Ravenna Diagram Reading Guide #3

Notes for the long poem, continued.  Please refer to previous post for clarification on this project.

RAVENNA DIAGRAM READING NOTES #3

“UP NORTH” (p.5)

Change of scene.  In stanzas 1-3, description of wilderness lake (Vermilion) in northern Minnesota.  “Mnemosyne Point” : poet’s mother (Mary Ravlin Gould) christened family camping area after keynote word from Nabokov.

“Time’s wooden (4th

grade) ruler.  Not to break.” :  obscure reference to the history-pattern of the poem (contra Pound) outlined in the “preliminaries” section of these notes.  Pun on “wooden... ruler” : the metaphysical “ruler” (“King of Kings”) rules from “fleet of ragged little cedars” – or from the Cross.  Establishing hegemonic chronology (B.C.-A.D.) of western culture.

Also : the simple childhood memory (mnemosyne).  The wooden 4th-grade school ruler.

“Placeness of quiet places” : in this stanza the northern MN landscape is merged with the imagined landscape around Ravenna (cedar, pine swamps near ocean).

“One saturnine pedestrian” : Dante, also Mandelstam (who wrote about Dante’s “long walks”)

“snowbound wedding band” : Dante’s Commedia correlates, interrelates human and divine Love – the Orphic “wedding” with Beatrice (& divinity) in the Paradisal afterlife.

“stream’s bright ford” : the poetic “stream” is the passage between the two realms.

after looking at Joan Mitchell paintings

SIMPLE BUBBLE

The battle for the blank white page.

To start anew, Joan.

Pale-bright field of corn

shaded by grey to black paint.  Rage?

Minnesota summer wheat

outside New Ulm.

Bohemian hum

of Anton Gàg?  Felt like defeat

for everyone.  Hungry Dakotas,

heimlich Bavarians...

local George Washingtons

banked on cheap lots (take theirs).

Everybody trying to shill Big George

back in redcoat London.

Not to be outdone,

Tidewater gents – that’s our land, by George!

Learn some Narragansett, maybe.

Milton did – from Roger,

one hot frozen winter.

To love, not to betray, your neighbor?

Somebody tell me how to get from here

to there, America.

Too used to being honcho

number one?  Come to shore;

wash in water.  À bas.  Restore.

The level’s golden measure,

simple bubble of air...

sea’s middle C, beyond all war.

10.13.18

the family woodpecker

STEEP RAVINE

Quiet today along the river.

In the steep ravine, only

the Morse drum-talky

of the family Woodpecker

interrogates the oaks with hollow

query.  Where are you,

worm?  Job’s blue.

Ice-packed for the long, Nile-slow

Egyptian winter, thick with Pharaoh-

dolour, pyramidical –

ridiculous cyclical

suffering, encased in snow.

It’s not his fault, & he will tell you so.

O, if these canyons were

only in a book!  We’re

leaving – desiccated, delicate.  Don’t go.

The poet has her humors – she’s

devoted to them, wholly.

Lear’s wise Fool, she’ll

follow Boaz carrying the heaves

out loud, in sheaves.  The polis, too,

be uncobbled knowledge.  What

vaguely familial knot

of rivals, bickering horseshoe

favors for grubs, is this?

Not Man-Eat-Too-Much

or Minotaur – no, such

rapacity’s reserved for the abyss

                *

of Pole Star Netherworld (Étoile

du Nord).  Little Crow

stood there, y’know –

with the Red Wing clan, in a potted bowl

of leers.  Stood with the scapegoat

as a prophet should – charisma

whirling in the twister-eye

(magenta bronze, the serpent-calumet).

Who sees him sky-hole in this mess?

Light imperturbable

as Mississippi burble

through a transparent lamb-lattice –

the holeness of that holy garment

parti-colored Joseph wore,

shellacquered semaphore

way under limestone sediment

of painful jealousies & wounded hate.

Her singular vocation,

musing on desolation

til scarred earth-pangs abate –

bored by a dream of early days.

Canoe of Camelot,

Lake-Lady’s thunder-knot...

the old bare dance, woodpecker maze

of placid Oak-Gal Day – a writ of spring

(St. Vitus 1913

Paris Corn Maiden)

that joins Creation to Thanksgiving.

