lanthanum 6.23

23

The sun sweeps low, a gold-vermilion eye
& the earth swings wide, to the shady solstice
& a goldfinch flutters in its rusty cage, anxious
to go. Moss-green graywing, goodby, goodby.

Rooted like Blackstone to a limestone ground
my shadow spools a single arc of longing ‒
rockbound silhouette, bent toward that Evening
Land. A simple Cézanne forest floor (dark brown,

pine-green). Homegrown Sibelius would know,
looking to the sky for her wingèd Victory,
peregrine, trailing clouds (dove-grey,
turning white... streaked with... rainbow

ringlets). Sursum corda. & my heart lifts
like an arch just above the horizon ‒ all steeled
for one strong matrix-claim, up there (rose wheel-
eye, touching treetops). Whose crosshairs shift

the lens (mandorla to mandala, eyes to rose).
To meet the earth’s deep-sounding travail (blue-
bleak)... with arms’ warm honey-amber... loving yew-
turn, bow-taut now! A chordal flame leaps, glows!

Sea-bells ring home, my soul, my soul!
& who was far, draws near... & what was fickle
desire yields place at last, to steadfast clay ‒
Love’s needful cry, the arched bow’s tinder-bowl ‒

Noah’s shipfold (two notes are one).
Low bass, high soprano. Imagination’s
advent, in the void... Beethoven’s
cure... snow-lit alcove of the Resurrection.

12.5.10

lanthanum 6.22

22

To walk a lonely stretch of Hope St., Providence
& try to collect myself for this endeavor
toward the center of the poem, & the earth...
to know that loneliness is of the essence ‒

yours, mine ‒ Blackstone’s, by his sole candle ‒
a poverty in the spine of things, a threadbare
shawl pulled around your shoulders... there,
in the mind’s eye. One ultraviolet mandorla

made of syllables ‒ at a lonesome crossroads
on Hope St. ‒ in the center of myself ‒ which is
(perhaps) also the center of yourself (promise
afloat upon the sea). My ship, my canoe (Rhode

Island wooden almond) ‒ straitened at last
through the narrow sluice of melancholy ‒
time ‒ your absence, my delusions ‒ O my
Lamp of Gaiety, my only Gate. Happiness

implanted before all things, by You : this is
the original status quo, on whose behalf
stern Roger proffered his indomitable life
(still stands, on the cliff, under the rainbow’s

cat’s-eye marble ‒ foot planted on the bow, like
that gold coin from Constantinople ‒ Anthousa
with a rose, foot shod by the prow ‒ Argo);
shaded the silhouette of a continent (one

aching arc). All these figures only filigree
for simple math, & plain geometry ‒
invert the envelope of solitude, toward mercy.
My guest is smiling at the gate (waiting for me).

12.4.10

Lanthanum in The Equalizer

Michael Schiavo published chapter 4 of Lanthanum in The Equalizer today. I like the format, the design. Here's the information. Thank you, Michael!

Equal to October

Michael Schiavo keeps on keepin' on, with his mighty interesting poetry dissemination project, The Equalizer. Happy to say a big chunk of Lanthanum will be featured there next week, in issue #13.

Lanthanum on TV

new Lanthanum on YouTube

Maximus (in the shadow of Maximus)

My poetry is rooted in Osip Mandelstam, & perhaps culminates in Maximus the Confessor.

Hans Urs von Balthasar (love the sound of that name), the Swiss Catholic theologian, wrote a groundbreaking study of Maximus about 50 yrs ago (Cosmic Liturgy).

Maximus shows up often in the poem Lanthanum.

Brooding on Michael Gizzi's sad-princely fate, perhaps... I had a (rare) moment of psychological introspection yesterday... it struck me that maybe I had been struggling for a long time - COMPLETELY subconsciously - with an inner image of my father. Not my real - gentle, infinitely patient, kindly - father... but the American father who hates poetry, all the arty (sissy, useless) stuff. It struck me that my belligerent/parasitic attitude & behavior toward all sorts of perceived "authorities" in Poetryland, over the last 2 decades, might have something to do with this inner anxiety/conflict about the poetic vocation itself (in the good ol' USA) - something rather Oedipal (Sigmund in the house?)...

