Friends, this is a diary, a journal, a record of stray thoughts, not some kind of formal essay or academic discourse. I guess that's obvious to everyone... I just want to reiterate this apologia, since today I might really wander in my ramblings.
Tomorrow, 12.21.2012, the ancient, subtle Mayan calendar goes into rewind. But the world ended last week for 28 people - children, teachers, a mother, and one young suicidal murderer. A whole town and nation have been draped in mourning black. Tomorrow the bells of the National Cathedral in Washington (epicenter of a new gun-control movement) will ring 28 times - once for each person, once for each of these violent deaths.
Maybe - we can only hope - this traumatic event will signal a new era, marked by stronger curbs on these killing machines.
Forgive me now for a seemingly detached, arcane aside. The number 28 became important to me this year, in the course of composing and finally finishing a long poem, Lanthanum.
Numbers in ancient times and cultures had a symbolic, even aesthetic value, which has been replaced in the modern era by an emphasis on pure calculation (mathematical, scientific, statistical...). But poetry is (or can be) a kind of throwback to old days - when "numbers" was a synonym or term of art for verse, when counting and rhythm were essential to poetry and mnemonics. In the early '90s my own work was inspired by Alastair Fowler's studies of numerology in ancient, medieval and renaissance poetry. I became fascinated with the symbolic/artistic potential of the "architectural" design of poetry. The process of number-design seemed to go hand-in-hand with the other elements involved in writing a long poem (theme, plot, etc.).
Symbolically, 28 is a "moon" number - a pattern of the lunar (monthly) calendar. This may partly explain the centrality of this number for some Native American tribes : Black Elk, for example, emphasized its importance, noting how the circular tepee used in Dakota Sun-Dance ceremonies was always constructed with 28 poles.
Quite a bit of my poetry has been influenced by Native American legends and concepts. The cross-cultural amalgam, in the long poem Forth of July, of "Orpheus-Dante-Jesus-Bluejay-Juliet-J" was shaped to re-tell the story of a descent/ascent to hell/heaven, and a journey into the interior of both the mind and the American continent. The "Jay" punningly combines Jesus, Juliet, and "Bluejay", an orphic trickster-figure from Northwest Coast Indian mythology.
Lanthanum carries on with many of these themes and symbols. The poem culminates in a kind of Dantean "rose wheel" mandala-figure, shaped by the conjunction of two circles, forming the geometry of a mandorla, or vesica (often used in ancient and medieval art as an ornamental border or alcove-shape around Christ, Mary, or the saints). The merging of 2 circles represents the wedding of contraries, the hieros gamos, the joining of earth & heaven, the synthesis of opposites : Lanthanum narrates or unfolds such a visionary process by way of both symbolic images and numbers.
Lanthanum is one of the elements of the atomic table - #57. It is a rare earth (not actually so rare). The poem Lanthanum is itself designed using this number, and its "factors" : ie. the basic building block of the poem is a strophe or section of 28 lines (the 4-line quatrain stanza, times 7). The mandala design is built on a pattern of 28-1-28, with the "1" in the center representing the pivotal figure of synthesis (the "wedding number"). The climax of the poem is a visual (concrete) symbol of the mandorla, with the words "Jesus Christos" in a crosswise pattern inset within. The shape also mimics the "catenary" arc of the Gateway Arch monument in St. Louis - ie., a mandorla prong rooted in the earth, at the center of the North American continent. The same mandorla or vesica design, rendered as a 3-dimensional octahedron, outlines the form of a diamond shape - the same shape drawn by the traditional Native American ritual offering of the peace pipe to the six directions.
There are a lot of complex elaborations on this basic numerical design, in the poem Lanthanum. Since finishing this long-term project, in July 2012, I have been struggling to find my creative bearings and direction for further poetry. One of the paths I've begun to follow involves an intensification of the methods and patterns I've used before : ie. I'm working on a loose series of poems patterned on a quatrain stanza of 28 syllables, in poems of 7 stanzas (or 28 lines).
I am very aware how abstruse or pedantic all this might sound. Where is all this symbolic numerology coming from? To what exactly is it relevant?
