On we go with Read-Along with Rest Note :

Poem # 13 :

13.1 : "jungle was a mutiny..." - we are back with fevered Teddy Roosevelt in the Amazon jungle. "mutiny of limbs" - more play with micro/macrocosm. As the jungle is a tangled "mutiny" of tree-limbs, so Teddy's feverish limbs are mutinous (& as Teddy as presidential "representative" American represents a fevered, lost country). "each hypertrope" etc. - see Candice Millard's book again (River of Doubt) on the voracious jungle ecosystem.

13.2 : "death was comedy" - the bizarre hunting/killing mechanisms of various jungle flora & fauna - their predatory quality - pushes the sense that life is cheap. "renounce all vanity" etc. - this environment is teaching TR to recognize the similar forms of malice & brutality which turned the "civilized" world into a jungle too.

13.4 : "jaguar" and "chrysalis" etc. - jaguar as avatar of jungle itself; dangling chrysalis as symbol (related to many others in the poems) of art or poetry - pendant, swaying between sky & earth. In this stanza the unknown & uncanny forces of both are interrelated or fused to some extent.

13.5 : "Fevered"... etc. this fusion - a sort of act of literary magic - is part of TR's fever; it leads him to find metaphorical/symbolic relations, to "poetize" himself. Thus he sees his father as both tree and "oaken volume" and "valid redeemer" (Vladimir Nabokov acronym); his mother as the almond tree with the dangling nest (Mandelstam/Jewish subtext), and all becoming a pendulum-breeze. This may sound rather "fevered" in its own right : but there is a subtextual logic to the lines. If TR is a persona or mask for the poetic speaker, then this narration - about language/jungle/human lostness - is in part a story about the poetic process in general, and in particular about the literary ancestry of the speaker's poetic voice.

13.6 : "Bored then... the planet was enough" - an arcane encounter - wrestling match, chessgame - between nature itself (the jaguar) and poetry ends in a kind of draw. The jaguar pads off, leaving the president in extremis : yet still he mutters, "the planet was enough". This phrase a sort of amalgam of Wallace Stevens with Osip Mandelstam's credo of Acmeism : that one of the deepest motives of poetry is to "humanize" the earth, to domesticate it, help people to recognize their kinship with it and each other, their "at-homeness" in reality. Stevens & Mandelstam came at this from different angles, but paradoxically shared many affinities regarding the (humane) values of the earth.

13.7 : "absolute/checkmate. And he wore a crown..." - in his "defeat" by nature's fierce law (the jaguar) - his willingness to encounter it - the poet/explorer actually wins the crown.

Here we go again, another

Read-Along with Rest Note.

Poem # 12 :

12.1 : "I heard some crickets..." - sometimes the poem drops the masks - the Teddy Roosevelt, Hobo, Lazarus, Oblomov, etc. "Soo Line" - an old midwestern freight train line.

12.3 : "a mask of gravity" - that is, the cricket sound stimulates memory, penetrates layers of past time, so time suddenly feels heavy, material, present.

12.4 : "railroad's ruthlessness" - refers to 19th cent. tension between small farmers, on the one hand, and railroad/mercantile interests on the other. "edict in the heart" - echo of TR's messages to wife "Edith" in previous poems.

12.5 : "peevish king" - allusion to Shakespeare's Richard II, figured variously in this part of Rest Note. "yon imperturbable" - God, divine providence. "shuffles the weights" - again, the oft-repeated motif (pervasive theme here) of balance, see-saw, polarity, swingset, between two dimensions of reality : heaven/earth, time/eternity, etc.

12.6 : "swingset... formula" - back, forth, life, dream... the polarity again. An architecture of reality - an old way of looking at things - coming back again, somewhat, somehow.

Curious how Rest Note is developing, in a sense, out of the final stanza of an important little section appearing early in that poem of several years ago, Stubborn Grew :

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.

Will try another Read-Along today. With Rest Note. & will try to keep it brief. Am skipping over poem # 10 : it's the centerpiece, twice as long as the others, sort of projected onto a different "plane" of the poem's structure. (That's the plan, anyway.) So I will leave that for another time. Here are some over-the-cliff notes on Poem # 11 :

11.1 : "only a single line..." etc. - life as a race driven by competitive desires.

