the Winter King (a mummer's play)

BLUE LIGHTNING

Hobo, sprawled among November reeds,

cattails.  His scattered bones

ache on jagged edges.

A chill is in the sky.  Light feeds

the icing-over swamp, the acid-

green vomit (absinthe

effigy of spring).  A plinth

of plastic raft supports his dream-kid,

Henry Hawkeye – duffed.  In mummer’s rags

of scruffy black, to match

his sullen rage (a match

is all it takes).  Here comes Antigone’s

antagonist... here comes Creon, Jason...

Here comes Le Grand K

himself, all brassy

mass and armored mirror – one

half bull, the other carny barker

in a cream straw hat.

Just look at that!

He laughs, he sneers, he boasts, he barks

surrounded by his bulky thugs,

stiletto-dames –

No Shame in Crimes

his badge declares (pinned with slugs

to his forehead).  The plastic raft

quivers to his stomp.

This is gonna be a romp,

he crows, & circles Henry, fore

                   *

& aft.  Wispy, cloudy, quiet Henry’s

cornered.  By the water.

No weapon (though an otter

peeks up near the scrim).  He’s

holding only a tiny pocket mirror,

which he flecks upward

toward the pale sun.  Hard

to say what will come next.  Your

ghost dance, Hobo, flickers photons

like Planck’s constant

from an old field tent –

where photos of Kennedy, Abe Lincoln,

Martin Luther King hang, haunted (black

& white).  The King

is dead, long live the King,

Ave Maria, Henry whispers back.

& suddenly a mass of flame pours out

like pale blue lightning

from a Chartres ceiling

down upon a maze, blazing partout

across the center of the raft.  Truth

is our Law, O shallow

prince – our commonweal.

She rules, & will spring forth

again – like that torch-bearing Liberty

all clothed in copper green

welcoming everyone...

So Hobo saw.  The raft was empty.

11.27.18

Hyper-formalism & the Long Henry Poem

I made a simple creative decision about 4 years ago.  I knew I was about to embark on yet another long serial poem (I've written about 9 of them).  I decided that the individual parts (the separate poems) within the whole thing should be, if possible, more free-standing.

In part, I wanted to make my writing more accessible.  I wanted more magazines to accept my poems for publication (always a real struggle for me).  In order for that to happen, these smaller parts would have to be more autonomous, complete in themselves.  They would need separate titles, not just "Lanthanum bk. 12 no. 28" & the like.

The titles were the easy part.  My plan has only been partially successful.  But partial is better than nothing.  I've landed a few pellets of the new poem (Ravenna Diagram) in various magazines : Poetry, Blackbox Manifold, Journal of Poetics Research, West Branch, Notre Dame Review, Truck, Battersea Review...

This is a step forward for me.  I've probably written more poems, and published less, than any poet in America.

Part of the problem is, I'm not consistent.  I make resolutions & then go the other way.  I resolved a year ago not to post so many poems on this blog, & then I did the opposite.

Not only that - I also alienate potential & previous friends and publishers.  Things go awry.  I've come to the conclusion that there are various subtle patterns shaping these frustrating encounters.  Real books only emerge because they were meant to be.  Or because your deepest affinities have finally borne fruit - by grace, by miracle, you meet the small publisher who's been waiting all this time for you.  Kismet.

My waxing voluble here is due to the fact that I'm unwinding.  I'm celebrating the successful finish of book 9, Ravenna Diagram.  & I'm nearing the halfway point of this hyper-formal poem.  It presently stands, or sits, at about 510 pp.

I know where I'm going (as in the old Isle of Mull film).  The poem has a plan for me.  Sort of a sand mandala, shaping itself up with little voodoo flicks of sandy fingertips.  An hourglass in the form of canoe.

It's a Leaves of Grass kind of mumble-saunter.  It's a mummer's walk around a golden labyrinth - a traditional Crane Dance, performed by a blind man (mesmerized).

That's why the blog has proved so seductive & essential.  It's both immediate and chronological; it walks with me on my planetary seasonal rounds.

The poem is a stone fallen from heaven; no one will judge it.  Osip Mandelstam.

I'm trying to exemplify & prove the truth of this statement.  Of course, there is a social cost involved.  If you try to go around the distinguished cultural authorization channels, you will, most assuredly, be branded an outcast, an interloper.

