the sense of being right

Stray thoughts of a stray dog, this afternoon...   Have been reading the translation of Mandelstam, by Oleg Lekmanov, a sober, concise, and poignant biography.  Came upon this passage, quoting a letter (written to his wife in the spring of 1935) of Sergei Rudakov, a writer who spent some time with the Mandelstams during their exile in Voronezh.  Rudakov :

"I have never seen anything like this in my life... At a distance it is impossible to measure or relate.  I am standing before a working mechanism (perhaps even organism - it would be the same) of poetry.  I see the same thing as in myself, though in the hands of a genius, which will mean much more than it is possible to understand now.  There is no human anymore - there is Michelangelo...  For the sake of 4 lines, literally 400 are pronounced.  He does not see anything.  He does not remember that some of these lines belong to his earlier poems and repeats these lines again.  Then by eschewing the old lines he creates new poems." (Mandelstam, p. 144)

Anna Akhmatova's memoirs are then quoted, reflecting on the same period : "It is amazing that the sense of space, breadth, deep breathing appeared in Mandelstam's poetry in Voronezh, when he was not at all free."

There are several statements here worth pondering.  I just want to focus on what they triggered in my thoughts.  First is Rudakov's impression of the "biological organism" at work.  The sense I have here is of an artist who has ripened and sharpened his talent over a lifetime.  This is not a dilettante, but a kind of word-sculptor ("Michelangelo"), who is refining - in compositional "real time", so to speak - his own conception of Russian poetry as a totality, and his own individual idiom, purpose & sense of occasion - within the theatre of creation which is the making of the particular poem.

Secondly, these pages got me thinking about works of art & poetry as monuments, turning points, as benchmarks of cultural refinement.  As great expressive achievements : quintessential, incomparable.

This sort of window on poetry seems unfashionable these days.  We don't think of poems (or poets) as "rare" : in fact we go out of our way to encourage everyone to be a poet.  We don't understand this picture - a poet composing out loud, not writing anything down - reciting 400 lines in order to melt them down to four.  The whole idea is alien to us.

Poetry today is nothing if not transitive, direct, colloquial, and above all informal.  Every line is a throwaway line.  Every line is a "hook."  Even our current "experimental", formalist poets lay out their organizing principles very explicitly,  as if on a blueprint, or as a Powerpoint presentation.  We are meant to see & appreciate exactly how A leads to B.

Difficulty is conceptualized as "technical difficulty".  Poetry is evaluated by the sharpness or effectiveness of its rhetorical weapons.

This is not to deny that sharp, effective rhetoric has not always been a part of poetry.  But what's missing in art & poetry today (in large part, if not everywhere) is some kind of elusive spiritual dimension.  The strange epileptic seizures or fits of passionate composition which we behold in Mandelstam should be understood as the culmination of decades of committed labor at his craft; yet they must also be seen as Mandelstam's own conscious submission to the wave of inspiration.  He cannot fully control what he is making, because it is happening out of the improvisatory process itself; and yet it is guided by a kind of overall sense of wholeness or cultural mission - a critical sense - which shapes and informs his artistic "oracles".

Mandelstam refines 4 lines out of 400 lines because he senses he is not just writing "for himself" but is composing something which has objective meaning for the Russian people as a whole, and perhaps for humanity as a whole.  Poetry is not solely a private egotistical achievement, but is part of a vow, a "commission", to produce these integral, free-standing objects or monuments of harmonic song.  They belong to everyone, and he is somehow aware of this, and his awareness reinforces his effort to sing it exactly right.

This is perhaps one interpretation of the retort Mandelstam offered, when asked by an apparatchik interviewer for his "definition of poetry."  Mandelstam simply replied : "the poet's sense of being right."

Where do we find this sense of mission in American poetry?  Where do we find a poet relinquishing the calculations of rhetorical guile, and submitting to a more profound source of inspiration?  Where do we find a poet refining & refining lines out of an obscure sense of enunciation, of oracular speech?

I'm not arguing such poetry is not out there in America now.  I just think perhaps it's a little hard to find, under the unceasing bombardment (from what Mandelstam called "the horde of scribblers") of easygoing, unctuous, smarmy, clever, cozening, glib, prosaic, tossed-off, complacent, shallow, and trivial so-called works which offer themselves to the public in the name of poetry.