3.9.17

Princess K of the Milky Way

MORNING CAVE

Late August.  Royal touch of autumn.

Comfortable king

of tenderness, bring

me down to your brown river once again.

The cottonwoods are silver-green

but turning gold.  A monarch

speeds black-orange – sparks

up the path, to vanishment (unseen

morpho-sprint).  My chunk of lumber

floats off too.  Fine meteor

pumice, sanded to pearl –

gray weathered pebble, unknown soldier...

The State Fair’s starting up today.

Princess K of the Milky

Way will crownèd be.

Black milk of bitter history

we sipped... fed roots of almond tree.

Cryptic redemption

on knife’s edge... Raven

remembers (Hazel, breathing free).

The King of Milk is by the riverside.

He washes memories

like Papa’s hand – a breeze

murmuring, Everything’s OK.  I sighed.

A child is comforted.  The Earth

will be.  Like Magdalen

or Beatrice – when the sun

colors a morning cave (in Nazareth).

8.25.16

steady seasonal work

LITTLE STORIES

                                       Jim Northrup, 1943-2016

The dead cottonwood leans its broken fork

like a Y-brace against

the live cottonwood.  Who’s

helping whom?  The river’s work

is steady, seasonal... flows

nearby.  Past Fort Snelling

like a hurt knee – swelling

strong west branch waters,

Dakota memory.  The boarding school

in Pipestone, pushing English

like a Ghost Dance wish

across calumet plains.  Clouds pool

like smoke under their limitless

blue dome.  The little stories

join hands – morning glories

vining indigo blooms... a sky-caress

out of heavy red clay.  She will go

with you to the Happy Land

her canoe made of almond

joy heartbeats, in waves.  I know

where I’m going... just a change of address.

The flower of a smile

blooms out of dust – the trial

just a test of loving (wilderness).

You’ll find the carnation in a sailor’s

chest, the rose in a worn

lapel.  So being born

will ride the swell, through locks, through doors.

8.8.16

*for more information about Jim Northrup, see today's NY Times obituary

Minnehaha's moccasin

SPIRIT-WOOD

                             i.m. Edward Lewis Peckham

Step lightly in my mother’s house,

whispered a tiny elf

named ELP – himself

a watercolorist (a yellow lady’s

slipper’s footprint left the forest

on this day).  Cypripedia

reginae – Minnehaha’s

moccasin – graced this wilderness

as well, making a pair for Joy

& Beauty (graces

almost three).  Time paces

seasoned out of winter, so employ

your dancing shoes, fiery Hiawatha –

roll like Polar Bear

around that pinpoint star,

sing like a loon, like your happy

father (Thalia-glad).  Nature

& Manitou join hands;

a Turtledove blends

sea-sounds, all about green Eire;

urn burials, gardens of Sirius

swim synchronizing

rhombs on monarch wings

(a rugged Paradise for ladybugs)...

one dance-call through spirit-wood

or jadestone flute

sows dreams of Camelot

(like waves of wheat around a vineyard).

6.9.16

*Note : Edward Lewis Peckham, Rhode Island artist and naturalist, painted a watercolor of Cypripedium parviflorum - Yellow Lady's Slipper - on this day in 1866, 150 years ago.  See illustration here from the Rhode Island Historical Society.

In a Scattergood world

PURE SOUND

                              i.m. Robert Treuer

Back East, in Rhode Island, the big snow

coming.  Thinking of William

Blackstone, hermit-pilgrim – the

one who went to live with Miantonomi

& the other red-men.  To the House

of 4 Pines – under

cartouche of Little Bear,

North Star.  Out of Nazi Austria

sped a peregrine, by grace of God

& pity of strange braves

(Scattergood saviors,

anonymous donors... meek just good).

To a tree farm he fostered (in remote

forest).  Led into circle

of silent First People,

tending ashes (sitting shiva).  Little

prow of acacia, rocking near Itasca-

Nile... your upside-down

fire-drill will drown its

candle in stony Minnehaha.

Sigh, winging out into grey sound

(b-flat at midnight).