11.2 : "a bugle" - TR's military trumpet. (cf. the distorted trumpets in # 1.1.) The horses also faintly akin to pegasi (poets as horses).

11.3 : "A Hawkwood..." etc. here's a nice obscurity I can happily explain. If you've been following along with these read-alongs, you'll know that the figure of Shakespeare's King Richard 2nd hovers in the background, as a sort of amalgam of wrecked poet/monarch. Hawkwood was a fearsome English mercenary and warlord, famed & hated in Tuscany & Lombardy for his contract wars, devastations & plundering. But he was so successful at it that he gained wealth & legitimate social standing among his employers. Richard II welcomed him to stay at his royal estate. (see Barbara Tuchman's wonderful history, A Distant Mirror. A good read.)

11.4 : "The forest..." etc. Rainforest, according to different sources I've read, can show an oppressive side of bleak sameness. The stanza is one of repeated oppositions (in this poem) between human doings and a kind of natural fatality. "A cataract..." etc. we are back into inside/outside imagery - the jungle cataract (or disease of the eyes) ends in the "blind whorl" of fingertips - lost identity, individuality. The palm-tree - and the palm with the fingertips - marks a grave.

11.5 : "tangled knolls" - bad pun (noli me tangere). Another Lazarus in garden/jungle image. "Shrouded cloudbank... etc." - the "incarnate" word is blurred, absent (gardener long gone); the image of the word as hovering between (and uniting) earth and heaven - constant element of this poem, reflected in various strands of imagery (esp. the "swingset") - here appears in a doubtful, uncertain mood. "Magdalen" (who met Jesus-the-gardener at the sepulchre) is "lightheaded".

11.6 : this stanza sort of outlines poet's role, while mocking it. He or she stands in between "prudent and prodigal" - "hunting" for something beyond both (mere) worldly wisdom and the diseased passions represented by the race-horses & mercenaries.

11.7 : "sortilege" - a word for fortunetelling or prophecy with negative connotations (magic, witchcraft, flummery). "Yet the lantern..." etc. despite the scepticism, these final two lines affirm some kind of kinship between art & nature, poetry & truth.

Read-Along with Rest Note

Poem #9 : Rest Note as a whole is built to some extent on patterns of 3 and 9, so as #9, this section brings the first full sequence to a close. And it's a winding-down, in a hesitant, doubtful mood. Can poetry ever escape its solipsistic, irrelevant, self-indulgent prison-house, in the midst of a social world of suffering, inequality, injustice?

Much of the opening of the poem concerns a "Lazarus" figure, and in this section he's tempted to go back to the sleep of the grave from which he has heretofore been stirring. The poem circles back, curves downward, and ends in a supplication.

9.1 : "Raindrops curve" etc. - the figure of micro/macrocosm (windowpane/retina), inside/outside (camera obscura) - the general oscillating movement which runs through the whole poem. Writing returns to "crumbling moss" (ms.).

9.2 : "iron ball" - a ball & chain dragging at the poet's "foot". Contrasted with awkward "toes" which do not dance, but tromp, oblivious to the empty canyon they inhabit. Poetry's dilemmas of solipsism. "coyote jest" - bad pun on "Quixote geste" - acting out of chivalric delusions.

9.3 : "lead mines" - Teddy Roosevelt (the "chivalrous" Prez) has begun a risky journey which seems to have "led" him to a deadening lead mine. But he will be a brave Teddy bear. "El Dorado"... etc. - it was not a fool's gold dream which led him on, a dream of riches. "compunctions of the scullery" - ie., to contrast with Wallace Stevens' "complacencies of the peignoir". Stevens (in the epicurean-Romantic, post-religious mode of "Sunday Morning") is contrasted with Roosevelt's crusading-heroic attitude. "scullery" - faint echo of Golgotha (cf. previous motifs of Last Supper "table"); "sanguine" - ie., simultaneously hopeful/bloody.

