... speaking of daughters, today is my daughter Phoebe's birthday.

On this day Constantinople was founded as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. I was born on the day it fell (May 29, in 1453).

Happy BLOOMSDAY

Today is the anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination.

(Posted this before, I know. Here goes again. Riddle for bloggies - who, in part, does PG refer to? Clues in 2nd stanza. Anyone hazard a guess?)

 44

  
 Interesting.  A black cub in a saltcellar
 might have to do with a J2 rainbow
 coalescence.  Where you go, I will go,
 Daddy-o – through the mirror –

  
 but what's it all for?  A warm
 swarm of pinks huddle together
 by a pile of boots and nails there.
 A nation in a car.  Some form

  
 of cartoon coronation.  Sloppy
 jalopy of jello pie suspended up
 for an anchor.  PG his marked-
 own pine tree.  See what I see?

  
 Chilled or gelled half of an ironing
 jenny on the bottom of Big Muddy
 – because fate dealt a delta hand
 a dandy way-off Chinese rune for

  
 dying.  This number's upside down
 and skewed sideways (pretty darn
 rigorous, Mort) on a purple Lincoln
 out of Mars, with 44 plates of blown

  
 lizard-lady luck.  Drove by today
 while everybody died inside.  Time
 stop broke Sin chain stop cried.
 Finish your 2 x 4 calf pie?  Eh,

  
 son?  Walk it slow now, Abe.
 Isaac in the sack, the lamb
 lookin askance... Mick, Sam,
 Clem, and that other one – Gabe –

  
 in the wings... hold it right there.
 Close your eyes now.  Silver Bullet
 (marvelous red racehorse) set
 her seal on him, Dad.  Let him go free.

     
                         4.27.99

so... this trans-historical potlatch... I'm the last of the "modern"! - remnant, ghosty, ghouled. "Millions of strange shadows." With Whitman lurking near the center, at the delta. (this from July - written on JFK dying-day. Poem (Forth of July) circles calendrically around his b-day - 5.29).

 – some star – like the articulate
 ghost of my fathers and of yours, who
 could not speak in life, but in the owlish
 afterlife – Ba, Ka, Crow, Lamb... tracked

  
 upstream to Ethiopia, the truth of it –
 manuscripted messenger, papyrus
 Pappy or Osiris sire, Moses ripened
 in the wilderness).  Mountain oak-tree.

  
 Cedar.  Pitch-black tar (for
 mordant).  Bebi, General of the Asiatics.
 Quick-runner, wasp.  Pharaoh’s taxi-
 driver. He Who Controls the Rat-

  
 God’s Offspring.  Latecomer,
 fast-talker.  Journalist for Delta
 Crescent.  Walker of the tiled
 ink-paths, typesetter.  Market-

  
 rent-collector, solitaire, free-
 speaker.  Literal, exact, exacting
 horsetrading slavestealing tax-
 gathering figure of a reefer-

  
 man, fearful, a-feared.
 Goes down ghost-trails
 under live-oak lairs
 of rattlesnakes... adrift

  
 in jagged eddies of nude alphabets.
 Murmuring to himself, saliva-
 white, spume-frothing blanched
 avalanche easily frozen, baffled, back-

  
 stabbed – easily beloved, won-over.
 And adhesive through the crane bone
 into the gravity waves (nacreous
 mob of carnelian nouveaux

  
 baubles all around the funereal
 sunken canopy of maudit covenants,
 rumors, glittering knives –
 ressentiment scripted into feral runes).

  
 A crossroad of aluminum tubing in the swamp.
 Ping from outer space, deflecting the rays.
 Silence, alligators, flamingos.  Yarns
 and picayune lagniappe – pommes

  
 de terreurs – spooks and voodoo queens
 if you’re scared of the dark – a muttering
 broom delta, the sowing of the tombs
 beneath the Gulf.  Steal, sneak

  
 away now, Jim – Julius is sound asleep.
 We’re going down the inky path
 toward a kid wrapped up in llama
 tarp and catnap tape, tripwired – peels loose

  
 at midnight – watch!  While my ghosts
 of keen-mauled, kill-skinned, tree-masted
 River-Sixties gather steam upstream
 like a money-caulked coot of wood-

  
 stuck crocodiles, bobbing at the dawn levee.
 Watch – there go the shadows of the swallows!
 Soon the sun arrives, lifting over the lousy
 prism-blocks (Angola, Ethiopia veiled, unveiled).


