for Notre Dame

PACIFIC ARC

April air, so clear today.  The quiet sea-

blue sky.  Clear as that great bell

ringing in Paris – for the swell

of hearts, for Notre Dame (in her infirmity).

In Minneapolis, as everywhere, the plague

confines each to monastic cell.

For contemplation, just as well…

for dreams, these patchworks made with rag.

My own dream surfaced in a film – Deserto Rosso

(M. Antonioni).  Monica Vitti, in

moss-green – damaged angelo-mammi;

her little boy, gone lame (povero bambino)

at her ceramic studio; those indecisive men

full of morose indifference

battered by commercial arrogance,

industrial violence… & the wistful omen

of the desolate cathedral (windswept, hollow

Sant’Apollinare).  Alighieri

stood in this nave once; calmly

pondered the tall wraiths, gleaming in shadow –

Justinian, & Theodora… all the martyrs

in procession, holding their lamps

lifted, unmoving… lambs

in a moss-green meadow, by the still waters.

Just so each poet carries in their heart

like robin’s egg in oak leaf nest

a Paradise, made roughly manifest –

as Langland’s Imaginativa would impart

dream-visions of the human Temple

hidden there.  So Henry Church

would make a supreme sketch

on local limestone, an American example –

one Venn diamond, rimmed with Jonah-pen

borrowed from humble Maximus

whose subtlest partitas mass

the radiant matrix of divine & human

(union of the two-in-one, distinct

without division or confusion).

Curl, then, into this acorn

nest of light, this Rose of every precinct –

Apollinaire & Mary Magdalen   together

witness at the sepulcher

*

Grace attentive   through Hell-sulfur

Love revive   on silver loon-feather

When the local materials begin to coalesce

& the collage takes shape & form

& the design of Maximus, his dream

translates (in waves) our constitutional mess –

for that incarnate Union of the two-in-one

implies a like distinction between

Church & State – salvation

neither by Emperor nor Pope, but won

deep within each living human soul

in liberty of conscience

loving freedom of response –

so that the invisible Churnagogue is whole

& multi-confessional – universal – hidden

like Micòl’s almond canoe

in the garage, in Ferrara (you

know what I mean).  So we begin again

where we ended before – in dreams

in shadow-lands of fiction

in the feathery benediction

under that granite palm of Roger Williams

in the old town of Providence, the rose

rood of Rhode Island

with an origami flower-bend

beside the humble stream of San Francesco

flowing to sky-tinged Gulf, flowing to Sea

under a firm Pacific arc

lit by candescent sunset spark

far off there   breathing   with you & me

4.16.20

upon St. Swithin's Day

MONARCH MILK

‘Tis hot & muggy in the octagon

upon St. Swithin’s Day.

& will it rain?  Say.

St. Emperor Henry’s (Holy Roman)

also, once upon a time.  It’s stifling.

An unreal toad usurps

the garden throne, & burps.

His orange tongue is mean, & trifling;

his fire-red refuge-chair is for a child

who hasn’t come home

in 33 years.  Christendom

conquered the Holy Sepulchre... wild

slaughter & rejoicing on this day,
1099.  But will his Ghost

lift from that gloomy host?

Joachim daubs a fingerpaint contrary

blindly, with bare feet (a cave-fresco

for San Francisco).  & Henry

plots his own obscure & minatory

figure : double wheels.  Of milky glow

& river-clay – Cahokia, North Star.

To turn the Great Year

5 29s... & spin from here

some monarch milk (a little almond to restore).

7.15.19

Ravenna Diagram Reading Guide #8

R.D. READING GUIDE #8

HOLE IN THE DAY  (p.10)

“Hole-in-the-Day” : prominent Ojibwe chieftain who tried to rally tribal support for the 1862 Dakota uprising in Minnesota.  He was assassinated in 1868 near the Crow Wing Agency by a group of Ojibwe men.  Here, the raven is represented as a kind of “hole in the day”.