9.4 : "Horse-sense", etc. - poets as Pegasus-knights, as participating in a historical remnant-holdover of domineering feudal mentality ("dominion"). "Spent millions" - both the money squandered by fraud & decadence, and the worn-out multitudes who subsist in that debilitated condition.

9.5 : "a ring/ of blue... corncobs" - sort of a synthetic image. Blue corn - Indian corn. Corncobs - old country poverty. spontaneous - both the horses bolting from the Derby starting line, and a sense of "spontaneous combustion" - the silos exploding. "squads of backs..." etc. - Lazarus-Hobo contrasts Teddy's fatherly-chivalric exhortations to rugged individualism ("character, my son!") with a different memory, the sense of "characters" as letters and numbers, printed on the shirts (& backs) of the chain gangs. This is the would-be heroic poem's dilemma.

9.6 : "Someone swings a scythe..." etc. - the sun, mysteriously, swings a scything shadow as it crosses through time & day. This is a "draconian sway" - far more elemental than human dominions. "chameleon/mimics a lemon" - ... ie. but it's not simply the sun, it's a "someone" - a person, a being (inverting, converting the power of the sun, the way "chameleon" punningly inverts a (sunny) "lemon". Who is this round someone, now "scything" the eye? (A gesture toward Blake - "a tear is an Intellectual thing / and a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King".) "windrow" - combining the "windows" of the eye and the "windrows" created by the scythe.

9.7 : This stanza somewhat shucks off the anxious formulations of previous stanzas, in favor of a personal supplication. Following up on the sense of personal presence in previous stanza ("someone"), TR makes a direct appeal to "Edith" (his wife). Let the curves end in a smile. "Be a nine, San Juan" - no longer the curve of a physical battlefield (San Juan Hill), but the spiral of a spiritual goal (cf. Dante : "Beatrice is a nine." San Juan de la Cruz was a mystical poet.) "Draw tight..." - the race is replaced by a "trace" - the inward discipline of a (horse's) harness.

Read-Along-with Rest Note, poem #7 :

7.1 : "May day, memorious..." - echoes opening of poem #1. Date of composition is Memorial Day. "the old soldier" - we're back with Teddy Roosevelt, making his Bull Moose comeback attempt with a big speech in Madison Square Garden. He had just survived an assassination attempt in the midwest a day or so before, and was walking around with the bullet still in his chest.

7.2 : "rich men..." etc. Some vocabulary from Richard II, another politician on his way out.

7.3 : "Stern was the sterling word..." etc. - public rhetoric, political rhetoric, takes on a tincture from the Iron Age (the world of power and violence) which it addresses.

7.4 : "oak tree... bantering manteau" - out hidden in the country, beyond sequestered rural wealth, a tree furls (hides) in a cloak of whispering leaves. Image of reserved, persistent presence of poetic speech, powerful in its sphere, yet distinguished from political rhetoric per se. May 29, the date of composition, is Oak Tree Day in England, or Restoration Day : a celebration of the young Charles II's successful escape (hiding in an oak tree) from the roundheads. May 29 was Charles 2nd's birthday - also this poet's birthday. Contrast of Charles II (strong successful monarch) with Richard II (weak falling monarch).

7.5 : poetry is both "sheltering" and a kind of riposte ("ripe post") to political conflict. "The octave..." etc. - the poetic word discovers the sameness or harmony or equality hidden beneath class differences ("squire" and "hand"). "rest note" - in musical terms, a rest note is a silent note : a pause between sounds.

7.6 : "young seal" - cf. previous comments on the "seal" motif.

7.7 : "speechless limbs" - the silent-speaking tree, the "seal" which speaks only silently or symbolically (as animal or as image). Yet the "retort" is a gesture, part of a real test, game, agon. The contest originates in the "racing heart" itself.

Persistence wins the day. Jonathan Mayhew has done it! & so he shall receive one of our many cuckoo Lulu publications. Congratulations, Mr. Mayhew!

"The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise." Final line of the second part of Crane's poem, "Voyages".

