Pound, Pletho, Nicholas Cusanus

Have been reading about late Byzantine culture (1300s, 1400s) & its influence on western Renaissance. Came upon discussion of Byzantine neo-Platonist (& neo-pagan?) Georgius Gemistus, or "Pletho"... & discovered a connection with another neo-pagan, Ezra Pound. History or legend has it that the late Pletho's body was removed from its tomb by his followers & re-buried in Sigismundo Malatesta's "Tempio", in Rimini (a Renaissance architectural testament to pagan revivalism). & it turns out Pletho indeed pops up in various allusions in the Cantos of Pound.

Furthermore, I discovered this morning that there is a connection between Pletho & the Renaissance Catholic philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, whose writings have fascinated me for a long time. Cusa attributed his most famous work, De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance) to a vision he was granted while on a tempestuous sea-voyage from Constantinople back to Italy (as part of a delegation attempting to resolve the endemic conflict between Catholic & Orthodox Christianity). Well... it turns out that Gemistus Pletho was ON THAT SAME SEA-VOYAGE, and may very well have engaged in conversation with Nicholas of Cusa.

One of the deep impulses of my own long-poem efforts has been to shape a response (& challenge) to Pound's great epic (The Cantos) - driven in part by a basic disagreement I have with him over the "shape" of history itself. So this nexus of people & events - Pletho, Malatesta, Nicholas Cusanus, Byzantium, Renaissance - is really grabbing my attention... in that (as some previous blog-posts here detail) Nicholas of Cusa is an historical & philosophical figure who is, for me, a kind of equivalent, maybe, to what Pletho was for Pound...

NICHOLAS OF CUSA, SAILING HOME

Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

He was on board ship, sailing from Byzantium
when the moment of illumination came, a flash
of light that staggered him (as happened to Paul
on the Damascus road): when he understood
there can be no ratio, no means of comparison,
no middle term, between the finite and the infinite.
Thus, since God is infinite, we have no means
of knowing Him (invisible, incommensurate); so,
as Paul says, If any man thinks he knows anything,
he has not yet known as he ought to know.
It follows then, for Nicholas (De Docta Ignorantia)
our proper study is, to understand our ignorance.

I think of him in Constantinople, looking up
into that limpid sphere, that massive cupola,
Hagia Sophia: gazing back at those gigantic eyes:
Christos Pantokrator, hovering there, magnificent
in lapis lazuli, translucent marble. He would
have known that, even then, all-conquering armies
of the Pasha were encroaching on the city gates;
had swept away, already, the last flimsy shreds
of once-almighty Christian Rome – history itself
grown incompatible with that triumphant
image glaring down.

I cannot know You
as You are. But when I think of you
I think of Bruegel panoramas: there’s Mankind
(a little, furry, muddy, peasant thing – yet
at home upon the earth – its caretaker – self-
conscious, quick – inventive builder, gardener –
blind governor – your tarnished mirror);
and, as he painted in The Road to Calvary,
you hide amongst us, suffering servant, near
the center of our troubles: buried in the crowd:
one of the roughs (disguised, in camouflage,
unknown).

Epic might be personal

Another interesting and insightful diary-entry from John Latta : this one on an essay on New American Poetry by Canadian writer Brian Fawcett.

Fawcett's critique of Charles Olson's epic "imperialism" & megalomania, while not exactly original, sounds (from Latta's excerpts anyway) well-put, and hard to deny. Yet it seems to me you lose something if you reduce Pound's & Olson's epic ambitions & projects to mere egotism & ideological grandiosity. Epic ambition is in part a search for epic wholeness : that vast multiplicity-in-unity - ancient epic's synthesis of history, poetry, & cosmic vision - bringing all experience (or at least the symbolic image of same) into the microcosm of a shape, a work of art. What from one angle looks like the shadow of megalomania, narcissism & totalitarian thinking - all the basically ugly & atrocious elements of these poets' vainglory - can, from another angle, be recognized as rooted in the basic shaping impulse of art : what I have tried to describe elsewhere as the ("Acmeist") humanizing, or personalizing, of reality. I see this as a primordial artistic task, going back to the archaic shamans : the function of providing a sense of order in the cosmos through dramatization - giving meaning to experience, and order to chaos, through "playing it out."

