Ravenna Diagram

As testified by both Annie Akhmatovy & Wheelliam Bootler Yeats (not to mention Wally Stuyvens), nobody knows like they do how much poetry depends upon the foul rag-&-bone shop of the dump.  So I confess I am very obscurely fixated on a work of probable horoscopic Masonic garbage (if seemingly very diligently researched) by one David Ovason, titled The Secret Architecture of our Nation's Capital.  Ovason appears to have turned poor Henry Adams on his Educational head.

Adams, scion of the original American Presidential-Egyptian dynasty, built his own historical philosophy on the contrast, the dialectic, between the Virgin & the Dynamo : the feminine-poetic-Christian heritage of the Middle Ages (Chartres, Notre Dame) vs. the technical-scientific Chaos of modern Power (Washington, Chicago...).    Yet according to Ovason, the landscape, architecture & sculpture of Washington, D.C. emanate a controlling hermetic geomantic pattern, overlaid on the nation's capital by the Masons - a radiance of the constellation Virgo, or the Virgin - the Corn Maiden, the Rite of Spring, Pocahontas, the Statue of Liberty... all those images & psychic icons certain ecstatic-Platonic poets (unacknowledged legislators) like Hart Crane articulated and defended as embattled (in prosaic America).  Somehow the Corn Maiden got in on the ground floor of the national grain elevator.

So I wrote in previous blog post about my personal affinity for ut pictura poiesis - the idea that at the heart of poetry is this visionary-shaping painterly dimension.  Poetry, by way of its rhythmic sonic mesmerism, communicates wave-lengths of vivid images - drawn from life and adequately mirroring living (as opposed to absent, detached, prosaic, humdrum, depersonalized) reality.  In the long-poem project Ravenna Diagram, I reckon that, for me, Ravenna represents a kind of civilizational matrix for this particular sense of incarnational iconophilia.  The "venn diagram" of Ravenna Diagram is a visual image of the union of two-in-one, the sacred marriage of spirit & flesh.  As an historical phenomenon : as a pivotal event which frames one's sense of the direction of our future world.

There are lots of things going in today's excerpt, which cluster around these ideas, along with others... I can't go into them all.  The idea of the "lattice" and the "Path P" are allusions to the chi-rho symbol : the pneuma (Spirit) P rising (like the Ghost Dance) over the lattice of the "X"... the "Path P" also refers to "poetry", thinking of Dante, buried in Ravenna - whose masterwork was completed in Ravenna, and which features, at its very end, another venn diagram (Dante's vision of the Trinity as a mysterious set of interlocking rainbow circles).

CLAY LIPS

If I whisper out of this backyard garden

& word went forth from Ramah

Rachel weeps... no more

a cricket shuttles through the iron

lattice – churring chi-rho, chi-rho

a pigeon croons là-bas

là-bas... labarum... abba...

baa... lambs on a radius go

round, skip stones, elliptical

(up to the mountaintop).

Rough clay lips elope

for steppes, ignite pyramidical

lens – Nile coming-forth-of-July

in one almond canoe;

wooden frame for yew

rainbow (adieu beyond river-eye).

Beneath an avalanche of violence

the lattice rusts, the eye

corrodes.  Still clay

will coalesce, in tinder hands;

Giuliana in her mossy coat

& frowning eye signal

another way; lips channel

shapes (mosaic, inchoate)...

Ravenna diagram, vertiginous cross-

road into Washington.

Path P, star-tangled almond

tree – here chariots bloom (manes toss).

6.30.15

Friday on the Ponderosa

We look back, we reminisce, and in the process we shape, suppress, edit, & deform everything.  For the sake of an idea or an argument, we oversimplify.  But it's unavoidable - and sometimes it's useful.  Sometimes a confusing series of events long ago can be summarized, characterized... maybe illuminated.

*

What is the ground of civilization?  What makes for a peaceful, free, happy & just world?  Good will toward others.  The ability to transmit as much goodness & kindness to others as we would like to receive ourselves.  The sense of universal justice.  The recognition of the dignity of persons.  The sense of responsibility toward nature & the sustaining earth.

The words alone sound Pollyanna-ish - a wishful, sentimental pablum.  But that's how it is sometimes with words.  One way to think of the poetic notion of "incarnational speech", or the idea of "the Word made Flesh", is with a moral recognition of the limitations of mere words.  "Words made flesh" are words materialized in deeds, in action.  So we have the saying "a man/woman of his/her word".  To "keep your word" is to acknowledge the responsibility for the promise of a commitment.  A covenant of words "underwritten" by deeds.

