The whole race is a poet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

design by Joachim of Fiore

What thou lovest well

Have been reading about art lately.  Adrian Stokes, author/artist, fused a psychoanalytic approach (via Melanie Klein) with a deep knowledge of Renaissance sculpture & painting.  (Came to this discovery by way of a stray tweet by Jeremy Noel-Tod, about a Carcanet book he had edited, collected poems by R.F. Langley, a British poet much influenced by Stokes.  All this has been delightful new territory for me.)

It has some relevance to my latest unrealistic writing project, Ravenna Diagram, which has something to do in places with triangulating Venice-Rimini-Ravenna.  Ezra Pound is buried in Venice; Dante is buried in Ravenna; and both Pound & Stokes were fascinated with Rimini. (I guess they also crossed paths at some point.)

So these recent preoccupations of mine coincided with the latest ISIS atrocity in Syria, the murder of Khalid al-Asaad, longtime director of antiquities in Palmyra.

Asaad's devoted life & iconic death reminded me of some remarks by Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, about how a person's death somehow sums up and defines their life.  This was certainly true in his own case : Mandelstam died a victim of a personal vendetta by another Osip (his evil twin), Joseph Stalin - after Mandelstam had written a brief satirical poem featuring Stalin as its target.  Not a prudent thing to do in 1930's Russia (nor in today's Russia either, as a matter of fact).  Yet Mandelstam had a commitment to something beyond his personal survival.  As did Khalid al-Asaad.  This is perhaps the "true" form of martyrdom, which, unlike the standard model popular today, does not require the mass murder of innocent bystanders in order to achieve its glorified apotheosis in Paradise.  No, you only have to give up your own life.

Melanie Klein's neo-Freudian psychology focuses on childhood development.  The personality of the  infant & very young child is shaped by a dynamic & dramatic relation with the nurturing & distanced mother : Klein (& Stokes as well) reads deeply into adult experience grounded in this primal & primary & ambivalent/conflicted relationship.

For Stokes, art presents models of human victory & plenitude, through the integrations of these subconscious conflicts by way of the hard-won justification of the beautiful (the work of the artist).

In view of some such angle of vision, the depredations of ISIS against anything that threatens their "control of the narrative" comes across as the panic of the child who has rejected his mother.  Maybe Judaism & paganism & Christianity, the whole Syrian melting-pot out of which Islam emerged in the first place (in about the 7th century) comes across as a subconscious feminine threat, from the vewpoint of fundamentalist (Saudi, Salafist, ISIS) Islam.  I don't know, maybe ISIS is frightened of the Jewish mother against which it has gone to irrevocable war.

Judaism and Christianity have also fostered similar strains of iconoclastic rejection of art and images. After all, one of the Ten Commandments prohibits the making of any "graven images" of Yahweh.  The idols of the pagans, in the eyes of monotheism, are regarded as wooden follies of darkened minds.  Scriptural Puritanism rejected medieval Catholicism on similar grounds.  ISIS simply takes this direction to its "logical" conclusion : all art is verboten, all art is from the "infidel".

I wonder what images they see when they sleep at night, if they are able to sleep at night.  Do they ever see their mothers in their dreams?  Or perhaps they glimpse fleeting snapshots of the mothers of the "kaffir" young women they have enslaved and violated?  Maybe they don't need to sleep.  They can thrive, momentarily, on their canned & indoctrinated daydreams of paradise.  Livin' the propaganda dream, courtesy of their cynical Ba'athist warlords.  (Ba'athism, by the way, modeled its modus operandi on Stalinism.  Stalin was one of Saddam Hussein's heroes.)

My own particular confessional tradition has to do with the Incarnation, the appearance of God as Man, in the body, in one particular place & time - so I am inexorably committed to the idolatry of physical timebound mortal earthly existence & all its consequences.  This does not put me in good stead with the extreme iconoclasts of whatever theological persuasion.  I would rather stand with Khalid al-Asaad, devoted as he was to some local piles of classical statues & pillars & broken ancient ruins.  His devotion & his death reminded me of some lines of another fanatic old codger, Ezra Pound (from Canto LXXXI) :

What thou lovest well remains,

                                                  the rest is dross

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage

Whose world, or mine or theirs

                                            or is it of none?

First came the seen, then thus the palpable

        Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,

What thou lovest well is thy true heritage

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

I am the Goat

Ours is a golden age of verbosity and explanation.  There is a very smart geek or robot or app for every verbal tic.  I, Blogger, am a part of the slough.

I certainly love music and musicians, but I think I love painters even more.  Why?  It seems more awkward, excruciating and difficult (maybe because I am more of a musician myself).  It seems even more anti-verbal than music.  Painters are famously inarticulate, no matter that they are makers of signs, semioticians par excellence.

My 60-odd year career in poetry swamp might possibly subsist on a few basic touchstones - patterns which survive the various zigs & zags of enthusiasm & commitment.  One of these touchstones is ut pictura poiesis.

My mother in her heyday was mainly a painter, a potter, a maker of images.  & also a reader & a storyteller (to children such as myself).

Three poets who quickened me most surely & steadily : Guillaume Apollinaire, John Ashbery, Osip Mandelstam.

Painting the image.  The sonic image.  The mysterious fanfare.

I feel very strongly that the contemporary whatnot scene, the global blabbateria & confessional cannibal-fest, the photo-shoot, the selfie-group love-yogurt hut, the total hug machine & forthright commitment speechification party, the holy us-v.-them war, has very little to do with poetry, no matter how much it has to do with humanity.  Ut pictura poiesis in this environment is a way of stepping back a little.  The otherness will jar slightly with your Community Jar - but without otherness there is no togetherness, right?  Every schedule needs a goat.  I am the goat.