Yet I'm sure, in fact I know, there is a dimension - let's call it divine Providence - where the useless freedom of art & poetry, and the active discipline of spiritual devotion, and the innate good will of ordinary people, and the philosophical light of a cosmic vision of reality - are all harmonized and redeemed. A hidden spiritual dimension of ordinary Providence...

& my shifty erratic trip - from Ashbery to the "Shakespeare event", from Jesus-hitchiker days to Mandelstam, from anti-poetry to the Borges-library, from Elena Shvarts & Joseph Brodsky to Hart Crane, all the rest... - finds meaning in this direction...

Lanthanum 6.5

5

Oriented to the center, then, and through
the eye of a needle ‒ threaded with junkyard
wool, black-white, grey… a cast-off loaded
with canards, castaways… your slander-

ship… your malady, milady (hubby-
hearse). & if I could mumble your tomb
open, little junkman's wing ‒ if I could hum
your name ‒ Red, Rube or Ruby?

‒ roseate as early raisin, ripe as grape
or turnip from heaven (purple-grey) ‒
I'd be home free. I'd be in Ithaca,
Itasca today ‒ I'd be ship-shape.

Only light, weightless light, Archimedean light
in a trice, through the eye of a bee.
Honey-light, glowing (you'll see, you'll see)
lifting a double-bass through brass fishnet

of wayward tears, years… (yours).
So we spin through the eye of hexagram-
hurricane, my dear ‒ 'twixt cherubim-
leavings, leaf-wings, pendulous

angle-bowers ‒ abeam every wandering
birchbark in creation. Drawing water,
bailing bale… rainwater, eye-water…
air & water & fire for the pottering

King of J (your ornery ancestor).
Who's coming back. Through that ring
of steadfast, bifoliate flame ‒ Love's singeing
Lincoln-leaf (O dove-cast mistress-master)

8.12.10

Lanthanum 6.4

4

To encounter the stranger, to welcome the guest,
to enlarge the circle ‒ a constituent element
of civilization at large ‒ the fundament
of more primordial union. & this was a test

of mettle for many characters, native & settler ‒
all particular tongues & colors, whorled
in clay… into a goldenrod sham Hamlet, moored
in Venice, Tunis. Queequeg's tattoo (vespered,

fluted in Nantucket, scored for ten fingers
with the Sign of Man, whispered
alive again ‒ the skin of his forefathers
saved by the skin of his teeth)… earth-tinctured,

all. Sparse sketches from memory
of prehistory ‒ a time when builders were
delvers, weavers, spider-wise ‒ somewhere
beneath exuberant & bracing armatures ‒ See

through my hand! wind mutters from the mound.
Midway, mid-continent… magma-lamp
in Maggie's palm ‒ the magisterium (tent-camp
& camel-dome) of deserted garden (Eden, found).

Labyrinth of fingertips. A whorl of star-
embossed flesh ‒ pent Quaker grandmother,
earth-patching grandfather ‒ the dance-patter
of partners in a pattern-wheel (a potter's far-

flung chariot of fire). & your ache
behind the eyelids is a rainbow-streak
of so many spirits round about you : Jake,
Jonah & (tender, tending wing)… hums, wake.

8.11.10

A chip off the new Lanthanum

Here's a plonk of more obscure Lanthanum. Harks back to some ancien matiere de Stubborn Grew.

3

Another solo Sunday, sweltering.
I mold my provisional home here, out of faulty
memories of weddings - each waltzing peripety
& its aftermath. From 157 Doyle (sheltering

tenement apartment) extending consequences
to infinity. Beside the Y there, just below
the Doyle Observatory (tracking a showy
morning star, her amiable glimmer). Providence,

my Providence, he whispers, like St. Louis
outside Tunis. Wrecks & errors
& the homely sorrows... nowhere's
where am is, he sez. His fraying quipu's

knotted to 1256 - but he can't explain
what he would like to sing! The choir's
aloft, but the soloist's a-hoarse - cribbed
with that defunct crabshell up in Maine -

helmet of some lost poilu (ultimate unknown
soldier). We found a single fingerprint, though :
a twirling labyrinth, back to the protozoa;
wound like snailshell, or cat-o-nine-

lives' smile... what does it mean? I think
it means the old man's comin' back. The Sojer-
Boy, back from the sands - the Ghost, the Over-
Ghost... back to embrace his mourning Morning

Star, once more. That Old Man of the Mountain,
that clay-foot weeping statue, that... silhouette
of a leaping Lafayette? In a state of minuet?
Through the needle's eye... whirl, premonition.

