HG Poetics turned 5 years old last Wednesday. He's learned to read the Dick & Jane books all by himself! What a good boy am he.

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Turned a corner last night; back on track with Fontegaia poem. Maybe I was aligned somehow with the fresh air coming out of Iowa (where my maternal grandmother grew up, in West Branch).

When I start making obscure design calculations based on parts & line-counts etc., I know something is crystallizing.

Fontegaia is really the culmination of all my quatrain-hoboing of the last 10 yrs. Nobody knows about it yet. Look out, Poetryland!

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Some constructive metaphors are also rambling into place. I don't want to explain too much at this point, though...

(The seal of the State of Minnesota shows a farmer at his plow watching a Sioux warrior riding by on his horse. I'm finding a way to think about the georgic plow of poetry and the Odyssean Trojan Pegasus of the muses and the ship of state and the Palio of Siena and the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse and Mandelstam's "Egyptian bark of the dead" and the ribs of the lungs around the heart.)



(I see MN will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of its statehood this year. "The Star of the North.")

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The georgic plow of verses has something to do with the georgic labor, in an Iron Age, of serving the common good, the commonwealth : since rising (by way of Aristotelian "virtue") beyond pure selfishness and egotism, toward the equity and fairness of justice - justice, which is an absolute necessity for global survival - requires labor and sacrifice. Perhaps even more, it requires tolerance and mercy (always difficult for the doctrinaire and self-righteous) - since we all come up short when it comes to loving our neighbor as ourself (the foundation of equity).

I'm feeling a lot of ambivalence these days about continuing this. It could end any day now. HG Poetics has been fun, squeezed into the corners of the workday; but maybe it's gotten too easy to flatter myself with your kind attention. I don't know. I'm trying to pull together an ability to write something worthwhile. My capacities seem curious & ever more elusive. Blogging feels like a distraction or a dissipation, sometimes. (I'm admiring Anne Winters lately, someone who's seemingly done it right. Authentic social/individual poetry, by its inherent balance & integrity, seems to render most of the febrile discussions & maneuverings in blogworld - including my own - irrelevant.)

My ambivalence is reflected in my feelings about this section of the poem I'm working on. I'm going to put it back up, with a slight change, despite my qualms. I don't really know why I'm doing this. I guess I need to feel like going on with a process, rather than endlessly stalled.

I read in the Times, as you probably have too, about the 74-yr-old nun, advocate & environmentalist, who was shot in the Amazon jungle. How it was her habit, when confronted with threats or violence, to pull out her Bible and just start reading aloud. I found her story very moving.

8

 
                  Sister Dorothy Stang (1930-2005)

 
Overhead, the shady trees were towering.
Behind, the brooding Amazon, flowing.
They drew their guns (to Mammon bowing
down).  You drew your book of Eden, flowering.

 
They hewed your coffin from abandoned wood
and took you, wailing, to the bartered ground.
A salty meal, kissed dry, was passed around -
your bread of dying (for a forsworn good).

 
A stone grinds sharp between God and Mammon
despite the yeast of well-fed prophecy,
and rotten meal's donated to the sea
to fatten sharks, when all the yeast is gone.

 
Between our tight-squeezed Bible belts,
on some old-fashioned farm, lost in Ohio,
some long-lived family (with simple sorrow)
reads your will (while lake ice slowly melts).

I've been posting some images of poets here lately. I did a google image search on Ezra Pound, but didn't find a copy of the little postage-stamp photo of him which I found in my 2nd-hand copy of the Cantos. I don't know where it came from; it looks like an original (though that's unlikely!). Should have it checked, I guess. It's EP in old age, sitting on a rock, holding a white cane.

A lot of my poetry writing during the 1990s was shaped by the notion that the "long poem" is a distinct genre, one I was very curious about. The variety & expansiveness of the models intrigued me. I was drawn to the special kind of seriousness & authority they (& the lives devoted to them) seemed to emanate (mana, charisma). I liked the way patterns or layers appeared - Pound's "palimpsest" - with various generations (Olson/Zukofsky/David Jones, et al.; Pound/Crane/Joyce, et al.; Whitman... and then back to the old epics).

