from Hecate came the Kali-Bear

GLOOMY RECESS

Brrr.  Encased in winter nadir.

A word stings like a burr

in my ear, grown morbider.

Out of California.  Excalibur.

Poe’s gloomy recess.  Ceiling

flickering with Neva-light

(limbeck of Hecate).

Ligeia, Solominka... cryptic feeling.

Juliet, embalmed upon a wounded,

senseless word, while

murder dogs each exile

in a stumbling Republic – hounded

refugees are coldly wrenched

from their own children.

What will you do, Hen?

Keep chanting mantra, teeth clenched.

From Hecate came the Kali-Bear,

Blake, Brown, Black –

stuffed Russian Monarch,

Cuffy from the Arctic (Polar) –

Crowned with the crown & splendor

– like Inẽs de Castro, here

in the casque of my ear,

my dear; of violence the silky daughter;

his banner over me was Love.

Your coming-forth, Psyche-

Persephone – out of the sea

in Frisco Bay – out of the starry cove

                     *

laving the Golden Gate, your destiny –

Old Glory Red, & Irish

Green, & Maple Sugar swish

your seal, ex-Californ– Aieeee...

– over the Bay.  Bears baring

every fang, & bearing

everything – boars goring

every Tarquin – innocence betraying!

So follow Hobo Henry’s burro

as he burrows through

her barrow – thorough

ravishing of hollow tumulo!

She’s flown, sweet Thunderbird.

& like Aurora Borealis

hovers above all this

flag-draped befuddlement (light-ward).

Ghost-haunted Morning Star,

Virgo-Astraea –

apotheosis of Sophia,

milky mosaic your dancing floor –

step your basilica sans fear;

the agate lamp atop

your Gate will not stop

raying back toward D.C., dear.

Columbia & Liberty will shine

their sister-lights within

your ark’s palladion;

Agape will this rage refine.

3.9.19

oracles from the Henry Couch

LOVE NEIGHBOR

While the planet bakes, heats up

like the moon... Henry,

like Winnie the Puer

Aeternus, idly rotates his kaleidoscope

full of little bits of brass cymbal.

Hibernal, he turns

this way & that; his urn’s

an ointment jar from Mary Magdala

full of tiny frozen stars of royal

palm oil.  His screech-owl

habitat’s a cypress bole,

an Erica-tree (washed up by Nile).

Osiris is a long brown river

searching for the sea.

A muddy throne for Henry,

couched like round-headed Cavalier

in the living room of an argot Argosy.

Whose vessel wavers

on the waves, & shivers

when the keel spokes (glossy Lady) –

a buoyant kind of synagogue-canoe

or pileated coracle –

high honeycomb cenacle,

multiocular almond (with ox-eye prow).

The Golden Fleece dangled in Providence

like a unicorn in a cloister;

in Sheep’s Clothing (her

murmur nest) Francesca wove the dense

                     *

gold poncho for young Dionysus

out of San Francisco.

Light moves now

through the window, Theseus;

Ariadne is a widow, & young Helle

sleeps with the shellfish

south of Phrixos (Frisco);

all shall be well, & all thing shall

be well, &... who shall lift up

the great acorn of light?

Not Henry, with all his might –

but Grace (who bears the Bear-man cup).

That donkey-man of Apuleius,

cousin to St. Francis,

steered the figurehead of Isis

to the throne of Henry’s soul-crisis.

Pressure from the Left to dispossess

the thriving bourgeoisie

leads (see 20th century)

to misery.  Children, beware forgetfulness!

Pressure from the Right to still maintain

luxurious plutocracy

leads (see 21st century)

to misery.  Children, beware unrighteousness!

Old Coke & his disciple, Williams

joined ancient lawful right

with each & all – O passionate

recognition!  Love neighbor, & be happy clams!