7.25.10

Poetry : it's a numbers game

For a few years now, my poetry has been caught up with numbers & counting. When I start fiddling around with meaningful numbers, stanza designs, line-counts, etc., I know there's a poem on its way. It's usually connected with other things I've been obsessing about.

The work-in-progress Lanthanum... how did it originate? It's been over a year now, I'd have to look through the old scribbles. I remember I simply liked the sound of it - that Greek word for an atomic element (# 57). & what it came from etymologically, as named by its discoverer (Grk for "secret, hidden, unnoticed").

I got into this number thing back in the late 80s, reading books by Alastair Fowler and others on numerology as a design factor in ancient & Renaissance poetry. & in connection with wild speculative books by John Michell et al., on Pythagorean geometry & ancient measuring systems, gematria (the practice of assigning meaningful numerical values to letters & words), etc.

Lanthanum is based on the # 57, as well as the quatrain, & the associated numbers 7, 4, 28. 7 & 28, obviously, have connections with the lunar cycle & the seven-day week. When you think that the 7-day week & other calendrical systems help to "synchronize" human activity with astronomical phenomena (the 365 rotations of the earth in one yearly revolution of the sun), you can start to see how these systems work on a symbolic level. Thus, for example, Genesis describes the creation of the universe in 6 days, with the Creator resting on the 7th; which obviously fits rather neatly into the numerical division of the 365-day year into (52) weeks; so that the tradition of working 6 days & resting on the 7th (sabbath) day means that, in doing so, Man imitates & remembers the Creator, resting "with him" at the end of the work week.

A poem based on these numbers might be saying something similar, in a figurative sense. Lanthanum is (projectively) made up of 3 volumes; each volume has 4 chapters; each chapter has 3 sequences; & each sequence has 8 poems : consisting of 7 poems of 7 stanzas, or 28 (4x7) lines each, and an 8th poem containing 8 stanzas (32 lines). Therefore each sequence contains a set of 7x7 or 49 stanzas (in 7 poems), plus an 8th poem (of 8 stanzas). The total number of stanzas then, in each sequence, is 57 (the number of lanthanum). (There are more complex patterns hidden in the whole design, but they shall remain "hidden"!)

Another figurative dimension implied here in this pattern 49 + 1, 49 + 8, has to do with the "sabbath of sabbaths", or Jubilee year (every 50 yrs in ancient Israel). In Lanthanum I apply lots of indirect & figurative symbolism to synthesize this number (50) with the number of states in the U.S., with the "sabbath number" (7), with their fusion or sum (57), etc. I like to spin out & play with the religious, historical, & poetic implications of these combinations (since I think of poetry itself as a kind of semi-divine sabbatical "play", which intrinsically praises & celebrates life & nature in its aspects of wholeness & creative fulfillment or completion).

Lanthanum, 7/4

Here's something from the 2nd volume of Lanthanum (drawing toward the center of the poem, now...). I'm only posting this because I can't imagine any magazine wanting to publish this very obscure passage... (p.s. "soul liberty" was a phrase Roger Williams used to characterize his notion of freedom of conscience. & the bit about "Cyrus" draws on Sir Thomas Browne's wonderful & justly famous numerological-botanical essay titled "The Garden of Cyrus". & "perfect rune"? Well, in a sense this refers to the number 28, the number of lines in this poem, which is a "perfect number", & has long been associated with the lunar calendar).