The long poem seemed like a way to engage with public, social & historical issues, to step beyond the seemingly inherent solitude & solipsism of poetry, to try something with different parts of the composing personality (aside from "music", which has always exerted a strong tug on my negatively-capable dream-life).

I wrote a bunch of them in the 1990s. Most of them are in little chapbooks in the Brown Library.

Memorial Day
Spring Quartet
In RI (still in manuscript)
Forth of July (which includes Stubborn Grew)

These projects focused a lot of my energy. In between I wrote some shorter poems.

We each hear and interpret the poetry before us and around us differently; we live each in our own imaginative conception of the po-sphere. But the literary tradition, like history itself, is both objective and subjective; personal and collective; changeless and changeable. At the high points of my travels through these long poem projects, sometimes I felt like I was finding a theme or an idiom which created a genuine aura of interaction or dialogue with what had been done before. In other words the experiments I was doing seemed meaningful in relation to the previous experiments of those poets who had "broken through" (into literary tradition). This, in part I guess, was what I was working for in the first place.

I think I had several motives for taking this sort of roundabout route or method of composition. For one thing, I wanted to frame a conception of reality in poetry which included history as a form or frame of Time itself. This sounds very vague & portentous, I guess. I was looking at Dante, Milton, & Pound & Olson, as poets who tried to set their own cultures within historical frames, which themselves were framed by philosophical or metaphysical conceptions. & I wanted to do something like that. I wanted to do something holistic. Because I had my own puzzled, inchoate notion of history, which differed from these others'. Where it came from I suppose is in part explained by the travails I went through in the 70s, as described sketchily over at AlephoeBooks.

Looking over my old poems, the big quatrain explosion, trying to get oriented, inspired.

Writing for me is a very elusive, elliptical thing. I think it's because I am the proud possessor of a left-handed birdbrain.

Mandelstam has repeatedly over the decades been a source of inspiration.

Last night again considering him & the Russian poets generally, struck me once more how for some poets, in some traditions, there's a clearer demarcation between poetry & other forms of writing & discourse.

The factor of song, musicality. Mandelstam liked to call it "breath" : he was fascinated with "curvature" (in smiles, in eyebrows, and especially in cupolas, domes and filled sails).

"And suddenly, an arch appears in my mumbling" [rough translation].

The musicality of the line in verse as an expression of curvature, tension. Again the affinity with architecture ("frozen music"). Maybe Mike Snider's onto something (about meter), and perhaps poetry will eventually turn back toward the distinctive, distinguishing marks of verse. (Just as an aside - fascinating comment quoted by Jonathan Mayhew - Marjorie Perloff noting Phd. candidates in English who have never read Keats or Milton.)

Brodsky's remark that his Petersburg poet-friends considered prose writers "the infantry" and poets "the air force".

[linked with the notion that harmonics is what differentiates reading (prose) from performing (verse) : AND that this has something to do with "presence" and "the present" - embodiment. The technical characteristics of verse have "epistemological & ontological" implications. these are things I've mulled over before on this blog.]

Thinking out loud here. How today, for me, poetry appears as a sort of parallel universe - due to the otherness, the strangeness, of harmony itself.

So to get going again will require going back into that parallel bird-world ("Bluejay").

I have to be in the right mood.

Took Pushkin the Cat for a P-walk after work. While he huddled under the (baby) northern spruce, I noticed a cardinal couple (dark red & light brown) piping meekly in the Bruegelly dusk. I thought of Bruegel snow.

That fine Downy Woodpecker to my immediate (Massachusettschutty) north, Allen B., suggests I have been promulgating metrics. Far be it from.

I am not metrickal. Somehow, I fell into rhyming. Guess I have written about 8,000 quatrains in the last 8 yrs. Occurrethed it, to me, this even, that what I been doin', is fiddlin' wid a new PROSODY (yeah, right...)

involvin' rhymes with variable 4-5-6 foot (freebie) lines.

this occurrethes to me verily (- ever thought about the word "very"? Latin. Basically, it means "truly". "very true" = truly true.) AFTER THE FACT. & I think this is verus for Sxpr., Chaucer, & Oddwyn Shlippsy, too (to mention only the salient figments).

