Crane & Olson. But a different C & O.

(As I've noted before here someplace...) I was reading a monograph on Aristotle when I started Stubborn Grew.
Helped me add sort of an introductory echo effect (talking, in the poem, about what the poem was going to do).

if I'm not mistaken, 8 years ago today I started writing Stubborn Grew. (please ask Tod Thilleman to re-issue!)

there are some strange & secret paths in Stubborn Grew. This afternoon I was reading Ariosto again, in the backyard (Cinque Canti) - as when Bluejay dropped in (see p. 22 of Stubborn) & the poem got rolling.

Ariosto left Cinque Canti unfinished, like one of his models (Lucan's Pharsalia), like one of his models, perhaps (the Aeneid)... poems cut short, like the (un)Holy Roman Empire... unfinished long poems...

Rome, Italy, America... Dante, Pound...

like autumn, like Lazarus, like Every-body...

Or soil science : Stubborn Grew began with a kind of sculptural impression of muddy Voronezh farmland, as presented in Mandelstam's little landscape poems (The Voronezh Notebooks, trans. the McKanes, Bloodaxe Bks).

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 seem to remember reading once that many archaic peoples recognized some kind of special occult relationship between a person & their maternal uncle. That's certainly true as regards the development of Forth of July. My uncle James Ravlin was an unusual character. Born in Saskatchewan in the winter of 1912, where his father (my grandfather) was on a building project. Jim Ravlin was very handsome, a Navy officer in WW 2. Became a lawyer, went east, worked for the tobacco companies, married into high society, shed his midwestern accent for a kind of high WASP drawl. Wrote Finneganesque letters to everyone (my grandfather's grandfather had come to the US from Dublin). Moved family to SF; left his wife; daughter Juliet jumped off Golden Gate Bridge, on his birthday; lived with his mistress, an important music agent in NYC; spent his last years with her in apartment overlooking Lincoln Center. Was a friend of poet James Merrill. The poem posted previously today was a kind of (lesser) echo of this one, which really got Stubborn rolling (toward my cousin Juliet!). It's an elegy for my uncle. (I know I've posted it before - sorry!)

6
                    i.m. James Ravlin, 1912-1997

 
Light quick mosquitoes speed flitter
and slide at latter-day angle easily
mounting every corniced ingle and
fuming, spuming, better, better and better.

 
Mosquitoes there were in Saskatchewan,
where you were born, between
Granddad's grain
elevators, Grandma's steel-eyed span.

 
Those clever, clever lips hovered
in camel smoke
like a Cheshire hookah, smiled.
And tumbled out an accent stranger

 
and stranger.  What flute
troubled earth to bear him?
The bare tongue-footed ague of him?
The sweet-eyed flourish, the high note

 
of his Viennese liner?  Where now,
sailor man, handsome PT-boat boy-o?
He sleeps in his long canoe.  He is
scattered... a late Minnesota snow.

 
Unmoored from the height of land,
drifting from Lawrentian divide,
blueberry, pine, air-filled
cliff, the taste of iron.

 
The cherry trees and the dogwood
bloom now in this sinner-town.
Pale green sprays tender
over the graveyard.

 
Soon come the clever mosquitoes,
the new swarms.  I inch along.
A snail, with prairie on my tongue.
Hesitant, grieving, stubborn grew, the rose.

Poe/Crane/Lovecraft : avatars of literary abjection/perfection (cf. previous post).

But I've subsumed them - & I've got them beat on the abjection score (cf. Stubborn Grew) (cf. my sub-sub-life).

Reading matter of rabid Bush moron:
Dante, Poet of the Desert, by Giuseppe Mazzotta. I come back to this author's books every few years, one of my favorites. Much about rhetoric & history & theology & what Dante does with them.

Perhaps the red/blue state phenomenon, the right/left, the rep/dem drama, is the result of the difference between rhetoric (the intellectuals) and history (the business class). David Brooks, the middle-of-my-road-anyway pundit for NY Times, wrote an op-ed along these lines a while back.

