Really interesting review by John Updike in this week's New Yorker of a new translation of the 5 Mosaic Books (by Robert Alter), in the course of which Updike talks about his own youthful encounter with the Bible. Also quotes two short passages from Auerbach's Mimesis, which felt (to me) like commentaries on my "Midnight Knock" travail.

Justice Bramhall writes (in an opinion lodged as part of his "tributary 2004" brief):

"I also wonder about the surety artists have about their own work and what it is 'doing'. as if intent (even as far as one can know one's own intent) translated directly to practice. "

The wonder of it all is what grows unexpectedly out of certain ambitions, intentions (or stubborn allegiances, habits). So in my own explanatory-para-poetics anthill, the labyrinth of meaning is always seen in retrospect. I'm surprised by what coheres.

So if you, expert legal surveyor, go over here to Alephoebooks & re-read the two adjacent panels ("Midnight Knock" & the trip-to-London/sonnet fandango), I think you will agree with me that there is a kind of rhyme linking a manic "Shakespeare episode" in the mid-70s, a wayward rock n'roll adventure of the same period, and a NY-Schoolish/Berrymanish/Shakespearish sonnet-gumbo sequence written over 20 years later. In other words, the focus on Shakespeare doesn't go away, but it gets filtered through the lens of a much later time in life.

Did I plan this then, intentionally? No. Not guilty.

5

I'm not making this up; my little traveling clock read midnight. I got up, shaking and quivering; I went to the door, yelling "This is the bravest thing I've ever done!" I thought Satan had come for me. I was raving mad.

It was the dorm advisor, Prof. Arnold Weinstein. Someone had notified him of my condition and asked him to check on me. I asked him, "are you related to Alexander Weinstein, up in Boston (old family friend, retired geneticist at Harvard)?" "Why, yes, he's my brother," Arnold Weinstein replied. He invited me down to his apartment to talk. (As it turned out, Arnold's brother was another Alex W. in Boston.) I thought, later, that God, rather than delivering me to the Devil, had brought me a "winecup" (Weinstein).

My panic subsided, but my paranoia was not over. On the advice of school officials, it was decided I should go home for a few days (classes hadn't even started yet), and speak to a psychiatrist. I agreed to this, but was secretly afraid that in my absence, Harry Howe would break into my room and steal my poems! Over the next few days in Minneapolis, I devised a terrible test. While convincing the psychiatrist that I was OK, I was secretly plotting & calculating what I had to do. (When I showed the doctor one of my recent poems, which was a narrative about the Hamilton/Burr duel, not very flattering with regard to Burr, I was surprised at his response. He said, "Well, actually, I'm a direct descendant of Aaron Burr.")

You have to understand that, to my mind, the fate of the world was at stake. I was living in a realm of spiritual forces, not everyday common sense. I went and bought a revolver. If (and only if: this was a weird sort of test of my own paranoia), when I returned at Brown, Harry had stolen my poems, I would shoot him and myself. ("Religious gunman", indeed - cf. Crane's "For the Marriage of Faustus & Helen".)

On my last night in Minneapolis, I was overcome with sadness. I felt myself regressing to a childhood state. In my basement room, I lay on my bed, weeping. I remember so clearly, my father coming downstairs that night, laying his hand on my forehead, telling me gently that everything would be all right.

Early the next morning, as I was waking up, I had the strangest experience of all.

Just as I was waking, I "heard" a voice. It was coming from my chest, from my heart. It was not my own. It was reciting the Lord's Prayer. "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

I was feeling more calm and peaceful; nevertheless, the gun was in my suitcase. Arriving back at Brown, I discovered, to my relief, that no one had broken into my room. I threw the gun in the Providence River.

For a few weeks, I tried to resume classes as usual. But it was impossible for me. In early November I packed my bag, took my guitar, threw away my record collection(!), and headed out into the country.

4

Harry Howe was a classmate of mine; a fellow poet, also a sculptor. He was old Boston, with a deeper literary education than mine (Eliot, Lowell, etc.); but he took to admiring what I wrote and encouraging me. He was tall, favoring heavy riding boots & black outfits, liked to carry an iron rod around as a walking stick. Really a gentle person, there was something a little intimidating about his violent persona & attitudes. (It was with Harry & his girlfriend, a RISD sculptor named Marcia Pels, that I heard John Ashbery - my hero then, in my glorious freshman year - read his poetry, up at Amherst.)

The next phase of my breakdown was paranoia. I suddenly took the notion that Harry would steal my new poems, and through them, HE would become this worldly-literary-deceiver - would hold the demonic place that I so vainly had thought was intended for me - the Antichrist!

I spent a few days trying to destroy all evidence of my work, so that this would not happen! I went to Edwin Honig's home and practically ransacked his study for the poems, without success. His wife said he was up in Boston. Immediately I hopped a bus and, merely on a hunch, headed for the Grolier Bookstore. On my arrival, the redheaded owner told me Edwin was due there in a half an hour. I sat down to wait. When he appeared, with another professor, I poured out my tale, weeping, panicky. Where were those poems? Edwin, kind & patient, assured me they would be returned. He and his friend ended up having their dinner with me, at a local medical clinic, where they had taken me. After I calmed down somewhat, they saw me off to the bus back to Providence. (I've never forgotten Edwin's graciousness that day.)

That night, waves of anxiety and exhaustion washed over me. My heart was pounding; I was near total collapse. I thought to myself : I am Faust; I have lost the spiritual battle. Around midnight, I knelt down by my cot & prayed to God to forgive me, to protect me. At the stroke of midnight, there was a knock on my door.