6.2

Quiet, all quiet... the
boom of last night's fireworks giving way
to sunny Sunday, 7/4. Soul liberty,
he said - only a single secret path through the

labyrinth. Its perfect rune, rhyming
with lofty, solitary moon (not white
not black, but dappled by limestone light
that shines before stars start wandering)...

one seven added to those fifty stars
that shimmer in the haze of history -
for sabbath-day, for Jubilee - really
one red & cardinal number (yours)

for wedding memory & justice (everywhere).
Cyrus planted a garden once, to celebrate
Earth's intricate flourishing (a quince quintet);
the center of the world, enclosèd there,

was calm (slight violet eye, beholding
hurricane). It was his grandmother, calling;
it was his grandfather, responsive, echoing;
before Cyrus was born, before Time began -

a wedding-song, a dream, a constancy.
An octave note, for makings of one family
from reconciling tribes, & tyrants finally
dethroned - bell-booming independency

on earth, as it is... in Cyrus's garden;
when the milky light at last reigns equally,
& fifty stars are seven sisters (really
one star, one limestone pentagon...). & then...

7.4.10

Grain of Lanthanum (for Father's Day)

ONLY WHEAT

On the last day of spring (already sultry
as July) I would make a little summa-
testament, for summer. As you crumble
a humble clod of earth, in memory

of your local Rome (marking its boundary)
or walk with weatherbeaten gardener around
the blackened iron fence of some New England
family plot - as you linger in the shade there

where uncut grass of tumbling gravestones
marks the locus tribes & nations meet
at end of time - all that sown wheat
of long-gone fathers (embattled Blackstones,

Lincolns, Washingtons) - there
where covenants of every hamlet find
their mirror in a lightning eye-in-hand,
primordial - you'll hear the thunder,

finally - a voice inside the thunder.
& it will be only wheat... rustling out of
the chest of that familiar gardener (whose step
you keep). The voice of your own, your only father,

gentle & kind; the voice you've forgotten
& never forget. Coming back out of the grass
as Lazarus, or Berryman - for those almond eyes
(light brown) that call him from oasis-grotto -

from the wide wave of Union, everlasting.
Like silkworm shrouded in its tomb... like that
butterfly - a monarch-outline, light & sweet
but yellow-black - the plowman's pilot, floating

home.

6.20.10 (Father's Day)

the stone in the well

This morning, lying on favorite couch (that looks out east porch window), getting ready to go to work, looking over notes for ongoing Lanthanum project, my thoughts about the nature and design of this poem seemed to grow more clear. About its theme & purposes. Of course I've had shifting notions about it from the beginning - sometimes clear, sometimes fuzzier - but this morning felt like a little more of a breakthrough. Curious that this would happen so soon after yesterday's post here, about the (rare) qualities of good, strong poetry - how ongoing (plot, theme, ornamental) threads sometimes coalesce, reach their acme or peripeteia.

Almost 40 years ago I wrote this curious poem, with the epigraph about a Byzantine church. & (as noted on this blog before) I think sometimes a poet will (understandably) forecast, unconsciously, future developments - a sort of embryonic "prophecy" of the themes & subject-matter to come. & this poem I think relates not only to a lot of the writing I've done since that time, but to the possible insight I had this morning about Lanthanum.

The poem (Lanthanum), as I've mentioned before, is a sort of "dream song" which emerged about an odd dream I had one night about the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, MO (a monument I've never seen, & never previously given much thought). The structure began to magnetize & collect certain themes, symbols, ideas... among them being :
- my long-term fascination with Hart Crane's poem The Bridge;
- the affinities I find (imagistic, stylistic, architectural, thematic) between Crane's poetry & the work of Russian "Acmeist" Osip Mandelstam;
- my desire to write a poem which synthesizes the American long poem's more national, "New World" impulses (in Crane, WC Williams & others) with the larger & older context of Western or world culture & traditions (as in, say, Auden, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, David Jones..., as well as Mandelstam & other Russian poets) - here the St. Louis Arch (in Eliot's birthplace) would stand for a kind of fusion of Old & New Worlds;
- a movement forward from the long poems I've already written, such as Forth of July, with its focus on the Mississippi (what the French called the "St. Louis River") - & in this context making connections with my own biography, & the whole "John Berryman", dream-song dimension;
- the desire to center this synthetic context within a certain Rhode Island (Providential) framework, where the worldview of pioneers like Roger Williams & William Blackstone - a magnanimous fusion of sacred & secular, religious & political freedom - finds its echo in the incarnational theology of Orthodox monk Maximus the Confessor (& so winds back into an affinity with the Russian poets)...

