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

The irrefragable John Latta quoted Viktor Shklovsky & some other interesting Russkies yesterday. Shklovsky presents what seems to be the classic "defamiliarization" argument for art's necessary independence from "life".

Somehow though it sounds very 20th-cent. I mean "defam" doesn't seem to "work" anymore. It's insufficient for originality. Our world relentlessly colonizes art, by way of parasitical forms of academic & "media" professionalism (or semi-professionalism), as well as popular "rebel" attitudinizing.

I'd like to imagine a poetry which "pushes back" against the violence & banality of that world. But it can only do that by its own forms of colonizing - ie. by absorbing and transmuting the other powerful & worldly-wise discourses of science, philosophy, law, theology, politics, ideology, etc. As well as emulating and transmitting the amalgamated achievements of past eras (when poets were also novelists, journalists, cultural critics, playwrights, etc. - there are lots of examples).

It relates to the question of what social "role" the poet wants to play. Are poets content to publish a few books, teach younger people "how to write" in colleges, publish little poems in the New Yorker, etc.? Is that it? Society would love poets to just stay there & be happy & not cause any trouble. And by trouble I don't mean the usual "rebel" role-playing : what would really trouble society is a poet who is intelligent, discursive, and fully engaged with the public debates of the day.

And that question begs the further question : where does poetry stand in relation to the general cultural traditions and transmissions (or disconnects) of the USA, the West, the world?

What if poets started by asking themselves these questions, rather than (self-servingly) jumping on the bandwagons of whatever are the hot political debates-du-jour (war in Iraq, the various "isms" they learned in school)?

Mark Scroggins writes an interesting response to the review here.

My statement that Breeze was modeled "deliberately" on Harmonium appears to have been a case of "creative misreading", as they say. But I'd like to defend myself by saying that there's more to it than simply questions of lineage & influence, as Mark puts it.

"Modern" poets chose distinct approaches to the very central crux of self-consciousness, reflexivity, "art-for-art's-sake". The styles & attitudes of "engaged" or political poets, of epic-historical poets, of confessional poets, of traditionalists, etc. have differed quite a bit.

One of the things that interested me about Latta's book is that he seems to have extended a line from Stevens' general approach - but not in the same direction taken by the New York School, or that of other more florid or "elliptical" poets.

Latta has a gene of the homespun philosopher & nature boy about him (like Stevens' verbal duelist in the anecdote - Frost!). (But I don't think I'll write my next review on How John Latta Sounds Like that Farmer from New Hampshire...)

John Latta, with some kindly remarks about the review, at his blog today. Confirmed my concern that I hadn't got it quite right. Seeing through my own goggles, I probably gave too much weight to Stevens as in the background.

Or perhaps it's that Stevens' concepts of what poetry is for & about, & his approach to language, have just pervaded the atmosphere, at least in some dimensions of the literary world.

Had been thinking I would try to do a "re-reading" (part 2) in a few weeks or so. Maybe will do that, we'll see.

Josh Corey comments today on Mark Halliday's recent review in Pleiades.

The issues around paraphrase and "paraphrasable meaning" seem very complicated. Are we talking about the poem's style or rhetoric, or about its subject-matter, its themes, its logopeia?

A poem's style would be impossible to paraphrase (cf. Mandelstam's comment : "if a poem can be paraphrased, the Muse has not spent the night, has not ruffled the bedsheets" - or something to that effect).

On the other hand, a poem may have many layers of intelligibility - which might be open to successive layers (like an onion) of interpretive unpacking : which is similar to paraphrase, but not exactly the same thing.

Halliday's remarks about paraphrase were what spurred me to offer the successive "read-alongs" here, of the ongoing poem Rest Note. His essay reminded me of Wallace Stevens' repeated forays in this direction, & thus I felt licensed to give it a try.

Hopefully, the poems have not been rendered completely transparent - which would close off their future, to some extent (cf. Josh's comments on understandability). Probably impossible, considering my obscurities.

I agree pretty much with Mark Halliday (in his review in Pleiades), when he says that every good poem can be paraphrased. As long as you admit that there's always a better, deeper reading down the line : the one even the poets themselves missed. "The builders builded better than they knew."

Thinking of Wallace Stevens' letters (they might have been emails) where he explicates every stanza. So I might try to do something like that with Rest Note. Read along with me (follow the bouncing ball).

