in the gold realm

ASCENSION DAY

My friend Chris in New Zealand

emailed (on Ascension Day)

about that homely display

of bare feet, trampolining to cloud

in the Lorenzetti fresco (or

was it Philip Guston?)

under the superscription

of a proscenium arch.  Flower

of early Renaissance mind

echoing (if necessary)

your mirror-quality

of reality.  Who will so bend

the boarhound from the boar,

Raven from Nevermore?

Is this your last cigar?

Plein air puffs from a planet’s core.

Limestone shreds of the labyrinth

at Chartres were sort of a letdown.

Rough work.  All the gold gone.

The mower set out to mow... absinthe

green, moss green clasping the scent.

The emerald pentagram

shadowed in the sheep’s I AM

quickens the dead husks in a fundament

of everlasting life; & when the Eternal comes

it will be as we remembered

in the gold realm of childhood –

when time swells (the drone lingers, hums).

6.14.19

surfing Delta gumbo

sketch by Benjamin Latrobe, architect

LIGHT DOWRY

On this day, 200 years ago

Benjamin Latrobe won

the municipal commission

for the bell tower in New O. –

St. Louis Cathedral, surfing delta

gumbo (French-Indian-

Spanish-Anglo-American)

on canoe-back of turtle-flotilla.

Oak Apple Day, Restoration Day,

Rhode Island Statehood Day

& many another day

no doubt (not far from Whitsunday).

In the well of the king, of the king who must die

(before time began?) shone

a shade of green pine

grieving... like an old Irish eye.

Luminous melancholy, just a shade

from joy – from the well

of well-being, when all

shall be well (amid all things well-made).

When frost of fright-scorn, the old

icehouse of sacred king

slides into melt... & everything

shines in right splendor of childhood;

when young ones in Rhode Island

or New Orleans lift themselves

to the light dowry of El

Shaddai – her pact of love and understand.

5.29.19

unbreakable chords

HUMAN ECHO

Your nostalgia for the aristocracy

of childhood, Vladimir,

I understand.  So here :

infantile tyrants bear it away

in sappy cerements of innocence.

Galla & her golden boy

& their brief beehive day

drowse in Ravenna, under silence

of mosaic stars; Dante too

sleeps there, still far

from his Firenze mère –

the milky galaxy of midnight blue,

his babble-realm of splendor-joy.

A fluent melody

pours endlessly

from thine ineffable benevolence, Blue J;

a spiral at the cave entrance,

an everlasting sign

of all Creation

(ceaseless, calm, majestic dance).

Those unbreakable chords of Mendelssohn

at the end of the trolley line;

the sound of the violin

lesson, the neighborhood of children...

& the shadow of the Thunderbird

in the immense oak tree

the dark green sanctuary

of Morning Star   dolphin-shepherd

                     *

out of deep-twined memory

by the cistern heard

rose-enfolded Word

out of Ocean’s fond   Jonah-infinity

Instinctive fright becomes aggression,

dominance abets revenge;

since long before Stonehenge

each weak scapegoat endures oppression

& the tantrum of the infant

replicated by depression

each political occasion

filters through both mob & tyrant.

But it shall not be so with thee.

I have no wrath, the Ghost

murmurs; I am the Most

High Heartbeat, mild Invisibility –

indivisible reply

out of the crystalline

& quintessential Union

at the source of Earth & Sky.

I am your human echo, come to be

among you, in my realm

of love, mercy, wisdom –

I am the Nazir, chanting out of Galilee.

& then I saw her, Jonah-Shadow –

wings extending over all

of Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Ghost-heart we feel, ghost-bird we know.

7.18.18

Since the ol' Quatrain Express seems to have finally come into the station, I've been pondering about the general basis of my ways in poetry... so it's been quiet around here.

Thinking about my deep attraction for "Deep Image" kinds of things... Mandelstam & Crane's riddles, hermetic imagery, some of that in Pound's Cantos & elsewhere... it's a kind of imagism-symbolism, visual music... Poe's "vagueness"...

but now I'm thinking about it as a kind of limitation...

wondering if there's a psychological/intellectual aspect to it. Like nostalgia for home or childhood instilling a subconcious hunger for vision - which is perhaps temporarily appeased by the striking, un-paraphrasable image, like a gong sounding...