Someone has probably written a treatise on the mutual co-dependence of High Society and Literature (maybe at the New Yorker?  or Paris Review?  Kenyon?  Harvard?).

On the other hand... please understand... I harbor no animus toward Society.  I am, simply, a poet caught in the net of hyper-formalism.

& what, you may ask, is hyper-formalism?

Hyper-formalism is the emergence of a form out of the necessary logic of a theme.  The theme, you could say, is the fate of the poem - & its fate determines its form.

Fate is, naturally, a dramatic force : a force for drama.  & poetry is the mimesis, the dramatization, of fate.  So poetry has discovered its vocation, finally - it's a mumbling medium for the human theatre.

& what if the fate of the poem - its theme - is to be a kind of local, allegorical embodiment of (universal, elemental) truth?  The poem veers toward prophecy... the poet veers toward seer... toward manifest Logos...

A stone fallen from heaven.  You begin perhaps to comprehend & forgive the orientation toward immediacy, toward "unsponsored" speech.

I've devoted most of my life to these verbal snares, these long-walk dream songs.  It's been a joy & a challenge.  I'm stepping blindfolded around a maze on the floor of Chartres cathedral.  Ariadne is the thread.  The Earth lies underneath.

Anybody out there heard of the theologian Urs von Balthasar? I've stumbled on his voluminous writings in my peregrinations through the stacks. He approaches religion & history through the fundamental category of drama.

All the world's a you-know-what. Yeatsian, too.

Dante et al. as historians. & history as a form of (cosmic) theater.

How are poets historians? By way of the tensions of history which pervade their work. The fascination with events & politics. The confidence & ambition to formulate a poetic image of same. The sense of moral complicity & responsibility. The authority of articulate thought.

In the twists & turns of the argument of Whittling, Whistling, I'm actually trying (among other things) to make room in the "theory" for modes of didactic, satiric poetry. Discursiveness, direct address. It may not seem that way... I may not have been very clear.

The idea is that these particular forms of poetry (along with all the other forms & modes) reflect the theatricality of poetry in general. I'm saying poetry & poets are inherently dramatic (hence the emphasis on those attributes noted by Aristophanes). That's why I call poetic language itself the main character, the protagonist : an exaggeration, meant to underline how the medium shapes the message.

Added an old review of Edwin Honig's collected poems over here. My apologies to those who have read this before. The thread of thinking about poetry's dramatic aspect brought the review to mind.

Sorry for the long-windedness yesterday. Looks now like a hodge-podge proto-essay, which somebody else will write if I don't get crackin'.

& the "list of paradigms" is not very gripping, much less complete. I'm going back to RS Crane's book Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry.

As I was taking my shower this morning, was thinking that the real focus of interest for me here, what woke me up at 3 a.m. the other day, was this :

By going back to Aristotle, the Chicago people found a way to re-frame a formalist criticism (ie. one that focused on what & how the poem does what it does - as opposed to thematic or other kinds of readings). Instead of reifying the poem in isolation - a la New Criticism - this framework creates a holistic sense of poetic form : not only text, but performance; not only an internally-balanced aesthetic object of beauty, but a dramatic shape, which has specific techniques for creating particular rhetorical effects and evoking particular responses in its audience (emotional, interpretive).

Not only text, but living expression - an offshoot of the living poet & his or her dramatis personae. (Goes back to places in this blog's archive where I thought about the difference between prose fiction & poetry.)

This is not really new : Horace developed a practical criticism which analyzed the poem's rhetoric. But Aristotle seems more fully-rounded : he can distinguish these rhetorical effects, yet in symbiosis with the analysis of the poem as a formal shape, a kind of verbal sculpture.

What I'm thinking is that a framework which includes both text & performance - both objective shape, and its effects, its resonance - could be generated as kind of a general platform for developing a new critical vocabulary to apply to contemporary work.

When you look less to the model of New Critical "close reading" of the internal texture of the diction, and more to the meanings and effects projected in the dramatic action which is the poem, you might find a more capacious fit between meaning & expression, style & its effects.

With some such framework, you might be able to talk about the seemingly odd & baroque expressive techniques of contemporary poets, in a way which shows their affinities, differences, inheritances from past poetries.

