Some follow-up commentary to the poem "Sans Net" (in previous post). This is from a reply on Facebook to Chris Kraemer :
Chris : Second reading and and I hear a definite lilt. Go ahead, wear out your dancing shoes this year.
Me: Thanks for reading this mighty obscure poem, Chris. I guess this could be considered Symbolist in the murkiest way. I'm following up the image of the snowstorm in Prov. seen from the cozy library window. Thinking of the pun on "divine Providence" & the challenge to glib intellectualizing presented by the many homeless people, out there in the freezing snow-globe ("sans avocat" - without an advocate" - "sans (safety) net" - echo of K. Lear "sans.. sans... everything"). The "stone man on the hill" - statue of Rog Williams, who founded & named this town - kind of a surreal otherness image, meant to imply a perhaps unseen human/divine dimension - the eschatology of Hope, which is providential ("Hope" is the RI state motto). This little hope leads to the "frothy lens" of the New Year, the "yea" of the bubbly wine. & this "lens" leads obscurely to an image of the mandorla, the "almond", by way of the bending (yew/you) of Apollinaire's/Apollo's bow... Apollinaire linking (in MY mind, anyway!) - & in related poems in this series - with the Great War & the medicine of poetry - that wounded healer/veteran (Apollinaire) with his hopeful poems... & leading also to the background of the mosaics in Ravenna (Church of St. Apollinaris) with their images of transfiguration... & inevitably also to Mandelstam (the "almond branch") in alluding to his poem written in cold snowy exile in Voronezh, as he imagines Dante's "all-human hills" in Tuscany (M. carried around a copy of the Divine Comedy into exile).
p.s. while I was writing this I was listening for the 1st time to a great cosmic album by Wayne Shorter - titled "Without a Net". So from the image of the sky & the dancing snowflake come these galaxies - "Pegasus", the poetry horse, is a title of one of the Shorter pieces. The "short Wain" or (fore)shortened Wain would be the Little Dipper, galactic home of the North Star... & the dancing snowflake is also bringing to mind King (& Psalmist) David dancing before the ark (by way of the hexagonal snowflake-Star of David, the star of Redemption...). So your reference to dancing shoes is very apropos!
I guess this is a pretty good illustration of how I make poems. I take what shows up in my mental library & try to turn it into music.
Showing posts with label commentary2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label commentary2. Show all posts
1.04.2014
6.27.2007
OK, lemme "unpack", as they say, just one obscure sentence from previous (in the context of earlier post this week, about the general aims & analogies of this Fontegaia poem).
The "sissy on a singing ass" fuses together : the loser-poet, St. Francis of Assisi, the "slow horse" (the donkey, Jesus's "colt" which carries him into Jerusalem as "King") of poetry (Pegasus), etc.
"Veronica's napkin, pallidly drawn" : the "palio" was the small cloth or prize or "pallium" given to the winner of the Palio race in Siena - the cloth linked with the Virgin (patron of city of Siena), & through her to "Veronica's napkin", the cloth which supposedly showed an image of Christ's face.
"cast-off of your unbound/feat, mis-spoken jockey" : generally thinking of the difference between the "real" Jesus and the various cultural/religious shapings, (mis)appropriations & distortions - throughout the long, tangled history of Jewish-Christian dialogue & dispute - of his "image" (much like current iconic celebrity-simulacra).
"nailed/ in the Campo every time" : the Palio race is, for the jockeys, a risky proposition in several ways - not least the risk getting beaten up by angry partisans of one horse or another. Also Jesus (the "nailed"/"feat" - the losing horse).
- this is, of course, just one sentence - there are other things going on here (echoes of Hart Crane etc.), & more (& different) things in the other stanzas....
*
p.s. you don't need to know all this stuff, carry all this baggage, to "get" the poem (or maybe you do). Often I don't "know" it myself very clearly. I relax into the poem, following certain parameters (like an algorithm). Like the bit about the "shadow faster than light". Came along when I happened to remember a NY Times op-ed piece from last week by Margaret Wertheim : shadows (because they are literally no-thing) actually can travel faster than the speed of light. The experiment (or thought-experiment?) she discussed had to do with a very powerful light beam circling on its axis in space. At a very great distance (on the perimeter of the light's "orbit") the shadow cast would travel faster - cover more distance - than the light itself.
...A sissy on a singing ass will win
Veronica's napkin, pallidly drawn
cast-off of your unbound
feat, mis-spoken jockey (nailed
in the Campo every time).