Olson & Pound both took this high-priestly role in some dark & demagogic directions. Totalism, totalitarianism are inherent dangers of any search for wholeness through art. & we should be careful not to romanticize the irrational, self-aggrandizing impulses of same. Yet this humanizing/dramatizing/synthesizing/visionary/epic dimension is fundamental to poetry. (Classicist Charles P. Segal has explored the ambiguous duality of the poetic "pharmakon" - delusive drug or visionary guide? - in a number of studies.)

& with this in mind, I guess Pound's self-effacing disciple in the "long poem", Zukofsky, can be seen as their alter(ed) ego : so many maximus-pounds of anti-gravity. Foreshadowing, in "A", the objectification of "language" to come...

One quality that shows clearly in Pound, and that you don't see much of in the extra-large milkshake of today's scene - he was, sometimes literally, hungry. This hunger sharpens (though not necessarily clears) his vision, and his cantankerousness. The motor of history is poverty... injustice, resentment... hunger. He went for insidious, crackpot solutions - but he was also attentive to the violence, the crisis, the scar-lines of the social complex. & so he ended up staggering - stupidly, absurdly - into the arms of Mussolini & the war itself.

The question of how society achieves justice - if it's possible at all - is the political question. The 20th-century authoritarian regimes dismissed the merely human-scale problems of human rights, equality, human imperfection, the conflict of interests, on behalf of fraudulent mass "solutions". But much of our literary culture either takes the forms of government and liberal democracy for granted, or assumes a cynical attitude of academic scepticism & dogmatic ideological righteousness. Neither attitude makes for an atmosphere conducive to a flourishing "civic" poetry (others - "activist" poets - will disagree with this). On the other hand, maybe this atmosphere is also latent with opportunity for some new kind of civic (poetic) speech.

Pound would have found a lot of poetic fodder in the current banking crisis.

Having sort of a small-scale re-encounter with E. Pound & Cantos. Very mixed feelings. EP had big influence on me in early 80s : the scale, the ambition, the attempt to integrate history with a (secret, arcane) history of poetry, with world culture... On the other hand, Montale called him a "barbarian", which was also true... Bacigalupo calls him a "primitive".

The story & para-story (the life, the poem) is stranger than fiction. Much of it just plain mean & hateful : the trajectory of the fanatic ideologue. But then there's his wonderful capacious curiosity & energy... the play with many languages & cultures...

My underlying impulse in writing with him in the background has been to revise, to re-write "historical", "epic" poetry so as to oppose his influence, to "right the ship"... some things in Pound are just a bad cloud over historical memory... & (in this moment of renascent authoritarianism) still dangerous (the amalgam of anti-semitism, fascism, the scorn for democracy, and Confucianism, for example)... there are things in Stubborn Grew, for example, which are a kind of shady parody-mockery of the Cantos, which I admire & dislike in equal measure...

Basically I am disappointed by his haughty arrogance (which he himself acknowledged in glimpses... say in the Pisan Cantos) and his kow-towing to "enlightened" despotism (Mussolini, Hitler, and all those wonderful "rulers")... and secondly - attracted as I am to some of the same philosophical lenses (Dante, some aspects of Neo-Platonism & medieval thought) - I see a very different actuality in the "tale" of world history, & I want to express that alternate view...

Something odd happened during the recent weeks of this re-reading... we have a sort of white & orange cat named Chester; recently we started taking care of a little scrawny feral stray cat, with a sharp face and green eyes, who has become a very affectionate pal to Chester... my wife started calling her "Esmerelda". When we finally caught her & were able to take her to the vet for shots etc., we discovered, lo & behold, Esmerelda was a he... so now Esmerelda is Ezra... (Pound was famously intrigued with the local stray cat population of whatever European city he happened to be wandering through... & the feline element in the Cantos is of course pervasive...). EP was enthralled with Ovid & Metamorphoses... maybe Ezra is Ezra! (But Ezra will never take the place of our beloved Pushkin, who like his namesake died young, & is buried in the backyard...)