      
                         11.22.99

Strange. Both Yeats & Joseph Brodsky died on this day, Jan. 28th. Strange, because Brodsky wrote a famous elegy (He died at the start of the year, in January...) for TS Eliot, which was an echo of Auden's famous elegy for Yeats.

(I learn things from my own archive. I tried to keep up the round-robin with that elegy for Brodsky (see archive for 1.30.04.)

... SO, poetry reflects that special embodiment, that embodied freedom-authority... & as such the messengers of that special space often come up against the other authorities. Thus July, the 3rd of Forth of July, ends on March 5th, the date on which both Stalin & Akhmatova (avatars of these two distinct powers) died.

& anyway, all this providential history is a work-in-progress. So the unpublished history poem In RI deals more directly with Roger Williams & his unique state-founding. & this has been translated, wonderfully, into italian by Anny Ballardini. I'll be a Dante yet.

& what I mean by this "embodiment", in part, involves all these threads I've been tying (plowing?) between my rows of verse, and the "rose" of Rhode Island. Thus I first came from the midwest to this state on the merit of my college application essay, which was a group of Ted Berrigan (of Cranston, RI) imitations. & though my roots are in Minnesota, I've discovered a lot of family background right here. There's a little island in Narragansett Bay called Gould Island, named after Thomas Gould, the nephew of my gr-gr-gr-grandfather Zaccheus. Tom Gould was a friend of Roger Williams, & rented him a field on that island, for raising hay.

I too try to "embody the word", in a poetry way. Here's an inkling of the "number, weight & measure" involved. (I'm sorry to repeat myself again on this blog - but I'm trying to outline a particular personal framework for poetic "embodiment".)

I wrote Forth of July in Rhode Island. The guiding spirit of this place is Roger Williams, founder of Providence; RI is considered the first political entity founded explicitly on the separation of Church & State.

Williams' worldview rhymes (roughly, an off-rhyme) with Dante's perspective, in the Divina Commedia and the essay De Monarchia. Dante believed that the Holy Spirit provided a legitimate role for secular humanity, secular government, in the providential historical process leading toward the renewal of the earth, the "Earthly Paradise", corrupted since the Fall. Rome, and the Holy Roman Emperor, he considered the true authority under which this renovation would occur. At the end of the Commedia, in the Paradiso, in the center of the heavenly Rose, Dante placed an empty throne, destined for the messianic Emperor who would oppose Papal pretentions to secular authority, restoring Italy, the Empire, and thus the whole world - Emperor Henry VII.

As Stubborn Grew/The Rose moves into its central volume, a certain numerical structure crystallizes (and then expands in the following volumes), based on 7/4 (4th of July), 5/28, and 5/29. The central volume (Grassblade Light) consists of 7 chapters (actually 8 panels - the center chapter containing a double panel). Each chapter is made up of 28 poems, each poem containing 28 lines (7 quatrains). At the center of the 28 is a 29th poem with a kind of square structure (16 quatrains total). (This is the template - & though there are slight variations in some chapters, the total line count for each chapt. is almost exactly the same.)

I designed this octagonal structure after the shape of a castle in southern Italy built by that great opponent of the Pope, (Holy Roman) Emperor Frederick II, which has 8 sides, and squarish towers at each angle.

The following volume, July, is designed as a mirror-image to the 1st vol., Stubborn Grew. It comes in 2 halves: the first half consists of 5 chapters, each containing 5 poems of 28 quatrains each. The 2nd half of the book has a very complicated structure (again using poems of 7 quatrains) which I won't get into here.