but what I sensed in particular this morning was how the poem's trajectory (& perhaps my whole 50-yr trajectory as a poet) finds itself illuminated or clarified by a single analogy : that is, the analogy between the American tradition of egalitarian political democracy (which as Tocqueville describes, grew out of New England town-meeting political independence & co-responsibility) and the theological concept of a world civilization based on a shared equality before God. In aesthetic terms, the latter has an application in the Russian Acmeist notion of "chasteness" : that is, the poet with "chaste" vision recognizes the inherent dignity & beauty of each & every unique created thing - each thing's beautiful "right to be itself". & this Acmeist vision in turn is very close to Whitman's ecstatic "democratic" celebration of the "union" of all things in creation. Thus, with all this in mind, it's possible to see how the trajectory of a nation's democratic principles & values might find their future justification in a broader, global concept of global civic equilibrium & normative world civilization - a peaceful world civil society (a new, more universal version of Dante's vision of a "Rome where Christ is Roman"). & this would be the ambitious project for a poem to remember, illustrate & celebrate.

What pleases me about this "clarification" is how it seems rooted in my longtime poetic debt to Mandelstam & the Acmeists : it shows a continuity of purpose in my writing over many years. The long poem partly rooted in both Longfellow & the Kalevala (& Mandelstam's "Karelian birches" - so close to Petersburg) circles back on its trans-American trans-Siberian, Mandelstamian-Nabokovian origins. Mandelstam's first book Kamen ("Stone"), was an anagram for Akme (in allusion to Acmeism). My first book (1979) was also titled Stone. Through this "Blackstone" vision I am reaching toward the "Akme" of a shared world worldview.

i.m. Elena Shvarts

I was very sad to learn, late last night, that Elena Shvarts has died. I have a little icon of St. Michael in front of me, on my desk, which she gave to me on a visit to Providence once. We were in the habit of exchanging small things. I have a Peter the Great cigarette box... a little ceramic Russian bell... & I once gave her a treasured little blue-&-white painted toy bathtub boat, christened Sophie, which my mother had made for me as a child. For a long time I liked to think of it in her apt. window in Petersburg (before the terrible building fire, in which the little boat & many of her manuscripts went up in flames). I also gave her one of those Audobon "bird clocks", in which different birds sing the hours,because she had been so interested in the one we have in our kitchen here in Providence...

Elena also wrote some things in poems & stories about me, & I wrote some things about her... it all began years ago when I read her book, "Paradise" (put out by Bloodaxe Bks). Afterward I wrote a short & simple poem in response... & then to my utter wonderment discovered that a Providence friend of mine, Tom Epstein, was a close friend and literary collaborator with Elena. He was able to hand deliver my poem to her, in Petersburg.... & thus a friendship began. (I wrote a little about that long ago in a short essay in the magazine Witz).

Poetry, as I am learning these days from the philosopher Emanuel Levinas, is about Saying back to a sort of primal mutual co-responding, a language of loving commitment to another, or an Other... an unspoken love-gesture & suffering commitment, at the beginning of all things. & this is the substance of Personhood, & a sort of inner, secret joy of the universe... & for me this encounter with Elena Shvarts not only re-affirmed, & set a living seal upon, my longtime absorption with Russian poetry - but it represents a sort of partial acting-out or playing-out of what Levinas et al. are saying... I write this not in pride, but humility & gratitude.

So I wrote this simple imperfect poem today, a chapter in Lanthanum. & I am sad that I will not see Elena again. But maybe in some other life, some other form, someday...