(speaking of gongs, I think Yeats went through something like this, a re-examination of his style... not that I'm doing anything so systematic or dramatic here)

So the challenge for me might be to find a way of writing which I can take to, which involves something more like direct discourse, statement... Maybe.

The child doesn't want to be left out in the cold, dismissed. One wants to join the round of ordinary goodness & warmth. One wants to be part of the family of happy endings, the comedy in which everybody pretty much gracefully "muddles through" somehow... Tolstoy's opening sentence in Anna Karenina - "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - ie. one wants to find oneself in the unwritten circle of the first group, the world of foolish-wise & bumbling grown children...

- old poem from Way Stations -

The wind for France
blusters and laughs.
Green hills, gathered
and chaste, gleam
over the humped sediment.

 
And bowmen will carry the day.
Silence an awkward garment
among the clear circles,
at the lighted feast
of modesty and honor.

 
Only, in the mild air,
to say goodby.  Or there,
in grandmother's book,
Rapunzel, glancing down
from her strange tower.

 
Or stars over the sea.
Or tongues of fire.
A hearth-blaze.  Fold
my hands, light the
four corners of the bed.

Gaston Bachelard (Poetics of Reverie) : "From poetic reverie, inspired by some great spectacle of the world, to childhood reverie, there is a commerce of grandeur. And that is why childhood is at the origin of the greatest landscapes. Our childhood solitudes have given us the primitive immensities."

(Something of this in the vast & rivery-bulbous dream-bridgedom of Forth of July).

The Bachelardian child (hidden unchanging solitary cosmic dreamer) is analogous to the perennial "order" of Melchizedek (mysterious King of Salem, who comes out to greet Abraham with bread & wine as he enters the Promised Land) in the Epistle to the Hebrews. ("For unless ye turn & become as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.")

The order of milk & honey (mel). (see Melville's Moby Dick for a whole arcane & ribald symbology along these lines)

The poetry of quietude is intimately related to the vague intuition that the poet's mission is to relive and revive the great and very old and very intricate language of the poems found in books.

This intuition has dual roots : first, in the encounter with the Bible (the book), experienced as a moment of personal destiny and rebirth; second, in the realization that every reading experience is an echo of the best moments of a lost childhood (when you were reading a story).

Thus the poetry of quietude is involved in a project of conquering or redeeming time.

The thing about imagination & war has, obviously, been with poetry from the beginning. The nobility & vanity of the Homeric heroes. Rilke's poem about the dead cavalryman's beautiful shako.

We want history to conform to a child's dream of heroism. The youthful perception of beauty incorporates all kinds of disparate elements. The focus in the Gospels on the power of childish (imaginative) vision. "They behold their Father's face."

Blake, of course, was into this...

A happy childhood forecasts the doom of the world.

I feel a big weight off my shoulders having produced the Lulu books. Sending out some review copies here & there. It's kind of amazing to me how it works. When I can afford it, I will improve the distribution channels even more.

This sort of thing is probably a big temptation to younger writers. It might be better to go through the editorial hoops for a while, the disappointments & the reality jolts. But I've been at it so long, & written so much, that I just want to shape it my own way now & put it out there.

Chapel Hill is a strange duck, a sort of semi-fictional memoir, or semi-memoirish fiction. One of the themes running through it is the idea of history as the work of a child's imagination. The contrast, the clash between historical "facts" and the beautiful & naive dreams which children make of them. A "coming-of-age" story, which circles around between history & family history, & fiction & poetry, in the mixed-up way of adolescent perception. Set in the 60s. About, among other things, two boys & their obsession with toy soldiers, & playing "war", while the older brother of one is off in Vietnam.

I started connecting this the other day with my recent reading in Vico. His way of thinking about the power of the human imagination (as it changes & develops) over cultural behavior. For Vico, according to Mazzotta anyway, "poetry is history" (& vice versa, I guess).

