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

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.)

Her low whispers frame the deserted dome.
Her light covers the circus floor.

Mainly, though, I'm absorbed in Urs von Balthasar's excellent book on Maximus the Confessor.

The theology of the Greek Fathers : Maximus, Pseudo-Dionysius...

A curious openness, open-mindedness, there. Along with all the ancient stoic severity & fierce polemics.

With the Moderns (philosophers), the Absolute is often just another terminological card to shuffle, in their endless titanic explanation-of-everything game.

For the old Greeks, the Absolute radiates an aura : obscurity, utter Beyondness (beyond Being, beyond knowledge, beyond human, beyond explanation...), and love, and personhood. The Absolute is a living mystery, Being-beyond-Being.

Those glowing icons.

Being, well-being, eternal being...
becoming, movement, rest...

Here's another very old poem which I've posted before. Written in 1972 or so. Some things never change.

...the letters add to the elegance of a structure, even if
their meaning is hidden from those not familiar with the language.
Here, they tell how a piece of the true Cross was obtained at
Constantinople in 1034 and enshrined in the Chapel, where
each night prayers were to be said until Christ came again.
About half of the Chapel has collapsed, the interior yawning
hollowly in the direction of the Soviet Union.
                              - Horizon Magazine (Winter 1971)

 
                          *

 
the well is always there
a decade of water
just a well
the soldiers pass by
and today the girls are among the clowns
each hiding an arm or wearing a red dance
standing around the well always there

That poem in previous post was written 36 years ago. It was part of a group of poems which won the Charles Philbrick Memorial Award for 1970 at Brown University. (I think that award was only given once.) The result was a chapbook, titled Where the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day (not my title : it was chosen by the editors, who published the poems along with an award-winning story, by James Morgan).

This chapbook is currently held by 5 libraries in the U.S., and one in Israel. (How my ancient text made its way over there, I don't know!)

& 36 years later, I'm still here (not counting some sidetrack years in community work & musical errancy).

Like Elijah in front of the whispering cave, I'm somebody who was transfixed by poetry, rooted to the spot. From the days of the Shakespeare Thing. "The lion sleeps on its paws. / It can kill a man."

It's like this (another old poem):

                from a cave

 
Such a small voice,
I would not stop to hear;
the sun was going down, and
there were no houses near.

 
Such a strange voice,
whispering out of the ground -
familiar, though it seemed
unearthly, utterly profound.

 
Such a sweet voice,
twining my cavern ear;
a vine for water jars, when
all the wedding guests are here.

Happy Valentine's Day. Here's an old poem from Way Stations:

  In a rough-hewn four-poster
  the moody Puritan sleeps.
  Down the steep dark stair,
  slowly, a poor wife creeps.

   
  Under a heavy kitchen box
  there's a crust of dry bread;
  strong hands undo the locks;
  she goes out by the shed.

   
  The old redhead dreams on,
  kindly dawn slowly rises –
  he sees a fatherly sun,
  gleaming strawberry ices,

   
  and a justified Rome –
  while his wife, thinly wan,
  espousing dear freedom,
  succors an orphan swan.

One of the old, "pre-epic" poems in Way Stations, which (in very partial illustration of previous post) contains a kind of vow to Mandelstam:

 
  The wind exhaled, this world
  sprawled – a spring disaster, flocks of embraces
  in the garage, under the oil refineries
  hospitable sirens, waltzing on broken silver.

   
  And night deepened around the temple,
  a yellow-black wafer, crust for the swans;
  and the wind circled the olives, a morning watch
  all night by the Kedron, all day by Euphrates.

   
  And we'll meet again by the wintry river
  where we swaddled the sun in a double wreath,
  cedar and lilac, tangled in a knot of beaten
  gold – sea-roses, breathing in Jerusalem.

(sounds like an OM poem passed through an Eliot-modifier)

Here's an old poem by, for, from, & about Quietude. I've posted it before. ("Ocean State" - the phrase - is on every RI auto license plate.)