1.25.19

human with human, clay with clay

Bde Maka Ska, 9.1.17

GREEK GALLEY

Now as high summer light ripens

for departure, I remember

how the slight high-wire figure

teetered with tinker shuffle – he bends

his magnetic pole like a long-legged

water-spider, concentrating,

pursuing path P (humming

under his breath) – like a ragged

American robin yodeling, like Francis

the mule on his slight dogwood

perch – so Mayflower would

not sink to sea-floor, so helpless

crowds not tumble from twin towers

to be men not destroyers

his mind moves with those powers

preternatural, avian – showers

of coruscate sparks   from Night Sea

mind   of Okean-reality

heart of   gratitude-mentality

a rustic Thanksgiving   Massasoit will see

to it   along with Black Elk   &

that woodpecker   Thunderbird

a red-streak   flute-word

seeking the common factor   grain

of sand   salt   the personal touch

her hand moves   back & forth

her footsteps   north, south

with his   east, west   in a torch-

                  *

song dream   a melody of Sabbath

silence   invisible liberty

simplicity of   soul poverty

& touch of palm   Grace   have no wrath

So you enter the fiery mind-hearth

of heart-mine   the flame

that never dies   who came

from Sky-Whale   to the earth

Jonah   turtledove   blinding Phoenix

so that disconsolate disunion

of father & daughter be undone

with mother & son   a catenary

parallax   twin for twin   tower

for gate   dark green Atlantic

azure-tangerine Pacific

primavera robin   in woodpecker bower

raven & bluejay & eagle   looking on

all these old threads   a nest

or safety net (good, better, best)

for wounded souls   yearning for dawn

So take firm hold   like little Philippe

the water-spider’s   shaking   handlebar

& skip   like Juliet   there

on the sandy shore   where Okean-Ship

embarks for a feast   of reconciliation

human with human   clay

with clay   like a Greek galley

with smiling eye   aye-aye   cosmopolitan

9.11.17

in my style of raven-squawk

OVER AMERICA

America, replete with stories,

bursting with tales – I’ll

tell you another, in my style

of raven-squawk (Cautantowwit’s

oblique rescue-directions, south-

southwest).  Narragansett

wraith of Afterlife – what

zigzags from the smokehole (mouth

full of shade).  Ink-echo of an Incan

Thunderbird, or bald eagle,

or maybe owl.  Feel

the light gray prickling your human

scalp, Columbia.  That Mexican

tin double-dove mirror

frames Aztec cult of fear

& violence (Dia de Muertos, Halloween).

The Consul, slobbering mescal,

muttering William Blackstone...

Went to live with Indians...

With Narragansetts.  Harboring all

refugees – all troubled, exiled souls

(Rog Williams testified).

& so we double back to Rhode

Island, to Providence.  My school’s

a bit of Brownian motion, drawn in

toward indomitable diamond

by Love’s invisible almond.

As magnet gathers scattered iron

                * 

into a Magna Chartres wheel

her beautiful dove-wings

breathed into lungs

inured to painvine (coal dust, steel)

& lifted Life up wholly from the ground.

That green palm held by Alighieri

circuited grey orrery

spun from high Ocean River State – profound

light fiery water vessel made of clay

wrested from death-cave

to quintessential grave

transfiguration – your soul’s dancing ray.

It is Love’s interlacing hands

figuring a catamaran

or Manitou two-woman

womb-canoe – crossweaving islands

in a cat’s-cradle (a fleecy safety-

net).  You may not

recognize the US yet

in such pre-Cambrian confetti –

Ezra Caw-Caw Ezekiel, on his harsh

bark, wandered, insane

with hatred.  All began

in 1913, he would cuss – poison marsh-

land of the War to End All Wars...

Yet Henry’s hobo mule

mutters an older Yule

under his breath.  Open the doors...

                *

those silver mirror-doors of monarch-land.

Roger’s canoe banks in Ferrara

shade-garage... Alleluiah.

A little almond planted on good ground

blooms to Eternity.  Thanksgiving

magnanimity, sweet William

sings; the grey I AM

flickers in flocks of overshadowing

lightness.  The one who made himself

perfect transparent acorn

octahedron – he was born

at end of May (ancient festival

of restoration).  Like evergreen

King Arthur... JFK

or MLK... Melchizedek

emerges from his tent of welcoming.

The doom that Jesus faced on Golgotha

he had prepared for, long

before.  Green prow or prong

of spiritual Power, he bent like Uther

Pendragon into the beggar-skins of men;

he smiled, & shared the bread

& wine; made his last bed

a sepulcher of victory, beyond our ken.

Over America, the clouds roll by.

The curling fiddlehead,

the milkweed pod... float

on your way, Monarch.  Souls never die.