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : poetics (label : subject/poetics).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Related topics (there are many, many others) :

allusion, beauty, commentary, complexity, incarnational poetics, literary absolute, mathematics, musicality, negative capability, paraphrase, reader, recapitulation, time...

There were values (impersonality, historicity) of the "Golden Age" of the American Moderns (1st half of 20th cent.). One only has to think of Eliot's essays, Pound's clusters of reference-allusion, Moore's exactitude, Crane's epic expansiveness, Stevens' conversations (in the poems) with precursors & contemporaries, his ambition for a "theory" of poetry in poetry... (though they each show as much originality & subjectivity as impersonality/objectivity...)

There have been at least 3 or 4 generations between now and then, during which American poets for the most part (though of course not entirely) were fixated on their own subjective interiority and the private experiences of life in a vast & singular nation. In retrospect, and in comparison, the early Moderns - whether they lived in the U.S. or abroad - come across (to various degrees) as exiles. The 2nd generation lived in their shadow; the 3rd generation rebelled against the New Critical crystallizations of the 2nd; and the 4th generation rebelled against the egocentricities of the 3rd - by the application of protocols or methodologies (the postmoderns, the "post-avants").

Perhaps the next step will be a sort of "silver age" - a 2nd flowering of some of the compositional principles underlying the Stravinskian neo-classicism of the early 20th-century. Methodologies of surface style will no longer be sufficient. There will be a return to "3-dimensional" composition : uniting topical subject-matter with generic modelling with original invention.

There's a method to my madness (& vice versa).

The gnarly, devious, rhymy-rheumy quatrains form a wall from which I toot my independent trumpet. Stand back - I'm having a fit.

They owe something (forever) to Mandelshtam's Voronezh poems.

The method owes something to Nicolas Cusanus's Game of Spheres (9 circles & an asymmetrical wooden ball).

I'm building a labyrinth to hold Theseus & Minotaur, Daedalus & Icarus. And the reader.

Fonte Gaia... rivers & streams run through all my run-on poems of the last 10 years. Maybe now I'm reaching the source (an old Italian fountain).

I'd like to be a successful writer someday, but for the time being I'm fascinated with the trumpeting, shapely otherness of poetry. It's good to be working in the Outer Limits, despised, ignored, condescended-to, defamed, etc. As long as I can stand it. (The Goulds of my tribe are known to be a very, very stubborn bunch. & I'm right in there with 'em.)

I work in humble isolation at the edge of despair. I don't despise other poets or the literary scene - no, I want to be part of it. But on my own terms.

I'm not publishing my poems to the blog simply to be different, or to take the easy path to dissemination. I'm well aware that people don't really want to read poems blasted out over the internet - that the sensible thing is to work patiently behind the scenes & then look for a publisher. The trouble is, I'm not sensible. & it's a serial poem I'm working on. & putting it on the blog has become part of my habit of composition. (That may change overnight, who knows...)

PAID MY DUES

I learned how to play the 2-handed quatrain from my uncle Jimi Poe, way back in 1938. Uncle Jimi was something else. Nothing he couldn't do with a basic 4-liner. If I could play a tenth of what he could, I'd be more than satisfied. As it is, I do the best I can. Many's the poets tout their theoretical chops these days, make hay in the college circuit, jive around the little-ary co-Z clubs, what all. As for me, I've got my riff down, & that's all I care about. They can't dress like me.

I know I'm in a creative state when things on the radio or in the newspaper or things people say seem prefabricated to fit into the next part of my poem. I suppose some people think of me as very anal-obsessive formalist, but in truth, 86.7% of my work is pure improvisation. On a good day.

I'm only happy, lately, when I'm writing something, constructing. I like to identify with my grandfather, who built grain elevators and shipyards.

This is something new : using the diaristic form of the blog to write a serial poem & commentary. We're going back to the Canterbloggy Tales.

I fill up notebooks with ideas & plans, & it gets top-heavy. & then I have to start writing out of the side of my mouth.

Busy with work & worries these days.

I seem to have the sort of mind, if you can call it that, which has to circle around & re-invent the same problems/solutions over & over again.

Like, mainly, the question of God.

These days am trying to get into a long-poem (or simply poem) writing state again. Many causes for discouragement; but it's even more discouraging not to be writing at all, so...

I'm in favor of a sort of neo-medieval sensibility, I guess. Medieval in a good way, that is (there are lots of bad ways too, as we know).

What do I mean by that?

Well, to my way of thinking, the "solution" to the mystery of God's existence/non-existence rests in a concept of what Mankind is.