(As noted previously, I was reminded of this line only after groping through various images of "the seal" - punning on TR's childhood experience with a baby seal (the animal), with Hamlet's (father's) royal seal, etc. The recall of this line struck me so forcefully because the poem originated & is in part structured on a (calendrical, thematic) conjunction of Crane & Teddy Roosevelt. So coming on this line again, relatively late in the game, was a joy.)

Jonathan Mayhew, one of my very fit though sweltering though very few readers, came all the way back from Spain to work on the Rest Note puzzler. & he's almost there. Anybody else want to catch this train? You have to name the poet, the poem, & the particular line.

Big clue : remember, this is a poem which began on April 26th, the day Teddy Roosevelt emerged alive from the Amazon jungle, & also the day Hart Crane disappeared into the Caribbean. And Teddy, in his memoirs, credits his lifelong interest in natural history to seeing a certain baby aquatic animal on the NYC fish market docks.

I've been offering Rest Note read-alongs, so I thought I'd add some emergency obscurity relief comments on the section just posted (#14).

In line with the alternation/ABA/ring-structure I described in previous read-alongs, there's a link between # 14 and a previous section, # 6 (posted here previously, & also over at Alephoebooks).

The ideas cluster around the word "seal". In poem #6, there's an allusion to the royal seal which Hamlet used, on board ship, to outwit his uncle's plan to have him executed. The first stanza of #14 (see below) is a fairly literal description of the Minnesota State Seal (a farmer, plowing, looks over shoulder at Sioux horseman, galloping away). In the background here, too, is Stevens' great late poem, "An Old Man Asleep" - "...the redness of the River R").

Teddy Roosevelt, as recounted in the C. Millard book, dated his own powerful interest in natural history to a childhood visit to the NYC fish market, where he saw a dead baby seal on a plank (I think I've got that right).

So I'm punning on seal - as natural fact, curiosity - and as insignia, representation of authority. Nature (natural law) & custom (positive law).

I understand this is a huge stretch - I mean more in my head than in the poem, as yet.

So what do I mean by the "seal"? It's the "character" - the "type" (as in typesetting) forged by Vulcan (volcanic) fire. It's nature's mortal seal on the particularity of each living creature. Thus the subdued allusions in #14 to Hart Crane's poem "Emblems of Conduct", as well as to Wordsworth's great brief poem which begins "A slumber did my spirit seal". These are in the background here.

Lurking on another level are allusions to Mandelstam & his "emblematic" encounter with Stalin ("wolf-meal" - links an Old English lament & Mandelstam poem about exile; "'star' for star", etc.). The "House of Ice" in #6 is a kind of satire on tyranny as traditional political status quo. Nabokov also lurks in the poem posted previously - #13 (see if you can find him). What I'm groping toward, actually, is a rather Nabokovian notion of a spiritual otherworld, which balances "this" world by means of enigmatic, emblematic, writerly tokens, insignia (cf. that other Hamletian Stephen Dedalus, in Ulysses - "signatures of all things I am here to read", or so it goes, something like that...) (p.s Happy Bloomsday, JayJay, & H.C. Everybody).

(This Nabokov thing runs very deep in me. It comes, I think, from his strong influence on my reading when I was around 13-14. There is a kind of subconscious melding of the vocation of writer with the spirit of Nabokov in my mind : & that, perhaps, is the ghostly imprint of his "character". But I digress...)

There is a sort of continuum being set up between social power (the freight train & its long echo imprinted on the night), TR's presidency as a social symbol, and Crane's symbolic death (becoming "one with the fishes") - going back to the conjunction noted between the date of TR's emergence from the jungle, & the date of Crane's death.

The vague notion presented in these lines is that of a duality between the "body left with Calypso" and, on the other hand, the homing spirit of Ulysses. What remains of the body is an emblem (the "jasper bandolier") - which in turn echoes the "banderole" - the symbolic curtain dividing heaven & earth - mentioned (& noted in the notes) in the opening poem (#1).

It's obvious from these notes that I'm describing an ongoing process of symbolization, which hopefully will become more exact & clear in sections to come... then again, much of the iceberg, in my particular house of ice, remains underwater, implicit - & that's as it should be.