“left the ark” : Noah, on the ark, sent out ravens to look for signs of dry land

“Furnace... against azure” : raven in sky imaged as “anti-matter X-factor”, a metaphysical sign

“Oil-power” : pun on oeuil (French for “eye”).  Replays metaphorical changes on the “third eye” etc. of previous poems

“fodder for wretched // prophet” : the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens sent by YHWH

“Hovers / outside” : the spiritual otherness signaled by the raven

“Night’s black... one sphere’s damaged / grey” : the uncanny raven-otherness seems to return to earth through the back door

“One Rahab-hair” : the Biblical Rahab opened the “back door” allowing Joshua to capture Jericho

“In the theater” : poet sees muse-like figure or Dantean “old flame” in the Avon Cinema (Providence)

“Geraldine Fitzgerald” : lead actress in bio-pic (Woodrow) Wilson, and other films.  The “circularity” of her name, and its echoes of Ireland and JFK, are marked here

“The hour draws nigh...” : by means of some alchemical movie magic, the cosmopolitan spirit of the film, and the actual presence of “Geraldine” in the theater, evoke this hopeful (Elijah-like) prophecy

Ravenna Diagram Reading Note #6

Ravenna Diagram guide for the Perplexed continues, page-by-page.  This poem appeared a few years ago in the journal West Branch.

R.D. READING GUIDE #6

BLACK PEAK  (p.8)

This poem has a nightmarish, abortive quality.  So many indecipherable personal references that one could make the argument it fails as a work of art.  But perhaps it stands as a kind of boundary marker, a warning of some real difficulties which lie ahead.  This poem was published in the journal West Branch.

“crows” and “oaks” : recurrent images

“Woods-Gerry” : the Woods-Gerry Mansion on Prospect St., in Providence, a couple blocks from the Brown University Library.  Imposing Victorian mansion on the crest of the hill, now housing offices and galleries of the RI School of Design.

“Persephone’s bee-day” : bee-day, birthday.  Bees of Persephone an image drawn from poems by Mandelstam

“Italianate” : we are back in the sphere of Ravenna

“archivo-kisses” : Orphic librarian-poet, with backward glance (fateful for Eurydice/Persephone)

“Marshland...” etc. : Ravenna pine-swamps

“Porta Aurea” : ancient ruins in both Ravenna and Constantinople – translates as “Golden Gate”

“twin black / brows” : a kind of montage of beloved faces sharing this feature of black eyebrows, mirrored/merging in a guilt-ridden occhio terzo (third eye)

sliver-orecchio : odd image of “sliver-ear” (wooden ear? moral deafness?)

“black omelet” : the eyebrows and the third eye merge in this apocalyptic sign of the “black sun”, with pun on OM – Osip Mandelstam, who wrote a poem alluding to the Pushkinian “black sun” of Russian (and Jewish) history.

“ghost of a memory” : the kiss in the Italianate mansion has multiple emotional strata for poet (ex-husband of an Italian-American, one dimension of many)

“who lifts / twin wings” : are we back to the redemptive owl-flight of Minerva/Sophia?  or something else?  “six, eight” wings signals a “seraph” (also a recurrent image in Mandelstam)

Ravenna Diagram Reading Guide #4

This be the next entry in Ravenna Diagram reading notes for Susan Brown.  Inquire here for more info....

R.D. READING NOTES #4

COLD SPRING (p.6)

Poem full of obscurities.  Stanzas 1 & 2 : we are back in northern MN winter landscape.  Raven/Ravenna.  Shakespeare’s “treble-dated crow” (Phoenix & Turtle) – which, according to legend,  engenders offspring by breathing – is flying back and forth.

“scrawny schemer.... Signature / of Cain-torn soil”  :  slight mingling of Biblical and Native American legends.  Raven, along with Bluejay, appears in some Trickster stories.