Pushkin, that Russian cat

Have been reading The formed trace : the later poetry of Ezra Pound, by Massimo Bacigalupo (Columbia UP, 1980). An excellent book, I think. Has a good chapter titled "An American tradition", where he talks about the differences in outlook & attitude of the stream flowing from Whitman-Pound-WC Williams, and maybe an older (New England/Puritan? - he doesn't use these terms) stream, represented by Robt Lowell & Berryman, among others. The "erotic vision of nature" and optimism of the former; their affinities with the countercultural movements of the 60s; etc. Funny, he calls this Whitman/Pound/WCW wing the "mainstream" - and is critical of them, though not absolutely (the book is, after all, a measured & careful study of the Cantos & Pound's translations). Mainstream! Holy Silliman categories!

Remarks on how these (& others, including Eliot & Stevens) main modernists knew and cared little about Melville or Dickinson - who represent a more sceptical take on the "oneness" of the universe.

Hart Crane, on the other hand...

Reconsidering past writings... don't want to be too negative! Unless I have to be.

The long poems... in their context (with other like-minded long journey-poems or life-poems) - maybe, anyway, have their good points...

Reading more in & about Ezra Pound lately. Feel some connections between themes in later Cantos & what I'm trying to do or think about these days...

"can you enter the great acorn of light?"

Long time ago I wrote a longish poem called Spring Quartet, which actually included a kind of "ideogram"... it was a sketch of a small wooden toy bathtub boat, which my mother had made for me, christened "Sophie" - all white and light blue. In the center of the boat was an acorn. It was represented as sailing into Providence (the city)... eventually I gave the boat to Elena Shvarts (the Petersburgians have a serious historical thing about boats). It was destroyed several years later in a massive apartment fire in her building... I wish I'd taken a photo of that little toy.

I'm definitely in the Whitman endless-poem bunch. Interesting to me that Anny Ballardini is acquainted with Pound's daughter (Mary de Rachewiltz), over in Italy - and gave her a copy of our bilingual In RI.

Pondering (in the shower, on way to work, etc.) next week's events with A. Ballardini.

We'll be reading in libraries (RWU, John Hay). Yesterday visiting British poet John Cayley orchestrated a performance piece in my library, via linked computers, called "Impositions" - involved chanting, singing alphabetical algorithms - very unusual ambience for "the Rock"...

the poet in the ancient matrix of texts...

reminded me of the also-ancient, generative duel between the poet and writing, texts. (I've tried to deal with this before.) Poetry's roots in oral performance and personal presence set up a kind of rivalry with the more-distinct separation of speech & text represented by prose. cf. Whitman on/in Leaves of Grass : "this is no book... but a man". There must be a rhetorical term for this kind of exaggeration - certainly a paradox, anyway. Of course, it is, in fact, a book you are holding in your hand... but Whitman's statement - his persuasive, beguiling poem generally - plants a doubt in the reader's mind.

So I was thinking about this, and then about Pound's Cantos. Pound set himself as the heir to Whitman. With the "beak of his ego", as Olson put it, he attempted to bring old documents, old texts to life - by setting them in vivid, poetic juxtaposition. The poet setting the "beak" of his person within the dry nothingness & vast wastes of history & historiography - & in so doing, identifying himself with the lifegiving Osiris or Orpheus - bringing the millennial vision of springtime renewal into earthly history. This is how Pound set out to "re-do" the epic task of the epic poet, in the path of Homer & Dante.

& he saw his approach as specifically marshalling the special rhetorical powers of poetry, in order to challenge the displacement of the epic role in literature, from poetry to prose fiction & other forms of prose discourse.

So I was thinking about some of this this morning, in relation to the talks & readings I'll be giving with A. Ballardini. Back in the early 80s, I started to glom onto these special long history-documentary poems - Pound, Williams, Olson, David Jones, & others. They had an immediate appeal to someone like me, who has been avidly reading history since early childhood (I remember that big terrific Random House series for young people - the "We Were There" books, the history of science books - which I devoured when I was about ten or so).

& I started walking in that path, of the long history-epic poem. & now, due to Anny's translation/interpretation of In RI, I'm starting to think of these things in the context of translation. If poetry, in its rivalry with prose, is manifested under the sign of embodiment - of personal presence - how does this relate to translation, & specifically to In RI?

Just as there is more than one way of considering translation, there is more than one way of considering presence or embodiment. A. Ballardini provides an example of 2 types of translation, as I've noted previously - linguistic (English into Italian), and conceptual (text into interpretation - ie., her essay on the poem).