In one sense, all this is an outgrowth of my own activity as a poet over the last 40 years. And the process of welding personal, national, and religious symbols together in poems has roots in my own psychic/aesthetic experience. In a way I look back on my life as one long, very slow, very incremental, very hesitant and halting, process of spiritual conversion. Maybe it's my own sort of interior Dantean journey through hell, purgatory and paradise. It began around 1972 : at age 20, I had already been a poet for several years. In 1972-73 I went through a psychological breakdown and spiritual crisis - a "conversion experience" - which changed my whole moral orientation, yet which was also very intimately tied up with poetry (and the poetry of the Bible : the poetry of Jesus-the-poet, the Nazarene, the Nazir : chanting, proclaiming his original parables). And the slow, incremental labor on these very extended, journey-like poems - their structuring around numerical-geometrical-symbolic numbers - can be seen as a creative process of drawing, or illustrating, or symbolizing the growth of a personal worldview of time, history - what is human and divine. My poetry is a response to world history, and a response to my personal experience, and a response to the tradition of American literature - all in one. Lanthanum, for example, is a kind of synthesis (welding, wedding) of America and Europe - centered in "St. Louis", between Melville & Crane on the one hand, and Henry Adams & T.S. Eliot on the other : between Notre Dame and the Gateway Arch. And it attempts a renewal, a re-visioning, of Dante's effort - to weld together Man and God, earth and heaven.
The slow, stubborn constancy of this particular approach to poetry has not been taken seriously by my contemporaries. But what can I do? That's not my business. I've basically lived in my creative workshop for the last 25 years. I've disseminated and published my work as best I could, under the circumstances : it's here & there for anyone who takes an interest. Maybe someday my work will gain a readership, and a place in the story of American poetry : I can't say. I just keeping doing what I do, under antithetical conditions.
So concludes Jesus Thoughts (28) : my Jesus-poetics of the number 28. (But there's much more to this, secretly squirreled away in my poems : numbers, dates.... 5.28, 5.29....)
Showing posts with label Native American. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Native American. Show all posts
1.21.2004
It would be pointless for me to pretend to be cognizant of & attuned to the threads in po-biz & blog chatter these days. I'm involved in a very slow process now of trying to orient my own writing & thinking in different directions. Part of that does involve looking back at the long-poem efforts which absorbed me for several years. I guess much of what I say about Forth of July here sounds about as obscure, eccentric & irrelevant as can be. But for anyone who feels like looking into it, these blog notes might offer glancing openings to it. So I'll try to continue to spend a little time each day reviewing my own efforts, for my own benefit & for possible readers too.
I think of Forth of July as working in part by analogy, a structure of thematic parallels. Thus the notion of resurrection, or retrieving a connection with the dead, translates a concept of poetry itself (as a kind of vital experience of creative awareness or imagination) into a theme or a proto-narrative. The attempt to revive or reshape the American long poem & its meanings mirrors or parallels a theory or concept of the meaning of life & history in general. You could compare the process, oddly enough, to a run for the Presidency, say Howard Dean, for example. A heroic narrative (the outsider challenger, the knight on horseback) becomes a vehicle for the articulation of a perspective on broader questions.
In Forth of July, this theme of resurrection is channeled through the Orpheus story. "Bluejay", the ghostly shaman-spirit guide [Bluejay is the Orpheus-like protagonist in Northwest Coast Native American folktales] , leads "Henry" into the world of the dead. What seems in Stubborn Grew to be an attempt to come to terms with a dying marriage, proves to be, in the central book (Grassblade Light), a different psychic process, of coming to terms with the death by suicide of "Juliet" ("Henry's" cousin, who leapt from the Golden Gate on her father's birthday).
The central "panel" of Grassblade Light, titled "Ghost Dance", welds together many of the thematic parallels, in a kind of shamanistic resurrection of dead poets & poetry (Hart Crane, John Berryman), the long poem itself, and at the center, Juliet, bringing them all into the spiritual "now" of the "living, breathing" poem.
July, the third book of the poem, in turn, reckons with the illusions & limitations of the romantic-iconic summoning of the dead found in Grassblade, & goes further into a kind of "pure poetry" of America, oddly shedding/transposing some of the personal elements, while discovering & probing still deeper motives for the effort.
Here's a section from the final panel of Grassblade, titled "Rite of Spring":
["Rite of Spring", of course, an allusion to the Stravinsky ballet about an iconic dying maiden, a spring sacrifice, folds into the Russian parallels of the poem, its return to its "Russian origins" - the instigation of Mandelstam's work - as well as the "springing" origins of the narrator - since the Rite was first performed on May 29, 1913, and 5.29 is the poet's birthday, and the numerical structure of Grassblade as a whole pivots on the number 29 - 5.29 being both the date of JFK's birth ("return of the American Camelot king") & of "Black Wednesday", the fall of Byzantium, 499 years before the poet's birthday.]