“something resolute... smoke-dispute” : a basic philosophical debate – what is Death?  What is Life?

“dissipating ghost-limb, drifting / wake” : allusion to parallels between 19th-cent. Ghost Dance movement and Christian doctrines of Resurrection

“morse code... remorse” : sound echo with Latin mors, death

“chancy chancery... So choose” : the actuality of death, its duel or chess game with life, motivates the moral conscience – what shall I choose to do, how shall I live, in the face of mortality?

“Only way / is up, replies the smoke” : affinity between ghost, or spirit, and smoke – the “morse code” of Native Am. smoke-signals (& peace pipes)

“raven-laughter (hoarse / sneers)” : the suggestion behind this poem’s folktale dialectic is of something beyond cynicism or fatalism

Reply to a question re : Ezra Pound, Hart Crane

Susan Brown, my gentle interlocutor in this ongoing explication of Ravenna Diagram conundra, emailed to ask for more detail on what I meant (in the "Preliminaries") by my statement that in this epic poem (that is, in Ravenna Diagram) I was mounting a challenge to Pound's presentation of history (in his Cantos, his "poem including history"), with help from Hart Crane.  This was my response :

Quick reply, Susan : my sense is that Pound, despite all his Dantesque and Provencal medievalism, his knowledge of medieval scholastic theology, tends to deride and downplay the "Hebraic" dimension of Western culture-history.  There is a strong occultist dimension - the Eleusinian mysteries, Neo-platonism, etc.  Also the very marked Fascist tendencies, the Nietzschean(?) disdain for Jewish and Christian compassion.  Pound is not consistent : my "argument" with him is not very fair.  But it's there.  Pound's "poem including history", in my view, pretty much eviscerates the basic Jewish-Christian foundations of (at least) the Western dimensions of world history.

Another aspect of all this concerns Crane.  Pound (like Eliot in some ways) was a nostalgic expatriate living in Europe.  He was a political authoritarian, a reactionary.  Hart Crane, despite his Platonic-visionary leanings, was devoted to Whitman and the tradition of a mythical, futuristic America (Crane's "Atlantis"), rooted in democratic values.  This is, I know, a great simplification and idealization of Crane.  Crane has a special symbolic place in Ravenna Diagram and in my writing in general, which I won't get into now.  But the STYLE of R.D. owes at least as much to Crane as to Pound.  For I long time I sensed a kind of sonic stylistic affinity between Crane's idiom (his imagery and sound) and Mandelstam's approach to imagery, metaphor & sound.  Which (sort of) became my own approach to imagery & sound.

Ravenna Diagram Reading Guide #3

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

RAVENNA DIAGRAM READING NOTES #3

“UP NORTH” (p.5)

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

“Time’s wooden (4th

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ravenna Diagram Reading Guide : #2

Here are notes to the Ravenna Diagram poem "Lunar Corona" (p.4).  This poem also is not posted to the blog.  (See previous post for a link to the physical book.)

RD READING NOTES #2

“LUNAR CORONA” (p.4)

Poet seems to be confronting enigma of the poem itself, his own work-in-progress.  City of Ravenna, for long a remote, neglected backwater, is presented here as mirror-image of poet’s own solitary endeavor.

“Brown leaf... my neck of the sea.”  : poet worked for decades at Brown Univ. Library in Providence, RI – his “neck of the sea”.

“picture a forlorn cathedral...” : many such for many centuries in Ravenna

“Rothko Chapel” : first of many references to visual art in RD.

“gray memory... wheel of silence” : see Jasper Johns’ works in particular

“Osip’s selva os” : linking Dante with Mandelstam.  “selva os” : dark wood (see opening of Divina Commedia).  Os – short for Osip – mouth or gate to his own inward wilderness.