BTW, hopeful news yesterday from Spuyten Duyvil Press: they plan to re-issue Stubborn Grew AND publish the sequel (The Rose)... hopefully later this year. 80% of the quatrains right there!!!

I may go back to using a manual typewriter, too.

Happy New Year!

I'm using a grayish blue pencil which I picked up here at work. It reads, in silver lettering, Venus Beats All No. 2. Hesitate to sharpen all that away.

Good background article on the Chicago School.

Most of them seem more interested in fiction than poetry, but not all (I want to look for the study by one of the "3rd generation" Chicagoans, Adena Rosmarin (Power of Genre, on 19th-20th cent. poetry). Implications of their general approach might be worth exploring. RS Crane in the book I'm reading (Languages of Crit. & Structure of Poetry) writes about how Aristotle's Poetics is not about the social or political aspects of the subject, but is an investigation of how "good poems" (in the mimetic mode - tragedy, epic) get written.

On a side note, I've mentioned here before how the opening of Stubborn Grew - which, by the way, appears to be out-of-print now at Spuyten Duyvil - was generated in part by the Poetics. I was reading a study on it, which argued that the Poetics "does what it says" in a sort of para-poetic way. This gave me the idea that a long poem could open with sketches exploring the concept of writing a long poem, of telling stories. Gives it sort of an echo effect, a reflexivity.

I placed the mask firmly over my face: the mask I had been fabricating & fiddling with for the previous 20 years.

& then Russia, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Brodsky, Pushkin, "white nights" Petersburg, Elena Shvarts (ie., "shining/black") became a master theme-&-variation, through the next 1000 pp. of that poem (Forth of July, in toto). Mandelstam = "almond branch". (I found out about Celan's parallel interest later.) The almond - the tree that flowers in January. Eliot's "midwinter spring is its own season". The Biblical branch. Magdalen, amygdaloid. The embodied, the rooted Word. The other one, the ghost, the Bride, the J. The meteoric stone fallen from heaven, placed in the otfe (bedouin tribal camel-tent shrine) as tablet of the Law.

& you have to recall that the "narrative" plot proper began on Halloween, with a search for a "lost black cat" (Berryman sidekick?) named Pushkin.

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.

for me, the quatrain became a "line" as Dale Smith describes it. it became second-nature expressive. whether it can be so again is my question to myself.

This just in (Pravda) : Allen Bramhall reading Stubborn Grew

Allen - word of advice from the Author Position. Do not begin to feel that reading it is work, or that you are guilty, inadequate. I Author have ofttimes done my Readers (& Author-Self) a disservice by harping on the deep complexity and High Postoffice-Modern Seriousness-Quality of my Work.

Remember : the Poem was written by a (drunken/sleeping) snail (Dung-Beetle) trying to munch his way into Providence. It should be read in that Spirit as well. It was written for fun, fun, fun and is meant to be fun, fun, fun - a true Leisure Time Activity brought to you by Prof. Leisure Time himself.

I have found that the best way to read my Work is in the Tub, out loud, while your Significant Author pours buckets of warm Water over your head. This tends to bring out the real "Ocean State" flavor (or material status) of the Verse.

Mr. Silliman, in his post on R.Duncan today, touches on the design of modern long poems, and the vexed question of how parts relate to wholes in these big, often seemingly unbounded "life-works".

Somebody intrepid other than me will have to figure out someday how or how well the 3 books + coda of Forth of July compare/relate to this particular issue. But since that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon, I will just throw in here that the capability of beginning the poem came from an examination of Mandelstam's sequences of linked short poems & their variants. So the 1st chapter of Stubborn Grew grew out of a sense of the possibility of doing something similar. Then the 2nd chapter ("Ancient Light") took that a step further, creating an autobiographical mini-narrative out of more-closely linked individual pieces. Then the 3rd & 4th chapters ("Once in Paradise" + "Two Cats at the Atheneum") took it another step further, mixing autobiography with both local history and a sort of "magic realism" (the Bluejay walk-on). Thus concluded the 1st Part of Stubborn. The 2nd Part of same also contains 4 chapters, which constitute a kind of retroversion to autobiography mixed with parody (the 1st 2 chapters parody the Cantos; the 4th and last chapter parodies Finnegans Wake). This 4th, Finnegan chapter, basically runs the entirety of the previous sections (Stubborn 1-7) through a Wakean-Viconian ricorso, ie. re-enacts & repeats them through a Joyce-Irish slang machine.