The musicologist

from Florence mutters back to ground

just so – back to the pigeon-clay

of primordial, steadfast

Bee (until the last

dragon of Sheol fades away).

1.22.16

Cirque Planetaire

UPSTART HILLS

Gray coal cars thunder monotonously

across an old iron bridge.

Only a local image

in midwestern bleak.  Your poem will be

allegorical, of necessity

since an Earth so various

is only one of a series

on parade (sparkling panoply

du Cirque Planetaire).  Italian sun

is as a brazen shield

above scarred poppy field;

the moon a candle in Pavian dungeon...

Poema Sacra, Dante’s testament

è tutto didascalico –

a climber’s manual (to go

from shady gloom to cheerful summit

of Rose Mountain splendor).  My sun

rides low in winter sky,

chanting How Not to Die

in plain & soulful Minnesotan

(Ojibwa).  The dream of history

breaks open at its heart.

All-human upstart

hills (Superior, or Tuscany)

fill nets of silver phosphor –

your soul’s a philosopher

in love with twin Mirror

Lakes (Justitia, Amor).

1.13.16

California lovebeats

MELODIOUS EMBLEM

Dante paced the perimeter of Florence

with mumbling gravitas

& halting step.  He was

building a grainy microcosm, dense

as diamond, light as linden leaf;

light as this Minnesota

snowfall (speechless alpha

blanketing state fairgrounds beef

– bandstand omega).  Orientation

toward North Star becomes

entangled with kingdoms

of heaven, world – a mule’s way station

to a Gold Rush claim, staked down at last

in San Francisco (keystone

of stark orange span).

A vortex (raven-blonde, vertiginous)

immurèd round painful iconic pair;

a song of songe (statute

of liberty) no more astute

than any lovebeat California dreamer

in midsummer.  Melodious emblem

for those deeper waters

(azure heights) that course

around foundations... Jerusalem

temple under Roman beams, arch

that forms the tensile wing

of eaglet eyrie (singing

scroll)... knife-edge of Raven-church.

12.28.15

The mast is dogwood too

The long poem is a curious thing, just going along one can find oneself both inside and outside, like those M.C. Escher reversible mirror-steps.  Step by step I stumble down my wheaty way.  Moving back to Minnesota soon - thinking about the limestone there, & Adrian Stokes' ideas about carving in art, how it merges the figure with the limestone ground, brings them into a watery-stony symbiosis...

FERRARA MIRROR

If I fade into the low relief

of Minnesota limestone

hedgerow cliffs – a zone

of Ice Age gypsy moths (brief

lives of dashing hummingbirds

& wingèd Peacock Angels

fixed in river-angled

banks of sediment) – my words

would bend into the grain, grow

rude & wooden – like

that bridge or flood-dike

scored by slashing Viking prow...

you’ll read about it in the paper.

World events (Pope

Francis Whirring Hopeful

Wings – Blood Moon a Rusty Copper

Penny – Putin Barricades

Himself in Alabama)

refract in your Ferrara

mirror (juvenescent shades

of gaiety & heartbreak, green

& bronze between twin cypress

ribs).  My wilderness

a Mendelssohn continuum (scene

from the window of a Roman train).

The mast is dogwood too,

Mama – I made it for you

all by myself.  The rain in Spain...

9.29.15

Erica's "Ferrara" cabinet

Look at the canoe

BRIGHT GAL

        “Look instead at the canoe, I beg you, and observe 

        its honesty, dignity, and moral courage...”

                   – The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

The last full drop of summer sun

plays out across a falling

garden.  Dogwood, shedding

scarlet berries, rattles in

cool air.  Leaving Lil’ Rhody soon

(for North Star State).  Exile

is a state of, meanwhile.

Yom Kippur whispers repent, atone;

Francis in Washington lifts up

his rod of Aaron (bloom

of magnanimity &

doom).  A star from David’s cap

came forth... a cedar replica

from Lebanon – like Wanda’s

wand (the State Fair Queen,

robed in golden Land o’Lakes

boxim (within more boxim)) -

aimed, centripetal,

toward glimmer-portal

of the Milky Way.  The little foxes

all stacked up, O my beloved.