I think of Forth of July as working in part by analogy, a structure of thematic parallels. Thus the notion of resurrection, or retrieving a connection with the dead, translates a concept of poetry itself (as a kind of vital experience of creative awareness or imagination) into a theme or a proto-narrative. The attempt to revive or reshape the American long poem & its meanings mirrors or parallels a theory or concept of the meaning of life & history in general. You could compare the process, oddly enough, to a run for the Presidency, say Howard Dean, for example. A heroic narrative (the outsider challenger, the knight on horseback) becomes a vehicle for the articulation of a perspective on broader questions.
In Forth of July, this theme of resurrection is channeled through the Orpheus story. "Bluejay", the ghostly shaman-spirit guide [Bluejay is the Orpheus-like protagonist in Northwest Coast Native American folktales] , leads "Henry" into the world of the dead. What seems in Stubborn Grew to be an attempt to come to terms with a dying marriage, proves to be, in the central book (Grassblade Light), a different psychic process, of coming to terms with the death by suicide of "Juliet" ("Henry's" cousin, who leapt from the Golden Gate on her father's birthday).
The central "panel" of Grassblade Light, titled "Ghost Dance", welds together many of the thematic parallels, in a kind of shamanistic resurrection of dead poets & poetry (Hart Crane, John Berryman), the long poem itself, and at the center, Juliet, bringing them all into the spiritual "now" of the "living, breathing" poem.
July, the third book of the poem, in turn, reckons with the illusions & limitations of the romantic-iconic summoning of the dead found in Grassblade, & goes further into a kind of "pure poetry" of America, oddly shedding/transposing some of the personal elements, while discovering & probing still deeper motives for the effort.
Here's a section from the final panel of Grassblade, titled "Rite of Spring":
6
The garden seethes with rust.
The king's litter (a dry canopy)
transported around a pool. See
the young maiden dancing,
as she must – arm lifted,
hand waving forward
like a figurehead
for the delicate ship outfitted
to carry her. And the ship
carried on a breath of wind
this way, that – bound
on azimuthal slope
to the meridian (one
angled M-turn
swollen with
dying men).
Gnomon of your returning
Magdalen – to a green gar-
den (time has never been).
There's no more dying then:
for the slave is free – fear
swallowed up in victory –
your vessel a flowering fiery
myrrh-box adrift on a tear
forever. Where the dance
begins and ends.
No more dying then:
the garden seethes
with –
6.4.99
["Rite of Spring", of course, an allusion to the Stravinsky ballet about an iconic dying maiden, a spring sacrifice, folds into the Russian parallels of the poem, its return to its "Russian origins" - the instigation of Mandelstam's work - as well as the "springing" origins of the narrator - since the Rite was first performed on May 29, 1913, and 5.29 is the poet's birthday, and the numerical structure of Grassblade as a whole pivots on the number 29 - 5.29 being both the date of JFK's birth ("return of the American Camelot king") & of "Black Wednesday", the fall of Byzantium, 499 years before the poet's birthday.]
1.15.2003
Arriving at work this morning I look at the poetry blogs, & see Kasey Mohammad's has this:
"In order to live completely with poetry, one must gradually learn to meet it as an Other. It comes to one on its terms, which one is powerless to negotiate. If one does negotiate these terms, the results may be skillful, amusing, beautiful, intricate, ad nauseam, but they will not be recognized by the poet, in her secret self-confessions, as poetry."
I was thinking about something like this walking in today (down Morris Ave, along Hope St - which runs between the posh prep school on one side & the "struggling" public Hope High on the other), as I was wondering what to say here this morning. . .
They say an artist shouldn't talk too much about their own work, but none of the hoary maxims seem to apply anyway when no one else talks about it either! So I'll try to say a little more about my long poem. Earlier on this blog I said something about poetry or art in general as a search for wholeness. I don't really buy the various doctrinal psychological &/or religious explanations that have been offered for this, but in my experience anyway something along those lines does seem to be the case. What seems least dubious to me, anyway, is a general philosophical notion of the Good or God as a goodness containing all things, and this is what we hunger for as an integral aspect of our nature, beneath particular satisfactions desires & consolations. A contemplative goal.
Anyway, how does this relate to Stubborn Grew & following? One way to approach this is to ask, who is this guy Bluejay?