We have trouble imagining a "personal" God : but there is a way to do it. It has to do with extrapolating from what we know about the personal or personality or personhood in a human sense.

It's a matter of admitting our ignorance : we don't know clearly, or we know only in a very dream-like or subjective sense, what a person really, substantially, is. But we experience persons.

God resides somewhere in the "transcendent" or supernatural realm of personhood.

This, if one can accept it (provisionally), changes how we perceive existence, reality, as a whole. A subjective, personal element is infused.

This is extremely difficult for the modern, "scientific", sceptical mind to accept. In fact it's easy to read it as absurd.

But there is a way of interpreting experience, reality, existence which incorporates this notion (of human & divine personhood). This is what I'm calling "neo-medieval". It could also be seen as an analogical or symbolic or "literary" reading of Nature.

It's possible to see Mankind on earth in terms of a divine/symbolic ecology.

Again, it's a matter of extrapolating or analogizing.

If you consider human consciousness & presence on earth as an anomaly - what makes it so?

Think about this. This is at the conceptual root of the analogical notion of Imago Dei (man as "image" of God). & that is at the root of "neo-medieval" vision.

To many it will sound like I'm talking in circles, talking nonsense, talking non sequitur, talking talking. So be it.

I know this sounds simplistic, polemical, unfair. It is. But these are tendencies, not sharply-drawn distinctions. & I'm just trying to resolve my own problems of composition & style.

Between ordinary speech and literary artifice : always this balancing act.

Another motive for the inability to write, I've noticed: the feeling of being overwhelmed by a theme or concept.

The (non-semi-annual) Monthly Henry Report

What's up with this Henry? Well, I've been able to write short poems. Haven't been able to do that for years, until now.

& lately, my readings of Nicholas Cusanus, & various books about painting, etc. (& seeing paintings), have given me the sensation, anyway, of beginning to formulate... not a poetics, or a theory, exactly... but a new (for me) conception...

I feel very close to Wallace Stevens these days. But it's as though I'm thinking on a complementary track. That is, where he thinks of poetry - the "supreme fiction" - as an adequate replacement for the belief in God - for the mythopoetic mind which has always created that profound figment (I almost wrote "fogment") -

I tend to understand the mirroring and mimetic function of art - which creates holistic abstracts of reality - as the only adequate means of expressing religious meaning: that is, a vision which allows even for the possibility (or the possibility of an adequate representation) of a "sacred" order or "divine" reality or "logos" or "wholeness" experience.

Why am I putting these words in "quotes"? For the very same reason I write poetry : because prose provides an inadequate argument for, or representation of, what I understand to be "reality".

This does not mean I think poets are special people, or all poetry is sacred, or any of that baloney.

I have a lot more to say about this mirroring or mimetic function, but it is so cool that I am putting it in my poetry as much as possible, rather than spelling it out, at the moment.

What else is happening? I am very happy to be blogging my poems. It has given me renewed faith in blog poetics. I think poetry bloggers are the Walt Whitmans of today. Blogs have the potential to redirect the editorial & critical function of contemporary literature (specifically, poetry - fiction is too much to read online) more directly to the reader. Hi, Ron.

How does one start writing a long "epic" poem? In 1997 I'd already written 2 or 3 not-quite-successful ones. After 15 years of off-&-on writing, I'd noticed that "going back to Mandelstam" often had a renewing or reviving effect on me.

Stubborn Grew began as an act of desperation. For a long time I'd been making notes & more notes toward a long poem. The beginning of Stubborn was finally a kind of "decomposition" : I let myself go. I started imitating the slangy, informal quality of some of Mandelstam's late poems from Voronezh. & I centered myself imaginatively in that same "black earth". Stubborn was a lucky conjunction of a style (Mandelstamish quatrains) & a plot - Orpheus-Bluejay-Henry returning to the earth to "bring back the dead". I had no idea how far those quatrains & that plot would take me.

from the 1st chapter of Stubborn:

11

 
It begins with the headache of a rational animal.
Sepulchred, perhaps, in a whitened rhyme
or bibliophile's musty drawers - reflective rim
or echo chamber, some titanic scuttled shell.

 
And you lose the thread, and this is the thread.
Purpled, from the mordant notebook,
from the charitable extinct awk's
last corkscrew into a cup of molten mead,

 
like lead.  The chorus and audience withdraw.
You are alone with the sound of an evening of a swing.
Here's the church, here's the steeple... here's the door.