Monarch is an imago

out of the cocoon

of long ago.   A turtledove,

the El of El – Francesco

out of San Francisco – ark

within an arc of light, or

Galilean galaxy (an Okie oak).

9.23.15

Something rich & strange

RIVER STREET

                                      i.m. Edwin Honig

That Bluejay with a raven on

his shoulder, that trickster

was a local fixture –

like cornered kid on stony Roman

pavement, Maggie.  Now you see him

in your mind’s eye, whom you knew

from streamy childhood (blue

was the mussel surf, where the Rephilim

stamped a sweet circumference

with giant feet). & Babe

the Blue Ox, & Gabriel

w’hm seraphim, & the fish fragrance

of White Bear Lake (miroir today)...

all the waters in the world

seem to coalesce now, pearled

to a cedar point of windy memory.

Only the shrill cree-crow of the tall

iron swing on River Street

reminds you of the weight

of all that autumn.  One free fall...

Weigh, anchor.  To the bottom you shall go,

infant infantryman –

loaded with diamond

mondiale.  A Seekonk conch will carry you

across her retina’s black sail, into

the womb of Imago.

Full fado five... just so,

Pessoa.  La vida es sueño.  Ephphatha.

9.4.15

Paul Bunyan & Babe the Blue Ox

The poem that took the shape of a state

One last memo from Elkhart.... a very old (& now a little revised) "shape poem"

 ARROWHEAD
    
        A
 Maze of lakes in northern Minnesota,
 Crisp air adrift on owl's wings
 Between the wide gray skies
 And fanfare of muted pines;
 Waves lapping, lapping
 Against the riding prow
 Of the motorboat, my dad
 At the tiller, looking
 Out toward shore, quiet,
 His beard grown rough now
 After a weekend in the woods –

 I'm afraid to dive too deep
 Into the scales of the past,
 My callow bones, the large
 Boy head full of springing
 Illusions, upstart to replace
 A sense of imperfection
 With voracious all-devouring
 Enveloping thought – fishline,
 This daily bait of blind birdsong.
 Before you, Iron Range long gone, I
 Will always be that unbound, reedy son.

Spring's on the way (even in Minnesota). An old painting by my mother - 2 old Minnesota babushki. Looks a little Sienese.

reading James Billington, The Icon and the Axe (cultural history of Russia). He goes on about the importance of the forest in the origins of Russian society.

(Occurred to me that Minnesota landscape is a mini-version of Russia. We have our vast lakes, our little lakes, our "twin cities", our Scandinavian "invasion", our rivers, our flat prairie, our immense swamps, our bears, our wolves, and most of all, our little Siberia, the dense cold pine-birch-tamarack forest.) (Not to mention me, the Russian poet from Minneapolis.)

Back from north woods, near Canadian border. Phoebe saw Bigfoot-like bear on hind legs, running. The rest of us heard it. We went the other way.

Have been back since Monday, swamped with office work.

By the perfect in poetry, I don't mean the slick, the mandarin, the pretentious, the complacent, the facile, the superficial, the remote, the archaicizing, the dull, the pedantic, the amateurish, the slack, the obfuscatory, the fake, the bathetic, the saccharine, the pontificatory, the self-righteous, the imitative, the sloppy, the portentous, the glib, the ingratiating, the garrulous, the drab, the mediocre, the demagogic, the ponderous, the vulgar (nor the "dead" either, pace Jordan).

The cultural authority of poetry (as with other art forms) depends on some original synthesis of:

- intellectual penetration (knowledge)
- empathy, humane engagement (feeling)
- beauty, style, precision (art)
- moral insight (ethics)

(their synthesis : evidence of genius, inspiration, Muse)

A critic should evaluate all these elements, and how they combine. The whole equals the poem's specific gravity - a judgement regarding its cultural value.

I've been offering Rest Note read-alongs, so I thought I'd add some emergency obscurity relief comments on the section just posted (#14).

In line with the alternation/ABA/ring-structure I described in previous read-alongs, there's a link between # 14 and a previous section, # 6 (posted here previously, & also over at Alephoebooks).