The Bible, correspondingly, offers at least two kinds of presence - both of them hovering near the sign of translation. In the King James version, Elijah, when he rides his burning chariot into the sky, is "translated" into heaven. Secondly, in the New Testament, there is the paradigmatic event of Pentecost, or Whitsuntide. Here, the ghostly presence of the Third Person of the Trinity is manifested by an explosion of translation - the famous "speaking in tongues", when the disciples from many nations saw flames flickering over each other's heads, and, though speaking in many languages, immediately understood each other. (This is a representation of the dual aspect of translation - linguistic & conceptual - fused together.)

We could say that this narrative of personal (or Personal, or supra-personal) presence - ordering and translating language into a new efficacy - is analogous to the role of poetry, in which personal presence manifests, vivifies and celebrates linguistic meaning.

So I was thinking of these things this morning, and of how A. Ballardini's attention and understanding of the text of my poem to some extent brings it to life; just as a poetry reading brings text to (celebratory) life.

In the context of In RI, we are talking about the epic tale of a "hero" (Roger Williams) who was, in many ways, both the product and the agent of translation. The new "counter-state" of Rhode Island, for which founding he was most responsible, was in a sense the outcome of a clash between the medieval & renaissance culture of autocratic state and enforced civil religion, on the one hand, and the radical, anarchic power of the newly-vernacularized Scripture on the other. When ordinary people could read the texts for themselves, forces of liberation were set in motion : forces which Williams, perhaps more effectively than anyone else, marshalled on behalf of the actualization of real political liberty. (p.s. some scholars have suggested that the term Williams used to identify RI as a "sanctuary state" - defining it as a "refuge" - might have been borrowed from an old report, in Italian - the first European description, by explorer Giovanni da Verrazano - of Narragansett Bay as a pleasant "refugio".)

So I was thinking about these things... and also about the title of the poem, In RI - which has a sort of double meaning. You see it in many medieval & renaissance paintings, as an inscription printed by the Romans over the crucified Jesus. Here is a counter-symbol, the polar opposite of that of Pentecost : an authoritative text inscribed over a dead body. At end end of her essay, A. Ballardini quotes an email I sent her in this regard :

"[The poem] is political. About founding a "counter-state", based on rights and popular sovereignty, which themselves in turn depend upon human empathy, fairness, openness, solidarity. Thus the title "In RI" sort of telescopes two things: an abuse of judicial language, and a special place (RI). By the abuse I mean the inscription 'IN RI' written by the Romans over Jesus' crucifixion. They had a procedure of writing the crimes of the condemned in this way, on the very instrument of execution. 'In RI' stood for 'king of the Jews', thus accusing Jesus of rebellion vs. the Roman state (actually a sort of stand-in for Barabbas). The political foundation of that "special place" (Rhode Island), through the agency of Williams, effects a sort of reversal (in world history) of the type of injustice represented by the inscription "In RI" (a mirror-image of the founding of Rome in Virgil's Aeneid...)."

So... anyway, I've been thinking about the role of poetry & the poet, in the context of a centuries-old literary predominance of prose. & how these varied elements of presence & translation - embodiment & ghostly transposition - are somehow activated by poetic performance...

I'm reading one of the best-written books I've ever read :

The Lion and the Throne : the Life & Times of Sir Edward Coke, 1552-1764

by Catherine Drinker Bowen (author also of Miracle At Philadelphia, about the Constitutional Convention)

Coke was the young Roger Williams' employer & mentor. Basically a master & saint of the Law (vs. tyranny). A key element of English legal tradition : right of accused to fair trial, no matter who, no matter what.

Here are some interesting Bowen quotes about writing.

& how did I get to this? Thanks to ol' Ez, whose Cantos extoll Coke as one of the wisest of men. Highly ironic, since Pound's whole temper & personality (violent, arrogant, irascible, contemptuous, brave, foolhardy) would have set him amongst those noblemen full of contumely whom Coke, time & again, excellent legal hound that he was, sent to the scaffold.

I wouldn't want to be stuck with the unwinnable argument that Crane is a greater poet than Pound, etc. My thought, however, is, that Crane's sense of, feel for, the image acts as a kind of tuning-fork (in relation to what's beautiful in Pound et al.). (Just as, for me, Mandelstam acted as a tuning-fork for Crane.)