7.18.17

Dante at 56

Little magazines, poetry publishers, the literary community... I say yes to all of them.  Heck, I co-edited & published a little magazine for 10 years (Nedge); I spent at least 5 years trying to promote a local literary non-profit (the Poetry Mission).  The fact that I put a lot of my poetry on this blog is not evidence that I am some naturally cantankerous, nay-saying misanthrope.  No way.  I may be a little feisty - I think I get this from my mother, who is very feisty.  I may at times be cutting & sarcastic (this is all me, not my mother).

But I do not avoid magazines on principle - in fact, I received another rejection notice just now!  No, I put out a lot of poetry on this blog because the kind of drivel I'm writing is in fact very suited to the blog set-up.  Ravenna Diagram, for example, is an ongoing serial poem, sometimes quite diaristic & occasional (ie. responding to the "occasions" of the day).

Today's entry is an example, as have been several posts of late.  Dante died on this day 694 years ago, in 1321, at the age of 56.  Some scholars (the jury is out) have taken a position which entails that Alighieri & I share a birthday (May 29th).  So I am already 7 years older (& almost 700 years later) than Dante was, when he died - having completed his Paradiso not long before.

I haven't completed any Paradise yet.  I have not "lifted the great acorn of light".  But Ravenna Diagram is a cat's-cradle all tangled up with Dante, among other things.  Here is today's report :

LATTICE-WORK

If we can shrink down small as Frisbee

the little leprechaun

from Arthur Street (in

Mendelssohn), we might just barely

wiggle through the lattice-work

of Erica’s Ferrara

cabinet (dove sta

memoria).  Such delicate

moss-green & gold!  Almost as bright

as your sea-iris – sun-

flecked, pregnant lens

of summer season (cave-light,

river-carved limestone... lakes

of glacier-deft sketches).

Time’s a yarn, that catches

history in quipu-knots.  Oak aches

for each acorn – the great light

diamondiale, that lifts

each person (infinite

è finit, unbreakable).  Slight

limp, unfinished manuscript...

slow clay, Mendelssohn

relief operation –

Berryman in Resurrection crypt

or Pound à Venice (perilous seat

in dolorous gondola)...

Dante sets down Ravenna

raven-feather (geste complete).

9.14.15

Tomb of Dante in Ravenna (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : long poems (label : subject/long poems).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Related topics (there are many others):

American poetry, Dante, narrative, numerology, Stubborn Grew...

Fine bit over here today.

Ezra Pound out of Treasure Island?

It's a rule : all big poems have to be modelled mathematically on the architecture of a building (or part of a building). For Dante it was the mosaics in the chapel in the Ravenna cathedral (there's a good book on the numerology of this). For Pound it was the Malatesta crypt. For Crane, of course, it was... you know.

I modelled the middle book of Forth of July (The Grassblade Light) on the Castel del Monte.

(Frederick II had many negative qualities. But in my poem he & his Castel represent a principle which both Dante & Roger Williams stood for : the separate, dual & independent spheres of church & state.)

Went up for a break to a 3rd-floor library carrel, thinking about previous Virgil comments. Opened up my RS Crane book, started reading. Looked up at the books on the carrel shelf - & found that the carrel's collection was entirely devoted to Virgil's poetics. Art thou with me, dolce padre?

Virgil's 4th Eclogue contains the famous messianic passage, predicting the "virgin birth" of the Child who will bring the return of the Golden Age. So his pastoral is tainted with "history". (& the eclogue is echoed later in the center of the Aeneid, in the lengthy apostrophe to Caesar Augustus.)

Dante, self-appointed heir to Virgil, places his pastoral earthly paradise in Purgatory, a way station to the final refuge in Paradise; but that Paradise is full of earthly history - the center of the final rose containing the empty chair for the coming of the messianic Holy Roman Emperor (Henry VII).

Milton, the revolutionary Protestant and advocate of regicide, sets aside any merely earthly political authority : his Adam & Eve, before their fall, in Eden, are taught directly by angel-shepherds, and after the fall, political authority on earth is described as under apocalyptic judgement.