The ideas cluster around the word "seal". In poem #6, there's an allusion to the royal seal which Hamlet used, on board ship, to outwit his uncle's plan to have him executed. The first stanza of #14 (see below) is a fairly literal description of the Minnesota State Seal (a farmer, plowing, looks over shoulder at Sioux horseman, galloping away). In the background here, too, is Stevens' great late poem, "An Old Man Asleep" - "...the redness of the River R").

Teddy Roosevelt, as recounted in the C. Millard book, dated his own powerful interest in natural history to a childhood visit to the NYC fish market, where he saw a dead baby seal on a plank (I think I've got that right).

So I'm punning on seal - as natural fact, curiosity - and as insignia, representation of authority. Nature (natural law) & custom (positive law).

I understand this is a huge stretch - I mean more in my head than in the poem, as yet.

So what do I mean by the "seal"? It's the "character" - the "type" (as in typesetting) forged by Vulcan (volcanic) fire. It's nature's mortal seal on the particularity of each living creature. Thus the subdued allusions in #14 to Hart Crane's poem "Emblems of Conduct", as well as to Wordsworth's great brief poem which begins "A slumber did my spirit seal". These are in the background here.

Lurking on another level are allusions to Mandelstam & his "emblematic" encounter with Stalin ("wolf-meal" - links an Old English lament & Mandelstam poem about exile; "'star' for star", etc.). The "House of Ice" in #6 is a kind of satire on tyranny as traditional political status quo. Nabokov also lurks in the poem posted previously - #13 (see if you can find him). What I'm groping toward, actually, is a rather Nabokovian notion of a spiritual otherworld, which balances "this" world by means of enigmatic, emblematic, writerly tokens, insignia (cf. that other Hamletian Stephen Dedalus, in Ulysses - "signatures of all things I am here to read", or so it goes, something like that...) (p.s Happy Bloomsday, JayJay, & H.C. Everybody).

(This Nabokov thing runs very deep in me. It comes, I think, from his strong influence on my reading when I was around 13-14. There is a kind of subconscious melding of the vocation of writer with the spirit of Nabokov in my mind : & that, perhaps, is the ghostly imprint of his "character". But I digress...)

There is a sort of continuum being set up between social power (the freight train & its long echo imprinted on the night), TR's presidency as a social symbol, and Crane's symbolic death (becoming "one with the fishes") - going back to the conjunction noted between the date of TR's emergence from the jungle, & the date of Crane's death.

The vague notion presented in these lines is that of a duality between the "body left with Calypso" and, on the other hand, the homing spirit of Ulysses. What remains of the body is an emblem (the "jasper bandolier") - which in turn echoes the "banderole" - the symbolic curtain dividing heaven & earth - mentioned (& noted in the notes) in the opening poem (#1).

It's obvious from these notes that I'm describing an ongoing process of symbolization, which hopefully will become more exact & clear in sections to come... then again, much of the iceberg, in my particular house of ice, remains underwater, implicit - & that's as it should be.

One of the more obscure sections, I guess...

14

 
The hollow hoot of the freight train sets it seal
on a limitless night.  Plowman leans on a line,
glancing over his shoulder (fleeting scene
of red-tipped feathers - Red's farewell).

 
Spirits shuttle to the shady gates (engulfed
in fanes of wheedling arms) and Vulcan sets
the type with rugged characters - Calypso,
Circe; the scalds, the scars.  Wolf-

 
meals, in the blue forest; a rustic war
of mirror-brethren, fixed in their Medusa-
headrest.  Slumber's their insignia :
engravings of engraving, "star" for star.

                                
                   *

 
As you move toward sleep, the leavings of the loom
loom over the deep... over the speechless
limbs.  A boy who wanted to play with dolphins
feeds the sharks (its name, its doom).

 
He frets your opulent asides, the festal
trumpetings, the wails of whales; you feel
closer to home, Ulysses, as you steal
a green wink from the morbid burial's

 
abiding score.  You left his earthy body
on Calypso's shore, and for Penelope
you clipped his jasper bandolier (she
toys with it in the grass... tombs it away).

  
Spring is in the air today.

RR bridge over Mississippi at Twin Cities