Bluejay is a character in the narrative of Stubborn Grew. He epitomizes the marginal, the outcast, the rejected, and the powerful. He's a ghost &/or a man; he's African- or Native American or Cajun. He's Hermes to Henry's Orpheus or Virgil to Henry's Dante : at one point he retells (briefly) one of the "Bluejay" complex of tales from NW Coast tribes which are Orphic in nature (journeys to retrieve the living from the dead). (Bluejay is a trickster figure similar to Coyote on the NW Pacific Coast.)
In the process of "guiding" Henry, Bluejay serves to re-order the signals of epic. He plants an otherness there which parallels the imaginative "shape" of the world the epic represents (the culture & landscape of North America).
In a sense, Bluejay opens a door, leading down to more primal imaginative shapes or world-picturings. Wholeness (in the form of a mandala, for example) describes a way, pictures a way. The door Bluejay opens for Henry-narrator allows him to magnify what began simply as a note or an occasional poem in the first section of Stubborn Grew. I had written a memorial poem for my maternal uncle, James Ravlin, and followed it with one for his daughter Juliet, who committed suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge on her father's birthday. When I wrote these sections I had not yet realized that the writing of this long poem was on a certain level integrating the Orpheus story with my own mourning for an adored cousin, and that the first sequel to Stubborn (Grassblade Light - described earlier here as an 8-sided formal structure) would take shape as a kind of healing mandala directed toward the suicides (Juliet; John Berryman - who died within sight of my grandparent's - Uncle Jim's parent's - house on the Mississippi; and Hart Crane). The mandala is also designed or ornamented as an Ojibwa midewe ceremony. The Ojibwa, living in the regions around the source of the Mississippi, developed this syncretic medicine ritual, incorporating songs & music, in the 18th-19th century. I adapted it in similar syncretic fashion to the form of the long poem.
These developments in the sequels to Stubborn Grew came as complete surprises to me. As I wrote earlier here on the blog, they were like the "rose" emerging out of the ashes of Stubborn. They were elaborations or flowerings of the orphic imbalance or disequilibrium - the love-relation as something lost or lacking. They parallel the "Russian" element in a different key. Each development - each new book in the long poem - strengthened or instigated what followed it. So that the 3rd large book of the poem - called "July" - incorporated all these elements in a textual vortex dominated by speed. "July" is a kind of symbolic manifestation of the poem as end-in-itself - the telos ("Forth of July" - the whole poem - is the coming-forth of "July") - as simultaneously analogous to the manifestation of the land, the continent, the nation (centered on the Mississippi River) - and leading, paradoxically, into a "Green Constellation" of deeper, more submerged levels of meaning & motivation.
These deeper levels - explored in the second part of "July" ("Green Constellation"), and in the gnomic coda to the entire poem (Book 4 - "Blackstone's Day-Book") related to the orphic journey in terms of both heaven & hell. On the "heavenly" level, the journey of Henry-narrator & Bluejay - from the Lenten un-building of Stubborn, to the Juliet-Beatrice-midewe medicine dance of Grassblade Light, to the continental instauration of July, leads toward a new manifestation of "J" - as Beatrice-figure, but also as Jerusalem & Jubilee. Jubilee is an image of world-renewal by means of divine justice or equilibrium. On the "hell" level, the closing parts of the poem intimate new sources and compulsions for the Lenten shriving "supervised" by Blackstone from the beginning. The poem in this way circles back on itself.
These notes, I suppose, appear garbled & arbitrary on the one hand, and overly-neat and -planned on the other, as well as irrelevant to anyone who hasn't read the poem. But the "plan" as described here is only an abstract. I haven't spoken about many other aspects, including perhaps the most important: the compositional process on the micro level of words & lines & stanzas. The "abba" quatrain provides a different matrix for approaching the whole experience & its possible meanings.
"In order to live completely with poetry, one must gradually learn to meet it as an Other. It comes to one on its terms, which one is powerless to negotiate. If one does negotiate these terms, the results may be skillful, amusing, beautiful, intricate, ad nauseam, but they will not be recognized by the poet, in her secret self-confessions, as poetry."
I was thinking about something like this walking in today (down Morris Ave, along Hope St - which runs between the posh prep school on one side & the "struggling" public Hope High on the other), as I was wondering what to say here this morning. . .