Finished Winesburg, Ohio. I love that book.

Still reading Eleanor Cook's great book on Wallace Stevens (Wallace Stevens : Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War). On "The Man with the Blue Guitar", she quotes the final canto:

XXXIII

 
That generation's dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,

 
That's it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time

 
To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,

 
Here is its actual stone. The bread 
Will be our bread, the stone will be

 
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except

 
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

"The imagined jay" - jumped out at me. I've been imagining J-jay in many a way, for a while.

Have been reading Lords of Limit, G. Hill book of essays.

Much focus on 16th- and 19th-century English poetry & philosophy. Held together throughout by the notion of writing as an engagement which is ineluctably rendered up to moral judgement. Poetry's grounding - its entanglement - in both words and experience - its human particularity - is its weakness & its strength. It is implicated in, as it informs, the moral reality of persons, times & nations.

Hill's manner is extremely ruminative, somewhat oblique. He'll take up a single moral paradox or literary-historical impasse, and slowly ravel into his progress these very acute & nuanced evaluations of the chorus of poets & thinkers who have weighed in on that particular issue over the span of a century or so.

It's as if there's an unspoken assertion serving as the pillar for the whole baroque architecture : the sense of poetry as a culture's necessary redemptive presence (because of that very rooted & particular moral implication in its speech & history). Not exactly in Stevens' sense ("poetry is the sanction of life"). Hill points out that Stevens was following in Arnold's footsteps, seeking to offer poetry as a substitute for religion. For Hill, it seems, the ultimate judgement & sanction lie elsewhere, outside literature - but literature, when it approaches the beautiful & the true, bears witness to that judgement - or bears the marks of it.

Eleanor Cook's deeply-learned book (Wallace Stevens : Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War) shows just how much someone with wide reading and a talent for hearing echos & constructions can discover.

& she shows that Helen Vendler & other critics were right to see Stevens as the central American answer to, & inheritor of, the main stream of English poetry.

America's "colonial" status, the long literary rivalry between England & "these states", has meant that Americans are in the (adolescent) position of having both to re-invent the wheel, and to follow their (English) forebears, at the same time. This causes all kinds of Oedipal exaggerations & generational nightmares.

Cook shows just how steeped in Milton & Keats & Shakespeare et al. Stevens is; how they inform the elegant subtleties of poem after poem. But was he a neo-Anglican epigone? I don't think so, Jack.

Reading : Poetry, word-play and word-war in Wallace Stevens, by Eleanor Cook. "Poetry is the scholar's art," he sd. Some of the semantic/rhetorical complexity she uncovers is astonishing, daunting.

Riddles, proverbs, charms. Poetry, in part, a burning-off, a paring-down, an escape from casual speech, cliches. "the firecat bristles in the way".

(Whereas po-biz acts like a miniscule sub-category of sho-biz.)

btw, interesting articles on Mayan glyphs in Times science section today.

Justice, in his essays, shows a curious specificity & exactitude. I mean the lit-historical events are there, to be pinpointed. Thus, in his essay on free verse, he notes not only the poet, but the specific poem, where it all began (in 20th cent. America, that is). The poet is Pound, the poem is from 1907:

Lips, words, and you snare them,
Dreams, words, and they are as jewels,
Strange spells of old deity,
Ravens, nights, allurement:
And they are not;
Having become the souls of song.

In his Stevens essay, he pinpoints particular lines which document the poet's careful & gradual opening-up of iambic blank verse; & how he does it (anapests...)

Not to be polemical, but I'm sort of tempted to turn my attention away from free verse for a while. It would make things both easier & more difficult. For one thing, I'd have to turn away from a lot of my own poetry. On the other hand it would allow me to block out a lot of sub-literary noise.

This unknown recommends Oblivion, a book of essays by Donald Justice (publ. in 1998). Should be a benchmark, lighthouse, guidebook.

In an essay on metrics, he debunks the notion that meters have some kind of organic basis (breathing, circadian rhythms, etc.). He offers a very persuasive (to me) interpretation of the paradoxical (subsidiary, understated) role they play, in the process of hammering together a memorious art work.

In a subtle essay on Baudelaire and "sincerity", written in 1957, he undermines the rationale for confessionalism - just a few years before that movement burst on the scene.

