   robes
 awash with pendants jingling   so far
 so small now   in the infinite   raft
 of grassland   horsemen, sober

  
 bringing the children to their wedding
 with clear-eyed   innocent song
 full-chested   doubleyoudoubleyou   gone
 by   invisible now   up into the air   like dew

  
 toward a mound of earth   in Gerrhus
 in the land of Gerrhi   where clovers grow
 quatrefoil   one urn   one lucky seven   worked
 from soil beside   great rivers   &   one Suger-bee

Had some things to say about Mandelstam yesterday, in the comments thread to Stephen Burt's article on Pindar & the Olympics.

Was wondering how to write a Pindaric ode about the 29th Games, when I ran into Stephen's essay...

Dog days at the old HG blog. Enjoying being done with Fontegaia poem. Trying to re-evaluate things, write or not-write in a different way.

Reading Christian Moevs' great book again, Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy. & Richard Farina, Been down so long it seems like up to me. I feel like I met each one of his (fictional) characters back in the 60s.

Whenever I'm in one of these transitional phases, I start thinking about Mandelstam again. My quirks & obsessions.

M's Voronezh poems at a certain time (10 yrs ago) not only gave me some ideas, "themes". Something in the tone of those poems set me free from my own hesitations, over-conceptualizing. A kind of cozy mumbling, gemutlichkeit. A sweetness. "My sadness is luminous" (Pushkin). Permission to improvise (for better & worse, I guess). That was the beginning of 10,000 quatrains.

Perfect summer day here, walking around on coffee break... have been through these "self-evaluations" before (see previous post). 10 yrs ago, when the qua-train started down the track, it was Mandelstam who provided the antidote to that same obscurity he had previously helped set in motion... his last poems, from Voronezh - fusion of that image-music with clear expression of real landscape, the "black earth"... listening to that, & connecting it suddenly with Orpheus-Eurydice-Persephone story, I was able to come up with a plot... & a sequence of poems really set in time & place & history (Stubborn Grew...).

40 years, today. 4/4. 44 is ancient Chinese number for "death".

Wrote here recently that "Life is drama." One thematic trend of recent Fontegaia alignment... I'm trying to evoke the notion that history, time & reality have already been sacramentalized, made sacred (through love, devotion, sacrifice). History = sacred theater. This is the kind of public feeling which emanates from "memorial days" like today.

(Mandelstam wrote about this, in his essay "Pushkin & Scriabin". Western art set utterly free, paradoxically, by a prior sacrifice.)

*

Writing these days feels like fresco-painting. I use a Neo - a simple keyboard designed for schoolchildren. Looks like a Stealth bomber.

Paper I would work on if I had time, energy & presence of mind...

something about Russian-Petersburg cultural history - 18th & 19th century currents of liberal democracy & republicanism - Pushkinian background in Nabokov, Mandelstam - and certain aspects of Acmeism & early 20th-cent. Petersburg poetry (as developed mostly by Mandelstam, Gumilev, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva) which assimilate these liberal trends, and try to blend them with older (medieval, Muskovite, Orthodox) traditions - thinking here of M's essay "Pushkin and Scriabin", where he sketches (very briefly) ideas about the "inner freedom" of Christian art in the West as being rooted in the historical fact of the Redemption - also the allegiance of the Acmeists to earthly, historical actuality & beauty (as opposed to the otherworldliness and spiritual detachment of Symbolism) - there is an analogy or kinship suggested there (in Acmeism) between spiritual, artistic and political freedom - & these impulses are evident (if often highly camouflaged) also in much of Nabokov -

- then about how my own development as a writer seems to find its historical ground & actuality, paradoxically, in these Petersburg writers, with whom I've been engaged off & on now for 40 years or so - ever since I got infected by my mother's enthusiasm for Nabokov (she tried to read everything he wrote) back in high school - the last short story I wrote in high school was a kind of proto-Nabokovian elegy for high school (which included a section in which the narrator & friends "re-enact" scenes from War & Peace in a snowy Minneapolis city park) - & probably beginning even earlier, with the affinities between Russian & northern Minnesotan & Ontario landscapes, where I spent so much time back then -

I suppose the epitaphic sensibility of Paul Fry et al., and Mandelstam's Acmeist notion of "domestic hellenism", could be seen as contrasting counterparts. Where Fry regards literature as an emanation from our non-human roots, Mandelstam understands poetry as an active labor of humanization. I suppose they're two faces of the same coin (see M's "Pindaric Fragment").

Christ's Promethean "I have come to cast fire upon the earth" gets domesticated beside the primordial Greek-Russian rustic hearth (the kitchen stove, a sacred object in those latitudes). The poet's breath breathes on culture and humanizes it, acknowledging with gratitude the (Acmeist) earthly "mansion" - thereby perhaps helping establish the terms of ethical life, or civilization. Brodsky : "Mankind was put on Earth for one purpose : to make civilization"(rough quote from memory). "In Him was light, and the light was the light of men." Nature and the round of life on earth - framed by wisdom to the seasonal, psychic dimensions of human experience & destiny.

Want to get back to poetry... lots of commitments & distractions lately.

Thin scattered thoughts on politics & religion etc. are not enough, irritating.

I know I'm out on a limb - that is, far from the current acceptable climate of opinion among the literary intelligentsia.