OCEAN STATE


 
 
Here the waters gather along the shore.
They meet the land breathing in foam,
and roll the sleepy pebbles and shells
back into long sand waves as before.

 
Our moon, casting her antique spells.
A motionless iris in the whale’s eye
of the sea, her unspeakable name
sinks to the bottom of lonely wells.

 
Her low whispers frame the deserted dome.
Her light covers the circus floor.
And she lifts, with one nocturnal sigh,
the heaving swells in a silver comb.

into the grassland of innocent whispers. (from another olde poem, "Radial"):

                  Speechless seeing,
  The child's eye
  Obedient, peaceful,
  Nursing in the blood
  Such slow harmonies:

   
                  The rustling elms,
  And houses ripening
  In the summer light –
  Tentative longing
  Rising from the streams.

another little old one from Way Stations (may have sent this before). . .

                  Bees dance above closed lips;
  in the clear shadow of the oak
  wherever they turn their heads
  they follow the bright pattern.

   
                  Quietly, by the granite cistern
  under a crowded canopy of reds,
  in the cool wind a broken spoke
  sways whichever way it slips.

Busy here in the Rock today. Meanwhile, another simple old poem from Way Stations :

                                 from a cave

   
                  Such a small voice,
  I would not stop to hear;
  the sun was going down, and
  there were no houses near.

   
                  Such a strange voice,
  whispering out of the ground –
  familiar, though it seemed
  unearthly, utterly profound.

   
                  Such a sweet voice,
  twining my cavern ear;
  a vine for water jars, when
  all the wedding guests are here.

Still bugged out with bad virus. No whiskified egg nog for me, thanks [sigh].

Watched PBS magical-mystical program last night on origin of 3 Kings. Magi may have been Zoroastrian astrologers from Babylon & environs. On April 17, BC 6, there was an eclipse of Jupiter by the moon in the constellation of the Ram (which signified Israel). Gold : royalty; frankincense : holiness, priesthood; myrrh : death & burial. Lo & behold, there on the program as one of the commentators was William Dalrymple, whose book I mentioned here a few days ago (From the Holy Mountain).

Here's a very old HG poem :

Proverbial


 
I give you the parables as I received them -
my mother's voice, the nursery rhymes,
the memorized rhetoric and the anthem
leading us like sheep to death sometimes.

 
The mystery ringing in our ears,
the noise of the cultivated howl
of ubiquitous unknown lusts and fears,
the music of monkey, wolf and owl.

 
In silence before music and the word,
a voice already prepared to save
delivers you into a pastoral world,
out of the dank and bestial cave.

 
A cadence I cannot repeat just right -
the pristine choir of many morning birds,
or the patience of children in the dancing light
performing the ritual of careful words.

Looking around at home, I found these curious precursors of the long river-poem (Forth of July). Sections of a poem called "Octaves":

4

 
Is it the sea or is it a voice,
or is it a sea-voice (rocked
by heartbeats long ago docked
in petrified wave-lengths, ice-

 
water)?  Or the wind in a tree.
That one, rising like a broken delta.
Speaks through me.
Rafted away now...  Huckleberry.  Selah

 
6

 
Mississippi, Mississippi...
Gravel and silt slide down the stream. 
Mississippi, Mississippi...
Spell it out, spell out your dream.

 
Why should I spell it out for you
(New York - D.C. - California)?
I hit the road before you do.
(Minnesota...  Alabama...)

& finally, here's an couple of odd (as usual) bits of something for the day, from The Grassblade Light:

21

 
The snow covered the ground like the shoulders
of his white bull, only colder, colder; he saw a cloud
of ice breath, chill between warm heartbeats.  Old
Blackstone, in clear December light, ponders, ponders.

 
Some penetrating sound, a loon-call through the aether,
or... some answer to a riddle, rectifying denouement,
perfect solution... some snow-crystalline all right,
like the moon sailing across deep soothing black... or...