Eliot(monarchist) & Pound(fascist) - political authoritarians both - looked to Dante, rather than Milton, as their model. But for Dante, divine & earthly (political) authority were counterbalanced. For Eliot & Pound, the (medieval) balance was broken : the feebleness, or complete lack, of a desired spiritual authority, made political authoritarians of them both.

The world is still dealing with these problems (imposed, politicized religious ideology; authoritarian politics; spiritual anomie & despair).

Josh responds to my "pastoral" comments of the 17th. Thanks, Josh.

I think I wouldn't characterize my original take as simply "Christian" or "too Christian"; I see it, anyway, as simply literary. I'm not promoting a particular version of pastoral; rather, I'm trying to understand how the literary mode called pastoral might be seen as combining both Pound's "eclogic" and his didactic impulses.

The eclogue or the pastoral may, as Josh says, evoke a fragile, trespassable, "synchronous", aesthetic (imagined) space; but I think the same always implies what has been rejected or kept outside (history, violence, etc.). & I think the trajectory of Pound's career indeed represents an attempt to fuse these contradictory/complimentary meanings of pastoral : his "epic" project itself was an effort to go beyond the closed circle of fin de siecle art-for-art's-sake; it was an attempt to fuse the aesthetic eclogue-pastoral with the rhetorical-didactic "shepherding"-pastoral. Unfortunately the authoritarian structure of his plans for world-renovation led him further & further into his own political anti-paradise. & I agree with you, that the partial peripeteia of this personal melodrama or tragedy appears in the Pisan cantos, when he's in the jail cage, looking at birds on the phone wires and ants in the sand.

(I say partial peripeteia, because Pound, like many a Sophoclean or Shakespearean tragic character, came to only a partial recognition of his mistakes. Yet even that partial recognition allowed him, sometimes, a new tone in the poetry.)

Interesting musings on Pound & pastoral mode by Josh. I guess if I were in his shoes I would start with two juxtaposed notions of the term: 1) pastoral as idyllic escape/union with sheltering landscape; 2) pastoral as in "pastoral letter" - didactic wisdom, prudence, guidance : the pastor, through wisdom, is a shepherd of the people.

Then I would investigate the intellectual frameworks grounding any particular pastoral idyll : the idea that every literary "Eden" (Biblical, Alexandrian, et al.) is framed by a prudential logic of loss and return - even the Epicurean versions (escape to pleasure for its own sake) are based on a logical assertion. In this perspective, the two definitions of "pastoral" always go together, depend upon each other : we do not return to the peaceable kingdom until we "return" inwardly, through conversion, repentance, discipline, struggle (personal/historical), etc. The road to the promised land leads through the desert : this is the ur-plot of pastoral. The pastor is the shepherd who guides through desert to pasture. Wisdom is expressed in speech, and thus the poet, the bearer of sacred speech, is the pastor.

Then I guess I would examine Pound's poetry & example using a kind of 4-fold diagram: on the horizontal, I would look at the development of "pastoral" imagery - identified using both definitions of the term, as described above - chronologically through the Cantos. On the vertical axis, I would: a) examine Pound's ideological commitments from 1918-1930, and b) look at what were the consequences of those commitments - what effect they had on his own life.

What information might I draw from this grid? An image might emerge which would show how Pound's commitment to enacting the pastoral mode - ie., taking on the role of an actual pastor leading an actual flock, through actual history toward a possibly real Earthly Paradise - had at least a couple of results: first, Pound sort of took his writing beyond "art" (the Cantos are a kind of palimpsest, a mumbled personal farrago of texts); second, this text he created provides a sort of photo-negative of pastoral. The moral blindness of some of his commitments led him into his own personal hell (madness, treason, incarceration, silence). The continuance of the praxis (making the poem) forced him to represent not only his visions of various forms of Paradise, but also some of his own failures & mistakes. This blend, the Cantos, is the resulting scar tissue : aestheticized (fascistic) dream-history replaced by the haltingly-narrated revenge of real history upon his own hubris.

Bemsha quotes an interesting email from a high school teacher in Spain.

I bought an old 2nd-hand copy of the Cantos once.  Inside the cover, when I got home, I found what seems to be a little original photo of Ez in old age, sitting with his white cane, looking druid-like.  It's up on the bulletin board by my desk; he's keeping a hawkish eye on my long poems.