*

In ordinary & contemporary everyday life - and setting aside for a moment those times of real suffering and crisis -  we are made constantly aware of the friction and trade-offs and anxieties and irritations involved in our interactions with others.  Other drivers, other shoppers, other co-workers, other neighbors... the little frictions & frayings which result from opposing territorial rights.  "It's my turn to go at the stop sign."  Road rage, etc.  The spirit of community, the sense of fellow-feeling, the willingness to be flexible, to give way, to respect others.... how fragile these things sometimes seem in a competitive world of demanding, self-interested, sometimes arrogant & selfish people...

These bourgeois realities of wear & tear have their parallels in the macrocosm of politics.  We live in a country split between two major parties, whose central dividing line appears to be a dispute over the boundaries of private and public interest.  Republicans stand for liberty and small government.  Democrats stand for equality and big government.  On this disagreement over the proper territories of the private & the public, the individual & the collective, property rights & social rights, the whole country seems to be slowly grinding to a paralyzed standstill, or stand-off.

Mine & yours.  Ours & theirs. The two parties divide the country by way of a mimesis, a magnified mirror of ourselves : ourselves at an intersection, having lost our temper.  Angry, stupid, self-righteous grumps, unwilling to give an inch.  My way or the highway... my way or the highway...

& it's all about the common good.  Except the two parties agree to disagree, since it means so much for their fundraising & public relations.

*

Jesus in the Gospels somewhere says you have to choose.  "No man can have two masters : you must serve God or Mammon (riches, wealth)."

Doctrinaire dogmatists of various stripes have often interpreted this in ways that serve their own absolutist political aims.  We see the same thing in the propaganda wars between extreme enthusiasts of both Left & Right.  Left dogmatists idealize the State, the Collective, the Common Good.  Right dogmatists extol Liberty, Property, & Privacy.

I'm a conservative liberal, a liberal conservative.  I hold with the "incarnational" idea that mere words & theoretical formulae with regard to political principles have to be tested & confirmed in actual, working, unspoken, normal, active life.  (I won't call this pragmatism, however, because I think that word is often used as a cover for expediency.)

It's possible to imagine a humane community of persons who, in their own ways, set aside pure selfishness (Mammon) on behalf of better, more altruistic goals (the social pursuit of happiness, for example).

Call it a global civil society.  When people are just - when they rise above their own narrow self-interest on behalf of love, charity & the common good - they work together to solve common problems.  The common good does not necessarily entail or require the surrender of property rights.  Collectivism, in general, does not serve human happiness any more than private greed does.  They  both (in opposing ways) detract from human rights & dignity.  But we all need to seek the right balance of public & private : both in our personal lives & in society at large.

Many ideological enthusiasts will certainly describe this as a lamentable form of sentimental delusion.  Maybe.  I just call it "the pursuit of happiness."

In fact the two faces of private greed & collective statism - let's call them Mammon & Cyclops - coincide in the Janus-face of Theft (like the two thieves hanging on either side of the crucified Son of Man).  "Behold, I am coming like a thief."   The current government of China, for example, has masterfully welded private greed & authoritarian collectivism into a seamless whole.  Meanwhile, of course, we in the U.S. have our own thriving cults of Mammon & Ideology, with all their down-home refinements of hypocrisy & fraud.  (Mark Twain & Herman Melville anatomized our special talents in this area 150 years ago.)  This is the world of force, not consent.  The Iron Age, not the Golden.  The Tower of Babel, not the Kingdom of God.

*

French thinker Jacques Rancière has an eloquent, subtle essay on the poetry of Mandelstam in his book Chair des mots (Flesh of Words).  He interprets poems from Tristia (& others) within a political-historical context, the movement from 19th-cent. republicanism & romanticism (Wordsworth), to the revolutionary 20th century.  It's about the impasse of lyric poetry in general & Mandelstam's particular (& in Tristia, definitely elegiac) "resolution" (comprehension) of this impasse.  I think  Rancière offers only a "partial" Mandelstam in this essay, which seems suffused (the essay) with a fairly pessimistic consciousness.  (Understandable, really, when you acknowledge 20th-cent. history.)

But his reading brings out elements of Mandelstam's own "program" (which R. describes as more idealistic than the poetry itself) : the Acmeist concepts of "domestic hellenism", which he traces back in part to M.'s allegiance to the Russian language itself, and its roots in Eastern Orthodoxy.  Some of these threads emerge in M.'s short (truncated) essay "Pushkin & Scriabin" : the freedom of the poetic word runs parallel to human cultural freedom generally, which is, in its "Western" manifestation, underwritten by the Redemption.  The free gift of love of the "Word made Flesh" sets art free (along with everything else) - to play "hide & seek with the Father" (but see Robert Paul's great, & rather darker, neo-Freudian interpretation of all this in his book Moses & Civilization).