“Consul’s barranca : the ravine in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano

“My one and only... speechless trumpeter” : Chet Baker (another suicidal artist)

“Remote... (sans crown).” : Dante, buried in Ravenna, lacks the public bestowal of a laurel crown from his native city (Florence)

“flies / who?” : haunted Ravenna visited by owl of Minerva/Beatrice (wisdom)

“shady rainbow” : a transmutation of the purely subjective (“blind”) colors of the “personal Rothko Chapel”

Reading Guide to Ravenna Diagram - #1

This week my friend Susan Brown, scholar, translator and Fernando Pessoa specialist, asked if I might supply some reading aids for Ravenna Diagram, that infinitely long and equally obscure poem I am writing.  Her request was timely, as I'm approaching the final segment of that opus, and have taken a pause to re-evaluate and collect myself.  So responding to her request will actually help me do that.

I've decided to post whatever I come up with in the way of a reader's guide here on the blog.  Most of the poem has appeared on HG Poetics day-by-day, so if possible I will provide a link to the page in question.  Otherwise, the actual book is available from Small Press Distribution, or possibly you'll find it in a nearby library.

So here we go.  I start with some brief preliminaries, and then some notes for the third poem of RD, titled "Shady Banquet" (which unfortunately is not posted here on the blog; but maybe my notes will encourage some of you to seek it out).

READING NOTES FOR RAVENNA DIAGRAM

PRELIMINARIES

RD is a long poem.  It is cumulative, made up of short poems which are added to the whole as they are written, and dated.

The long poem is a sub-genre of American poetry, with its own genealogy.  All kinds of poets have written them, since before the American Revolution, from Longfellow to H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) to James Merrill and beyond.

I trace my own lineage in this genre through Whitman, to Pound and his emulators (WC Williams, H.D., Charles Olson, Zukofsky).  But my closest affinity is with Hart Crane.  In fact I tend to juxtapose what I see as the stance of Crane against that of Pound.  

Why?  Pound defined the modern epic as a “poem including history”.  He traced his own lineage back to Dante, and further back.  But I’m absorbed by the question of “history” as well.  I base my sense of western and world history on different grounds from those of Pound.  So there’s a dialectic going on, an argument with Pound, with assistance from Crane.  

I am really not able to summarize what I’m doing with this poem in a few words.  It would be a mistake to try : there is so much that remains obscure about it, even to myself.  But there seem to be a few constant and recurring themes :

the emotional attraction of Ravenna – as the place Dante finished the Divina Commedia and the place he is buried; as the site of the Byzantine mosaics (which influenced Dante’s own writing); as the location of Antonioni’s mysterious 60s film, Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) starring Monica Vitti & Richard Harris.

an over-arching Orphic dimension, translated to America.  My cousin Juliet leapt off the Golden Gate Bridge in 1971, at age 19.  This psychic trauma seems to thread into all my long poems.  Here it becomes a kind of keynote for a search for spiritual response to suicide and the death-wish in general (including the fate of John Berryman, the poet of the “Henry” Dream Songs, who jumped off a bridge a few blocks from where I live).  Juliet becomes a sort of Eurydice/Persephone/Beatrice sign.  And this leads to further perusal of the archaic “feminine” underside of history and religion, and involves collisions between our American modernity and archaic native American beliefs & practices.

a re-imagining or re-visiting of theological/philosophical impulses shaping the Divina Commedia.  That is, I have my own leanings or conceptions about “transcendental” reality, which I try to address, gradually, incrementally, in this poem.  In that sense it’s a sort of spiritual journey, a “new model” Divine Comedy.

RD READING NOTES

“SHADY BANQUET”  (p.3)

The sun stands still, as if held in the beak of dogwood limbs.  Time halts or pauses.

Northwest Coast Indian mythic image of Raven holding the sun (“the bright sheep-pelt” – golden fleece?) in his beak.

Raven – Cautantowwit – Narragansett main god.  God of the afterlife : carried souls to heaven in the “Southwest”.