It would be pointless for me to pretend to be cognizant of & attuned to the threads in po-biz & blog chatter these days. I'm involved in a very slow process now of trying to orient my own writing & thinking in different directions. Part of that does involve looking back at the long-poem efforts which absorbed me for several years. I guess much of what I say about Forth of July here sounds about as obscure, eccentric & irrelevant as can be. But for anyone who feels like looking into it, these blog notes might offer glancing openings to it. So I'll try to continue to spend a little time each day reviewing my own efforts, for my own benefit & for possible readers too.

I think of Forth of July as working in part by analogy, a structure of thematic parallels. Thus the notion of resurrection, or retrieving a connection with the dead, translates a concept of poetry itself (as a kind of vital experience of creative awareness or imagination) into a theme or a proto-narrative. The attempt to revive or reshape the American long poem & its meanings mirrors or parallels a theory or concept of the meaning of life & history in general. You could compare the process, oddly enough, to a run for the Presidency, say Howard Dean, for example. A heroic narrative (the outsider challenger, the knight on horseback) becomes a vehicle for the articulation of a perspective on broader questions.

In Forth of July, this theme of resurrection is channeled through the Orpheus story. "Bluejay", the ghostly shaman-spirit guide [Bluejay is the Orpheus-like protagonist in Northwest Coast Native American folktales] , leads "Henry" into the world of the dead. What seems in Stubborn Grew to be an attempt to come to terms with a dying marriage, proves to be, in the central book (Grassblade Light), a different psychic process, of coming to terms with the death by suicide of "Juliet" ("Henry's" cousin, who leapt from the Golden Gate on her father's birthday).

The central "panel" of Grassblade Light, titled "Ghost Dance", welds together many of the thematic parallels, in a kind of shamanistic resurrection of dead poets & poetry (Hart Crane, John Berryman), the long poem itself, and at the center, Juliet, bringing them all into the spiritual "now" of the "living, breathing" poem.

July, the third book of the poem, in turn, reckons with the illusions & limitations of the romantic-iconic summoning of the dead found in Grassblade, & goes further into a kind of "pure poetry" of America, oddly shedding/transposing some of the personal elements, while discovering & probing still deeper motives for the effort.

Here's a section from the final panel of Grassblade, titled "Rite of Spring":

         6


  
         The garden seethes with rust.
 The king's litter (a dry canopy)
 transported around a pool.  See
 the young maiden dancing,

  
         as she must – arm lifted,
 hand waving forward
 like a figurehead
 for the delicate ship outfitted

  
         to carry her.  And the ship
 carried on a breath of wind
 this way, that – bound
 on azimuthal slope

  
         to the meridian (one
 angled M-turn
 swollen with
         dying men).

  
         Gnomon of your returning
 Magdalen – to a green gar-
 den (time has never been).
 There's no more dying then:

  
         for the slave is free – fear
 swallowed up in victory –
 your vessel a flowering fiery
 myrrh-box adrift on a tear

  
         forever.  Where the dance
 begins and ends.
 No more dying then:
 the garden seethes

  
         with –

 
                                6.4.99

["Rite of Spring", of course, an allusion to the Stravinsky ballet about an iconic dying maiden, a spring sacrifice, folds into the Russian parallels of the poem, its return to its "Russian origins" - the instigation of Mandelstam's work - as well as the "springing" origins of the narrator - since the Rite was first performed on May 29, 1913, and 5.29 is the poet's birthday, and the numerical structure of Grassblade as a whole pivots on the number 29 - 5.29 being both the date of JFK's birth ("return of the American Camelot king") & of "Black Wednesday", the fall of Byzantium, 499 years before the poet's birthday.]

Pleasantly snowed-in here for a few days.

I guess people reading my entries about Byzantium, Mandelstam, etc. would have to overcome a sense of obscurity, incoherence, hobbyhorse-ism.

Someday maybe I'll write a My Mandelstam, like Tsvetaeva's My Pushkin or Howe's My Emily Dickinson, & try to render some coherence to it all.

In poetry, I do two main things, I guess. Under certain favorable circumstances, I write poems. Otherwise, I think in "poetics", which is a jumble including my own taste in reading & my response to other writers & traditions (not just an aesthetic response but a personal response, which includes aesthetics, politics, "world-view", a sense of kinship, etc.).

This is how it is for most poets, I figure.