Reading interesting book by John MacKay - Inscription and Modernity. Wordsworth, Clare, Baudelaire, & a bunch of Russians (Khlebnikov, Kluiev, Mandelstam especially). From an historicizing left-materialist-Marxist perspective (Barrett Watten is one among many names in the acknowledgements). Interesting to see Mandelstam's Acmeism and "domestic hellenism" taken seriously from this perspective.

I know that in my occasional informal attempts to align or echo Acmeism/Futurism with "me"/post-avant-langpo, I have oversimplified Mandelstam. Also, much of the OM criticism over the decades has emphasized his victimhood, as part of an anti-Soviet polemic. MacKay, on the other hand, looks at Acmeism as not at all nostalgic/reactionary, but as a secularizing, materialist-humanist vision; and MacKay's interpretation of M's deep interest in language and "the Word as such" takes on an almost proto-"language poetry" cast. It would be interesting to contrast this viewpoint with that of Elena Corrigan (Mandelshtam's Poetics). M's critical writing is rich and complex, & can sustain opposing perspectives; there are passages which contradict MacKay's general position ("the Word is Psyche"; the "double strand" of the "verbal material" and the "poetic impulse"; etc.)

In general, MacKay's close readings seem to me both politically tendentious (based on several familiar socio-historical assumptions of left "critique") and very sensitive & discerning. His analysis of Mandelstam's concept of the perpetual renewal and invigoration of ancient poetic language is probing and evocative : inspiring, actually.

I love this brief sentence of Mandelstam's, which seems the best answer to the whole enormous Assyrian pile of 20th-century show-biz materialist-objective poetry construction projects :

"The Word is Psyche."

It occurred to me last night that someone could write a scholarly piece on Mandelstam's oeuvre as a commentary on Pushkin's final testamentary poem, "Exegi Monumentum" (see translation here - the last poem in the group). Poem as complex architecture. Architecture as freedom-in-history, autonomy.

But as I read through the group of Pushkin translations, I was struck by their transparency, directness, simplicity, forcefulness. I got jealous, mired as I am in long-poem obliquities. (Henry jealous of Pushkin. Oh boy.)

Remember many a 90s debate on Buffalo poetics list about stylistic clarity & social engagement. & had to remind myself that I've written many a short poem, too.

Temperament, character, conscience, engagement... & an idea of poetry as written for people at large, the unknown reader. Not poetry for Poetry Empire. Distance, detachment from all that. Free-standing.

There's a method to my madness (& vice versa).

The gnarly, devious, rhymy-rheumy quatrains form a wall from which I toot my independent trumpet. Stand back - I'm having a fit.

They owe something (forever) to Mandelshtam's Voronezh poems.

The method owes something to Nicolas Cusanus's Game of Spheres (9 circles & an asymmetrical wooden ball).

I'm building a labyrinth to hold Theseus & Minotaur, Daedalus & Icarus. And the reader.

Fonte Gaia... rivers & streams run through all my run-on poems of the last 10 years. Maybe now I'm reaching the source (an old Italian fountain).

I'd like to be a successful writer someday, but for the time being I'm fascinated with the trumpeting, shapely otherness of poetry. It's good to be working in the Outer Limits, despised, ignored, condescended-to, defamed, etc. As long as I can stand it. (The Goulds of my tribe are known to be a very, very stubborn bunch. & I'm right in there with 'em.)

I work in humble isolation at the edge of despair. I don't despise other poets or the literary scene - no, I want to be part of it. But on my own terms.

I'm not publishing my poems to the blog simply to be different, or to take the easy path to dissemination. I'm well aware that people don't really want to read poems blasted out over the internet - that the sensible thing is to work patiently behind the scenes & then look for a publisher. The trouble is, I'm not sensible. & it's a serial poem I'm working on. & putting it on the blog has become part of my habit of composition. (That may change overnight, who knows...)

Link between Ariosto & ancient chansons de geste. Cinque Canti ends with disaster for Charlemagne. Echoes that ur-chanson, the Chanson de Roland (many of Ariosto's characters - in both Cinque Canti & Orlando Furioso - are drawn from the geste-legends around Charlemagne).

Mandelstam, in Voronezh, was reading Old French epics about Guillaume d'Orange (ie. Guillem de Gellone), one of Charlemagne's officers.

What does all this have to do with anything?

Good question. I dunno.

The atmosphere in some of these poems is one of anxiety & dread. One of their pervasive themes is the conflict (& the interrelations) between Islam & Christendom. Very old things & very new things - & old threads taken up from poet to poet.

Plus reading this kind of thing helps me avoid my contemporaries & the youngsters.

[Plus - & I'm sorry to repeat myself - I can trace my ancestry through my maternal grandmother's family back to Guillem de Gellone.]

The Crane thing, I know, seems a trifle obsessive or recherche. In the panoptic view, hey, look at all them poets! But I don't have a panoptical. "My Hart" is a part of my own program.

It began, it seems, with that chance find of Mandelstam in the bookstore back in '77 or so (David McDuff translation). Leibnizian monad of verbal image, detaching itself... (see OM's "Conv. About Dante" - where he talks about images in terms of aeronautics - images flying off from other images).

Strongly ecphrastic imagination. Verbal icon. The compact elegant phrase - like those Ecuadoran birds that sing with their wings. Nucleus of poems. "The Bridge" as exponential expansion of this process - the free-floating resonant image. Atlantis - hold thy floating singer late!

This image-making power in conjunction with epic scope & national ambition. How it cross-cuts the other & contemporary long poem projects. This I find fascinating. This I've built on in my Crane-Mandelstam US-RUS amalgam (Forth of July).