Antenna Race dept.: Bob Vincent, my inventor friend mentioned previously (6/4), was written up in today's NY Times ("Circuits" section, under "what's next", here). (Bob's a good friend also of Pushkin the cat.)

"Poets are the antennae of the race." - Ezra Pound

What was the pith of what Pound found & celebrated in "tradition"? The same thing Montale found, that both found via Dante:

Provence, the love-song, the archaic-troubadour springtime mating-call, the epithalamion at the heart of Arcadia or Paradise, the Song of Songs...

the deep natural root of the grand epic-cosmic visions (Homer, Dante et al.). At the center of the Divina Commedia, Dante addresses his theme : What or Who is the real and proper goal of all our willing & desiring & loving (& the substance of our singing)?

[Actually, this forms the overall plot of my own grandiose effort in Forth of July, too, where the poem's path follows the transformations & coruscations of July, jewel-eye, Julius/Juliet, J-El, & so on. The "coming-forth of jewel-eye"]

Stray thoughts on Ezra Pound, in relation to the controversy at Tony Tost's blog:

EP assumed the mantle of the traditional poet, in all its intensity & vatic pomp. Anyone who has heard recordings of his chanting the Cantos will recognize some of the effects. The intensity, the dramatic presence, he instilled into his experimental epic, comes through, even as it works in counterpoint across the free-slapdash, quotational-notational, archival-dustbinnishness & slanginess.

As such & so he was assuming a mask, the mask of the ancient epic vates; a very unusual & curious endeavor. I think he did this under the influence, & in the partial shadow, of Yeats, and somewhat in conscious contrast to Eliot, whose Anglified urbanity presented another version of "tradition".

What I find interesting is just the wildness of the project itself, the way this something of a swamp Yankee upstart sloughed off his own Americanness to become a sort of eccentric-yet-representative "figure" for the West at a certain and particular historical crossroads; and the way the contradictions involved in assuming such a pose are reflected in the grain of the poem's (the Cantos') style and "plot", the excruciating way it tries to meld archaic Europe with US political developments, in an overall world-epic of consciousness.

Pound thus presents himself as an inescapable, pivotal literary-historical phenomenon. But what remains valuable is not so much the substance of his own world-view, or his pronouncements, but the example of engagement he offers. Not the engagement with politics (which revealed both his shrunken capacity for empathetic humanity, and his misguided authoritarianism) but the stance he took, his attitude toward poetry as a living tradition, as something of continuing relevance and importance to the world at large. He wasn't satisfied with his own dialect, his own experience, his own land, his own local business: for him poetry engaged the whole world and the whole past and future; Dante & Homer & Spenser et al. were still living literary forces, spirits he encountered. Olson was right to argue that Pound was so tied to tradition and the past that it distorted his understanding of contemporary reality; but the weakness of Olson's technique, in comparison to Pound's, shows how much was lost by shrugging off Pound's vatic mantle.

Bluejay & Henry's nekuia, or descent into hell, in Stubborn Grew :

the presence of the rejected, the abject, the detritus, which, curiously, is essential element of a true picture of "America" : that which was evaded, elided, or avoided by aesthetics of "EP + EP" (Poe & Pound).

Bluejay a sort of amalgam of abject or "persecutable" qualities.

Chris Lott finds my excerpts & explanations utterly confusing. Understandable! I warned they were obscure & eccentric.

It's a Song of Myself, a counter-Cantos [cf. Bluejay on Poe & Pound, EP & EP]. & still ongoing.

from July (chapter "A Catenary Arc"):

         – some star – like the articulate
 ghost of my fathers and of yours, who
 could not speak in life, but in the owlish
 afterlife – Ba, Ka, Crow, Lamb... tracked

  
         upstream to Ethiopia, the truth of it –
 manuscripted messenger, papyrus
 Pappy or Osiris sire, Moses ripened
 in the wilderness).  Mountain oak-tree.