 
Good King Wenceslas looked out
on the feast of Stephen
when the snow lay round about
deep and fresh and even

 
High clear children's voices above the dark
tops of pine trees, as they make their way
through snow from house to house.  Gradually,
slowly, peacefully (in the cold night).  Hark

 
the herald angels sing...  He looked out toward the mangers
of the world.  There... on the outside of the inns...
in the cold, among animals, straw, the thin
coverings, the sparse walls... the hungers, the dangers.

 
And like Balthasar astride his mule (riding west
and staring east) old Blackstone thought:
what One is this? - as, bright-wrought,
an arc of moonlight moored above that nest

 
(a lowly nef, berthed under a lofty shell).
An airship, or some hovering bell... it shed
a sweet, translucent music overhead.  And
music changes everything (as Wenceslas could tell).

                       
                     12.24.98





 
22

 
In December, in the snow, in the clear cold air,
everything grows double, everything is allegorical,
like those distant crows, high over the Bruegel
valley, and the hunters turning home, bare

 
bodkins, empty-handed; a half-moon, small
and delicate, glows through a haze,
and the stiletto of one star beside it says:
behold tight-woven final acts of good and evil

 
here now passing... upon theatrical soil.
Here simplest things are full of profundity:
hungry wayfarers, winecellars of reality...
gypsies, flocks, shepherds... an angel.

 
Meanwhile, under the dome, the black stone
of Isaac waits.  And gathering specific gravity,
to the city - through Stephen's Gate - comes Jubilee,
like spring streams down from Zechariah's canyon.

 
And he will stage these holograms of Incarnation
(strange attractors, gathering wise men toward one
star's dark matter)... cask them, roll them on board,
until the ark of Wenceslas is full, and Stephen's crown

 
goes round again, millennial - in those meadows 
where Time does not run down, but circles...
where May Goulding conceived, and Stephen's bulls
are papal, Romany... where Blackstone throws

 
his final boomerang : a child is born,
and everything is changed.  Come down,
you shepherds, to the manger now, come down,
behold - how God is cradling Isaac like a son.

                         
               12.24.98

Wishing you holiday cheer & lights - *

. . . but again, why didn't Hart Crane "break the pentameter"? There was a positive reason : he could reshape the Elizabethan line, as in "For the Marriage of Faustus & Helen", and parts of The Bridge. In Crane the 1590s returned; he was Marlowe as W.Stevens was Shakespeare.

The Nietzschean idea of "eternal return" was in the air; the notion of cyclical time & the presence of the past. It was reflected in Eliot's recapitulation of Tradition, his Heraclitean sense of the conjunction of time & Eternity ("History is Now and England"); it was in Mandelstam's invocations of Ovid; it was in Joyce's overlap of Homer & Dublin; it was in Pound's mythologizing, & Yeats' gyres. Crane thought he could see the recurrence of ancient times, Atlantis/New York in the dentist's chair.

Where you won't find it is in the futurist wing of modernism; for the Futurists, whether Russian or Italian or Vorticist, the past was something to be obliterated for the sake of absolute Progress. They were too much the sophisticated, politicized materialists, to accept some version of neo-Platonic aesthetics. In Russian poetics it's formalized in the divide between Acmeism & Futurism. Total novelty obliterates the potential for the presence of past times, past forms, past poems.

Acmeism, on the other hand, or the eternal return, intimates the possibility of re-incarnation, of time travel, of the ghostly presence of dead avatars, of communion with the dead.

I don't want to repeat a mirror-image of Ron Silliman's simplistic binaries. The futurist Pound & his disciples Olson & Zukofsky certainly created their own very effective versions of the presence of the past (& sometimes of the pentameter, too). But they did so in the context of a radical distancing from ordinary speech & cultural norms. It takes a very refined taste to appreciate how these prodigal sons echoed that general culture by means of ultra-private idioms. Their uncompromising independence makes them culture heros, in a sense; but their choices are not the only option (witness again, for example, Stevens or Crane).

Here's a very old poem of mine. It was written in the 70s, after a visit to the Minneapolis Art Institute. Across the street, hidden among some fir trees, I found a statue of George Washington.