Maybe you can see how this particular shaping of a sense of Mandelstam's "incarnational" poetics has echoes, parallels, with the general "liberal conservative" political stance I've been sketching out here.  This was all laid out in the first (biographical) chapters of Clarence Brown's early study (Mandelstam) : the Acmeists emerged from the last vestiges of an "ordinary", church-going,  pre-Revolutionary Russian middle class.

Maybe some things come back around again...

*

When we reminisce about our own remote past, we select, we over-simplify.  40 years ago I went through a psychological crisis which brought on, or was triggered by, a sort of upwelling of uncanniness & inexplicable, irrational experiences.  I've written about it several times before.  I think a sort of "rational" way of analyzing that crisis would be to think of it as an adolescent vocational impasse.  I was a poet, of all things - a poet in America - & I couldn't handle it.

As a result I had an "encounter" with the Bible & Shakespeare.  You could say I was thrown back on the literary foundations of Western culture - I had to reiterate them, recapitulate them in terms of my own breakdown.  Somehow I kept my head about water - but it changed me.  The ground had shifted : you could say I became intellectually committed to the notion of a spiritual Presence or subjectivity.  Thus words to the wise like "No one can serve two masters - you must serve either God or Mammon" (along with the rest of the Bible) seemed to manifest a real "living" imprint : a personal charisma.

My "encounter" with Mandelstam a few years later had nothing irrational or uncanny about it.  I didn't feel Mandelstam's personal "spirit" drawing near.  Instead, his life & words seemed to help me actualize or realize or amend the original break between everyday reality and religious enthusiasm.  Because, perhaps, for me it all began - the crisis itself - in a specifically literary context.  It was a problem for a poet, a problem of poetry.  It was a local iteration of the story - of the Word made Flesh...

Oren Izenberg intro

I'm very intrigued by this preview/intro to a new book by Oren Izenberg. It reads as quite clear & sensible to me... looking forward to seeing the book itself. Some of the emphases he outlines here seem related or fairly close to some things I've been blogging about (more incoherently) for some time : that is, the connection between a philosophical and ethical concept of "the person" as fundamental to our engagement with the aesthetic & artistic dimension of poems & poets...

I see this as a dimension I've sketched out elsewhere as "incarnational." A loaded (overloaded) word, I realize : in my scribbles it refers in part to a sense of life, reality, time, the cosmos, etc. as centered in, & somehow proportioned for, the person... the person as an ethical, teleological, aesthetic "end" or ultimate & self-sufficient framework or life-purpose...

A few days ago, reading a book by Hubert Damisch, A childhood memory by Piero della Francesca, I came upon a passage where Damisch discusses a theological concept called the Verbum infans, or "infant Word" (as the Piero work he analyzes is an image of the pregnant Virgin Mary). Damisch remarks that the Verbum infans, as (purely verbal) Word of God, in a sense disappears, or goes silent, as it is "made flesh", become incarnate, in the living divine Person (of Jesus).

The comment fertilized some inchoate ponderings on my part, which I am still working out. I thought about the particular aesthetic dimension of poetry - of the imaginative constructions of art & their inherent value as beautiful things, as ends in themselves. & I thought about how this involved representations : mimesis, recognizable impressions & images from the shared experience of both artist and audience, poet & reader. & I thought about how poetry seems to tend toward the dramatic : from the mini-dramas of a lyric poem to the full-fledged spectacle of a narrative or dramatic story, a novel or play. & I thought about something that Plato worried about : the danger that our artistic ("virtual") representations might actually displace or replace the reality which they represent. This is a way in which "Word becomes flesh" - the poetic word embodied in dramatic mimesis - which loses itself, goes silent, is absorbed in the larger synthesis, the synthetic whole, of its mirrored images.

How might poetry resist this displacement of reality, this turn to the self-absorption of its own mirrored irreality? I think perhaps poets themselves resist this pressure of the unreal, in various ways... One way they might do this is through a kind of reduction or abstraction - an intentional self-limitation. The poem does not aspire to be a "universal whole" or total mimesis : rather it aims for its own quiddity, or unique integrity - which might very well involve the making of literary fragments & very short poems, rather than cosmic epics or play cycles. (I'm thinking of this in terms of my original reaction to reading some short lyrics by Mandelstam in a Providence bookstore : how I was so taken with their brief, sudden, puzzling, musical but mysterious imagery. A kind of "experience-shorthand" or telegraphy.) Another way that poets might offer resistance is through the intentional cross-over or intercalation of person & poem, of art & experience : with the result that in responding to a poem we react to the presence of both a person & a poem, an artistic creation and a personal communication.... Poets & poetry have a way of pushing through the barriers erected between the objectivity of the art work and the personal charisma or presence of the poet....

