to restore a soul

SECRET WORLD

To restore a soul, to mend a broken heart

out of the wells of memory

for relief of misery

for your grace we pray.  A crane bone flute

keening her lonely call might still redeem

the wind that carries it

on the storm-clouds.  Fiat

lux – though the darkness loom.

This primitive wooden Vierge Ouvrante

unveils her secret world

with a copper hinge.  Old

masters of le Verbe significant

carved, flickered into form

a buoyant microcosm

within her oaken beam –

a human shelter from the storm.

Cicadas buzz amid burnt branches

of a poem framing history.

It is a mystery.

Isis on her throne, Ariadne’s hunches,

spider-Minotaur in his plangent web...

the sacrifice of innocence

behind a screen (some dense

thicket of Pig’s Eye Social Club).

The wind is clear & clean tonight.

Whole homesteads rise

toward ordinary Paradise,

warm lips forging a female Paraclete.

1.16.19

domestic hellenism

REMBRANDT WORLD

Imagine a humble Rembrandt world

(domestic hellenism, say)

where everything is (replay,

rusty Super-8) revealed –

unsealed, familiar testament

wherein you were sown

amid Grant Wood corn

(Birthplace of Herbert Hoover), bent

beneath pewter thunderheads

like wheat long-planted

at a battlefield (wind-

harrowed silos, homesteads).

By the rude bridge that arched the flood

– the wordspan, carved against

despair (Grace hastens

with her furnace-lamp... slight lift of mood)

here once the embattled farmers stood

– measuring early earth,

where your Dream (4th

of J?) becomes flesh & blood

& fired the shot heard round the world.

Ariosto in Ferrara,

say – that avian eye

on tyranny (Limentani’s branded

heron-lid).  Poetry is resistance

against the Emperor

of pyramidal distemper;

Concord... Voronezh... (buoyant equivalence).

4.19.18

arise, iris

GOLDEN RULE

An iris opened on the first morning

in June.  Like a Byzantine

empress, rich purple &

gold – her petals butterfly wings

or flying buttresses at Chartres.

In the mirror of her eye

a spark of fiery beauty

keeps us tethered from the start

to time & clay & gravity.

What we know of day

stems from the way

her lullaby enclosed Night Sea

with human shores.  So poetry,

say Anna, Nicolai,

Osip; the warm akme

glows like a sun-hearth, humanly;

so that we feel at home on earth,

where all our rights & dignity

are cherished – held inalienably

near, defended, justified – their worth

continually savored by our freedom.

This the bright consensus

won by Athens once,

& by Jerusalem – that liberty of Rome

as well, as well-water.  Oasis

of mild light & shade,

Athena-keel for well-made

coracle – pilot’s compass

              *

through confounding waves – hardy braid

Arachne spun for us

to cross Pontus Axeinos

(Lethe too, returning from the dead).

Those immense majestic figs

haunting a promontory

in Pacific Sydney

guard the Observatory – wisdom’s pegs

around a mounted, tented hologram

of Southern Cross.  Diamond

of floating light – almond

icosahedron – luminous emblem

of the 6-way star Black Elk beheld

on prairie underneath wide sky

                  *

           *           *

                  *

invisible Manitou we travel by

all night, to where bridge-rivets weld

phenomena to Thanksgiving.

Kind circuit of a whisper-

dome, thy Presence clear

& sure Love-blessings bring!

That ghost dance out of Resurrection

Cimetière – when Buried

Man became unburied

after three days in the ocean-

chest of earth – concluded with a sail

due north, to Ocean

River, where it all began;

& now, like Jonah out of mother whale

                  *

or like Carlotta out of Vertigo

a little charley-horse

tightened its muscle-force

around the oaken knee of Sampo

(read : Humanity) amid thick shade

of English oaks (Fig-

Newton Township – dig?).

An acorn Lincoln-logos made

branched into spine & ribs & mast; 

the human rights of Edward

Coke transmuted seaward

in good Williams’ boat; at last

the courageous limb bore fruit – Soul

Liberty.  Where Alighieri

drew the line, we

carry on – our freedom’s in the whole

Thanksgiving Bowl of civil rights.

You cannot chain the wind

of smiling Manitou, nor bind

Creation with your rabid fights,

O fanatic unseasoned fools!

Free mind like lightning

(your dead branches blasting)

lifts just Jonah with her Golden Rule

& adds the pearl of high Sophia

Jesus chanted, Francis

planted... holy kiss

of cosmic Union – azure everlasting Gaia.

6.2.17

Michael Scharf on "Personalism"

I like the historical acuity of Michael Scharf's critique of "personalism" in American poetry, despite the fact that my perspective is about as opposite to his as one can get. I do think he has identified something deeply askew in the approach or method which turns poetry into a celebration of subjectivity without limits, as a kind of aesthetic compensation for all the limitations of actual & historical reality.

But I fork paths with Scharf when he offers a form of Marxist-historical-materialist critique as a response to the problem of the person & the personal. A hortatory & quasi-religious rhetoric insinuates itself into his analysis. We are under a moral obligation to "figure a disposition" between "possession and dispossession" - a "material site" of "mistranslation" and "struggle" - ie. it appears that Scharf's notion of the person is that of something partially determined or impinged upon by a materialist history of social struggle, and poetry, in order to mean anything, has to seek the constantly-shifting nexus or interface or locus of this set of implied obligations to the larger (& conflicted) situation.

I have no problem with the idea that individual human meaning is only discovered within a context of the shapes of time & history of the human race as a species, and the world as a whole. What I would argue is that such meaning can be explored & discovered without denying the individual human person an essential - the essential, paradigmatic role - both in history in general, and in poetry in particular.

