they were playing Benjamin Britten

LEAF-MURMUR

In the peace & quiet of her little room

with cactus & late poinsettia

on the sill, she’s growing quieter

herself, just one step from the tomb.

They were playing Benjamin Britten

on the radio, his Moonlight

from Sea Interludes.  Slow

breathing, like tides come in;

the pulse of one high cresting wave;

flute-shrieks of gulls.

Her strong deep swells…

receding now.  She curls concave

into her wheelchair, brave head bowed

(the pride of life, brought low).

Her potter’s wheel, slow

spinning, rounds her own clay into cloud

as in the Garden of Gesthemane

all-powerful God

knelt to his own rough mud

fleshing star-fire to flinty harmony.

The wheel of life, how she runs down

at last!  This shadow of herself

feigns sleep, feigns prayer.  Only

the fleeting elfin smile remains her own.

Stalin, Akhmatova… terror & grace,

beauty & ugliness meet

in the grave.  A life’s complete

that hears leaf-murmur through a face.

3.5.20

oak-leaf plate by Mary R. Gould

near the pin of the spoke

ALMOND BOAT

Love & harmony are the spring of song

murmured the little holm oak

near the pin of the spoke

& sanction of same, she sapped along;

so I task you, febrile Henry Hobo,

tiny A-grade acorn, flow.

So down to Gulf of Mexico

adrifted on the current, shady Penny-O

& me.  Time was an arc of aquamarine,

with cloud-ships for dreaming;

transumptive Ocean, circuiting

the galaxies, checkmating history (unseen,

almost).  Our boat was an ovoid ovum

chicken-coop (Rhode Island

Red) ruddered by hand –

she wove you liberty & welcome

for your immersive infancy of joy –

sails belling with sweet air

of solidarity & friendly care,

infinity of each one in our eye.

& Penny dreamt alongside, inside me

in the same language, dark

& light – Lady of the Ark

closer than whisper, vaster than sea.

Like Beatrice or Eurydice or Mary,

she’s Iris in her almond boat –

shimmering beyond this moat

gripped by the Minotaur, to set us free.

2.7.20

message to President Donald Trump

Dear President Trump,

Just thought I'd share something we here in America call "harmony".  Harmony is a concord of different notes - "e pluribus unum" expresses the same idea. We don't try to hate & attack & control others, because we all come from the same place, we're all brothers & sisters. Life is good. We're all immigrants & pilgrims in this world.

Sincerely,
Henry Gould

 

Of Marcel Proust, of Oblomov

TEEMING ORBIT

In the old octagonal gazebo

shaded from sunrays

screened from mosquitoes

I think of Marcel Proust, of Oblomov;

of the haze of tranquil summers

in an equilibrium

of nature.  Let it come.

The books fade into memoirs,

epics filigree life’s borders

with remote heroics

while the housecat licks

his fur, & children play recorders.

To live life on the edge

of the petunia patch.

To bandage every scratch,

wipe every tear...  sea-azure pledge!

Noah’s flute-compass – a pilot’s

Providence – the homing

pigeon’s purple ring

of ocarina nostos-pivots...

Deep down in the teeming orbit

of the clay, a blessed

favor lifts each nested

creature into intricate

brush-feathered limestone – emerald

fresco, where white-

haired eagles congregate –

floresce into the parchment (gold).

5.18.16

To say the beautiful is strict, absolute, universal, objective, rooted in nature... is only half of the equation. The beautiful is also surprising, original, unaccountable, challenging, recalcitrant, sometimes awful, terrible, tremendous.

The beautiful is a balance between creative power & the inherent proportions of nature. A proportion of proportions.

Even the poems that reject or deny harmony can't escape its presence, lurking in the background.

It's easy to define the beautiful. Much harder to find & defend it. That's the critic's job : to apprehend beauty where it wasn't noticed before.

It might be easier to understand what I was trying to get at yesterday, with my rubrics about poetry's transcendental perfection, if we think of such a characteristic as analogous to what music is & does.

I don't want to think of music "inhabiting" poetry, translating it into an unknown beautiful dream-speech (symbolism). I want to think of the harmony of poetry as sui generis, as applying its own peculiar powers & methods; but that the beauty expressed in painting & music is evidence of analogous forms of harmony.

I think of poetry's harmony as global, manifest in all languages. Global, yet strict. Something different from Ron Silliman's or Josh Corey's "post-avant community".

The strictness I'm talking about has to do with beauty's inherent qualities, which, in poetry, encompass the objects of both sense & intellect, and have to comprehend all the human & natural constructions which make up tradition - going back to the origins of language on the one hand, and the origins of the universe on the other.

in poetry we hear the echo or flicker of something. . . thus Pushkin calls poets the children of "Harmony".