The seemingly innate drive people have, starting in childhood, to make sense of their experience, to recapitulate it, to turn it into story & history, to interpret it - to play with it. & the destiny of the poet & poetry : to judge the doings of individuals & nations through the prism of poetic speech. This seems like a source for both poetry's "seriousness" and its power to lighten & console.

This "historical" aspect of the poet's social role is undermined, sometimes, by so much acidic despair & scepticism, which often seems to turn contemporary poetry into intentionally vapid or superficial cadging & jokery. It's rare in poetry to find a fusion of both clear-sighted irony and hope.

Odd how musicality in poetry - from symbolism onward into the 20th century - became an avenue for increasing experiments in obscurity and private poetic language. Odd, that is, when you consider that music itself has so many characteristics of a "universal" language (of feeling and symbolic order).

What if poets applied musicality in the direction of intelligibility, communicative power? The power of feeling & shared experience. In the same way that ecologists idealize sharing one world. I recognize very clearly how these notions might seem threatening to the very essence of many poets' practice. The truth must be that every poet must find their own balance between sheer verbal exploration & originality, on the one hand, and clarity & intelligibility on the other. And the alignment of this balance will have a great deal to do with the larger or deeper motive or telos for the writing itself. Poets will often "sacrifice obscurity" - turn to very ordinary speech, even cliches - if the larger aesthetic purpose demands it.

(Sometimes I think all creative effort is merely an attempt to recover the powerful feelings and sensations of childhood.)

It can be argued that the age of science, enlightenment, & rationalism set poetry free to enter its proper sphere of pure play. & if you accept that play is a central & "serious" human activity, there is some truth to this. But if play/poetry/childhood is framed as part of a duality in which work/seriousness/reality-principle is the more important or essential half, then poetry has been assigned to a play-pen & will be coddled, tolerated, & held in fond contempt.

I would realign these relations, with the claim that science & rationalism cannot, & will never, provide an adequate description of reality. Philosophy reaches a little closer, but its discursive abstractions are still inadequately communicative. Only the arts provide a sufficiently vivid affective-intellectual image of experience & reality. Poetry can span the distance between philosophical concepts on the one hand, and dramatic immediacy & actuality on the other. (Philosophy for its part aspires toward the condition of dialogue & drama.)

I offer these admittedly unoriginal notions to follow up on previous posts. How can poetry assume its full powers, then? I would think one critical measure in this regard would be a poetry's expressive wholeness - its willingness to patiently present & clearly "argue" - or logically defend - its sensuous, affective, or experiential subject-matter & the underlying rhetoric of same. This is what I see, for example, in the tightly-knotted & expressive sentence-structures of Keats' sonnets and odes : these poems display a striking, a startling, fusion of song & statement. Expressive logic or wholeness - as opposed to the poetry of half-statement, deflection, intimation, pose, predetermined attitude, rhetorical inflation-for-effect.

Closer to our time, Wallace Stevens reaches in this direction, with his fusion of philosophical reflection & rhetorical play. Robert Lowell simultaneously argues & suffers with contemporary history. But these are just 2 examples among many, not meant as representative figures; my purpose is to focus on a way of interpreting poetic value.

Have to disagree with Jonathan on two points:

1) No, he's not getting dumber (that was just a Borgesian take-off on Ron Padgett): he's getting smarter & more scintillant as he blogs along.

2) No, my comments do not provide an example of Heriberto's point. One person's "ideological projection" is another person's empirical observation. Sure, there's continuity between the child you & me & the adult you & me; but there's a difference too. As Jordan pointed out, the difference is dependence (economic, social, psychological). It's a relationship which changes the terms of its balance as the child becomes the independent adult (& perhaps a parent in turn).

If I view this through a theological kaleidoscope, this does not mean its basis in empirical reality is cancelled out. The child/parent relation is there : it's not an ideological projection (though my theological corollary, on the other hand, might be).

Heriberto saying there's no such thing as childhood strikes me as a kind of sophism (nominalism?).