Scent of an ending

Summer fading, a For Sale sign on the house... getting ready to leave Little Rhody.  Yet still remains one rose out back, a very bright one.

PETAL-FAN

September.  One late crimson backyard

rose remains.  Knot

not exactly Ruby, not

Desire – but Steadfast Fire (framed

by maroon foundation of the house).

Afloat upon your thorns,

a crozier, or serpent’s

copperhead – magenta compass,

planetary pole.  Away beyond

all foregone Oregon

disputes – those Diomedan

straits of Fenris-Greyhound –

54º32-by-Four!  Ringing

the International Date

Line – must I hesitate?

Princess in a shower, singing.

We clambered to the clear high room

where SF in a bay flamed

orange bloom – became

entangled like a quipu sum (loom,

cedars).  Weight of one iron anchor

filled that octagon

with spray of azure ocean

when Evening Star fired his tangential

thread of light into shade-womb

of piers – that San Franciscan

adamant, where limestone

Rhodi petal-fan (leaf-shaken hum).

    9.3.15

Family of Man

It's late at night on 5.28.  May 28.  We buried my father's ashes in St. Stephen's churchyard today (my mother was born on St. Stephen's Day - 12.26).  In a beautiful spot beside Minnehaha Creek.  My mother will be buried there too, someday.  She says she hopes the creek will flood sometime, & wash them all downstream.  My mother had her first drink (sherry) at the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (in Portland, Maine) at the age of about 12 or 13 (ca. 1940).  She was pals with the daughter of "Laughing Allegra".  "By the shores of Gitchee Gumee..." (- just a little further downstream stands the statue of Hiawatha carrying Minnehaha across the stream...)

5.28.  May 28.  I finished the long poem (about 600 pp.) Forth of July on 5.28.2000.  The poem circles around (among other things) the early New England Anglican minister & freethinker & librarian & orchardist & Seeker William Blackstone.  First exile from Boston.  Early settler (pre-Roger Williams) in Rhode Island.  He shows up in many of my poems (see the books Lanthanum, Dove Street...) - even a poem celebrating my father's birthday (4.12.27).  In fact a lot of my poems are numerically structured around the numbers 5, 28 (28 is a perfect number).

Forth of July.  My grandmother (John Gould's mother) was born on the 4th of July, 1900.  Florence Gould was the first Episcopalian (Anglican) in the family.

William Blackstone was buried on his property in Cumberland, RI on or around 5.28.1675.

It's kind of mysterious how life imitates art & art imitates life & the structures of the imagination are worked out in the dust to which thou shalt return.  All these strange shadows of many lives well lived (in the "Family of Man")!

Gabriel Gudding has a big new book out (Rhode Island Notebook).

Obscure spider threads seem to bind the fate of these two former-Minnesotan poets (that is, Gabriel & me). Members of the School of Embodied Poetry. Minnesota, midwestern homesickness, the wedding (I was their best man), the amazing "Clio" poem serendipity (according to that other RI visitant, Ange Mlinko, sort of a Kieslowski film in embryo), Rhode Island, family history, long poems, epic journeys. Rhode Island is a small cosmos.

(Stubborn Grew, In RI - TWO MORE excessive poems by a Minnesotan about Rhode Island, family break-ups, history, politics, epic journeys (Henry, Bluejay, Roger Williams) - they're companion volumes to Gabriel's book. We're somehow akin in that Eliotic (idiotic?) tradition-realm. Read all 3 together. Teach them in class. That's an order. We're re-writing American culture as Rhode Island poetry.)

Today's helpful hint re previous post : this is Memorial Day in USA; Oak Tree Day or Restoration Day in UK; Rhode Island Statehood Day; (& my b-day).

Roger Williams, writing in an attempt to quell one of the frequent rancorous squabbles in his newfound state (he was referring to the bond of trust he had established with his Narragansett friends):

"It was not price nor money could have purchased Rhode Island. Rhode Island was purchased by love."

17.3.4 And so HENRAH with his onions set forth from Berrymn-lond by the myth of the Missingsippu. & he carried his lancelets & his flaming windup wand on his back; & he canoed from thence to Rode-Island. & when he had set foot ashore in that place, immediately he posted upon a Tree his Papyrus of Verses, which he had copied out, with his bare hand, 40 years hence, from out of a Boke of bare bodkin Berrigans. And he sate down there to wait for the people of the tribes who dwelt therein (of the tribes of Oddiense).

17.3.5 And he waited there further.

17.3.6 And so he continually waited thus, twiddling his thumbs, and reporting to his minions upon the Nephilim (Giant Space People from Atlantis) which he had seen thereabouts.

... SO, poetry reflects that special embodiment, that embodied freedom-authority... & as such the messengers of that special space often come up against the other authorities. Thus July, the 3rd of Forth of July, ends on March 5th, the date on which both Stalin & Akhmatova (avatars of these two distinct powers) died.