The "sissy on a singing ass" fuses together : the loser-poet, St. Francis of Assisi, the "slow horse" (the donkey, Jesus's "colt" which carries him into Jerusalem as "King") of poetry (Pegasus), etc.
"Veronica's napkin, pallidly drawn" : the "palio" was the small cloth or prize or "pallium" given to the winner of the Palio race in Siena - the cloth linked with the Virgin (patron of city of Siena), & through her to "Veronica's napkin", the cloth which supposedly showed an image of Christ's face.
"cast-off of your unbound/feat, mis-spoken jockey" : generally thinking of the difference between the "real" Jesus and the various cultural/religious shapings, (mis)appropriations & distortions - throughout the long, tangled history of Jewish-Christian dialogue & dispute - of his "image" (much like current iconic celebrity-simulacra).
"nailed/ in the Campo every time" : the Palio race is, for the jockeys, a risky proposition in several ways - not least the risk getting beaten up by angry partisans of one horse or another. Also Jesus (the "nailed"/"feat" - the losing horse).
- this is, of course, just one sentence - there are other things going on here (echoes of Hart Crane etc.), & more (& different) things in the other stanzas....
*
p.s. you don't need to know all this stuff, carry all this baggage, to "get" the poem (or maybe you do). Often I don't "know" it myself very clearly. I relax into the poem, following certain parameters (like an algorithm). Like the bit about the "shadow faster than light". Came along when I happened to remember a NY Times op-ed piece from last week by Margaret Wertheim : shadows (because they are literally no-thing) actually can travel faster than the speed of light. The experiment (or thought-experiment?) she discussed had to do with a very powerful light beam circling on its axis in space. At a very great distance (on the perimeter of the light's "orbit") the shadow cast would travel faster - cover more distance - than the light itself.
7.11.2005
Following the discussion of poetry-&-paraphrase from Jonathan, Kasey et al.
I guess I would question whether this is an either-or thing. Why can't a poem have meanings, which can be extrapolated from the poem, & yet retain its integrity & quiddity or whatever as an artistic end-in-itself? The sum is greater or different than its parts - the meanings are abstracted from the poem after all. But these meanings are also evidence of the poem's generative capacities.
Imagine the geometry of a poem as being like a "vesica" - the lens-like shape formed by the intersection of two circles. The shape has integrity despite the fact that it draws from two different figures, two different directions.
I sometimes think that the power of poems has something to do with the compression of meaning into parable. "Telling it slant" (E. Dickinson). You read a 3-line haiku and you experience the pleasure of a whole array of possible meanings, at once. Riddles work in a similar way.
"Paraphraseable meaning" is such a boring way of putting it. The negative connotations stem from the concept's origin in the New Criticism, which was built on a rejection of overt, politicized, didactic poetries of the 1930s (in this it was in line with much 50's art in the US). "The poem must not mean / but be" & all that crap (Archibald MacLeish).
Poets work in such a variety of ways that there is, obviously, no correct method. Negative capability & the passive reception of imaginative expressions & forms is a huge part of the process. However, to deny the importance of "meaning" - & its symbiotic dualities & energies at work in the poem - seems like the kind of rubric which makes a lot of postmodern poetry pretty vacuous & turgid.
I guess I would question whether this is an either-or thing. Why can't a poem have meanings, which can be extrapolated from the poem, & yet retain its integrity & quiddity or whatever as an artistic end-in-itself? The sum is greater or different than its parts - the meanings are abstracted from the poem after all. But these meanings are also evidence of the poem's generative capacities.
Imagine the geometry of a poem as being like a "vesica" - the lens-like shape formed by the intersection of two circles. The shape has integrity despite the fact that it draws from two different figures, two different directions.
I sometimes think that the power of poems has something to do with the compression of meaning into parable. "Telling it slant" (E. Dickinson). You read a 3-line haiku and you experience the pleasure of a whole array of possible meanings, at once. Riddles work in a similar way.
"Paraphraseable meaning" is such a boring way of putting it. The negative connotations stem from the concept's origin in the New Criticism, which was built on a rejection of overt, politicized, didactic poetries of the 1930s (in this it was in line with much 50's art in the US). "The poem must not mean / but be" & all that crap (Archibald MacLeish).
Poets work in such a variety of ways that there is, obviously, no correct method. Negative capability & the passive reception of imaginative expressions & forms is a huge part of the process. However, to deny the importance of "meaning" - & its symbiotic dualities & energies at work in the poem - seems like the kind of rubric which makes a lot of postmodern poetry pretty vacuous & turgid.
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