Hast 'ou seen boat's wake on sea wall,
                              how crests it?
What panache?
               paw-flap, wave-tap,
                      that is gaiety,
Toba Sojo,
        toward limpidity,
                         that is exultance,
             here the crest runs on the wall

(Canto CX)

(note the Yeats in the background)

A blown husk that is finished
                                   but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
             where the salt hay whispers to tide's change.

- famous late Cantos lines. faintly, New Englandly. I can identify with the sentiment. can't get no traction these years. but maybe My Siena be another start. (the motion toward Siena has many sources, some which I don't feel like mentioning at the moment)

Ol Ez, the long poems... guys talking about Olson & Zuk again... Olson, Zuk... then another 40 years? (per M. Scroggini). ya missed sumpin' there, boys.

This long poem thing, the whole grandeurosity... kind of a throwback to an archaic sort of poet's Authority. Has its authoritarian aspect. which is part of the reason I tried to throw Hart Crane & Mandelstam & thems two's inimitable negative capabilities into the mix.

Mandelstam had that old birch cane kind of old-poet mana. Me-ums vs. Stalin. & boy he done it too, in 12 rounds. but he & Crane had such utterly different personality-atmospherics from Pound Ol'Wmszuk.

The only real authority is that "light sings eternal". Granted to the poet who penetrates to it & lets it shine.

I'm looking at Pound's search, search... & at what he missed (hidden in plainest sight).

& here I am, & I gets no respeck, not from the flitterati, nor the scholastic ham-jambons.

Found some of Joseph Rock's books here in the Rock (source for Pound's "Na-Khi" imagery in late Cantos). Reading some of his late fragments (Pound's), note the New Englandy, genealogical trend (the bits about the colonial charter of Connecticut, which one of his maternal ancestors had something to do with - a Joseph Wadsworth).

Reminds me of Olson a little.

Mark Scroggins in interesting thread.

Reading Hall of Mirrors, by Peter Stoicheff. Monograph on Pound's last cantos (Drafts & Fragments).

Struck by the repeated word in Canto 116:

Many errors,
               a little rightness,
to excuse his hell
                 and my paradiso.
And as to why they go wrong,
              thinking of rightness
*
To confess wrong without losing rightness:
Charity I have had sometimes,
            I cannot make it flow thru.

(thinking of Mandelstam's (1930s) off-the-cuff, defensive "definition" of poetry : "the poet's sense of being right".)

Stoicheff's discussion of Pound's focus on the Confucian link between inner rightness, personal integrity, and general social reform. How the melodrama, the tragicomedy of his own life & actions forced him to confront this issue in a way he hadn't expected.

Look at this fascinating bit from a Cox essay on Jules Laforgue, printed here in Jacket. I guess this is the kind of thing I meant, yesterday, as the standard of "world literature". Just really careful, perceptive, informed reading. A real critic is a real literary historian.

"Laforgue’s poetry is more moving and more difficult than anyone would think whose idea of it derives from Eliot’s imitations. Eliot captured some of its tones of voice, applying them to ends of his own, to mask and evade. When he found other means to do it his interest in Laforgue declined.

Pound’s never lapsed. It was Laforgue who opened his eyes to certain qualities in Propertius and it is features of Laforgue’s writing that underlie the Homage and crop out at places in Mauberley. To call it verbalism seems to degrade intellectual detachment to stylistic trickery but the facts are complex. If some of his tricks are extreme, Laforgue’s detachment is exponential: he mocks his own self-mockery. Something in him Pound always found hard to grasp but knew was there and strove to emulate. He once described it as force coinciding the fragility, great power with great nonchalance. It’s not exactly nonchalance, rather a studied offhandedness. His last word in Canto CXVI: ‘...Jules... deeps in him...’"

[I like the line about "Jules" too. Sounds like a quote from Forth of July, ha-ha]

a little more from My Siena :

10

                         The Lord hath created a new thing in the earth.
                         A woman shall compass a man.
                                                        Jer. 31:22


 
In the quiet womb of what shall be
The estranged, homesick word flies back to its nest
Of abiding peacefulness.
                          Alighieri and
Ezra circle home again, through the door
Beneath a bookstore's rocking sign
For Wisdom (coracle) - touched
By patient, penetrant
Forgiveness - lifted
From the jaws of Leviathan.