But I have to think about this some more. (Paul Celan dealt with some of these questions in his little story "Conversation in the Mountains"...)

Gabriel Gudding has a big new book out (Rhode Island Notebook).

Obscure spider threads seem to bind the fate of these two former-Minnesotan poets (that is, Gabriel & me). Members of the School of Embodied Poetry. Minnesota, midwestern homesickness, the wedding (I was their best man), the amazing "Clio" poem serendipity (according to that other RI visitant, Ange Mlinko, sort of a Kieslowski film in embryo), Rhode Island, family history, long poems, epic journeys. Rhode Island is a small cosmos.

(Stubborn Grew, In RI - TWO MORE excessive poems by a Minnesotan about Rhode Island, family break-ups, history, politics, epic journeys (Henry, Bluejay, Roger Williams) - they're companion volumes to Gabriel's book. We're somehow akin in that Eliotic (idiotic?) tradition-realm. Read all 3 together. Teach them in class. That's an order. We're re-writing American culture as Rhode Island poetry.)

Both Maximus & Paterson interpellate the narrator/poet with the image of "poet" generally & with the nexus of the "local history". There is some of this in In RI (the poem notes, for example, the coincidence of the poet's birthday and RI Statehood Day) - but it's more diffuse, less dramatized. In both Olson & Williams, you get this "here I am doing this now" work-in-progress scene-setting. In RI is a little bit more impersonal, maybe. Working in a loose genre already set up by Olson & WCW. I was only doing warm-ups, anyway, for the more intense poet-dramatization of Forth of July.

This vague "figure in a landscape" situation of poet-speaking-from-the-local-nook : has some interesting connotations. I mean in terms of the special relation between writing & person, "word & flesh", "letter & spirit". In an "incarnational poetry" (as Guy Raffa points out in his book Divine dialectic), poetry represents the fusion of letter and spirit, the collapse of the opposition between the two.

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

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.)

Related topics (there are others) : breakdown, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry's books, Shakespeare...

... of course, you can interpret Prickett's theme of metaphorical "double focus" vision in religious terms (cf. "single vision and Newton's sleep" - Blake). Transcendent divinity and incarnate mortality. The eye shifting back & forth, unable to grasp the two-in-one... logos shifting back & forth, yoking & dividing the opposites... cf. Sanford Budick, Dividing muse : images of sacred disjunction in Milton's poetry. Budick contrasts/compares ancient versions of logos (Heraclitus and Philo, Greek & Hebrew) - excellent book.

Maybe the language poets' (or I should say Ron Silliman's historical version of same) reaction against "speech", and American anecdotal poetry, signalled a dissatisfaction with narrative and representation; but it seems predicated on an equally simplistic (ie. as simplistic as the prose realists') concept of representation. One sees a New-Critical emphasis on the technical analysis of the "verbal object", its autotelism - Clark Coolidge's "word-drumming".

The issue of representation-as-communication - as parable, if you will - is downplayed.

The Romantics understood inspiration as a progressive, purposeful movement of ecstatic vision : the sun is not a 1-inch bright disk in the sky, but a burning eye at the "top" of the visible world, an emblem of the fusing power of spiritual insight - the synthetic, imaginative intelligence. For Hopkins, each thing speaks itself, and in speaking, "selves" itself - communication is its essence; it mirrors the dark "speech" of its origins in the Logos.

These stances imply a cosmology, obviously! A particular interpretation of nature & experience.

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.)

Did you follow all that, all that I posted on Friday? The eyes blur over.

It's blurry, I know. The idea is that poetry is a special kind of "embodied" speech, analogous to incarnation. An end in itself, as well as a representation of something else.

& the concept of incarnation stems from a metaphysics, if you will, which includes both divine & human; not one without the other. A religious perspective which includes BOTH divine will and human self-will, human freedom. This is the general idea that underlies Renaissance christian humanism, Dante's polemic for a balance between Pope & Emperor, Roger Williams' demand for liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state.