& it might give poets more confidence in the motivations which impel them to offer their artistic activities as some kind of contribution to society at large. If poems are art works - not texts to be "processed" into their ideological paraphrases; not exercises in some dys-Platonic scriptorium, but forms which absorb text, in order to unite writing with dramatic presence - we might have a new sense of the symbiotic relationship between style & theme, between diction & Aristotle's trio of powers (ethos, pathos, logos).

... speaking of "reality breaking through" : the library just bought two issues of Play : A Journal of Plays. I saw some familiar names among supporters & contributors (Keith Waldrop, Kasey Mohammad...).

At home, I dug out a copy of my old play, Manzago! : a Farce in Reverse. A silly song-&-dance about Noriega, GHW Bush invasion of Panama. & it seemed to be about GWB & Iraq! I was more radical back then (1990).

I sent it to Play today.

 III  (Sham Death of a Minor Shakespearean)


  
 "I die for the glory of the light and
 the majesty of Apollo!" – he cried
 – drifting slowly, fastidiously,
 to the floorboard bedside.

  
 Head flat against the hard oak
 neither he nor audience could tell
 if it was by his own hand
 or by another's, that he fell.

  
 Only that the heavy thunder, the light ringing
 washing through his skull was not applause,
 but penetrating phantom fingers
 of the black – sable – nurse of darkness.
      
                                  5.27.96

Listened to some of the (NPR) radio commentary on Arthur Miller, r.i.p., after work. One of his friends had bought his house in Connecticut, where he wrote "Death of a Salesman". His friend described how he had built a special shack out in the back yard, because he felt this important work coming... he wrote the 1st act in 48 hrs straight, pacing around, mumbling to himself... it suddenly reminded me of what Siberian shamans do... (build a little hut away from it all)...

before that they played a 1995 interview with Miller, where he talked about the show he'd gone to with his mother, age 8, which taught him the power of theater...

which reminded me of Elena Shvarts' memoir, about her own theatrical baptism (Brothers Karamazov, in Kiev) (see archive a few wks ago)

see archive, "life is theater" etc.

See also archive about Anny Ballardini's trans. of In RI (the poem). About RI history & separation of church & state, etc. The people dramatized in The Crucible are my direct ancestors. The mother of the Putnam girls (who started the Salem witch craze) was Priscilla Gould, sister (daughter?) of Zaccheus, of Topsfield, my gr-etc-grandfather. Priscilla also happens to be a direct ancestor of Joseph Smith, of Mormon fame. "The pure products of America / go crazy".

Which brings me back to Providence, and Roger Williams...

and my own sub-sub-literary line of descent: Poe-Crane-Lovecraft-Gould. I'm going to write a detective story...

Am reading an interesting book right now, Prisoners of hate : the cognitive basis of anger, hostility, and violence. By Aaron Beck, who I guess is considered the founder of cognitive psychology. I come upon things in the process of buying books for the library, lucky me.

Surprised to find it shedding light from a certain angle on the pathology of (sub)literary polemics, my own in particular within the larger scene of same.

Also struck by similarity between Beck's architecture of cognition/emotion, and the way that Elder Olson, in one of his Chicago-critic essays, analyzed the dynamics and effects of poetry, especially dramatic poetry. He describes there how a drama, by depicting or shaping a certain limited set of images or representations (logos), first affects the opinion or judgement of the audience about what they are witnessing : and then that opinion, that cognitive assessment of the image or scene (ethos), triggers the audience's emotional response (pathos).

I'm just getting into Beck's book, but the introduction describes his research into the elusive, peripheral thoughts of his patients - the thoughts they don't even recognize enough to share in psychoanalysis : thoughts which, paradoxically, frame & direct more overt behavior (often defense mechanisms or delusions). These are sort of protective thoughts, guarding the perimeter of the egocentric self - which if damaged or vulnerable, result in fantastic forms of intellectual & behavioral over-reactions. As in the audience's "judgement" of a drama's events, these very primitive ego-protective cognitions - survival mechanisms - trigger (or at least contribute to) feelings, emotions.

The book is sort of a summary of Beck's decades of research. He tries to show how the personal pathologies are seamlessly linked with mass social & political disturbances & afflictions. But I'm only on the first pages.

life's theater, theater... here's a stentorian, dramaturgical old poem:

         An Old Question


  
 
         The war knew many theaters,
 McClellan vacillating at the Potomac,
 Comic-opera Burnside driving the farmboys
 Up the hill again and again
 Like clockwork into blood and grass,
 Serious Lee striking northward
 Only to meet the Minnesota Regiment
 And touch the veritable turning-point...