Telling it slant.  Telling it so slant you don't get it.  You just gonna have to look & listen for a while, like Oblomov lying in a Russian wheatfield.  Life is larger than Tolstoy, according to Tolstoy.

You are not going to "get" my poetry, America.  Summer is here.  Go jump in a lake.

MASON’S PIN

The gray underside of these

dogwood leaves, clustered

over my head.  The blistered,

lingering pussy willow.  Evening’s

repose à Providence, which I

must exit before long.

Into the slough I’m diving...

weedy heartland (lake country).

Roger Williams’ apple-root,

Blackstone’s Yellow Sweeting

will remain.  A meeting

at Swan Point – starry circuit,

milky wheel (Pappy’s birthday

pivots on your mother’s

grave).  Some Vladimir’s

renunciation – icon of clay

starfish, her lambswool tracery

around a baptistry –

Boethius in ecstasy

after the rack is rolled away.

Uncle Henry weaves his spiderweb

out of one gold strand

of maidenhair.  Trebizond

cell for Guillem, Maximus – ebb-

tide for violence, with violins.

A child skips over granite.

Spinning, inviolate

djinn, dynamic Virgo (mason’s pin).

  6.29.15

MRG, painter, potter

Nostalgia for world culture

Quick stray thoughts tonight... Osip Mandelstam once defined the impulse of the Acmeist movement (early 20th cent. Russian poetry) as "nostalgia for world culture."  Nostalgia for world culture.  Implying that "world culture" once existed (or still existed, elsewhere).  But then Acmeism also promoted a Bergsonian, anachronistic anti-sense of Time - what was deep in the past (Ovid, Dante) was actually calling to us from the future.  (In this he may have been attempting to one-up the contemporary Futurist movement, among other things.)

But what would be a real world culture?  A global culture, life-supporting, life-enhancing, humane, refined, playful.  Not the world as we know it today... but maybe an aspiration.

Then again one way of thinking of culture is as an inherently parasitic lichen-like growth.  Culture is opportunist.  For example, the culture of the "divine king", established around the world in various phases & formations - the culture of powerful rulers and autocrats, with their enormous suction machines for collecting & channeling the labor of millions of slaves (see : pyramids) - the culture of royal power might be seen as a defense mechanism of the kings themselves.  A survival mechanism, in other words, insinuated into society by the rulers, to protect themselves from being divided up and eaten, tossed about in communal games, by the whole peon mass of the tribe itself (see A.M. Hocart's Kings and Councillors for a consideration of such phenomena).

Then imagine that the speedy vine-growth of culture takes another world-historical bend, once the ziggurat of royal power & totalitarian government reaches its apex : I mean the turn toward apocalyptic messianism (see Norman Cohn's classic study of the Iranian-Zoroastrian roots of same, Cosmos, chaos & the world to come).  Here religious thinking happens upon a viral antidote to overweening political power : the idea of the return of the God-King - the uber-King, the "King of Kings", who will finally put the tyrants in their place (like Yurtle the Turtle, at the bottom of the pond).

I think of these parasitic culture-shifts as edge-phenomena, happening on the margins of something even deeper & more invisible & slow.  I'm thinking of the historical project of "species-Man", homo sapiens, seeking equilibrium.  Humankind is still building the conceptual house which is truly life-enhancing, lovable, livable.  This, as it happens, is another theme which turns up in Mandelstam's version of Acmeism : the idea that poetry has a role to play in the human project to "domesticate" life on earth.  "Domestic hellenism", he called it.

What would be a really "domestic" global culture?  Livable, lovable, familial, gemutlich?  It would have to involve the old English theme of liberty - the freedom from encroachment by tyrannical government.  But, on the other side, it would also have to involve something beyond pure individualism : the active engagement in the common good, the commonweal, the welfare of the whole community.  (These are, you may have noticed, the primal ideals, respectively, of the two major political parties in the U.S. - yet how sadly & stupidly & rigidly & uselessly & backwardly & corruptly & blindly & dogmatically & inflexibly they have worked themselves out in the electoral process.)

What's really needed in order to stimulate Mandelstam's "world culture" - what's required at the most basic level of conception - is a spiritual orientation.  Pope Francis, it seems to me, is saying some of the right things in that direction.  The "poor church" is the global house we share.  The spiritual attitude is one that sets aside narrow pleasures & greedy ambitions & haughty pride on behalf of a sense of wholeness : a "gratitude for existence" (another Brodskian, Gumilevian, Mandelshtamian theme).

How is this possible?  I'm not an advocate by any means of any kind of theocracy : don't get me wrong.  Rather I am talking about something much more basic, simple, and primitive - the kind of childlike faith represented by the original St. Francis.  How can we live in the global house if we cannot trust in the benevolent love of the Spirit that formed & created it all?  How can we build a future without a sense of being "at home" in the universe?  I think of Jesus, the first "son" of God, as playing the middle C on the piano, of a major chord of affirmation - of union with the source of Being.  Francis only echoed the same.  "Unless you turn & become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

Granted much of this will strike many as idiocy or ideology, or both.  So be it.  The poet represents a "nostalgia for world culture".  As such he or she represents a link in the spine of historical time - a time working itself out in the human sense of reality & possibility.  The poet's vision is grounded in harmony, triggered by a basic sense of wonder : of wonder at all that exists, majestically, from nothing at all.

The personal, subjective & familial love we experience among ordinary friends, strangers, & family, might someday be echoed & reinforced by culture at large - & this might, actually, be a return to "Nature" itself - the natural cosmos stamped by the seal of divine Providence.  "The Son of Man is coming, & he will restore all things."  O ye of little faith!  Sursum corda.