3

Thrilling, frightening, fantastic (ridiculous, too) - the next few days would change me forever. All the symptoms were there: hyper-manic energy, megalomania, paranoia... - and something else, like a thread through the maze.

For my senior year, I had a dorm room of my own. On the first day there, right after unpacking, I flopped down on the bed and thought, "why not?" I picked up my copy of the Sonnets. It was as if, with my self-confidence and equilibrium somewhat restored, I was challenging the Bard to a duel - daring him to throw me again.

Will won; I lost. Slowly, gradually, as I read the melodious lines, it began happening once again, this time even more powerfully. It was as though the ghost of Shakespeare were hovering there as I read those sonnet-epistles addressed directly to me. Suddenly I was filled with a sense of manic power, poetic "fury", "divine afflatus". This was an hour of destiny. Will was the Bard of England; I would be his counterpart, the Genius of America!

Over the next few (sleepless) days and nights, I tried to prove my hunch in verse. I wrote long rhymed & metered (never having bothered with that before!) historical narratives; I began a series of 50 poems on the 50 states... and as soon as I had typed them up, I fired them off in the mail, or delivered them to friends and teachers (Prof. Edwin Honig, in particular). I was in a manic state: every thought was crystalline, clear, yet each one hit me like a sledgehammer.

Suddenly, in the midst of this, a sort of pendulum swung. I began to remember lines from the Bible. Ecclesiastes, in particular. And I saw that youth, the second one, and he was lord over all the people. And this, too, is a striving after wind.

I stopped in my tracks. A kind of Manichean duality took hold. Suddenly I saw myself in a Faustian light. What was poetry, but worldly vainglory? What was this Bardic "spirit", but demonic delusion? It was as though the high ground, the pinnacle I had ascended, was instantly swept away beneath my feet. The fright of hell & Satan took hold, gripped me.

I began racing about, trying to retrieve my poems, as a new wave of panic arrived.

2

The next 9 months were a gestation period for what proved to be a far more intense crisis. My memories of the time are sparse. I know that all through those first few years at college, I puzzled over the conundrum of the poet's role & vocation - the riddle of my future.

I don't remember exactly when I started reading the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, whether it was during that spring semester ('73), or later that summer. I do know I was reading it steadily, beginning to end, during the 5-6 weeks I spent with my brother Jim, working on a ranch in a remote section of Wyoming. After a strenuous day of haybaling, I would stretch out in the bunkhouse we shared with the rancher's feisty 14-yr old son, & read & read.

Looking back on it now, I think that the Bible compensated for my drought of literary reading over the previous several months. I was fascinated with it; I found the long saga's poetry/history/mystery utterly compelling. The Bible was not completely foreign to me, since I'd been brought up in the Episcopalian church; but it had been many years since my confirmation meant anything to me. Now I was soaking up the Good Book through my pores. Three literary effects come to mind as central then: the moral force, the sense of demand that runs through the Mosaic Books, the prophets, the New Testament; the sheer drama of some of the storytelling; and finally, the "chronicle" aspect - the sense that, spun & garbled as it might be, the Bible is a record of vast, so-ancient events.

I went back to school in September, to begin my senior year, feeling invigorated & newly-confident after my summer outdoors in Wyoming. Then the real crisis struck.

Kent Johnson sent a query to the comment-box of the previous post. I deleted it along with some ill-considered responses of my own, but it got me thinking about the "Shakespeare event" of 1973, a pivotal crisis in my life. So I'd like to try to address his question somewhat, and at the same time provide some context, as I see it, to that experience. I think I will have to do this in a sequence of posts. In the meantime, the "hypertext" Island Road post, below, has teleported over to my warehouse/distribution center, AlephoeBooks, for those who would like continued quick access to it (AlephoeBooks doesn't scroll so fast as HG Poetics).

So here goes.

1

In the fall of 1972, I was a junior at Brown Univ. Those were the heady days of "curricular reform", and I took full advantage of the lack of required courses, choosing mostly creative writing classes. In my freshman year, I won 3 literary contests offered by the English Dept., and had my first chapbook published. That was exciting. Of course, the war in Vietnam was on. I had applied for conscientious objector status, which angered & worried my father. But I had the student deferment, & got a high draft number. So I was lucky, and I didn't push my "objector" status to any substantial act of protest.

In those days, I think you could say I was on the edge of manic depression. I was often gloomy and withdrawn, shy of human contact. One romance had already ended, another was in trouble; the "sexual revolution" and my feelings of guilt & dislocation were in jarring contrast. On top of this, my writing was not going so well. My sophomore year was far more difficult than the previous one. I had, seemingly, already played out a sort of happy-go-lucky NY School (award-winning) persona; I was reading a lot of heavy-duty "masters" (Stevens, Rilke, et al.) and feeling unsure of myself.

In early December of that year, my cousin Juliet jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. I took this very hard. My own sense of psychological balance was fragile.

Later that month, I picked up Shakespeare's Sonnets for the first time. Suddenly I had the strangest sensation, totally new to me, simultaneously frightening & exhilarating. I thought that, by some unknown process, utterly anachronistic, Shakespeare was addressing me personally. The sonnets to the Young Man were written to me.

I'm fully aware that the literary history of responses to the Bard is chock full of eccentric episodes (such as Prof. Looney's theories of authorship, & far beyond). Even as it was happening, the irrationality of my experience was shocking to me. And shortly thereafter, I renounced poetry altogether. In a sense, this first "Bard episode" was the culmination of a downward spiral of depression. Dimly, I recognized the manic nature, the compensatory aspect, of my response to the Sonnets. I changed my major to History, and signed up for a completely "unliterary" spring semester.