  
         And then there was Lincoln,
 Best actor of them all, plain-spoken
 Yet with heart and mind in tune
 For the mastery of gruesome Mars;
 Waiting for the war on the field
 To end at last, his duty done –
 And then let destiny unfold its hand
 With an off-stage crown, a funeral train.

  
         These lights cast on the boards,
 Amateur actors traveling up from home –
 Were the lines learnt well enough,
 The plowing properly done that spring?
 And the coffin crossing the prairie,
 The wafer sun among the lilacs,
 The warbling voice – sacrifice enough,
 And memory, for the conflagration?

I suppose my shadow-box with Mr. Silliman is also motivated by a sense of symmetry. His approach appears to me as one of the crystallizations or focal points of a general period style; and because I am (nearly, I guess) of the same generation, there seems to be a fairly clear parting of the ways.

We share an admiration for the modern poets of the early 20th century; we share an indifference toward much of the free-verse 1st-person anecdotal lyric poetry of the American 70s. But where the language poets - and related trends toward overt textuality in postmodernism - built a movement on the complete rejection of "the lyrical subject" - I move in another direction.

If it were up to me, I would rescue rather than reject the "lyric I", by drawing on the resources of tradition in a broader sense than that offered by the 20th-cent. avant-garde.

As I have argued in discussing the Chicago Critics here recently, poetry is not simply text. It is not even a mode of language, merely. As I understand it, poetry, and narrative, and drama find their mutual root in human action. The modes of literature branch from their resemblance, their re-enactment, their intellectual and aesthetic re-shaping, of thought-&-action.

Here is where a poetic style accomplishes its syntheses : people, voices, represented in very particular, recognizable landscapes and events. How different this perspective from that offered by the tortured "texts" and mannered "discourses" we know so well! Lyrics in which "speakers" address us in all strangeness - yet grounded, believable, in some sense - dramatic.

I think of an art which finds a way to harmonize with & interpret the context & conditions of the world(s) within which it exists : so that you can see & feel & recognize experiences which the language evokes.

(& one doesn't need , as far as literary-genre theoretics goes, the metaphysical overlay which is nevertheless a fundamental part of my own understanding of this : the framework which understands life and reality as theatrical in an ultimate sense. "This mighty stage", as Yeats put it. What was the interplay of gods & heroes in archaic times, transposed into the barn-floor fundament of the manger-Incarnation. Mandelstam's "deep grain-bins of faith". All the world's a stage for this Imago Dei and imitatio Christi.)

As I am reading in her memoir, E. Shvarts grew up around actors & the stage. Her mother was a script-reader & etc. for a major Petersburg theater.

"Ghenrik Gouldski" & "Yelena Karonska" star in : The L(love? language?)-Shaped Room !!!

Have been reading a lot of Sophocles lately (some of Julia's poems remind me of the translations).

Robert Fagles' versions are great, I think. I've read his translations of Oedipus Rex, Antigone & Oedipus at Colonus. I'm hoping he also translated Philoctetes, which is my favorite of the seven extant.

Electra seems like one of the weirdest plays ever written.

These plays are 2500 years old.

(Sophocles lived to 90 yrs. Philoctetes his 2nd-to-last play (before O. at Colonus). Athens already defeated by Sparta, & Sophocles had already died, when O. at C. was first performed.)

Kent J. tyalkin' about heteronyms.

I've noticed that puttin' on a mask & speaking through it is basic for fiction. (I'm writin' a novel in the voice of an old college roommate, and a short story in the voice of a goofy film-maker.) Not sure how it relates to poetry, though. Makes me nervous.

Kent, what's the connection between masking and remembering?

I mean perhaps the best way to remember the 60s, for example, is to play a role, take on a voice. Get into the part. Method Acting.

The Redeemable Players, theater group at my church (Redeemer) across the street, puts on its first production tomorrow night : Les Aveugles (The Blind Men), by Michel de Ghelderode. The one-act brings to life a painting of the same title by Bruegel. Appropriate Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) material. I'm directing.

Directing a short play at church by Michel de Ghelderode, unusual Belgian playwright. The Three Blind Men; based on a Bruegel painting of that name. (If Bruegel interests you, Michael Frayn's Headlong is a pretty good read. Funny.)