Series of images from Macbeth.  Death’s ghastliness.  (A kind of warning to the “Orphic” poet entering these regions.)

“wind sighs through old / pinatas, where a star slips now” : the soul-star is now in the Southwest – land of Mexico, death, pinatas (battered birthday icons).  Southwest throughout poem is linked with annual renewal journey of monarch butterflies to Mexico (and sacred “monarchs” in general).

“So listen; hear” – poet or reader is summoned to continue

“Plummet into yon undertow / of marshland tombs” – the realm of Ravenna itself

image in closing stanzas of an elusive anima/soul/spirit – Juliet?  Beatrice? “skipping / across her melancholy / diamond”.  This introduces a recurring motif drawn from Pound’s lines in Cantos :  “For me nothing / But that the child / walk in peace in her basilica”

transcendental & irrational path P

THIN BANDS

The outer circle of this diagram

is drawing to a close.

The path P we chose

here loops into its ruddy oriflamme.

An old man’s line of numbers,

transcendental &

irrational.  Thin bands,

ketched for riding heavy combers –

sea-path between good & evil.

One people’s destiny

doubled in duality;

twin circles on their parallel

                **

emerge (amid stars & stripes

& iron bars).  History

halts here : between Rimini

& Ravenna (Venice-Paris) overlaps.

The pilot at the wheel of Providence

eyes the prow of his canoe.

Her figurehead (1132)

blooms from the sepulcher – immense

Redemption, like a Stonehenge grail

from 44 B.C. to 4.14.

Melchizedek stands in between.

The plummet-eye of Joachim sets sail.

3.14.19

a flower for Bloomsday

CIRQUE MATRIX

Gray Hobo-bird faces a problem :

how to save his own long

featherweight fern song?

How to rewind a strung-out poem?

Effigies & icons flashing by

like ripples in his eye –

Burchfield, El Anatsui...

Hartley, Martin, Klimt... Johnny

Jasper... fond winter raven-

oeuil of Master Bruegel...

Pompey, in the empty well

of Yahweh, was befuddled – No One

There.  The clear plein air of Quaker

meeting house, of Shaker

chair.  The carpenter’s

simplicity of Philadelphian law-

oracles.  We hold these truths...

But Hobo’s murmuring his

Nil Reed Candace house;

his prairie wind blows wild (Ruth’s

trail through mazy corn, tracking

Boaz from Goshen-land).

With poem-in-a-can

in hand (his pemmican) & Red Wing

Thunderbird-Woodpecker perched

atop his hat, he moseys,

slouching, sea to sea;

aboard his polar bear canoe (birch-

                 *

light) he circulates a mystery –

where be this Henry Church

round whom leaf-sundials march?

Planted in Resurrection Cemetery?

Or hidden in a holm oak tree?

The painted whisper gallery

enshades invisibility.

Will he sleepwalk forever, Poetry?

The milkweed monarch fans meekness.

This moth is camouflaged

brown dust.  The sagebrush

rolls through red deserts, the cedars

pine for Juniper (slate-blue).

Time’s broom sweeps clean

but tiny seeds remain.

A microcosmic mustard-yellow

gyroscope (spun in Ravenna

backwater) balances

Galilee on Providence;

the bicycle with one duo-antenna

twirls its silver spokes into

a rose-wheel window.

Where did Harry go,

Hobo?  He’s hidden in Otranto

glass.  He’s riding Pegasus

into a cirque matrix –

cartwheeling carny tricks

as Henry Flower Wilderness.

6.16.17

Walking around Ravenna Diagram

Ravenna Diagram, the project I've been engaged with for the last few years, begins with a poem called "Potter's Whirl".  That poem was set in motion by small ceramic plate my mother made many years ago, featuring a pale pink starfish with a background of stars & rays - sort of a cosmic little dish.