 
The womb absorbs their eccentricity.
An unexpected equilibrium takes hold.
The empty wind and the words it carries
Ruffle the water and reflect unspoken things.
What was justice for the High Commissioner
Becomes a pathway for the downcast immigrant -
That baby refugee, whose throbbing wail
(Still untranslateable) will parse
The future tense.

sculpture is the art of muscle. what is explicit in dance is implicit in every sculpture.

that mangle of steel has a person inside it.

the sculptor is the opposite of the bomber (Conrad's "pest among men" - cf. Secret Agent).

"to be builders, not destroyers" [Cantos?]

Notes Toward & So On (11)

A book of criticism on the mid-20th century American poets by Adam Kirsch - titled The Wounded Surgeon - got a rave review in the NY Times yesterday. (The photo of Kirsch - with the little TS Eliot glasses & tie & hair mussed just so... amazing, like some kind of hologrammic projection or clone of the quintessential 50s English prof. Send it to Jim Behrle for processing.)

(Dude, whazzup with your author photo?)

According to the review, Kirsch's thesis is that under the intimidating shadow of the previous generation, the mid-century poets (Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, et al.) were forced to branch into a less monumental, more personal, inward (if that's the right word) practice - but that, nevertheless, the stringencies of the Moderns maintained influence benign.

I'm going to see if the library has this...

Thinking this morning about Pound, though. As critic & schoolmarm-stickler, he certainly had tremendous influence. Yet did he practice what he preached?

Pound is somebody whose mad flight manifests, in all its maniacal fibrillation, a certain freedom, profundity & ranginess, which is not exactly an applicable paradigm or learnable rubric of modernist/New Critical technique. These attributes are cultivated, perhaps, by an insatiable appetite for knowledge - combined with a faith in poetry as the medium of a unified sensibility : an integral consciousness, integrity. (This in no way justifies the stupid, harsh & mean aspects of Pound, though his obvious nuttiness somewhat mitigates our judgement.)

A unified sensibility delves into the world, reality, & finds ways to characterize it - which is why the works can be studied repeatedly, always offering new perspectives. The faith in poetry's value, as a means of expression, results in a long struggle. I guess this was the motive for the production of long poems, even after the displacement of epic by fiction. (On the other hand, an integral sensibility is also the means by which poets discover their own distinctive style - whatever length or form it takes.)

Pound was that kind of resilient, stubborn, independent soul, that solitary eccentric (monomaniacal, actually) thinker. There are better, purer, examples of the artist - the ones who succeed in the struggle to unify & transmute sensibility into poetry. It's the flagrant eccentrics, like Pound & Blake, whose extremity illustrates a more general rule.

In fact this may be the main lesson - "soul freedom", utter (vocational) commitment, the link between integrity (of sensibility) & art - which Lowell & Berryman, anyway, took from Pound, rather than anything to do with the monumentality & objectivity of the art work.

Notes Toward & So On (10)

Looking back at last week's outpourings... what was I thinking? Who can read all that? Have be more concise & focused.

OK, back to thinking out loud.

This all began with the question of "what is to come" in poetry. Crosses somewhat with the various bloggussions about reviews & reviewing.

I have certain models or benchmarks always in mind. People who read HG Poetics already know what they are. There was the moment in the late 70s when I found the David McDuff translations of Mandelstam : from that stemmed almost everything (in my 2nd life in poetry, that is : the 1st life being high school, college, NY School days - 60s to early 70s).

It was M's handling of imagery which struck me, & opened all the other doors : leading to Crane, then to the long poems (Pound, WCW, Olson, mostly), Celan, Montale... & back to Renaissance & other poetries (ring-structure, number symbolism in poetry, epic narratives, etc).

So there is a predilection for ut pictura.... & a sense of a divide between poetry and ordinary discourse & socializing. The literary work is a very highly-elaborated special environment, dense with particular affect(s), which should be approached with circumspection. The lion sleeps on its paws./It can kill a man.

Now what my tendencies are may have very little to do with where poetry-in-general is "going". I've been talking around a constellation (or muddle) involving symbolic facts with something like seriousness. Melopoeia (song, lyricism) underlies & supports phanopoeia (imagery) which radiates logopoeia (symbolism). Serious, in part because a "symbolic fact" is something irrevocably tied to experience; and in part because the tradition of poetic song involves intensity (of thought, of feeling, of encounter). But most poetry operates on a much broader, looser band of rhetorical effects than what I've focused on here. So let it go where it will.