  
         Cedar.  Pitch-black tar (for
 mordant).  Bebi, General of the Asiatics.
 Quick-runner, wasp.  Pharaoh's taxi-
 driver. He Who Controls the Rat-

  
         God's Offspring.  Latecomer,
 fast-talker.  Journalist for Delta
 Crescent.  Walker of the tiled
 ink-paths, typesetter.  Market-

  
         rent-collector, solitaire, free-
 speaker.  Literal, exact, exacting
 horsetrading slavestealing tax-
 gathering figure of a reefer-

  
         man, fearful, a-feared.
 Goes down ghost-trails
 under live-oak lairs
 of rattlesnakes... adrift

  
         in jagged eddies of nude alphabets.
 Murmuring to himself, saliva-
 white, spume-frothing blanched
 avalanche easily frozen, baffled, back-

  
         stabbed – easily beloved, won-over.
 And adhesive through the crane bone
 into the gravity waves (nacreous
 mob of carnelian nouveaux

  
         baubles all around the funereal
 sunken canopy of maudit covenants,
 rumors, glittering knives –
 ressentiment scripted into feral runes).

  
         A crossroad of aluminum tubing in the swamp.
 Ping from outer space, deflecting the rays.
 Silence, alligators, flamingos.  Yarns
 and picayune lagniappe – pommes

          
         de terreurs – spooks and voodoo queens
 if you're scared of the dark – a muttering
 broom delta, the sowing of the tombs
 beneath the Gulf.  Steal, sneak

  
         away now, Jim – Julius is sound asleep.
 We're going down the inky path
 toward a kid wrapped up in llama
 tarp and catnap tape, tripwired – peels loose

  
         at midnight – watch!  While my ghosts
 of keen-mauled, kill-skinned, tree-masted
 River-Sixties gather steam upstream
 like a money-caulked coot of wood-

  
         crocodiles, bobbing at the dawn levee.
 Watch – there go the shadows of the swallows!
 Soon the sun arrives, lifting over the lousy
 prism-blocks (Angola, Ethiopia veiled, unveiled).


      
                                           11.22.99

When I have time, in another life, when I am the Auguste Dupin of literature, I want to write an essay on the curious affinities between EP & EP, Poe & Pound, 2 po's. Time has somewhat obscur'd what a voracious, clamorous, devious, ambitious, many-minded chap-of-letters Poe was. Irwin's book (Mystery to a Solution) brings this out to some extent, emphasizing Poe's acquaintance with the intricacies of Parisian science/math/politics of his time.

(Whitman, one of the few to show up at his funeral.)

(Bluejay, in Stubborn Grew, has his own wacky theories about EP & EP.)

Reading 3rd vol. of Eric Pankey, Cenotaph. Also checked his 1st 2 vols at downtown Public today (For the New Year - no apparent reference to Auden - & Heartland). Something happened with 3rd vol (Apocrypha). First 2 are standard boilerplate MFA style (except better - subdued & careful - makes the simple phrases sound without excess. Both his parents were accountants (like GG?)). Poetry & money.

But Apocrypha was a leap forward. Weight of Stevens & Donne & Bible & Shakespeare - and he was EQUAL TO IT : the wit & design & language all in balance, quite extraordinary. Models of excellence.

Then something happened : some personal trouble or reaching some limit of inspiration. These 2 books following Apocrypha read like a record of spiritual impasse. The response was uneven : confession, slackness, backing & filling, occasional successes, depression & some despair. Hard to read without feeling pity & sadness, because he's honest, he doesn't fake (though he repeats himself sometimes), but the meditations are dry, angst-ridden. I feel like I'm looking at the limit of orthodox US expression here.

Curious to read the latest vol. (which crossed my desk & got me started on him), Oracle Figures.

EP. Exemplary initials . . .
See insane peroration of Bluejay in Stubborn Grew, pp. 87-91. Here the Ojibwa outcast casts Amurrcan Litachore in the shadow of the aesthetic Ass of the Providence Atheneum, a neo-classical private library where the most famous photo of EP (Edgar Poe, not Ezra Pound) was taken, not long before his death, when he came (drunk & disorderly) to Providence to woo & snake-oil local poetess Sarah Helen Whitman into marriage & a new American Literary Arsistocracy. The subtext is Notebooks of Arthur Gordon Pym, which pivots on race war fear & the Peter & Paul Islands in mid-Atlantic; meanwhile (1848) Thomas Dorr was in RI prison for inciting the Dorr War, a miniature figurine RI constitutional re-revolution over extension of the franchise - but only to immigrant workers, not to African-Americans (so same supported the anti-Dorr faction, the South County landowners & aristocracy). Bluejay rhymes Poe's racist southern snobbery with Pound's pecking orders in a general condemnation of elitist "Greek" slavery:

"O.K. Now lookee here carefully, now. De cussin
blasted shippin outa hell lands at Desolation
Island, see? Dem duded white pengoons all dressy

wit de alba trapses onna trapeezes widda net, see?
Anna black doorman o backdoor man, see
he holdin up the whole thing wid one pinky -
an it ain't even yarn. Odd, man - lamby-pamby!