Moving on to Book Two of Forth of July : The Grassblade Light. But I've gone over this ground before on this blog, so I will simply say that this central book of the poem is a highly-configured array of 7 separate-yet-consecutive poems.

Book Three (July) and the Coda (Blackstone's Day-Book), again, have their own distinct design (though the whole poem is structured on a variety of rhymed quatrains). Whether it all works & "makes sense" is for someone else to decide. But I think that the particular way I handle autobiography & narrative & part-to-whole structure tends to aim for a middle ground between the expansive "life-work" (say of Leaves of Grass) and the more autonomous, objectified shape of Crane's Bridge. Zukofsky managed this too, with "A".

But folks, ya know, I'm tellin ya, people like me represent an alternative history of "New American poetry", which has traveled far beneath the radar of the anthologies & the literary historicists & canonizers. They have no idea what I been doin' over there in Forth of July-land & the Island Road sonnets etc.

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Poetry : a stone fallen from heaven.
No one judges it.

- Mandelstam

(I play a lot with this "stone" metaphor in Forth of July, what with "William Blackstone" & his timewarp-boomerang "black stone" at the Dome of the Rock, & the otfe (meteorite) stones of the ark of the covenant, & the glittering "jewel-eye", the "almond" (mandel) of Jubilee at the center of Time. . .)

Reading these days:

books about the Comune of Siena (1200s-1400s). & the artwork produced there.

my wonderful library.

(pondering where to go with a new poem-project.)

very worn out lately. trying to think about Wordsworth Bookstore reading. I will probably not be reading a lot of Wordsworth.

Most of the time I have about 3-4 writing projects in mind, for which I'm jotting down notes.

When I actually start writing poetry, it usually feels like a release from the burden of all those plans, & has nothing to do with them.

Something similar with music : I often do better when I haven't played or practiced for a while.

Is this because I'm left-handed? A gemini? Lazy? All of the above?

My two half-beats toward the prosody discussion:
 
read an interesting book once by David Keppel-Jones, The Strict Metrical Tradition.   Focusing only on iambic pentameter, he describes very specific innovations, starting with Spenser, through Matthew Arnold, which made it the powerful mode it was.
 
But every era in language & poetry develops its own approaches to rhythm.  I don't think the special pleading for form or freedom really helps much.  The formalists have done a service by keeping the issue alive at all; but it seems like there may be a fundamental misprision in taking prosodic analysis (which is always belated) and applying it prescriptively to the craft itself.  Even the particular innovations outlined by Keppel-Jones grew out of a specific literary milieu, which is not our milieu today. 
 
I have no problem with Mike's promotion of accentual-syllabic practice; if he can help bring it back into circulation, all power to him.  But the claims that it is better than free verse, that free verse can't express meaning as well (because it doesn't have a pattern against which to project variations) - this seems needlessly categorical.  A milieu that supports both approaches is the one most able to generate new rhythmic discoveries and capabilities.
 
In my own poetry, I've counted beats and not counted beats; I've worked within set patterns (both given forms & ones I've invented), and not.  Everyone has their own distinctive feel for rhythm.  When I think of how I work, it seems to me that I revise a poem intuitively until it has a requisite smoothness or "elegance" according to my own standards; I focus on sound values per se and on the symbolic (mathematical) values of line-count and stanza forms, while at the same time aiming for a rhythm which is not clumsy, jarring, perfunctory or seemingly random.  What I dislike more than almost anything in the poetry I read, is the sort of casual lineation - line-breaks which simply chop up the sentence any old way.  This lazy practice makes for very dull reading.  Rhyme, for me, adds interest and tension to line-breaks.
 