MEMORIAL DAY


Statue standing grey in summer rain,
wrinkled stone worn by many seasons,
brow, shoulders, backbone full of purpose,
memory shivering in the roar of battle,
emblem of endurance everlasting,
lasting now in peacetime summer rain.

Rising in the shadow of the trees,
mist of thoughts returning from the dead,
comes to life within the broken heart,
comes to join the living and the dead,
statue of the mystery of glory,
statue standing grey in summer rain.

I am a prairie dog. Early poem written by young prairie dog:

POEM

Why are the plains like memory,
and the sea like a daydream
where the sun breaks in pieces
of old musicals, blind summers?

The farmhouse far from the ocean
carries my death on waves of wheat,
and bears a heavy childhood too,
bearing a heavy child, my fields -
where we look away to
when the tools are put down
and our hands are free.

When the head leans on the doorpost
and the arms are folded, almost waiting,
the mind could become a river flowing south
and shaking with that human sound.

Perhaps a brief & partial literary timeline will reveal to some extent why I feel puzzled & alienated by the epiphenomena of New American jumbo shrimp, leading to various collisions of the late 90s on the Buffalo Poetics List.

HG Timeline

5.29.1952 - born in Minneapolis. Spends 1st year & a half in grandparents' apt. on Oak St., near U of M campus on Mississippi River.

ca. 1956 - recites first poem, for (workaholic) father, who writes it down on a key tag. Mother saves it:

Play, play,
it's time to play!
Play all day,
that's what I say!
Your work is done,
come out in the sun!
Play, play, play!

(He never abandoned the themes or the late 19th-cent. "pseudo-limerick" style of this early work.)

1957 - suffers from severe case of Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a rare form of polio. Paralyzed up to neck for 2 months. Photo in Mpls Star Trib. upon recovery, in wheelchair, holding life-size Curious George monkey.

1959 - writes 1st short story, after hike in woods with Jamie Freeman & his older sister Mary. Short-story writing continues into high school.

1959-1969 - INTENSE, CONTINUAL reading of fiction. Favorites include Nabokov, Grass, Catch-22, many many. . .

1964 - Recites "Charge of the Light Brigade" from memory for 6th grade English class.

1966 - Reads "For a Gift of Watermelon Pickle", a popular poetry anthology. Memorizes ee cummings' "In Just- Spring"

1969-70 - edits high school lit magazine, Talisman. Inspired by Padgett/Shapiro NY School anthology, begins writing imitations of Berrigan, Ashbery, et al. Many many favorites. Transfers childhood fascination/fetishization with toy soldiers to these poetic objects.

1969 - applies for C.O. draft status; takes student deferment.

1970 - for Senior Speech in high school, recites narrative poem in the persona of an anti-war protestor. During long ride to March on Washington, protagonist is seduced by "Dark Lady" in the back of the bus; ends up as aging hippie guru isolated in Rocky Mountains, his children having become successful businesspeople.

1970 - Berrigan imitations & soccer playing win admission to Brown University (rejected by several other colleges).

early 70s - takes full advantage of Brown "New Curriculum" by pursuing creative writing courses as much as possible. Wins 3 poetry awards in sophomore year.

1972 - depression after suicide of cousin Juliet Ravlin. (Blurry photo of Henry, Julie & sister Cara, ca. 1968, here.) Vocational uncertainties, social disorientations.

Late 1972 - reads Shakespeare's Sonnets. Uncanny sense that the Bard is addressing him directly. Frightened by this, changes major to history, renounces writing.

Summer 1973 - reads Bible while working on ranch in Wyoming.

Fall 1973 to 1976 - During 1st days of senior year at Brown, re-reads Sonnets. Has sudden manic breakdown when ghost of Shakespeare again seems to be "present" in the room. Initiates week of spiritual turmoil, soul at war between Bible & Shakespeare, paranoia about literary fame conspiracy & demonic possession, purchases gun, throws gun in Seekonk River. (Story told more fully in Glass of Green Tea - With Honig). Goes home to recuperate for a week (while there, shows complex new narrative poem about A. Hamilton & Aaron Burr to psychiatrist. Psychiatrist says he may not be able to respond very objectively since he's a direct descendant of Aaron Burr). Returns to Brown; drops out one month later. Becomes wandering solitary "Jesus freak", working odd jobs, playing guitar, reading, meditating, occasionally writing, Providence-Minneapolis-Cora, Wyo.-Denver-Los Angeles-S.F.-New York-London-Providence.