- an he crost Atlantic belowdicks, chain up to a T.
Na square dat wid dem rocksaglory, right -
P an P, sturdy an steady inna middle ova tight
sea - upright, man! Like Pizza Polevaulter, key!

Heavin an whole inna earth, alright! Y'follow?
So hey I sieze you got deez double dabblin upside-
arse-o-cats, real hep, man! Formula Tide,
like washin oeuvre everthin wid words t'swallow

aplenty! So soak dis formula, Hen:
Q2 (-E2 - P2) = -J2.
See, you got yo EP an yo EP, both ovum laird
o' th'Catkills. But even they gotta peepee, man!

An they gotta drop they shots an tiss inth toilet
juss like you an me! You with me?
We talkin catshit! Iz all kinda murmuree,
lowdown, muddy an mutteree, backassed - an wet!"

Bizarre as may be, this should be understood in the narrative context of a Henry/Bluejay - Dante/Virgil catabasis or descent into Hell, in search of Henry's lost black cat, Pushkin, stolen on Halloween - the analogy being Dante's emergence from (a literary) Hell into Purgatory through Satan's ass (figured locally in Stubborn as the abandoned railway tunnel under the Atheneum & the RISD art museum).

"Time was I ain't shot my wad inta Yoi yet either.
But iz comin, man. We down among the trainin' ground,
the jailbait. There's Dorr down there, soundin
mighty low below the courthouse, a mere nether-

unworldly goose he is, too. An here come his whiteface
double, po ol' Poe! 1848 slidin like a dyin worm
down Benefit, shoes achin, head achin widda storm
a Whitman onna brain - yeah, the coal lady in lace!

Burnin coal, waitin by the window, lookin down
from the broken wall - one helluva Helen firin him!
Afloat in his mind he wander up to th'Atheneum,
get his blacknwhite ticklelily icon taken

with a crown to his brow an his eyes awry, forever
an ever. He was damned an good at them posterior
analytics - helluva chilly mathematical germcarrier,
Poe. Black n white everthing goes t'him - steer

for the po-po-Pole, amen! I mean, Dorr's dyin
bloated an blighted down in jail fo the franchise,
an Poe's upstairs brushin his teeth, realize -
dig Helen in the whitey semperequal sepulcryin

shame, man! She comin back like a ghost,
lil muddy, but o'clay! Cistern in the grounsoon!
Yeah, he play one limpin aristocat, that one -
that only lonely Poe, po man - evbody get lost."

Again this has to be understood in the context of the Orpheus story which frames Stubborn, & the Poe obsession with the "dead lady", and the fact that Dorr was being held in prison in a basement cell only a couple of blocks from where Poe was reeling insanely up & down Benefit St, & the fact that Rhode Island was deeply & centrally engaged in the slave trade from the beginning, & the fact that the "Dorr War" was riven by racism & Napoleonism (Dorr was often likened physically & politically to little Nappy), and the fact that the only RI fatality of the farcical Dorr War (a Massachusetts carpenter was also shot by mistake, standing in his doorway) was a bystander named Gould (one of my relatives). Politics is local.

& speaking of modern epics, look at the dazzling, astonishing re-creation of Roman-Christian-early Britain-Wales historical reality in the work of David Jones. Not to mention his great war prose poem[?] In Parenthesis. Finnegan re-wakes indeed.

The past is not even past. [see FW: 1132-556-(Silent.)-556-1132.] In Stubborn Grew I "apply" Joyce to surround Pound/Olson et al. (it's a military maneuver) & sink epic into the microcosm of Everyman (HCE). Then he pops up again chasing Julie in The Rose (of Rhode Island). Forth of Julie, jewel-eye; reversal of Julius Sieger. (I talked about this earlier in hgpoetics.)