The crux of the matter comes with an analysis of this notion of the individual human person. If we limit the concept of the person to the egocentric Self as sketched by Scharf (as part of the "mainstream" ideology of American poetics), then Scharf's critique & dismissal of such a limited concept is easy to understand. But we need, rather, to qualify & complicate our sense of the person, rather than reject a caricature of same. One could consult, just for one example, Christian Moev's The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy, for an introduction to Dante's medieval-poetic understanding of the human self as essentially contingent : but not, as in the modern sense, contingent upon abstract or human-historical forces, but upon a relationship with a divine source in whose image man is made. The relational complexities of the (Judeo-Christian) religious vision of Man-&-God - within which the category of the "personal" is not denied, but rather supplemented & enhanced, while at the same time subjected to an ultimate ethical demand ("eternal judgement" on each individual soul) - these complex relations are part of a nexus of understanding, a viewpoint within which materialist historicism seems finally like a form of personal irresponsibility masking itself as social ethics.

I have gone into these issues at greater length in various blog posts here on Russian Acmeism & "domestic hellenism" : on the perspective emanating from Gumilev & Mandelstam (with deep roots in Byzantine Christianity) which asserted - in the face of revolutionary collectivism - a "chaste" vision of the dignity & beauty of both individual persons & distinct natural phenomena of all sorts. The early 20th-cent. debate between Acmeism & Futurism was another arena in which these basic philosophical problems polarized & played themselves out on an aesthetic/poetic plane.

Stephen Hawking, Orpheus, "hellenism"

A different M-Theory altogether...

I know I harp too much on this Michigan chap, but I do feel you can often get several kinds of nourishment from John Latta's comments : 1) an authentic report or history of a few decades of American poetry (starting in 60s); 2) a perceptive understanding of what poetic language actually does, ie., a real aesthetics; 3) a critical intelligence and a sharp critique of some of the hyper-rationalized or ideological or academic trends in the current scene. I don't always agree with him, but I always learn things with pleasure.

See for ex. comments on the image/metaphor today. Rather than indulging in the fashionable mockery-japery so prevalent on blogs, he finds a way to evoke & illustrate what "deep image" poets were aiming for; and in the process, provides a real sense of how poetic speech examines/humanizes/domesticates, weighs experience in the balance, all at once. I believe this was what Osip Mandelstam was getting at with his (Acmeist) concept of "domestic hellenism" - quoting very roughly from memory : "hellenism is the surrounding of the body and earthly life with the teleological warmth of beloved domestic objects" - the civilizing labor itself. Something akin to Bachelard's notions about how the poetic image, the human psyche, and the surrounding world all unite in that image...

A source for the tone in the Berkeley poem posted yesterday (& much of Stubborn Grew) is Mandelstam's Complete Poetry (SUNY Press, 1973) trans. by Raffel & Burago. OM often did portrait-poems of historical figures, painters, writers, musicians & friends - somewhat similar to Robert Lowell's verbal icons, but more humorous & affectionate. He connected it to his Acmeist project of "domestic hellenism" - the idea that poetry was part of a larger human-cultural project to "surround life with utensils, with teleological warmth". With his portraits he presented historical figures (Bach, Beethoven) as part of the family.

Berkeley himself can be seen as a forerunner of sorts for the controversial contemporary physics theory known as the Anthropic Principle (which holds, roughly, that the cosmos seems designed in order to support conscious (or human) life). With his notion that existence entails perception, that the tree falling doesn't make a sound - doesn't even exist - unless someone is there to hear it, he's suggesting a purposive cosmos with consciousness at its center. Samuel Johnson mocked Berkeley's idealism ("I know the stone exists without me, because I stubbed my toe on it", or something like that), and the following era belonged to the Samual Johnsons. But 20th-century physics, starting with relativity, threw a spanner in those works.

My internet shadow-boxing with the langpos & postmodernism in the 90s was partly a critique of their critique of autobiographical, confessional, storytelling styles. The postmodern poets questioned, rejected, undermined the ontological status of the person. Words were dislocated from context and composition was disconnected from authorial motivation.

One of the consequences of doing long poems, however, can be (though it doesn't have to be) the building up of foundational layers of context & specificity. Ideally, in Stubborn Grew (& Forth of July as a whole), the interconnections are there to add a weave, a structure of more & more specificity. Thus the epic journey of "Henry" & "Bluejay" in the first half of Stubborn takes place over the space of about 10 city blocks and 300 years of history; the 2nd half takes place in the narrator's head, at a particular coffee shop table on Wickenden St., in the Fox Point neighborhood.

Theme of "domestic hellenism" in Mandelstam's essays. Poetics of celebration of mankind "at home" in this world - ecology of civilization.

Eden Again.

from India Point

8

The winter mist, the angles of rooftops,
the shadowy academies, the swoop
of wren between the dripping
trees. Odysseus, wrestling Cyclops

far from home, remembers the kitchen stove.
From the low barn in the farmyard
starting out and returning, a star-word
points the bricks toward unbounded love

and the subtle flicker of a snakeskin
(in and out of the muddy ground) portends
another springtime (umbilical, endless).
A morris-dance in every Troy-town

coils around its secret law. A cold iron
ring (forged in starlight) turns molten gold.

*

You turn your face toward the truth
like a grandmother gazing at the hearth.

Unbending law under a dogwood branch
swaying in the early wind of March.
Bead on the level. Night-watch
on horizon-line. Gyro (unchangeable) -

what seemed fatal (Time's unfolding,
imperturbable). Donated to chance,
equilibrium - beyond remonstrance
seemingly - Darwinian - til holding

only held (mold or death-mask) -
far light outlining final shape.
Oval of your murmuring lips,
a lofty, graceful arabesque.

12.31.02