In the first half of Stubborn Grew, the flow of actual (local) history is narrated by a fictional character (actually, a ghost). In the 2nd half, the obverse is the case. The fictionalized (failed) process of writing an epic/history poem is framed by, inset within, the "documentary"/confessional image of an actual individual (the author).

reading an Elder Olson essay on Aristotle's Poetics. Olson was part of the so-called Chicago School, a 50s grouping with a little different point of view from that of the New Critics.

When I started Stubborn Grew, I was reading another study of the Poetics, which argued that the form of Aristotle's text resembles that of a tragic plot, and as such, is designed to do what it describes, setting up sort of a reflexive, self-mirroring framework.

This influenced the opening of Stubborn, in that the introductory sketches simultaneously reflect on poetry-making, on the one hand, and begin to act out the orphic pattern of the plot, on the other - sort of a hall of mirrors. "Bluejay" : the mime (schtick) of a mimic. So the mimicking narrator and "Bluejay" are somewhat like Russian dolls-within-dolls (the narrator mimicking a "black-talking" Bluejay, himself a mimic).

This Olson essay I'm reading outlines 3 steps: the instinctual pleasure/learning we derive from imitation (mimicry, schtick); the moral or ethical disciplines by which imitation is molded (the depiction of "good & bad" characters & situations); & finally the experience of made things (poems, dramas) as good-in-themselves (their intrinsic aesthetic value - a discovery which, to some degree, circles back around to the original instinctual springs).

I suppose, ideally, there's an equilibrium to these three levels. What is the ethical root or motive which fuses with the aesthetic goal? What would Ovid on the Black Sea, or Dante in exile, or Walt in the hospital, speak to the powers that be (as of 11/3)? - to all the feuding, angry factions?

Another Olson, in another Ovid spot... ("Watch-House Point")

by the way, dear Emperor Jonathan, I don't think one should reduce Berryman's "Mr. Bones" interlocutor in the Dream Songs to "music hall schtick". I know some poets & readers take offense at that particular black-talk imitation, but I think the offense is misplaced. Berryman's alter ego is not a subaltern, but a function of his conscience. Clearly, no one should accept the notion that African-American identity is limited to white Americans' imaginary constructs or fantasies about same. But it is mistaken (and uncharitable) to discount those constructs as merely - inevitably - empty, worthless or malign. They can be ironic, critical representations of cultural landscapes & relations, at certain points in history.

This is obviously a "vexed issue", a controversy, within the general heat of cultural politics, and I don't claim to have the final answer.

I think it could be argued that Stubborn Grew takes the representation - the "schtick", if you will - of submerged (oppressed) conscience, and makes it pivotal to the plot. Some intrepid scholar might want to dig into the sources of this - such as (even more than Berryman) Melville's "counter-Bible of the cosmic castaway", Moby-Dick (cf. Olivia Sachs' weird, hard-to-find Melville study, Game of Creation).

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!

Have been reading the section on JH Prynne over in Jacket. Such complex careful attention. Despite the sense that late-Empire Larkinaise (Larkin-malaise) is easily transmitted to Brit academic fellers, one can be jealous of the highly-cultivated ears over there. A poetry gains weight & resonance when it finds a shared language for shared experiences. A "landscape", a "season".

Also Keith Ward, Religion and Community.

from the "Ancient Light" chapt. of Stubborn Grew:


The train ride to Oxford was something else.
Profound droning weight of iron travel machine,
farmland English backyard a pale moss green
in the moist December light, your pulse

is calm outside of London, Providence
might be a way of life, a common sphere,
fair, sensible and just - a Hertfordshire
in an ovoid Shakespeare's head, a salience.


(cf. Mandelstam's ruminations on poetry as evolutionary "salience", in Journey to Armenia.)

"ovoid"? It struck me yesterday - the distinct oddity of the term for the center of power: "the Oval Office".

*

An egg sprung out of winter Iron Age.