 

The old backyard. Once upon a time, in the willow over the canoe, I heard "Bluejay" improvising, which was the beginning of Stubborn Grew/Forth of July, that neo-formalist traditional free metrical postmodern something or other. There's Pushkin, snoozing under the flowers. 

Kasey comments on a new anthology of 20th-century American poetics.

Ron Silliman's claim that the "us vs them", the postmod vs. premod, or, in his terms, Quietude vs Post-Avant, clash is a fact of (literary) history, does not tell us much about its actual importance. Teams of dogmatists & partisans, in the various realms of human foolishness, can often be found bickering about things for which neither side actually has a real affinity.

Aggressive literary partisans and polemicists obscure the fact that a living role for poetry in a culture (just as in the case of science or philosophy or religion or economics or politics) is bound up with a set of deep and substantial and sometimes deceptively simple questions, which every culture addresses in the process of historical change. Any good general literary history - of poetry in English, say - makes this crystal clear. Poets "represent" both general-cultural and individual responses to these questions.

The polemicists will stridently claim that it is precisely because of the seriousness with which they take these larger questions, that they are able to distinguish the good from the bad, the new from the old hat, etc. But poets themselves are usually not so aggressive : they are too busy grappling, in their poems, with the unanswered questions per se. & the partisans assiduously avoid the fact that good poetry, and its reading public, do not need their help in sorting these cultural questions into pat categorical pigeonholes & critical cliches.

Busy working on a novel these days. Mother is the invention of necessity. Don't really want to go back to the library, mine exquisite golden cage. & haven't, or haven't applied, any other socially-useful skills lately (like teaching). Wish to write myself out of a hole, or try. It's silly & hopeless, but heck, I can't think of anything else at the moment.

Tempted to talk about it, but afraid to give away secrets of the craft. A story is a gizmo.

Kent Johnson emailed me the following question, & suggested I post it with my response here. I'm doing so, despite misgivings : I don't like using the word "shit" in public (or private, actually). But according to such august authorities as Yeats & Akhmatova, this is where poems come from. . .

Henry, so all these connections and layers-- layers connecting and connections 
layering... You seem to be able to verify it all and with impressive empirical 
aplomb. 
> 
>  
Did you plan it all out, or did it just happen? 
> 
> 
 (A bit of both, I suspect, but could you talk about how all these tropic and 
allegorical interweavings were woofed on the warp and vice versa? You might 
consider this a follow up question to our interview at Jacket.)
> 
>  
Kent

 
Hi Kent,

 
it's hard to explain, because as you know writing happens in sort of a liminal 
area.

 
I remember a key moment when I was reading the Mandelstam Voronezh poems again, 
about "black earth". I have a feeling for that kind of landscape, coming from 
where I do. Who knows, maybe on a certain freudian level it's all just playing 
with shit (like the kid in the poem I published today, playing with mud between 
her legs)!!

 
But there was a moment when I was identifying with the sound & imagery of that 
rural place which OM was evoking, & I linked it with "letting go", & going into 
the earth, & somehow retrieving all the broken things in my life from the past & 
dealing with them (unrequited love, divorce, Julie's suicide, etc.) - & doing 
this through the Orpheus thing. all that plus actively "mimicking" a certain 
sound I thought I heard in the Voronezh poems.

 
At that moment, when I think of it, I was at a point where all my somewhat 
unsuccessful efforts were behind me, as PRACTICE & preparation, & something new 
was about to unfold.   The best way I can describe it, is that it happened - all 
those layers & connections - the way an algorithm works. A fairly simple 
combination creates a certain energy-stimulus : and that energy AUTOMATICALLY 
starts to spiral & complexify. That's what it felt like to me. Those 3 yrs or 
so writing this poem, I was exploding with connective energy.  It wouldn't let 
me go. I certainly didn't "plan" it all. when I finished Stubborn Grew, I 
thought it was done. Then when I finished Grassblade, I thought it was done. 
But only a few days after finishing each book, the next book would come at me 
like a giant WAVE. I felt a kind of dread when that happened because I knew how 
much time & energy it would involve, totally absorbing. "one thing led to 
another".

stay warm,
Henry