& anyway, all this providential history is a work-in-progress. So the unpublished history poem In RI deals more directly with Roger Williams & his unique state-founding. & this has been translated, wonderfully, into italian by Anny Ballardini. I'll be a Dante yet.

& what I mean by this "embodiment", in part, involves all these threads I've been tying (plowing?) between my rows of verse, and the "rose" of Rhode Island. Thus I first came from the midwest to this state on the merit of my college application essay, which was a group of Ted Berrigan (of Cranston, RI) imitations. & though my roots are in Minnesota, I've discovered a lot of family background right here. There's a little island in Narragansett Bay called Gould Island, named after Thomas Gould, the nephew of my gr-gr-gr-grandfather Zaccheus. Tom Gould was a friend of Roger Williams, & rented him a field on that island, for raising hay.

Rhode Islanders just think differently. That must be it. While I was doing my strange voting behavior in the polling booth, RI's true-blue old-line liberal Republican - Lincoln Chafee - was announcing to the public that he would not be voting for his party's President - because of the Iraq war.

A source for the tone in the Berkeley poem posted yesterday (& much of Stubborn Grew) is Mandelstam's Complete Poetry (SUNY Press, 1973) trans. by Raffel & Burago. OM often did portrait-poems of historical figures, painters, writers, musicians & friends - somewhat similar to Robert Lowell's verbal icons, but more humorous & affectionate. He connected it to his Acmeist project of "domestic hellenism" - the idea that poetry was part of a larger human-cultural project to "surround life with utensils, with teleological warmth". With his portraits he presented historical figures (Bach, Beethoven) as part of the family.

Berkeley himself can be seen as a forerunner of sorts for the controversial contemporary physics theory known as the Anthropic Principle (which holds, roughly, that the cosmos seems designed in order to support conscious (or human) life). With his notion that existence entails perception, that the tree falling doesn't make a sound - doesn't even exist - unless someone is there to hear it, he's suggesting a purposive cosmos with consciousness at its center. Samuel Johnson mocked Berkeley's idealism ("I know the stone exists without me, because I stubbed my toe on it", or something like that), and the following era belonged to the Samual Johnsons. But 20th-century physics, starting with relativity, threw a spanner in those works.

My internet shadow-boxing with the langpos & postmodernism in the 90s was partly a critique of their critique of autobiographical, confessional, storytelling styles. The postmodern poets questioned, rejected, undermined the ontological status of the person. Words were dislocated from context and composition was disconnected from authorial motivation.

One of the consequences of doing long poems, however, can be (though it doesn't have to be) the building up of foundational layers of context & specificity. Ideally, in Stubborn Grew (& Forth of July as a whole), the interconnections are there to add a weave, a structure of more & more specificity. Thus the epic journey of "Henry" & "Bluejay" in the first half of Stubborn takes place over the space of about 10 city blocks and 300 years of history; the 2nd half takes place in the narrator's head, at a particular coffee shop table on Wickenden St., in the Fox Point neighborhood.

George Berkeley spent a couple years living in the "Paradise" neighborhood of Newport, waiting for the loans and grants to come through for his fantastic, visionary scheme to create a College for the Americas, for anglos & natives alike, in Bermuda. The money never materialized, & eventually he sailed back to England. But while in Newport, he composed some of his major philosophical dialogues. He liked to look out at the Atlantic from a cleft in a large puddingstone outcrop, known to locals as "Berkeley's Seat".


Was Irish philosopher George Berkeley an extreme idealist? A realist? A transcendentalist? He wrote against contemporaneous currents in science & philosophy which posited something abstract called "matter", a kind of substrate of reality upon which fleeting surface "phenomena" enacted their changes. For Berkeley, "esse est percipi", or "what is, is what is perceived". An Anglican bishop as well as philosopher & dabbler in scientific speculation (the benefits of "Tar-Water", etc.), his worldview is grounded in theism & a notion of creation. Thus the holistic Reality which we perceive and experience, is so perceived by a means somehow analogous to the divine Imagination which conceives it, imagines it, dreams it.

Berkeley is one of several local avatars in Stubborn Grew, where along with painter (& fellow "Paradise"-dweller) John LaFarge, he sort of sanctions the fiction-making, the fantastic elements, of this "local history" poem.

from the "Once in Paradise" chapter :

16

Aloft there on shale shelf, in cave mouth,
Berkeley's eyes drifted out to sea.
A pair of dicey gypsy barks
gambling on the shepherding waves.

You have your materialist peasants
nattering pedantically along with your
libertine idle blank-eyed statuettes O
London - and this jovial pleasant

noncholeric collared Irish bookish Dean
waves the Vico key in your face. And waits.
Waits for your double crosscheck, mates -
your doubloon that never comes - keening,

why have you forsaken me? In RI? Heaven's
not some dull neuteronian mechanical.
It's providential - and recreational!
A dream, again! - again! - Bermudian!