Read-along-with-Rest Note :

Poem # 2 :

I'm sort of worn out today (stayed up too late). So comments brief. A way to think about Rest Note structure : it's built on the most basic form of design, simple variation, back-&-forth, turning & returning. Software binaries : 1/0/1/0... a/b/a/b/a... night/day/night/day... That's the first level. The second is : return, recursion, reflection : a to b and back to a. It's in the rhyme-stanza scheme (ABBA). The third level : such returns or recursions are expansive, or exponential : a/b/a, A/B/A, A/B/A... in other words, the ring structures are reflected up from the smallest to the largest units.

There's a thematic aspect to this shuttling back & forth - but maybe I'll get into that another time. With respect to poem # 2, the variation goes from the 3rd person description of poem #1, to the 1st person soliloquy of poem #2. It's TR, feverish, in the jungle, addressing his wife, Edith, back in the USA.

2. (epigraph) : "In Xanadu", etc. - from Coleridge's famous dream-poem, which his companions said TR was muttering obsessively, over & over, during his fever-delirium.

2.1 : pretty clear... "pinhole star-swarm" - glance back at the camera obscura of #1. TR is also Lazarus.

2.2-3 - Again, see Candice Millard's book River of Doubt for insight on the eco-biology of rainforest. "my demise... undo myself" - echoes of Shakespeare's Richard II. Shakespeare's Richard is something of a narcissist as well as sacred king (ie. something of a poet). Mixing here the "hero" representative figurings - TR, Richard, Lazarus, poet. (Selva oscura.) Chaucer was a courtier in Richard's reign. Setting up relations between these figures.

2.4 : center stanza establishes image of arch-swing-tree for first time, on its smallest scale (the inch worm). So the imagery, in spreading & growing, will echo, to some extent (improvisationally) the structure of the poem as previously described. & eventually (hopefully) images & structure will fold into certain ideas or themes.

2.5-7 : TR's expressions of discouragement & despair. Part of the same alternating variation : thus the hopeful image of the inchworm (a "little little worm" - cf. Richard's "little little grave") is shrouded in gloom. And the tone of #2 - rather hopeless - contrasts with the tones of the adjacent sections (#1 - sort of apprehensive, wary; #3 - more hopeful, forward-looking).

REST NOTE : AN EXPLANICATION (1)

Because it's a quiet day at the library (students gone). Because it's not easy to read (this poem). Because only 12 people a month visit this blog any more - most of them from Mars (because I've lost interest in febrile wrangling?).

Why am I writing this poem, which is so recalcitrant? The sameness of structure & syntax - the vagueness of reference...

Well, I'm just getting into it, myself. But with every step I have to try to increase the resistance.

Who are these people - Lazarus, Hobo, Edith, Teddy Roosevelt? Figures, I guess, representing renewal. Renewal in a sort of all-encompassing sense. Renewal as a concept.

Art, well, it seems to be self-reflexive, if that's the right term. Folds back on itself, renews & extends itself through echo-effects. Implication.

So a poetry will try to renew itself by writing about renewal. Lazarus will sing himself out of the grave. With help.

This basic image (Lazarus) is meant to represent aspects of reality in general. "Lazarus", in a sense, puts a person - a particular image of the person - near the center of one's imaginative image of (cosmic) order.

& philosophical consequences result from that ordering choice. What they are I am only beginning to be able to articulate & defend.

*

Besides - does the poem so far really exhibit sameness, etc.? Well, maybe so... I seem to have a taste, a habit, an appetite, for the sound of it - at least for my own way of sounding. Maybe no one else hears it that way.

But, as mentioned, I want to make things difficult for myself, to find the resistance (which is related to reflexivity). So the aim would be to move toward a betterment of style. In some ways the serial mode helps allow for that possibility, along with many more negative outcomes (logorrhea, graphomania...). ("...he that of repetition is most master.")

That's part of the aim, & part of the difficulty. As one can tell from the nervous blur of the openings of Rest Note, I'm anxious about it. I've had too many false starts, & too much resistance (in myself & my life) toward writing anything at all.

