to imagine governance anew

CURVE-MIRROR

Everything resolves into the question

of good will.  The mystery

of this most simple anti-

gravity (11.32 ft/sec, a-falling down).

Firebranded sign of imago Dei.

So we desire the good –

wholeness (soul food).

The skeleton key of MLK,

the metaphysical hope informing

scapegrace Providence;

little Ocean State’s immense

rose light (perpetually intensifying).

Only a memory of Henry’s youth.

That community-building élan

of the VISTA legion –

to imagine governance anew, in truth

& conspicuous joy (Roger’s liberty

of conscience).  Dante

& his animale compagnevole

on Dante Street (on Federal Hill)… si, si!

Canopic geometry – vanishing point.

The apse at Sant’Apollinare.

One solitary shepherd, & the sky

a coracle of stars around one smile (anoint

her compassionate Pilot over Kings).

In the curve-mirror of the dome

you sense her light.  Calm

Shekinah… mild restoration of all things.

3.12.20

in the dawn mirror

SINGLE SPOKE

These quiet late winter days.  My mother

lies in her small bed.

The past is not restored

but rows to its island across the water.

I see it in the distance, there –

dark rocks, pines wrapped

in mist.  What happened

to those springing years?  Vibrant affair

of VISTA volunteers… Rhode Island

skipping in my early heart.

JFK’s Newport.

A tiny sea-casket of azure, sand

in the dawn mirror of a rose lighthouse

casting Roger’s heart’s eye-

beam – his Providential replica

of conscience-liberty (human Cosmopolis).

You elevate my Minnesota grain

toward your red-violet wine

welding human & divine

on the river’s leaping arch – then

paddle further… through green pillars

from Columbia to Gravesend,

Pocahontas Williams (raven-

haired pilot for milky stars).

Where the Wain of Charles is chartered

to an evergreen holm oak –

your Ocean State a single spoke

spinning my reel & sarabande, wholehearted.

3.10.20

Providence ca. 1980

MYSTERY PLAY

Somewhere in the archives of the sea

the salt preserves a memory

of miniature incestuous Providence

beneath gray dandruff caverns of asbestos

mingling with cigarette puff-clouds

where caffeinated VISTA crowds

light up the Brown & Sharpe building

to hash out next year’s organizing

plot.  The State House marble sepulcher

will grudge them their rotunda for another

Machiavellian tear-jerker, or mystery play.

Castaways will show.  Henry will have his day

– Shelton, that is (St. Francis of the street).

O sea-rose waif, that rock and sky make sweet!

Dream swells your impulse for the public good

and flings a grace note (orbic neighborhood).

the public good is an intellectual thing

WHATEVER HAPPENS

                                                      i.m. Sister Pat DeMoully

Hobo, that disintegrating Henry

sank into Mississippi

bottomland.  Big Muddy.

Like Lucius with his wayward donkey

rescued (finally) by Isis-Psyche.

The mule wanders Badlands.

Civic twilight (all hands

off deck).  Some refusenik-refugee.

Henry recalls the Brown & Sharpe

machinery complex

where young Rex

mingled with VISTA volunteers, harp

tuned to Dionysian thunder drum.

Green genius JFK

chanted (head all bloody)

Camelot concept.  Whole sum

of common good (an intellectual thing)

for young collegians,

braving their joy-dance

from campus triangle to iron ring;

the commonwealth is worth defending

whatever happens to me

(beam, solidarity).

Like Sister Pat in Jonestown, bending

from Minneapolis to Mississippi’s

veritable excess poverty.

To be there, every day...

a live-oak Galahad, touching the keys.

1.22.19

serene Cosmopolis

CHASTE VISION

Imagination of the common good

gleams in the mind’s eye –

a gift from on high

to children of the neighborhood.

I remember Ellen Ryan, from Bridgeport

out of Holy Cross,

smoking under the asbestos

of the Henry Sharpe complex (fort)

off 95 – splitting Providence

just as in Bridgeport,

where her father (Mort,

the cop) & mother (Mary, since

deceased) instilled their sober sense

of ultimate innocence –

outwitting insolence

by grace (elusive fauna of experience).

Sheepish cabal of VISTA volunteers!

Bussed into Washington

to lobby Congressman

Boro Dolpawa (he’s “all ears”).

Chaste vision of the commonweal.

My strength in weakness

is perfected (witness,

black lamb rust-red wool).