I've probably absorbed as much of the general assumptions of my time & generation as everybody else. Thinking about it off the top of my head this morning, I think I tend to orient myself as part of an era or a century - and an era which is either ending or transmogrifying into something else. This era began around World War I ("the real, not the calendar, 20th century" - Akhmatova), and was characterized by a new kind of self-consciousness, perhaps a sort of apocalyptic thinking, which simultaneously recognizes its alienation from the previous age, and tries to comprehend or interpret or summarize it in a new synthesis, for a new era (ie., Modernism).

In the atmosphere created by the modernist poets & those who followed (up to our own time) I guess I make certain choices & elect certain affinities or models, like everybody else.

to be continued, maybe. . .

Thinking this morning about three things that influence poetry-making, yesterday and today:

1. The inherent exploratory quality of every creative effort, whether in art or anything else. The blank page & its first words face the pre-existent world in all its tenured prestige. Thus there will always be an inventive aspect to original creation.

2. The present-day separation between fiction, poetry, and music, which creates challenges and opportunities.

3. The combination of the first two factors, in the context of a limited audience for poetry (compared with that for both fiction and music), generates an intensified self-conscious, or reflexive, quality in poetry. Creativity is at least as much autonomous and self-absorbed, as it is social and "opportunistic"; the isolation of poetry complicates the rhetoric of its address to an audience - leading poets, in poetry, to question the "fiction of fiction" and the authenticity of every literary mode and manner.

The Now, the Eternal. A moment of awareness in the past, perhaps in childhood. Something in the present triggers a recollection of that prior awareness. This present puts that moment in a new context of perception. The twinning or overlapping of two moments in time creates a sense of liberation or adds a new dimension to the simple unidirectional passage of time. Theme of Proust, Nabokov, Four Quartets. Dante spoke about the denizens of Inferno being separated forever from the ben del intelletto, the "good of the intellect"; maybe this experience represents an analogous (aesthetic) "good of perception". Prose (or poetry) designed with such hidden overlapping patterns creates a reading experience which re-enacts the same process. We read along in a forward motion but are given pause by these "time-rhymes". Perhaps all art encourages these moments of contemplative stillness.

Thinking of my own long poems : the re-enactment (through writing) of a reading experience - reading Hart Crane or Mandelstam or the Cantos or Finnegans Wake - which in part is what Stubborn Grew is (since the plot of a "search for the lost cat Pushkin" is a kind of thematizing of the Mandelstam-mimicry process) - triggered my own memory-poiesis in its sequels : the spooky coming-forth of cousin Juliet (the "Forth of July").

Tim & David are talking about the definitions of "social poet".

Responding to Tim : 20th cent. lit is more than modernist anti-mass culture struggles. Think of Nabokov or Thos. Mann. Beneath the idea that there is no synthesizing of elite & mass culture is the assumption that there is no viable or culturally normative middle class.

It might be better to focus on the characteristics of poetry per se rather than trying to identify character traits or allegiances of individual poets. Because poetry-making is inherently social, and at the same time, social issues are irrelevant. How so? Because poetry-making is like other kinds of art-making : it involves a "primitive", childish kind of fetishization of objects. The poem for the poet is a fetishized object, a container for impulses of love & fascination. This is true regardless of the poet's social background, cultural assumptions, political ideals, intellectual allegiances, etc. So in a way poetry-making is a hobby, an obsession, a meeting-ground, A PLAY SPACE, where social categories lose their seriousness to some degree. & in this very un-seriousness resides its most important social function.

Parallels between writing a poem, having self-consciousness, and Nicolas Cusanus' theory of "learned ignorance".

The idea that, because our ideas about God & Reality are always (even if only slightly) incommensurate with those things in themselves, it follows that we inhabit a human universe, in which all knowledge is metaphorical & creative, human-produced, including our metaphors for God. Absolute knowledge is a delusion; art alone creates an authentic model (because it's only a model), because the model makes allowance for the unknown, because the creative model is an imitation of divine free creation. (The Incarnation is the only "hard evidence" of the specifically human meaning of the universe.)

But one doesn't NEED such justifications (any more than one needs a poem).

Mandelstam in one of his essays talks about poetry as the crossing of two strands: the verbal material & the impulse. Or sound & sense, to simplify. (Elena Corrigan's interesting book "Mandelshtam's Poetics" goes in depth into this concept.)