OK, now I've probably gone & jinxed myself.

8

     
                             for John Tagliabue

 
Hobo drifts through rusted railroad world.
His tongue rasps out the iron flavor
of refusals, privy contretemps.  Over
cautious caravans, his pet raven hurls

 
exacting retribution - narrow gauge
thrown down to a thin red line of lips.
That curved plum of silence, where ships
descend... the promise of their tutelage

 
a concord at the vanishing point.  Stout keys
of shared reality.  Not disenchantment,
now, but hopefulness - ninefold reconcilement
(sweet reunions, recognition's ecstasies).

                    
                   *

 
Edith, I slept across the roots of the jade tree,
hopelessly.  Above me, the driftwood
(strung from slow parallels) rocked quietly,
back, forth... drawing a pattern (see-

 
saw) out of suspended gravity.
It was the inclusive arch, spread tenderly
between obdurate stones, above the turmoil
of indifferent waves.  A lambency

 
of recursions, curled toward equanimity;
an almond shadow-lens (cornerstone
of coronations) twirled into one
untutored sport - light spirit-ditty. 

7

 
May day, memorious.  The old soldier
processing to the podium, a bullet-
wound to remind him.  Roosevelt
in Milwaukee, Bull Moose in Madison Square.

 
Progressive.  Rich men and ruffians,
lean-to prophets, kings of snow –
the brittle glory of the Medicine Show,
the Big Tent, windy with quotations...

 
Stern was the sterling word, stirring
the crowd.  The veteran tasted the rust
of blooded lavender.  It was a test
for metal filings – it was Vulcan, simmering.

 
Lines of poplars point past the chateau.
Beyond the mansard and the glinting fields,
there, off in the distance (among some weeds)
an oak tree squirrels her bantering manteau.

 
A sheltering ripe post.  Ancient annuity.
The octave muted in the squire's arpeggio,
the hand's St. Vitus' dance.  And it was so.
Silence appends its rest note; the incongruous

 
miracle-ditty (quarrelsome cowpoke's vine
and trumpet) grew.  Hid from fresh alarums
and Goliath gloss - wrapped in films
of a young seal's frozen frame (its spine).

 
Begin, then, with the perilous retort
of speechless limbs.  What marks the man
from the also-ran.  The game in Yucatan,
the racing heart – iris of the jungle (smart). 

                               
                                   5.29.06

Have been correcting that troublesome little piece posted yesterday. It may be a keeper, or not.

A replica of Empress Anna of Russia's elaborate "House of Ice", constructed in St. Petersburg around 1740, was built there last winter - article about it in last New Yorker.

Some think the House of Ice was partly responsible for some of Coleridge's images in his dream-poem "Kublai Khan". & that was the poem Teddy Roosevelt kept obsessively reciting as he was near death from fever in the Amazon jungle.

I'm trying to pull together various distant seasonal & weather & political threads into this poem which is focused for the moment around a sort of Lazarus figure emerging at springtime.

Regret the obscurities of this particular section. The line about the "table among enemies" is from Psalm 23. The bit about the promissory seal etc. is from Hamlet.

I've posted a couple parts of current poem project. Started it on April 26th - anniversary of both Hart Crane's death and Teddy Roosevelt's emergence from harrowing trip down the "River of Doubt", an Amazon tributary.

The long poem of a few years ago ended up (in part) in the Amazon, so I'm trying to emerge again myself.

The juxtaposition of these 2 anniversaries has some thematic interest for me. (aspects of "national epic".)

(sometimes poetry-making feels like a scramble through personal caves & swamps, toward some kind of clearing)

Logjam broke yesterday. Able to start writing again. Hope I'm not deluding myself.

The math magic works for me. It's like a computer, or abacus - or, even better, weaving. 1/0/1/0/1/0. Dominant/tonic/dominant. A/B/A. On expanding overlays. Theme & variations.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Hart Crane's death. And Teddy Roosevelt's emergence from the River of Doubt (now Rio Roosevelt).