Beyond transparent vanishings

serene Cosmopolis...

bright realm of kindness

radiating equilibrium (eternal things).

11.15.18

Confessional blog post # 341

Greetings, fellow moles.  I've lost the habit of conversational blogging.  The old Brown University Library (the Rock) was my Alexandria, my table-talk slab : now I'm way out here in the high lonesome, like a rolling stump (off Highway 61).

Apparently we inhabit these digital knowledge-canals.  Robots remember things for us, bots remind us, etc.  I've gone out of fashion (about 10 years ago) as bloggentator (aka Mr. Potato-head).

Poetry shivers in the frisson of its immediacy, its grasp of The Cool - the shimmer of This, your slangy Now.  Behind lurks the power of the Word Itself - like an Old Master, like Big Daddy, with the moneybags (Universities Bank Here).  It Can Help You.  But the kids are nervous : that's how it goes (swimmingly).  The Academy of American Poets invites you to become an Associate Member (tote bag to follow); Poetry magazine hits monthly, like velvet lightning.  Jimi Hendrix reads us!

(It is really good, btw - especially the issue I was in, sometime last year.  Tonic verbs, with scattering of playdough... what is poetry, btw?)

I've lost, as I say, the hobbit of consternation.  Out of the gloop.

Still try to read books, now & then.  People may get the idea I've retreated into some kind of bizarre eccentric personal hut.  As John Keats once averred, "I am picked up and sorted to a pip.  My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk."

Yet my day is very scheduled (horae) - what with family industries, managing various major national crises, reading parts of a book or mag, and writing my Answer-To-Dante Poem...

As a matter of fact my personal mental space is so "Middle American" it's become exotic to many.  Recently I was subjected to a biting, sarcastic FB attack, by the accomplished young poet Phillip B. Williams - I guess because he felt I was some kind of Neanderthal.  Probably a generational thing (young guy knifes geezer).  You have to wear a digital sign on your head now to explain what appropriate medicines you are currently on in order to make you immune to the wrong purifications.

Am in the middle of this volume, American Covenant.  By another Philip - Philip Gorski (Princeton UP, 2017).  See, I can still find scholarly tomes!  This is a good one.

Do you know the difference between despotism, liberalism and republicanism?  Are you aware of the "civic religion" of These States?  Are you conscious of its binding presence in American history, and in your daily life?

It's a kind of hagiography, or demonology - from John Winthrop through Hannah Arendt, H.L. Mencken, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Lincoln, the Federalists, Roger Williams, many another.  Along the road you receive a blast of enlightening rational political science, theology, sociology... sorting to a pip the various strains of religious nationalism, radical secularism, libertarianism, neo-liberalism, democratic republicanism, etc etc - aside from the special orthodoxies of the Two Major Parties - which have framed the debate about American life since the Primal Dawn of Roger Williams' Canoe.  Umpt to Trump.

Gorski is searching for the spiritual-intellectual common ground : the forces moving American history.  I'm finding (right now) his commentary on Hannah Arendt quite stimulating : her concept of the "public happiness" - as she describes the revolutionary origins of the United States - having to do with a very concrete experience of democratic participation, a path to finding oneself-as-citizen, something wider and more liberating than oneself-as-private (economic) individual.  She gets at the root of the necessity for self-government, popular sovereignty : that we become content, energized, & deeply happy, as we engage with our neighbors on a basis of equality and justice.  Thus she redefines (or rediscovers) the Founders' meaning of "pursuit of happiness" : it's a public, civic thing.  So she asserts the authority of the forum, the commonweal, as a counterweight to merely private interest, the seductions of predatory Mammon (pure money).  Reading Gorski's interpretation I was reminded of my halcyon days with the VISTA program (established by JFK - the domestic Peace Corps) so long ago : community organizing for civic engagement, empowerment (by the scruffiest neighborhoods).

There are many sorts of poetry.  I'm following up some very ingrown toenails of personal obsessions, with me since the early 1970s (that's almost 50 years ago).  Problems with Shakespeare, Bible, Nabokov, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Hart Crane... Pound, Dante, Stevens, Eliot, et al...  - what to do with the Epic Poem?

I am aware that just because they are old obsessions doesn't mean they are interesting.  Coolness is a kind of polish - lemon wax.  You have to be able to speak to the moment... perhaps I've lost my touch, my Lemon Pledge (if I ever had it).

Too late now, I guess.  I'm an inveterate Blog Monster.