They say an artist shouldn't talk too much about their own work, but none of the hoary maxims seem to apply anyway when no one else talks about it either! So I'll try to say a little more about my long poem. Earlier on this blog I said something about poetry or art in general as a search for wholeness. I don't really buy the various doctrinal psychological &/or religious explanations that have been offered for this, but in my experience anyway something along those lines does seem to be the case. What seems least dubious to me, anyway, is a general philosophical notion of the Good or God as a goodness containing all things, and this is what we hunger for as an integral aspect of our nature, beneath particular satisfactions desires & consolations. A contemplative goal.
Anyway, how does this relate to Stubborn Grew & following? One way to approach this is to ask, who is this guy Bluejay?
Bluejay is a character in the narrative of Stubborn Grew. He epitomizes the marginal, the outcast, the rejected, and the powerful. He's a ghost &/or a man; he's African- or Native American or Cajun. He's Hermes to Henry's Orpheus or Virgil to Henry's Dante : at one point he retells (briefly) one of the "Bluejay" complex of tales from NW Coast tribes which are Orphic in nature (journeys to retrieve the living from the dead). (Bluejay is a trickster figure similar to Coyote on the NW Pacific Coast.)
In the process of "guiding" Henry, Bluejay serves to re-order the signals of epic. He plants an otherness there which parallels the imaginative "shape" of the world the epic represents (the culture & landscape of North America).
In a sense, Bluejay opens a door, leading down to more primal imaginative shapes or world-picturings. Wholeness (in the form of a mandala, for example) describes a way, pictures a way. The door Bluejay opens for Henry-narrator allows him to magnify what began simply as a note or an occasional poem in the first section of Stubborn Grew. I had written a memorial poem for my maternal uncle, James Ravlin, and followed it with one for his daughter Juliet, who committed suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge on her father's birthday. When I wrote these sections I had not yet realized that the writing of this long poem was on a certain level integrating the Orpheus story with my own mourning for an adored cousin, and that the first sequel to Stubborn (Grassblade Light - described earlier here as an 8-sided formal structure) would take shape as a kind of healing mandala directed toward the suicides (Juliet; John Berryman - who died within sight of my grandparent's - Uncle Jim's parent's - house on the Mississippi; and Hart Crane). The mandala is also designed or ornamented as an Ojibwa midewe ceremony. The Ojibwa, living in the regions around the source of the Mississippi, developed this syncretic medicine ritual, incorporating songs & music, in the 18th-19th century. I adapted it in similar syncretic fashion to the form of the long poem.
These developments in the sequels to Stubborn Grew came as complete surprises to me. As I wrote earlier here on the blog, they were like the "rose" emerging out of the ashes of Stubborn. They were elaborations or flowerings of the orphic imbalance or disequilibrium - the love-relation as something lost or lacking. They parallel the "Russian" element in a different key. Each development - each new book in the long poem - strengthened or instigated what followed it. So that the 3rd large book of the poem - called "July" - incorporated all these elements in a textual vortex dominated by speed. "July" is a kind of symbolic manifestation of the poem as end-in-itself - the telos ("Forth of July" - the whole poem - is the coming-forth of "July") - as simultaneously analogous to the manifestation of the land, the continent, the nation (centered on the Mississippi River) - and leading, paradoxically, into a "Green Constellation" of deeper, more submerged levels of meaning & motivation.
These deeper levels - explored in the second part of "July" ("Green Constellation"), and in the gnomic coda to the entire poem (Book 4 - "Blackstone's Day-Book") related to the orphic journey in terms of both heaven & hell. On the "heavenly" level, the journey of Henry-narrator & Bluejay - from the Lenten un-building of Stubborn, to the Juliet-Beatrice-midewe medicine dance of Grassblade Light, to the continental instauration of July, leads toward a new manifestation of "J" - as Beatrice-figure, but also as Jerusalem & Jubilee. Jubilee is an image of world-renewal by means of divine justice or equilibrium. On the "hell" level, the closing parts of the poem intimate new sources and compulsions for the Lenten shriving "supervised" by Blackstone from the beginning. The poem in this way circles back on itself.
These notes, I suppose, appear garbled & arbitrary on the one hand, and overly-neat and -planned on the other, as well as irrelevant to anyone who hasn't read the poem. But the "plan" as described here is only an abstract. I haven't spoken about many other aspects, including perhaps the most important: the compositional process on the micro level of words & lines & stanzas. The "abba" quatrain provides a different matrix for approaching the whole experience & its possible meanings.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