Joyce saw history through the lens of messed-up family relations, the tragicomedy of mingled affection & indifference, perception & blind insensitivity. . . "love's old sweet song"

Kent's take on the effect of WCW/Rakosi-style prosody (in his essay linked here yesterday)  is the opposite of Mike's & New Formalist theory.  Kent says that the unpredictability of same creates the possibility of clearer poetic perception, less mediated by ego or tradition.   NF theory, as Mike has described it, holds that the metrical patterns & their variations help create the conditions for meaning to emerge.
 
These are basic 20th-cent. positions on the difference between free verse & metrical form.  Pound sought to "break the pentameter", pushed for ideograms/imagism.  Stevens, I think, used rhythm - with both free & metrical bases - as one facet of his own musicality (which also employs phonic values, repetition, fantastic vocabulary, and other means toward this end).
 
The idea that poetry fulfills its function by reflecting natural & divine order by means of measure & harmony is very olde.  It hasn't gone away, either - witness the various theories promoting iambic pentameter as based on biology and natural form  (cf. - for fun - Sir Thomas Browne's Garden of Cyrus for the prevalence of the number "5" in nature). 
 
The general critical take on Modernism, though - reflected in Kent's analysis of Stevens - has been that this intellectual/artistic era had no faith in overarching order or natural harmony : rather, art imposed its autonomous orders as a guard or protest against the violence & chaos "outside".
 
So the free-verse/postmodern/(Taoist, Kent?) position faults metrical formalism on two counts: its idealism and its traditionalism. The idealism layers over nature with an imposed order; the traditionalism blocks innovation & new perception.
 
How to get beyond these (rather worn-out) dichotomies?
 
Rather than arguing that "there is no such thing as free verse", say : all verse is free.
 
How so?  Verse is free in the sense that the poetic word can function as both music and anti-music, as order and disruption.  Poetry can be song, but it is not only or necessarily song.  Poetry can be the closest thing to a curse, or to silence itself.
 
I would say that the activity of the poet is essentially an orientation toward harmony.  But harmony operates on more than one level : there is an intellectual as well as a sensible harmony, and sometimes the former counters, opposes, negates the latter; sometimes sensible harmony is configured ironically to veil a very different intellectual substance.  Intellectual harmony is logical, reasonable, ethical : it may have formal or mathematical or aesthetic aspects - but these elements may be at work to break superficial or oppressive "harmonies" of "nature".  It may be subversive in this sense.
 
Order, pattern, harmony - the interwoven wheels and forms and numbers of time & nature are irreducible facts.  We take physical pleasure - perhaps even physical health - in the octave and the circle of fifths and the pythagorean triangle & the shapes and colors of leaves & sky & fresh air.  But when Stevens, say, writes that "poetry is the sanction of life," I don't think he's granting poetry such prestige simply because of its ability to mimic or model the physical harmonies of nature.  The freedom of the poet to find and articulate intellectual harmony - another name for it might be justice - functions at the active, living center of the purely aesthetic or natural harmonies.
 
So these general notions of the poet's role have some implications for prosody, perhaps.  The sovereign freedom of the poetic word moves toward musical harmony or against it, at will.
 
The general ground I'm trying to sketch out here, though, doesn't support the arguments of the free verse wing any more than it does the New Formalist.  I repeat my comment posted yesterday:  the argument that WCW/Rakosi style imagism or impressionism allows nature or reality access to the poem, in a way that a more rhythmically-patterned prosody (such as some of Stevens') does not, avoids the whole issue of pattern and regularity and form in nature.  The coherences of formal repetition in poetry can represent the fantastically interwoven coherences of natural ecology:  the subsuming of line to stanza to poem can mirror the overlay of forces and powers which move through time and space, and also the overlay of themes and meanings which the poet wants to emphasize or interlace.  These patterns have at least as much reality as the contingent perceptions of the romantic imagist.

... back to the search for a word beneath the word "image" (by the way, that's when I discovered the Secret of Comment Box : if you want responses, don't make pronouncements - just ask a question) -

anyway, Wallace Stevens is almost too quotable, but I happened on this, from his poem "Study of Images II":

As if, as if, as if the disparate halves
Of things were waiting in a betrothal known
To none, awaiting espousal to the sound

 
Of right joining, a music of ideas, the burning
And breeding and bearing birth of harmony,
The final relation, the marriage of the rest.

This plays with the aura, the resonance, the symbolism, the overtones, the whole or the source of "disparate" imagery...

What's the positive term for "quietude" (Ron's diss) ?

Harmony ? Reading Bloom : he says (after Plato) that poetry emerges when reason enters music. He writes much about the relations between reason, passion, faith.

Or maybe : equanimity ?