1975 - London. Works under the table at odd jobs. Plays guitar & harmonica in pub band. Applies for Mick Taylor's former job w/Rolling Stones. Discusses Bible & Wm. Blake with Keith Richards; attempted employment & attempted conversion of K. Richards both unsuccessful.

1976 - returns from London upon illness of grandfather; re-enters Brown & finishes B.A.

1977 - discovers poetry of Mandelstam (in translation). Reads Nadezhda Mandelstam memoirs (Hope Against Hope, Hope Abandoned). Begins slow process of recovering poetic capability independent of religious fervor.

1978 - Organizes/manages Kneecap Food Coop, a storefront food coop. Manages CETA project construction of community solar greenhouse based on geometry of "vesica" designs, found in John Michell's popular studies of prehistoric architecture & numerology of "New Jerusalem". (Site eventually torn down by Brown University for housing project.)

1979 - Marries Francesca Tagliabue, daughter of Maine poet John Tagliabue.

1980-83 - works as VISTA volunteer for various Providence community organizations. Continues attempts at writing; deepens interest in 20th-century moderns Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Eugenio Montale, et al. Sustained study of Mandelstam's style, poetics, worldview as counter-weight to American traditions.

- to be continued (maybe) -

1983 - After partial dismantling of the VISTA program by the Reagan Admin., spent 10 mos. working as a "professional resume writer". Fired after not charging enough for resumes. Finds job at Brown U. Library (Door Guard). Begins posthumous literary life.

- to be continued again (???)

Poetry as language of desire & insufficiency (Orpheus needing Eurydice etc.). Broken symmetry.

Poetry as embodied language, pregnant. Inherently catholic and scandalous. Title poem from Way Stations:


The child honoring you in dreams,
embrasure of innocence, tender shoots
of early radiance - your figure
landscape, unfamiliar town, scent
of May lilacs along a worn road.

Not to be known yet,
only a heavy cloud pregnant
with summer rain
(iron mortality, rust
of decline not yet to be);

gathering up your skirts
you make your way, slow path
beyond the jealous decorations,
fever of scorn, offended pride,
dry branches crackling - a bonfire.

Have been away in Minnesota for a few days.

May just stay away.

The Romans put a rose over the door to indicate "do not disturb" or secret, hence the term "sub rosa". I didn't know that when I wrote this old thing, back in the 70s.


HUE

Words kind as rain pour down
from mothers and fathers of gentle eye.

Bees have hidden in the hive's head
a little sunlight fallen on the field.

Small planets hover in the immense
blue Pacific of starlit. . .; morning

mumbles rustling branches of night
into morning glories, and a rose

resides, lightly bearded with snow,
on the ancient wall above your door.

*

My parents live near the River Road in Minneapolis, along the Mississippi, only a block or so from where they both grew up. Circles in nature.

The height of my novel-devouring period was when I was about 16. I loved the smell of a new paperback, lingered over its shape & size & lettering. Tin Drum, & . . .

May quit blogging & try to close that circle myself. Don't feel like this is my world, really, gang. Back in RI, sub Rhody, sub-sub-sub-librunque.

Webster's says "booby" refers to any of several small gannets of tropical seas; any of several American ducks; an awkward foolish person; the poorest performer or lowest scorer in a group. A modification of Spanish bobo, from L. balbus, meaning "stammering".

"babble", on the other hand, derives from ME babelen, prob. of imit. origin.

"babbitt metal" - an alloy used for lining bearings. to "babbitt" is to line or furnish with babbitt metal.

Which reminds me of this early prom, circa 1971:


CONVERSATIONS WITH TIME TO SPARE

"We have three now, we have three now, we have three. Keep those three."