In an essay on Stevens' meters, he gives a sparkling mini-course on the "Imagist moment", followed by a discerning analysis of the pentameter background in Stevens, & what he did with it.

I'm loving this book.

Beautiful day here today. I was home today.

Minor literary miracle : I discovered (with help) the poetry of Donald Justice.

Ignorance is a gift from God, as Nick de Cusa explained.

Like a door opening on my own life.

Justice.... Stevens, Rilke, Bishop, Crane.... Kees. Listen to the music.

Ange Mlinko writes:

"As to the question, "How to find the way to write both an artful and utilitarian poetry?" I can't say I would ever use "poetry" and "utilitarian" in the same sentence, but if Sarah means "relevant to the daily lives of nonintellectuals," I think there are lots of examples, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Daisy Fried, but it entails an abandonment of abstraction and ornament."

I admire the impulse, disagree with the analysis.

Akhmatova was a best-seller in her time (the 1910s, -20s). She managed to write a poetry which fused the simple and the ornamental, the harsh & the sweet.

One can deflect this with more analysis, of one flavor or another. But her impact, her commitment to a social, populist poetry (similar to Whitman) is just one example which denies the Puritan form of this dichotomy, which American poets seem to fall into again & again.

& I don't want to surrender Wally from Hartford, either.

I guess the most authentic and irrevocable poetry is that which had to be written : the writer pushed by something more than ambition, curiosity or boredom. Rather, by need. Stevens' "poverty".

The poem is a resolution. A record of more-than-intellectual engagement.

I liked the Franz Wright poem included in the recent Poets & Writers feature. Wish I could have written it. (In fact I was tempted to think he had borrowed a certain vocabulary & rhythm from one of my poems! But that's very unlikely.)

This despite the fact that I was on the receiving end of one of his unpleasant email attacks. (The funny thing was I had the impression he thought I was someone else. I am someone else.)

Hope to pull together an essay sometime on affinities between Bachelard, Mandelstam, Wallace Stevens.

M's Acmeism, humanism, "domestic hellenism", "teleological warmth". (Hellenism with a very Jewish warm kitchen feeling.)

The idea that poetry is part of the project to humanize and civilize the earth. Poetry breathing life into stony reality.

Steven's joy in the beautiful "idea" of a thing (or: the idea of Mankind).

Bachelard's lyric phenomenology.

Imago. Imago. Imago.

(I would toss an old Byzantine element into the mix. For me there is just one incandescent idea : imago Dei.)

To "pioneer", wherever you are.

Polish scholar Ryszard Przybylski expounds on some of this quite eloquently, in a book titled An essay on the poetry of Osip Mandelstam : God's grateful guest. (The subtitle an allusion to M's Acmeist credo - in one of his early essays.)

Joseph Brodsky, out of that (Petersburgian) tradition : "Mankind was put on earth for one purpose : to make civilization." [rough quote from memory]

How fearsome is the poet's quietude! How tainted the one who reads the poem aloud, in all its quietness & nakedness, in all its vulnerable mere wordiness! No wonder the mob shuns the poet! No wonder the poet-mob rolls out all its tawdry tricks, its bells & whistles, its hubbub of pretensions - in order to deny the very quietudinous & abject & formidable thing it is!

The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near, point A
In a perspective that begins again

At B: the origin of the mango's rind.
It is the rock where tranquil must adduce
Its tranquil self, the main of things, the mind,

The starting point of the human and the end,
That in which space itself is contained, the gate
To the enclosure, day, the things illumined

By day, night and that which night illumines,
Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,
Night's hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep.

- Wallace Stevens

...thus the appeal for me of Hart Crane, Anna Akhmatova, Mandelstam, some Stevens, some Yeats - as opposed to the jump-cut edginess of much modernism, post-modernism.

adagios of islands.

sunny sublimity.

the gesture, the understated signal, toward the vast, the calm.

the thrill at the heart of Wallace Stevens' "first idea" : that's what this art/nature oscillation is all about. . .

The pitiless authority of the old, suffocating the present under its weight.

A happy marriage involves mutual renunciation, self-sacrifice out of love.
So the new pleases the old, & vice versa.

Stevens' image of poetry as a man carrying his father on his back.

The wars over style & "lineage" : psychological projection & compensation.