William Blackstone, RW's friend, Anglican preacher-in-exile, planter of the first known apple orchard in the New World (in Cumberland, RI), & figure in these poems, was buried on his property on 5.28.1675. His property ("Study Hill") was burned to the ground the next day, 5.29 (this was during King Philip's War).

5.29 is my birthday, and RI Statehood Day.

The entire poem (Forth of July) was finished on 5.28.2000, with this line :

"the nef rows, rows... palms, heartbeats, light."

It's Everywoman, Everyman. It's you, me, it's Berkeley in Paradise... the Son of Man, the Imago. It's All Souls' Eve (& Happy Halloween).

Halloween is coming.

I started this wild memoir jag back on Oct. 7th, after posting an image of the young Vladimir Nabokov. So I'm ending it with an image of Will Shaksper. The 2 of them share a birthday, April 23rd. This is the English National Day, I think; traditionally St. George's Day, patron saint of both England & Russia.

(I was born on May 29th, which is Restoration Day (or Oak Tree Day) in England.)

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.)

Zukofsky (via Josh) & "objectification" - aesthetic principle of rest, finish, completion, fulness, equilibrium, self-sufficiency (beauty/pleasure), being related to utopia, Paradise, Shabbat (sabbath).

A very old notion - much speculated upon by Byzantine theologians (Hexaemera - meditations & sermons on the 6 "days" of Creation).

Poetry's special relation to the word as good-in-itself.

Comes out in Forth of July via imagery of the ark, the covenant, Jonah ("dove"-prophet-spirit), Jerusalem, Jubilee, time-travel.

I sought "finish" & objectification in my own way. The patterns of numbers, seasons, festival days - the "occasional poem" elements. (5.28) The formal crystallization of the 3-vols. + Coda. The numerical extensions of the abba quatrain; numerology. The symmetry of the 3 vols (over 900 pp.) centered on a single 7-line poem (#28) at center of Grassblade Light, which itself in turn pivots on a single line. Then the thematic rhymes, the Russian puns, the "delta" element, the Orpheus-Bluejay-Ojibwa layers. . . the central puns (Julius, Juliet, July, Jewel-eye, Jubilee. . .)

Plus a lot of great Minnesota stuff!!!!!!!!!! whoopie!!! loon calls!!!!!!! Put up yer dukes, Zuks!!!

today is Constitution Day. & sister Cara's birthday. that's her on the tricycle.

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.)

Out of the blog loop (or "bloop") these days. Poem (which I've been excerpting here) somewhat in abeyance, have been working on novel novel idea. Using index cards, it feels right. Also reading a lot of Melville & other boat books.

Wrote here a few weeks ago about the book Hamlet's Mill, which explores the links between archaic star-mapping and storytelling (myths). Melville basically replicated this process in his odd puzzle-novel Mardi. All the characters, all the events in the book are personifications of astronomical-astrological readings using the typical star almanacs of the time (an 1845 almanac, to be precise). Mariners were the last great Babylonian star-gazers. This is all brought to light in Maxine Moore's study, That Lonely Game (Missouri UP, 1975). ("That lonely game" is solitaire, or sol-itaire, or writing.)

Rhody roses for Bloomsday 100.

"There are 29 sweet reasons why blossomtime's the best." - Finnegans Wake 

[I've removed a rather bilious late-night post from yesterday.]

Today is the saint's day of Guillem de Gellone, who began appearing somewhat to my own surprise toward the end of the longy-long poem Forth of July. He pops up in some of the shorter poems too lately.

He was a military officer under Charlemagne, who later took holy orders and founded a monastic community in southern France, on the coast near Narbonne (Gellone). His real &/or legendary exploits in Charlemagne's Spanish campaigns turn up in several of the early chansons de geste. I like to think that he's an (extremely distant) ancestor (which was traced through my maternal grandmother's family by a genealogist on the web).

This is also the anniversary of William Blackstone's burial at his Study Hill, in Cumberland.

Tomorrow's the 551st anniversary of the fall of Constantinople (1453). I'm going down to NYC to see the Byzantium show at the Met tomorrow, for my 52nd birthday (5/29).

Today marks the anniversary of the founding of Constantinople in 330 A.D. But more importantly, my daughter Phoebe turns 21 today.