"We have three minutes, ladies and gentlemen:
Jake, Maria, and Bobo of Minneapolis.
Jake and Maria are alone together
with the creek and the sun will watch itself
go down in a puddle, now watch Bobo,
he's going to fall,
do it Maria -"

compass dance. Jake, Maria and
being here makes it all so necessary to refer back
inside the orange for another point of view.
"This man is a. . . foot." A foot, yes, but
one of the best. He's not any kind of foot,
he's an ordinary foot. Leave him,
crowd, the summer will enjoy him -
he'll answer back with frequent, often
dazzling postcards, with details from his life
in toenail clippings, articles of hair, smiles.

"I suppose you're all wondering why I called you Herby.
It's an easy-going sort of name,
one which
you might as well throw away as construct into
subtle, silent postcards." (three, three, three. . .)

The kids in the front yard are playing statue.
It's a subtle, humorous game - several
domesticated animals join in too - the grandparents
play croquet or sit on the porch,
relaxing in the hot air,
in their friendly, birthday skins.

an old poem from Way Stations


Between the parchment of an ending testament
and tongue-tied shadows crowded in a dream -
between blind feelers urgent in the city
and useless talent lodged in bitter syllables -

hanging, balanced on a grim little hill
among thieves and huddled followers, the Word
consents to dying in an empty theater -
to match the futile world with an empty tomb.

Haven't had much time to blog lately.

Readers probably put off by my para-religious discourse sometimes. I can't help it, sorry : it's part of me, ever since religio-psychological crisis here at old Brunonia in 1973, when I thought Shakespeare & Jesus were hovering around my dorm room.

My work in poetry a scrap heap of hesitant forays. Line from which the title came :
"Hesitant, grieving, stubborn grew, the rose."

Have been reading a lot about the ancient Greeks. Am interested in POETICS as an exploration of the borderline between different kinds of knowledge : philosophy, science, history, poetry. & poetry as means of presenting states of feeling & experience that are elusive, not so easily subject to definition & categorical discourse. Talking about this some in the Jacket interview with Kent Johnson.

No, this blog post is not a resume, sorry.
No David H., I'm not a "projectivist". Too much magic thinking & mumbo-jumbo, not enough art.

But I AM recurrently interested, very much so, in the concepts circling around poetry and "polis", or city-making. It's a steady theme in Pound, WCW, Olson, Crane's long poems. It's something I've generally taken an interest in, having an M.A. & experience in neighborhood organizing, living in a little city-state, etc. No this is not a resume, sorry.

Poetry is not rational discourse. But it's not necessarily irrational. Wallace Stevens was so interested in this issue. It's not rational because underlying its organicness (sound & sense synthesis, animality) is a kind of a priori AFFIRMATION, prior to dialectics or discussion. It's an enunciation all by itself that creates a roundedness, a sense of pleroma, fulness. That a priori emphatic phatic speech - is that what worried the philosopher (Plato)?

Funny doubleness of poetry : dangerously solipsistic on the one hand; amazingly responsive to direct immediate particular reality, nature, thingness, emotion, experience, on the other. Consequence of the impulse to make sounds, prior to their "correctness", appropriateness (Dante ends Divina Commedia with imitation of baby talk).

Yet the art is about fitness & finish. Which also represent or reflect ethical qualities. Place in good poetry where technique, theme, inspiration coalesce. Cannot be willed or faked. Also often domesticated into permanent Boredom-world (I too dislike it).

Orphism represented "soul search" in Greek world of power-polis. World poetry, poetry in English, American poetry, New American subcultures - what a universe of Babble ! But poetry is an unaccountable synthesis, an appearance of talent, a rarity. & we sicken ourselves on rich food.

Here's an old poem (I know, I posted this back in Jan.):


at noon

Orpheus sings alone,
his lyre left in the wind
moaning in elliptical harmony.

Persephone sleeps, her head
hidden in her arms, and shadows
of clouds passing over her hair.

And John, in his prison, hears
dance music in the rooms above,
and the sound of an axe on stone.

I guess my poem "Lousanna" (blogged here on Friday) ends with a little Picardy 3rd.