You could say this poem is an introductory pointer toward the shape of Ravenna Diagram as a whole.  The "diagram" in question is actually a kind of Venn diagram, with two interlocking spheres centered, respectively, on the contemporary here & now, and on Dante Alighieri's presence at the end of his life among the Byzantine structures & mosaics of Ravenna (Dante completed his Divina Commedia there, and is buried in Ravenna).

It's meant to be a kind of juxtaposition of Modern & Medieval mind & culture, or a synthesis.  The Venn diagram also points to the underlying worldview of the western Middle Ages : a concept of Incarnation, which is itself a sort of Venn diagram, melding the human and the divine.  In the poem, this worldview or philosophy is represented in part by the figure of Maximus the Confessor, a Byzantine monk whose writings on the Trinity had a deep impact on the thought-world of the 12th-cent. French cathedral-builders, as well as on the Byzantine Orthodox church itself (see Otto von Simson's monograph The Gothic Cathedral for more on this).

I think of my Dante juxtaposition as a sort of 90-degree tweak.  While the Divine Commedia climbs vertically (up & down the ladder from Earth to Heaven), Ravenna Diagram works on the horizontal - set upon the "flat plate" of the American Midwest, & seeking this-world ramifications and consequences of a spiritual worldview (the eschatological meaning of "Providence", for example).

I sense that the poem actually gathers mass & energy in the same way that my mother shaped her plates and bowls from lumps of wet clay turned on a potter's wheel.  The making of ancient, medieval and Renaissance poetry was enmeshed in such "ring structures" - their unity welded by numerologically-concentric rings of design.  This process is something I've been pursuing over several long poems & several decades of work.  The chapters & books of Ravenna Diagram turn on their own centers, which in turn are linked by motifs surfacing in the corresponding or parallel "numbers" (ie. the 14th poem in Book 1 will find echoes in the 14th & nearby poems of Books 2-9+).

One of the strange effects for me of this process is that the individual units or poems will foreshadow each other in advance.  Here's how it happens.  My general method is to read through the aligned or corresponding "numbers" of the previous books before setting out on the next poem.  Thus if I'm writing # 27 in Book 10, I will read through the previous #27s in Books 1-9, seeking a general orientation.  Then I will proceed to write #27.  The odd thing is this : when I then turn to composing #28, and proceed to read all the previous #28s, I discover that what I'm reading has already been foreshadowed by what I've just written (#27).  It's sort of a double motion, planned/unplanned.

If this sounds convoluted, my apologies : the basic idea is that the large poem is structured on a series of rings, growing slowly outward, like a tree.  It's a massive ceramic plate - shaped by clay lips (a sort of "whisper gallery").  Or a maze, a labyrinth - a slow, spiraling pilgrimage one has to walk.

My constant companion in this seemingly endless project is a shadow of doubt & frustration.  There is no acknowledgement in the literary world for what I'm engaged with here.  The silence is absolute.  It's like I'm traveling in a separate or private universe, on an irrational fool's errand.  There is a vast chasm between creation & publication.  I have no prestige, no powerful advocates.  Ravenna Diagram goes out there on HG Poetics, with occasional forays into literary magazines (for which I'm extremely grateful).

I've written before about the motivations for blogging the poem. Basically I find that the blog is an appropriate way to present a long, serial, diaristic, processual work, which sometimes interacts with signal holidays or public events.  But the disadvantages are many.  Moreover, I have a very old & very bad habit of self-publication - which doesn't sit well with many people, especially prestigious academics, book reviewers & editors.  This greatly limits my access to the larger literary scene.

But I want to suggest that there is another, more fundamental dimension to this poetry thing I am acting out at such great length.  & that is that I am attempting to express a radical worldview, a sort of philosophy with my work.  The intellectual pivot of all these poetic ring structures is a challenge to the modern & postmodern era as a whole (an intellectual challenge).