When I look back at the poem (Stubborn Grew, etc.) I see it as expressing a position in the middle, facing 2 ways: first, by celebrating Roger Williams & echoing Dante in certain ways (the "octagonal" design described on Fri.), it represents this humanist stand for freedom of conscience & the separation of political & religious authority; second - especially in the 3rd book, July - it represents the distance between present-day dispositions of political power ("Julius" - military-state force) and a utopian future ("Jubilee").

After returning to the US from my year in London, I went back to school, finally (3 yrs later), to finish my senior year. The hangover from my wanderings, a combination of scruples & exhaustion, led me to a new, somewhat firmer renunciation of literature. I needed to do something social & impersonal. At Brown I did a year's independent study of local RI agriculture, and after graduation, I turned a small health food store near campus into a food cooperative (this is a very Minnesota thing, by the way).

5 years later, in the early '80s, my life was quite different. I was married, a parent, a VISTA volunteer working with community organizations in downtown Providence.

Gradually, too, I had been developing what was, for me, a somewhat new approach to poetry. The charismatic-ecstatic-egotistical adventures of the 70s were in a sense projected, vicariously, onto the sacrificial-paradigmatic career of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. I had happened upon a volume of his work (Selected Poems, trans. David McDuff; NY: FSG, 1973) & liked it immediately, which led me to his wife Nadezhda's 2-vol set of memoirs (Hope Against Hope; Hope Abandoned). & this led me back to other poets, with renewed interest: Anna Akhmatova, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale, Ezra Pound...

How to describe my new sense of what poetry was about? I would say I was developing a perspective in which poetry was, as Stevens calls it, "the sanction of life". How so?

I began to think of poetry as a mode of communication which represents, better than any other verbal mode, the actuality of things and experience. What gives poetry this special role is its creative/aesthetic self-sufficiency, its reflexivity. Because poetry is "good in itself", because its language is not simply a delivery-system for something else, but a (partial) end in itself - as such, therefore, poetry reflects or shines forth the "glory" of reality, its inner creative meaning, its character as "creation".

I began to identify with the sacred/sacrificial, the incarnational quality of the vocation itself, as embodied in the lives, and the exalted claims, of poets like Mandelstam, Celan, Dante, Whitman, Crane.

So the hermetic-ekphrastic imagery of Mandelstam & Celan fascinated me, as different expressions of this kind of claim. So the "authoritative", communal poetics of the long poem began to absorb my interest through the 1980s and early 90s, and many experiments in writing followed.

& maybe one can glimpse how my playing with the "incarnational", with the name of Berryman's "Henry", fit into this development out of both the adventures of the 70s and the deeper reading of the 80s.

But does any of this make an impression, relate in any way, to the literary history of American poetry & poetics of those same decades? Where does a poem like this fit in to the "canon"?

An "incarnational" poetics, which is what I'm concerned with, would circle around this asymmetrical symbiosis (voice & text) - but with a different emphasis from that of the postmodernists, post-structuralists, etc. A different "reading" of the evidence of experience, a different notion of what the poet is about.

See John Latta's circumspections & link to Dale Smith's reviews for what's happening now.

In both Jarnot & Foust, minimalism seems to enhance "embodiment."

I have my own peculiar take on the "incarnational" nature of poetry.

The figure in the landscape. The hero in the not-so-sacred wood. The word in the woodwork. The curse at the crossroad. Woden hanging from the world-ash-tree.

Another structural note: noticeable, the design of Grassblade Light, based on 7 panels each containing 28 sections of 28 lines, 4 x 7 = 28 : 7 quatrains of 4 lines each : title of book is Forth of July, ie. 7.4 : the "coming forth of Julie, jewel-eye, Bluejay...".

Forth of July is "incarnational", ie. grounded by numbers & letters & places & persons & names & dates.

Island Road moves slowly, zigzaggedly, from autumn to spring, from despair to hope, from cynicism to love. When I listened to the recording of my awkward Reaganesque/Clint-Eastwoodian whisper through the whole 99 "sonnets", I re-experienced, recognized again the EFFORT that is part of giving birth to a new poem. It's an "incarnational" poetics - & perhaps hearing these mutterings, while reading along, is one consequence. "Entering" the form of the sonnet (I almost wrote sinnet), answering Shakespeare & Berrigan & Berryman - it was a physical, embodied encounter, represented by the "muse" figure - the figure of Spring or Persephone or Dark Lady - right from the beginning, in sonnet # 1. It felt like an encounter, a MEETING - and indeed it was.

Whether the awkwardness is finally a sign of artistic defeat - well, I hope not. Listening to the whole thing felt like listening to some big untidy Cantos getting underway. I wish someone else, some smooth actor, could read it FOR me : but it's better this way.