On the shores of Gitche Gumee

Am reading a remarkable new biography of Dante Alighieri, by Marco Santagata, translated by Richard Dixon (Harvard UP, 2016).  Alongside Longfellow's remarkably reader-friendly translation of the Divina Commedia.

Where I live now is Longfellow territory : Minnesota.  In fact I live in a duplex adjacent to the Longfellow section of Minneapolis.  This is the land of Minnehaha Falls, Lake Nokomis, the Hiawatha rail line...  Henry L's Song of Hiawatha was inspired & underwritten by the Ojibwa legends recorded by his scholar-explorer friend Henry Schoolcraft (discoverer of the source of the Mississippi).  I can hear my late father even now - Minnesota Scout-camper-canoeist that he was - reciting (slightly tongue-in-cheek) tidbits of Hiawatha and Evangeline...

Santagata's Dante is a preternaturally-gifted young poeta (Einstein-like), trapped in a political combination of Inferno and South Boston.  His yearning for the authority of Empire makes (partial, recherche) sense in a parochial spacetime imprisoned by warlords, feuds, vengeance, murder, and every other circle of Hell.  These circles were closed.  Dante was like a drowning man struggling to the surface.  His appeal to Beatrice and Mary was a cry for a spiritual lifesaver - and a rescue from personal/political catastrophe.

But don't let me suggest that what we have here is a version of the mind-body problem.  Dante was more than an alienated intellectual.  He was a lot like Whitman, too.  He asserted Love at the center of reality, at the matrix of the cosmos - and found a way to synthesize all the different departments of Philosophia within the very human desire to love and be loved.  This was the gift of his mentors (Brunetti, Cavalcanti, Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas, Aristotle... Virgil) - but a gift he transfigured into blazing bardic fireworks (Whitman's descants on Emerson provide a parallel).

I find it interesting that during his agitated exilic (& hungry) wanderings around Tuscany & environs, Dante gravitated toward anywhere with a good library.  That early Renaissance hunger for knowledge chimes with what Mandelstam calls the Italians' (Dante, Ariosto) enormous appetite & gusto for speech, rhyme, poetry...  Mandelstam, out there in Voronezh & Vladivostok, carrying his frangled, tattered copy of the Divine Comedy around, always, wherever Stalin decided to send him...

The library was my refuge too.  I spent 30 years in the bowels of the Rock (Rockefeller Library, Brown University) - after Ronald Reagan brought an end to my 5-yr VISTA volunteer career (circa 1980).  I didn't want to be an organizer anymore; I needed to write.  But I didn't want to go back to school (I graduated from Brown - finally - in 1977).  For a brief ridiculous desperate time I worked as a "professional resume writer"...

I thought of poetry as something simple & direct - beyond academia, beneath academia; beyond politics, beneath politics; beyond po-biz, beneath po-biz.  I started a group called the Poetry Mission for that reason (stealing poetry off campus).  We sponsored events in an art gallery, organized some talks, published an anthology for Edwin Honig's birthday... but this was long ago (early 1990s).  Others have been down this path.

The library.  On the campus.  Yes.  I went back there, into my shell - and stayed for 30 years.

Here's what Wikipedia says about the dome of the Rhode Island State House, under which I spent much of my 5 years as a VISTA volunteer :


"The Rhode Island State House is composed of 327,000 cubic feet (9,300 m³) of white Georgia marble, 15 million bricks, and 1,309 short tons (1,188 t) of iron floor beams.^[2]

The dome of the State House is the fourth-largest self-supporting marble dome in the world, after St. Peter's Basilica, the Taj Mahal, and the Minnesota State Capitol.^[2][3] On top of the dome is a gold-covered bronze statue of the Independent Man, originally named "Hope". The statue, weighing more than 500 pounds (230 kg), is 11 feet (3.4 m) tall and stands 278 feet (85 m) above the ground. The Independent Man represents freedom and independence and alludes to the independent spirit which led Roger Williams to settle and establish Providence and later Rhode Island."

"Hope."

This post is a throwback to the HG Poetics of old - that Minnehaha of endless gab-gab... how did I manage it?  As TS Eliot says somewhere, "Humility is endless."  I worked, managed.  Now, strangely, I'm home again.  Florence was my paternal grandmother's name - the Goulds lived about 2 blocks from where I'm writing this, in another shady apt by the river.  Florence was born on the the 4th of July, 1900... granddaughter of a Mississippi riverboat captain...