What is to come, for me anyway, will circle around the core characteristics I have adumbrated in this lecture-babble series. Drawing from that lyric-ecphrastic-symbolic center, the resonant meanings will branch out in many directions.

In the Sunday Times book review section, there was another long take on Robert Lowell's Letters (reviewed by Walter Kirn). He quoted an early (adolescent) letter to Pound, in which Lowell magnified on Pound's greatness & force, & expatiated on how he (Lowell) would carry on the torch & take it further.

I had the odd thought that Lowell was narrowing in on the literary practitioner, & in so doing, had surrendered a certain critical distance. I thought about Ezra Pound, not perhaps as he would have thought of himself (a Great Modernist, an ego-beak thrusting into the future), but as a figure stemming from a certain time & place - post-Civil War America : the late 19th-cen. world of Henry James, Twain, Teddy Roosevelt, et al. Something about the Innocent-Abroad The American insouciance and command... as if he & Eliot, in a way, were perpetual cruisers on their Gilded Age, Belle Epoque, postgraduate jaunt to Europe. Rooted, despite all their struggles, like flies in amber - in the fading echoes of prewar Europe & Old America.

This I think would be an interesting way to read Pound, anyway.
Not sure what this has to do with the generalities with which I started today's maunder. Except that maybe it reinforces the notion of reading poems - even poems written today - as dense with background & cultural-historical resonances.

Likeable post from Robert Archambeau today, via John Peck, on Pound's & Olson's differing syntax. Daniel Albright (in Quantum Poetics) also covers the way ol' Ez would sideline the subject of his sentences & promote the verb (in a letter to someone, EP re-did the opening of the Gospel of John as "In the beginning was the Verb"). (Mandelstam wrote once that he'd like to live in the "future perfect conditional case" [hope I've got that right]. Probably means something completely different in Russian.)

I practice the harmonica walking to work these days. Learning from Sonny Terry again : less is more. You focus on the tiny shifts here & there. This is what such attention to the texture of a poet's diction does - leads to new possibilities, new pleasures too.

[huh. synchronicity. Hotel man wrote about harmonica-playing today too.]

Josh with some more interesting thoughts on "post-postmodern pastoral", etc.

Interesting that he starts the genealogy with Pound. You could think of epic, long-poem, and pastoral (the goal of epic?) as sharing a certain space. Pound thought of his long-poem as a "tale of the tribe" (see Michael Bernstein book on this).

When I started exploring this area for myself, back in the early 80s, I was still working as a VISTA volunteer for various community/activist groups in Providence. I had managed a food coop & community gardens, & a CETA project with high school kids, to build a "community solar greenhouse"*. I was finishing a M.A. in community organizing at Beacon College in Boston. This work influenced my literary outlook, too. The notion of a long poem for me had to do with forms of poetry which were able to connect with historical movements & narratives, and with a kind of ideal, at least, of "public speech".

So for me the notion of pastoral had (& still has) a populist-political cast. Just part of the general awareness or desire for a "sustainable" common life, in harmony with the world (with people & nature in general). The relationship between social justice, the common good, and a healthy integration with nature.

In the days of VISTA we had a sense that the right thing for young people to do, before they plunged into the private sector in one way or another, was to work in the public sector - to monitor and rein in private interests on behalf of the common good. We were young & naive enough to imagine we had a pretty clear & reasonable notion of what that common good was, and that there was a kind of heroic grassroots/everyday struggle going on, against business interests & corrupt pols, that grassroots people could get involved with.

Why this was the right thing to do was precisely because the common good, since it is so vast, amorphous, and future-oriented, really has few advocates - unlike the narrow & short-term interests of the private sector. And this amorphous ideal quality was akin to the interests of the poor, who also had few advocates. And young people, because of their relative freedom from narrow obligations, were in a position to be those advocates. There's something beautiful about this notion, almost romantic. During the course of the 80s and 90s, political advocacy expanded, sharpened, and professionalized to a great degree. Lines were drawn more sharply, and soft-romantic idealism was curtailed.