Happy birthday, Shakespeare & Nabokov (& St. George, traditional patron saint of England & Russia).

Ghostly meetings : Brodsky, Eliot, Yeats

I see from Laurable's calendar that Brodsky & Yeats died on the same day, Jan. 28th.

Curious, considering the round robin involved when Brodsky, in his elegy for TS Eliot, closely echoed Auden's elegy for Yeats, both of them emphasizing the cold January weather. (I tried to do the same thing for Brodsky a few years ago.)

 
 JOSEPH BRODSKY   
                     But each grave is the limit of the earth.
       
                   1
  
 You died on a cold night in January.
 It was Superbowl Sunday.  A supine empire,
 Preoccupied with bread and circuses,
 Land Rovers, stratagems of muscle-
 Bound heroes.  Next day, fire
 Swallows the famous opera house in Venice.
 Not with a bang – with a light rustle
 Of red silk, your heart passed the final
 Exam, black-sailed, in the science of farewells.

 Snow falls on the fleeting moiré of the sea;
 It falls on horsemen passing by, on the halfbacks
 Of the dolphins' curved smiles (in a mirror
 Of alien tribes).  Snow falls on night grass
 In the trackless pine forest; it falls with the stars
 Drifting down from unnumbered, shiftless heaven;
 So it fell, and will fall, on those bronze eyelids.
 A guarded glance, coiled in frozen hexagons;
 Shy cedar voice, immured in pyramids.

 Snow mixed with tears signals a hearth somewhere.
 Not in the street, not in this Byzantine air
 Of columns and cenotaphs – no.  Just a home
 By a river of marrying streams; a certain Rome
 Where tongues descend – ascending voices mingle
 In companionable flame.  This friendly fire
 Eats brotherly dusk, shakes fearful ether
 Into evening wine... one hawk's cry
 Screams – and melds into the Muse's profile.
     
                  2

 Life's flimsy laundry, easily
 Unraveled.  Transparent butterfly net,
 Wing of a moth, how slyly they
 Trap the hunter, iced on an alpine sheet.

 You fight the droning in your head
 With all the cunning you can muster;
 Turning its power against itself, you lead
 A life Laertes would approve (bluster,

 Business laboring for acclaim)
 Only to drown the voice above the trees.
 Relentless, impervious to shame,
 It finds you out, brings you to your knees.

 And like the heavy signet ring,
 A chieftain's ring, that hidden in hand
 Sealed Hamlet's heart (O molten, circling sting) –
 The droning issues forth its stark command.

 You listened, followed.  A shuttling pencil
 In a nighthawk's beak – a spear in your side;
 And a huge sea-moth with crossbone stencil
 Shattered your lamp.  Died.

 Summer ends, the droning subsides.
 The ruthless tango of prose and poetry
 Is dead.  Cicada shells, butterfly hides...
 Some leftover spider's ecstasy.
     
                   3

 In the depths of the Soviet winter, in the ponderous cold
 Of Siberia, a boy cups an abandoned moth in his hands,
 Born – to die a few hours old –

 Into a false firewood springtime.  Its delicate wings
 Are only an affront to the divine benevolence; he understands
 Nothing; his hands, like an insect coffin, bear the stings

 Of the nails themselves; like a dry cocoon, absently,
 They drift to the shack wall, and the fingers fan,
 In unison, a camouflaged figure in the pinewood pantry.

 This tender sign... a tenderness snuffed out.
 This heavy icon, then... true mimic of an action?
 Or only the swollen, distorted wings of a parasite?
  

 Or only the screech of broken chalk on slate?
 Droning brittle wings, poets take their stations
 At the edge of the cliff – their noise intuitive, innate...

 The butterfly is gone.  Its form was here, immaculate;
 The hands tracing its flight, aimless, serpentine,
 Mimic its undetermined motion – late, late –

 Since that double-woven fountain, afloat with indirection,
 Surging, sparkling, translucent, seeks its mate
 In a signal heaven – a camouflage beyond dissection.
      
                                     2.2.96