One might see this coming with a poem structured on a parallel to Dante.  Eliot & Pound, in their own ways, did something similar.   But I'm not at all a neoconservative or revolutionary-authoritarian Modern, as they were.  My intellectual allegiance (if I have to choose models) is closer to Hart Crane & James Joyce.  Or to some of the visionary dimensions in Mandelstam & Yeats.

I believe in a new Age of Faith : but one in which faith itself is understood also in a new way.

Poetry, in my view, is a mode of expressing the vitality, goodness & beauty of Reality as a whole : as an End, as a Creation, as a living, breathing multivalent Sign of a supreme loving Consciousness.  This view need contradict neither human free will nor scientific objective reason (theory & evidence).  But it is rooted in this sense of faith : this joyful apprehension of a benevolent purpose in cosmic nature (call it divine "Providence").

I can only call it Faith, because it is incommensurate with simple verbal arguments or logical verifications.  But I do think this is what Jesus meant when he spoke of "going back to the beginning", or about faith as the root of all active accomplishment, or when he characterized God the Creator as Love.   This faith is really not that different from the "primitive" faith of archaic human cultures - that all goodness descends from the One Great Spirit, from the "Manitou" who is the source of all blessings.  We are talking about the root meaning of the general social-behavioral attitude we call "good faith", "good will".

This way of putting things will strike many as not "new" at all.  I agree : I'm not up to the task here in prose.  Hence the need for poetry.  Ravenna Diagram is circling very slowly around a new sense of "Incarnation" - something emerging presently, out of the here & now, out of the clay of Big Muddy, like an infant emerging from the womb, or Jonah from the whale.  An Incarnation which expresses and confirms (forever) an inherent thankfulness-for-being; a celebration of its own existence, a happy end-in-itself.

The foregoing sketches out a vision - not unrelated to that of the Russian Acmeist poet Nikolai Gumilev.  A "chaste" vision, of the inherent beauty & blessedness of all things; of the harmony of the cosmos as one fundamental, & fundamentally victorious, Dream-reality.

Hyper-formalism & the Long Henry Poem

I made a simple creative decision about 4 years ago.  I knew I was about to embark on yet another long serial poem (I've written about 9 of them).  I decided that the individual parts (the separate poems) within the whole thing should be, if possible, more free-standing.

In part, I wanted to make my writing more accessible.  I wanted more magazines to accept my poems for publication (always a real struggle for me).  In order for that to happen, these smaller parts would have to be more autonomous, complete in themselves.  They would need separate titles, not just "Lanthanum bk. 12 no. 28" & the like.

The titles were the easy part.  My plan has only been partially successful.  But partial is better than nothing.  I've landed a few pellets of the new poem (Ravenna Diagram) in various magazines : Poetry, Blackbox Manifold, Journal of Poetics Research, West Branch, Notre Dame Review, Truck, Battersea Review...

This is a step forward for me.  I've probably written more poems, and published less, than any poet in America.

Part of the problem is, I'm not consistent.  I make resolutions & then go the other way.  I resolved a year ago not to post so many poems on this blog, & then I did the opposite.

Not only that - I also alienate potential & previous friends and publishers.  Things go awry.  I've come to the conclusion that there are various subtle patterns shaping these frustrating encounters.  Real books only emerge because they were meant to be.  Or because your deepest affinities have finally borne fruit - by grace, by miracle, you meet the small publisher who's been waiting all this time for you.  Kismet.

My waxing voluble here is due to the fact that I'm unwinding.  I'm celebrating the successful finish of book 9, Ravenna Diagram.  & I'm nearing the halfway point of this hyper-formal poem.  It presently stands, or sits, at about 510 pp.

I know where I'm going (as in the old Isle of Mull film).  The poem has a plan for me.  Sort of a sand mandala, shaping itself up with little voodoo flicks of sandy fingertips.  An hourglass in the form of canoe.

It's a Leaves of Grass kind of mumble-saunter.  It's a mummer's walk around a golden labyrinth - a traditional Crane Dance, performed by a blind man (mesmerized).