Achieved or received lyric forms add a third level, since these forms create signals of their own, another semiotic dimension. S.K. Heninger (in "Proportion Poetical") describes how the early sonnet form was designed as a replica or microcosm of cosmic creation (the 7 days in 14 lines). The coils of the sestina supply an undertone or overtone to the verbal statements.

So these received forms can act as invitations to send complex messages. For the most part, though, in late 20th-cent. US poetry, the invitation has been turned down. The motivations have been varied. For one thing, the modernist practices of Pound, Marianne Moore, WC Williams, ee cummings extended technical innovation far beyond the limits of these medieval and Renaissance forms. The populist impulse of free verse gave them an outmoded image. And the multiple alienations and "makings-strange" of postmodernist poetry made illegal, so to speak, the communicative contract of the traditional forms; they represented a fallacious, naive harmony, just as did the uncomplicated egocentrism of "mainstream" free verse.

In the 80s & 90s I was on a different track. As described earlier in this blog, I was in the process of absorbing & integrating a religious/Hebraic/incarnational worldview with making poetry; in the effort Mandelstam & Acmeism were serving as models & guides. At the same time I was getting interested in the long poem, as a way of formulating some kind of comprehensive vision/message. For me the problems were not the one posed by postmodernist anti-metaphysics or the stylistic differentiations & alienations of the New Americans. For me the problems were simpler, in a way: the means toward the conceptualization & articulation of a message which energized me. Direction, not indirection, was the aim.

So for a while, before I could manage long poems, or as a way of taking a break from that issue, I played with some of the received lyric forms. What I liked to do was "cross" them with other strands. So for example in a series of sort of autobiographical poems called "Midwest Elegies", I interwove allusions to early anglo-saxon forms. I was crossing my personal origins with the origins of poetry in English. I wrote a dream-vision ("Grain Elevator": see archive for Jan. 9); I put down a subtext of a.-s. laments & elegies into some of my own; & I wrote this little poem, crossing Hart Crane with a particular a.-s. riddle, along with the Song of Songs:



RUSTY EXIT RAMP


How many spears, frozen in phalanxes,
how many iron hills circled the fathers'
hope - chained waters of enmity,
cars harnessed for a pathway through the sea -

when, with a jesting wave, philosophies
of unsettled pyramids the fluted palm
of your promise whispers toward autumn
beneath twin-risen towers, O City of Cities!



This is a poem about Crane & New York; it's also about the displacement of hatred & despair by some kind of metaphysical/poetic intervention. It has a strange sound to me after 9/11.

To reiterate: at the time I was interested in "crossing" the lyric received forms with opposing material. By sending a fairly direct, simple message, via the traditional over-determined envelope of received forms, I was really doing the opposite of the encrypted, hermetic, disjunctive approaches of the contemporary postmodernist poets. For example, I wrote the following sestina in the mid-80s, when mass homelessness was still a shocking anomaly, before we had become so inured to & complicit with this social evil. I wanted to cross a very sophisticated literary form with a very unsophisticated message. The closing stanza, however, can be interpreted in several different ways.


DOWNTOWN SESTINA

Downtown is gleaming, a nest of glass
scant refuge for the homeless and the poor
who trudge along under looming towers
hungry, frazzled, begging small change
and subject to the better sort of people
whose eyes reflect the glitter of the city

And so many circles animate the city
captured in the high gloss of the glass
what's taken for the playground of the people
erases every doorstep of the poor
in sprawling ellipses of loose change
under the stolid mystery of these towers

Under the bright conundrum of these towers
these measuring rods allotting every city
gyroscopes adjusting every change
by whirling speculation in the glass
the downward spirals of the ornery poor
set stirring turbid shadows in the people

And shuttling promotions of the people
forecast by divination in the towers
(who's growing rich and who remaining poor)
start dancing fevers in the chattering city
and snarl the artist in her broken glass
frail craft undone by overmastering change

When fortune is the favored end of change
suburbia the limbo of the people
and tender conscience faints before the glass
rocketing skyward in pretentious towers:
to serve the sleek imaginary city
or swell the sullen rancor of the poor

Meanwhile the rhetoricians of the poor
in campus pockets rummaging for change
inscribe the true authoritative city
and mint sterling mementos of the people
studies wherein the mind serenely towers
over safe specimens tacked up under glass

So let's raise a glass to the dizzy city -
a toast to towers, and all red-faced people!
And drink for a change among the homespun poor.

3.16.86


Again, after 9/11, the poem has a strange feel.