This is how I see (very vaguely, anyway), the process happening over the last few decades. But I think underlying the rather naive and perhaps arrogant worldview of those times (mid to late 70s), there is a kernel of truth, an unresolved goal. How so? Well, politics, social policy, social justice are basically about figuring out how to live together. And there is always going to be a necessary balancing-out, an equilibrium, between particular special/private interests (both economic & political), on the one hand, and government policy regarding the welfare of the whole (the common good), on the other.

If one recognizes that political participation means engaging with the project of fostering that equilibrium - and if one accepts the notion of a kind of social-historical poetry (epic/long-poem/pastoral) - one might see how in different ways these two activities intersect. Because an "achievable" or sustainable pastoral world is obviously a project of social justice, in the most general and inclusive sense (ie., all the multifarious ways people engage in beneficial social activity). So pastoral poetry would necessarily have a political aspect.

Language - and poetry - of course, cannot be channeled or directed from the outside, not by any political strategy, philosophy, or 5-yr plan. The force of language - lyric, dramatic, narrative, didactic, satirical, comic - manifests in autonomous and unpredictable fashion. Setting aside any purely aesthetic argument, poetic language is a manifestation of the freedom of the human spirit. The project of epic/long-poem, however - akin to similar efforts in other modes of literature - is to represent "social wholes" or shared realities; they are narratives which reach for wide public recognition and assent/dissent.

[*in the 2nd collage in Stubborn Grew, there's a little photo of me standing next to that greenhouse. The CETA project which built it was probably one of the more unusual in the history of federal programs. A 6-sided solar greenhouse, about 40 ft long and 20 ft tall, designed so its 6 points would touch the side of a "vesica", the geometrical figure formed by the intersection of two circles; length dimensions were drawn from British author John Michell's various books on ancient "sacred geometry". Constructed by Brown student volunteers & CETA high school kids from Fox Point. One of the Brown students, Mark Van Noppen, went on to become a leading builder of urban rehab housing in Providence.]

I've been posting some images of poets here lately. I did a google image search on Ezra Pound, but didn't find a copy of the little postage-stamp photo of him which I found in my 2nd-hand copy of the Cantos. I don't know where it came from; it looks like an original (though that's unlikely!). Should have it checked, I guess. It's EP in old age, sitting on a rock, holding a white cane.

A lot of my poetry writing during the 1990s was shaped by the notion that the "long poem" is a distinct genre, one I was very curious about. The variety & expansiveness of the models intrigued me. I was drawn to the special kind of seriousness & authority they (& the lives devoted to them) seemed to emanate (mana, charisma). I liked the way patterns or layers appeared - Pound's "palimpsest" - with various generations (Olson/Zukofsky/David Jones, et al.; Pound/Crane/Joyce, et al.; Whitman... and then back to the old epics).

The long poem seemed like a way to engage with public, social & historical issues, to step beyond the seemingly inherent solitude & solipsism of poetry, to try something with different parts of the composing personality (aside from "music", which has always exerted a strong tug on my negatively-capable dream-life).

I wrote a bunch of them in the 1990s. Most of them are in little chapbooks in the Brown Library.

Memorial Day
Spring Quartet
In RI (still in manuscript)
Forth of July (which includes Stubborn Grew)

These projects focused a lot of my energy. In between I wrote some shorter poems.

We each hear and interpret the poetry before us and around us differently; we live each in our own imaginative conception of the po-sphere. But the literary tradition, like history itself, is both objective and subjective; personal and collective; changeless and changeable. At the high points of my travels through these long poem projects, sometimes I felt like I was finding a theme or an idiom which created a genuine aura of interaction or dialogue with what had been done before. In other words the experiments I was doing seemed meaningful in relation to the previous experiments of those poets who had "broken through" (into literary tradition). This, in part I guess, was what I was working for in the first place.

I think I had several motives for taking this sort of roundabout route or method of composition. For one thing, I wanted to frame a conception of reality in poetry which included history as a form or frame of Time itself. This sounds very vague & portentous, I guess. I was looking at Dante, Milton, & Pound & Olson, as poets who tried to set their own cultures within historical frames, which themselves were framed by philosophical or metaphysical conceptions. & I wanted to do something like that. I wanted to do something holistic. Because I had my own puzzled, inchoate notion of history, which differed from these others'. Where it came from I suppose is in part explained by the travails I went through in the 70s, as described sketchily over at AlephoeBooks.