That's why the blog has proved so seductive & essential.  It's both immediate and chronological; it walks with me on my planetary seasonal rounds.

The poem is a stone fallen from heaven; no one will judge it.  Osip Mandelstam.

I'm trying to exemplify & prove the truth of this statement.  Of course, there is a social cost involved.  If you try to go around the distinguished cultural authorization channels, you will, most assuredly, be branded an outcast, an interloper.

Someone has probably written a treatise on the mutual co-dependence of High Society and Literature (maybe at the New Yorker?  or Paris Review?  Kenyon?  Harvard?).

On the other hand... please understand... I harbor no animus toward Society.  I am, simply, a poet caught in the net of hyper-formalism.

& what, you may ask, is hyper-formalism?

Hyper-formalism is the emergence of a form out of the necessary logic of a theme.  The theme, you could say, is the fate of the poem - & its fate determines its form.

Fate is, naturally, a dramatic force : a force for drama.  & poetry is the mimesis, the dramatization, of fate.  So poetry has discovered its vocation, finally - it's a mumbling medium for the human theatre.

& what if the fate of the poem - its theme - is to be a kind of local, allegorical embodiment of (universal, elemental) truth?  The poem veers toward prophecy... the poet veers toward seer... toward manifest Logos...

A stone fallen from heaven.  You begin perhaps to comprehend & forgive the orientation toward immediacy, toward "unsponsored" speech.

I've devoted most of my life to these verbal snares, these long-walk dream songs.  It's been a joy & a challenge.  I'm stepping blindfolded around a maze on the floor of Chartres cathedral.  Ariadne is the thread.  The Earth lies underneath.

Blue Planes

More bardic prep. Just getting started. folks. You can read the poem here.

Joy Dialect

This instructional video illustrates how not to set poetry to music.

& yet a bard has to start somewhere. The actual poem ("Joy-Dialect") can be found here.

We're getting our act together & taking it on the road.

RAVENNA DIAGRAM becomes 3-dimensional object

Dear steady long-suffering readers of HG Poetics,
this is just to say
that you can now read the
seemingly infinitely-long poem
Ravenna Diagram
in book form -
in the comfort of your own unscreened cabin,
cave, or hobbit-hutch (or apartment).
Volume One (books 1-4), that is.

The tome is a physical object now, for sale online
from Lulu Books, here -
and from Amazon, here -
and maybe from other places I don't yet know about.

Volume Two (books 5-8) has also been written -
much of it has appeared on this blog -
I'm waiting on results of some magazine submissions
before I put out Volume Two - probably early next year.

The projected forecast for Ravenna Diagram is 20 books.
I don't know if I'll ever get there,
but so far, so good - it's been a fast-running, babbling brook of a poem.

Thank you, dear friends.  Cheers & adios for now -

setting out toward the 9th

ACORN WIGWAM

The last of the crickets, in their silver mines

among dun stalks, pipe

to each other, under a ripe

& misty Bruegel sky.  Hobo Henry’s lines

distend toward hibernation.  Soon

he must contend with bumpkin

men, their jealous trumpetin’ –

all Caesars of the earth, again...

that agèd guild of frozen snowmen

Knossos harbors in the maze.

But now we know their ways –

cowmen dividing up the herd end

up dividing up themselves, as they began.

He flecks his oiled horsehair

to spike the nightmare –

cloud-grey dove’s-eye view, the human

magic lamp, Okie dream-songe.

& like a baby ape emerging

from the cave, he’ll sing

the Sun of Love, très riche, étrange –

Apollinaire’s trompette marine

will flute the sweet bass

threads, an Ariadne-lasso...

YAMB-WHIT-YAM (so coralline,

full-fathomed now).  Kind eye

of Psyche, manifest

to fire the clay – to test

the relativity of acorn wigwam (A-OK).

11.17.16

Another Jonah