At the other end of Stubborn, there's a Joycean-Chaucerian parade-procession of sorts, Anna Akhmatova on her way to get a prize in Oxford:


Nay, the horses are in final fedders and wee flying.
Through the greenmoss ways by the quiet waters,
by the oxenford, near where Actemydovie totters
along with to sieve her mettle, warning and warming

her loving piece all the way to Petroglad, finally;
and well pick Nuckleheadup along the Wye, playing flowt
and flowering flowcraft, like Jimi Hucktrix and what
Bea J Hen can seagal us a supthere, friendly

among the gould keelover flowerpunters,
those steady-eyed treefellers and form farmers
like granite under the holy rollercoasters,
a sprungfeedle farmcanter. A witbull H-er's

resting on the Blackstone shoulders, his liberty
a done thing everydeeday, as we canterbury
along, long plowman's wake - and a very gradumerry
grape it is, ripe to the buddies, from a little tree -

near the edge of the Terrace
the limbs all black and thorny
the buds, just barely
the green moss

soft, tender
spring whispers
kindness now, and grief. Hers,
yours, ours. . . [etc.]


(p.s. the 3rd vol, July, was finished on 3.5.2000, the anniversary of both Akhmatova's & Stalin's death. Akhmatova crops up in odd places throughout Forth of July.)

Thank you, Allen. You make my day, today. Generosity. (& Kent, ever alert & compagnevole.)

(On this day in 1999 I started the sequel to Stubborn G.)

This just in (Pravda) : Allen Bramhall reading Stubborn Grew

Allen - word of advice from the Author Position. Do not begin to feel that reading it is work, or that you are guilty, inadequate. I Author have ofttimes done my Readers (& Author-Self) a disservice by harping on the deep complexity and High Postoffice-Modern Seriousness-Quality of my Work.

Remember : the Poem was written by a (drunken/sleeping) snail (Dung-Beetle) trying to munch his way into Providence. It should be read in that Spirit as well. It was written for fun, fun, fun and is meant to be fun, fun, fun - a true Leisure Time Activity brought to you by Prof. Leisure Time himself.

I have found that the best way to read my Work is in the Tub, out loud, while your Significant Author pours buckets of warm Water over your head. This tends to bring out the real "Ocean State" flavor (or material status) of the Verse.

Here's Jonathan on the aforementioned latin bit. (& he becomes reader # 8 of Stubborn Grew, the book that changed history (at least until the Johnson-Silliman Pact of 2004, outlined by that Walden guy) - thanks - & congratulations!).

I would never think of Robert Creeley in relation to that notion. Ars et celare artem makes me think, not so much of plainness & simplicity, as of a kind of crafty guile, combined with all sorts of indirections, including perhaps a surface moderation or transparency. But Jonathan's concept may be more accurate.

This gets me to Jordan's aside on "depth". I'll have to think a little more deeply about this. Somewhere in the book Hamlet's Mill, mentioned here a while back, there is something about archaic astronomy-astrology as the search for. . . man, now I can't think of the word! It's not consistency. . . it's not continuity. . . but it's like that. . . it's like a philosophical term for steady duration, a pattern which remains the same. . .

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that it seems to me that hermeneutics or interpretation of art works often involves searching for the deep motive, the wellspring which connects all the dots, the answer to why an artist or writer chose this particular obscure symbol or image or emphasis.

The presence of such a motivating plot or plan is one signature of depth. You could also talk about an artwork's "emotional depth", but such is usually brought, paradoxically, to the surface (the crisis, the denouement). Depth of purpose, on the other hand, often remains hidden & disguised - and the reason for this is because there is the deepest emotional commitment to the deep-ocean argument which actually triggered the work in the first place.

I guess township democracy was of a piece with pre-industrial do-it-yourself pioneer life. You grew your own crops, made your own homes, tools, clothing, etc. (with the help of family, hired hands, indentured servants & sometimes slaves). & you do your own municipal democracy.

things have gotten a bit more centralized, professionalized, & technical since then, yah? but people still get involved.

Stubborn Grew touched on some of these things in RI experience. The Dorr War (over extending the franchise to non-property owners), populism, slavery, Newport gilded age, Nelson Aldrich & the corruption of state politics, etc.

But the poem doesn't really examine them. There's no dispassionate observer, no lingering over historical events. The narrator of SG is deeply corroded, you might say. There's more to be said about this, but enough blah blah for now. SG's divided narrator (Henry-Bluejay) is bound up in an interior psychodrama for which local history is mostly furniture.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, though it goes against the grain of certain modernist ideals.

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

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

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

How does one start writing a long "epic" poem? In 1997 I'd already written 2 or 3 not-quite-successful ones. After 15 years of off-&-on writing, I'd noticed that "going back to Mandelstam" often had a renewing or reviving effect on me.

Stubborn Grew began as an act of desperation. For a long time I'd been making notes & more notes toward a long poem. The beginning of Stubborn was finally a kind of "decomposition" : I let myself go. I started imitating the slangy, informal quality of some of Mandelstam's late poems from Voronezh. & I centered myself imaginatively in that same "black earth". Stubborn was a lucky conjunction of a style (Mandelstamish quatrains) & a plot - Orpheus-Bluejay-Henry returning to the earth to "bring back the dead". I had no idea how far those quatrains & that plot would take me.

from the 1st chapter of Stubborn:

11

 
It begins with the headache of a rational animal.
Sepulchred, perhaps, in a whitened rhyme
or bibliophile's musty drawers - reflective rim
or echo chamber, some titanic scuttled shell.

 
And you lose the thread, and this is the thread.
Purpled, from the mordant notebook,
from the charitable extinct awk's
last corkscrew into a cup of molten mead,

 
like lead.  The chorus and audience withdraw.
You are alone with the sound of an evening of a swing.
Here's the church, here's the steeple... here's the door.

The 3-yrs-or-so process of writing Forth of July was preceded by a couple decades of thought & experimentation with long poems & the influence of Crane, Olson, Williams, Pound, primarily. I was always stimulated by local history & landscape, so that Stubborn Grew is in part a local history poem, and some of the symbolic figures of Forth of July emerge from that background.

William Blackstone, the Anglican hermit-minister, scholar, farmer, & early RI settler, is one of those figures. While "Bluejay" emerges as a Hermes-shaman-Holy Ghost instigator-of-adventures, Blackstone represents the search for knowledge, understanding, vision - a kind of reclusive solitary quest for the central meanings of human reality - acting out the scriptural precept, "Make your eye single, and your whole body will be full of light." In Stubborn he stands in the shadows of "Henry's" confessional Lenten shriving. Here's a salient Blackstone section from early in Stubborn:

Rain and wind, wind and the rain. Lent.
Drifting for days, cloudy, over New England.
El Nino.  In my beginning is my end.
And Blackstone rode into exile without incident

 
out of Boston, into Rhode Island, astride a white bull.
Anglican recluse.  Study Hill, in Cumberland.
His Study Hall was Alexandrian -
a nest of books; his morning orchard full

 
of Yellow Sweetings.  It was Eden before Eden,
Ithaca before the Greek was translated, hidden Rome
at the end of roaming, Ethiopian Negus kingdom
nestled high beyond flood-tide... heaven

 
for meditation.  3 Bibles, 10s; 6 English books
in folios, L2.  3 Latin books, in folio, 15s;
3 do. large quarto, L2; 15 small quarto, L1 17s
16d; 14 small do., 14s.; 30 large octavo...L4....5s...

 
Inventory, May 28th (day of his burial).  Body
was hardly cold in the ground.  Band of King Philip's.
Burned Study Hall and all its books.  The earth itself
was all that remained.  A few smoldering ashes... two

 
rough quartz grave markers.  Painfully regret the
destruction... those "paper books".  (Probably ms.)
Left England to get out from under the power of lord bishops,
but in America I am fallen under lord brethren.

 
I looked to have dwelt with my orchards and my books,
my young fawn and bull, in undisturbed solitude.
Was there not room enough for all of ye?
Could ye not leave the hermit in his corner?

 
Study Hill became Ann & Hope (first American
shopping center).  Blackstone went missing - bones
in a wooden box sealed in lead... heavy lead foil.
Its corners were soldered... 12x12x6 inches in

 
size.  Ashes, bones, clay - time past perhaps good compost.