9
in memory of Elena Shvarts

A wet March wind blows through this twilit day.
And two days ago, you were still on earth;
but not for long. A last soft breath... a yellow
moth through the blackened cypress frame of bay

window... gone. Once you were only a name
to me, far off there in Petersburg -
a name for shining black - & whispered
words, changed in translation. Your poem

touched me, then : its Russian humor,
humorous remorse, wry welcome to
life's dangling, ramshackle ways - the hobo's
leaking wounds, all the scrap iron of this early

spring weather... & so you leave me now,
dangling here : never able to read you
in the original, as I was rarely able to see you
in person, zdyes. Yet there's no wedding vow

so solemn and substantial as the flight
of those frail verse missiles we launched
across an Atlantic of salty estrangements -
since what began as mumbles in the night

found its embodiment in flesh. An echoing
embrace of free bird-sounds - feathered
& traced on curving flute-bone - tethered
in harmony... as if we were never going

to say goodbye. On chilly Prospect Street
one bold forsythia has launched light-petals
of sunny praise... harbinger of such mettle as
a woman figures, limping toward the vernal vault.

3.13.10

Back to Lanthanum 57

Trying to get back to writing Lanthanum again (& here). Out of my sluggish slough of slugs of accidia. This is really my best poetry ever (of course, I may be biased). I hope I can find the energy to write Book 2.

I'd like it to be read in the context of Sibelius. Wave upon wave, that's what it's about. There's a Finland (Karelian, to be exact) dimension to this. Finnegans Wake, Karelia, Mandelshtam, & the MN pike that never got caught. Am I being coy? My mother had her first drink (sherry) in Longfellow's house, in Portland, Maine. I lost a fish to a northern pike once - tore the bass right off my hook.

Henry's model train set (keeps going in circles)

My toy model choo-choo quatraining all these years has become what amounts to a literary habitus. It feels natural, it flows. But it could be just a bad habitus. The slippery, shifty rhyming & repetitions... the over-musicality... the cloudy indications... I'm seeing it in the light of Gumilevian Acmeism now.

Gumilev's emphasis on the word itself - not "music" - as the basic building block of poetry : the word, with its meanings - "Romance" (Mediterranean) clarity & irony, as opposed to "Germanic" northern gloomy-serious mysticism... might be seen as a criticism of the way I write, maybe. Maybe, I don't know.

The pull to keep doin' what I'm doin', only make it stronger - as opposed to really breaking out - is very, very strong... because I'm afraid of losing my knack, forgetting how to play. & I'm in the middle of another long ambitious poem (Lanthanum). If I could do both - keep doin' and branch out - I would. It's a question of mental fortitude, flexibility, inspiration, time & strength... God, soon I'll be doin' "old man's poetry", if I'm not already.

Maybe I'm just good at building birdcages for myself. Or just plain cages.... where I sit & yowl & yodel to myself....

Lanthanum update

Happily at work is Henry on Lanthanum. He just doesn't want to blog the latest yet, is all. Needs a few rejection slips first. Tay stewed.

Happy 2010

Happy New Year, friends -

My bloggishness has slowed down of late, but I'm still hanging around. 2009 was fizzling out in December, after I made a fool of myself on the Harriet blog, getting into a needless tiff with Franz Wright... but then finally wrote a book review I'd been meaning to do for months (on Gabriel Gudding's poetry), & sent it off on January 31st. So that was a good way to end the year.

Over the weekend, sat down & re-read the whole of the Lanthanum so far. Have had misgivings about it, off & on. But re-reading it, I'm happy! Not perfect, but not a waste of time (let others decide). (A sort of oblique dove-muttering, I say.) On to Part Two, I hope.

If you go to the preview of Lanthanum, & look at the 1st poem, I'm happy to see how the beginning (including the snow in line 1) predicted my daughter's cover photo. But I'm thinking especially of line 19. (The shade there, in the picture, is the shade of the bridge.) Forms a sort of "decussation" (cf. Sir Thos. Browne)...

Saarinen's tuning-fork

See Gabriel Gudding's excellent essay on the Gateway Arch. I hadn't come across the "tuning-fork" metaphor before, but it made an independent appearance in Lanthanum.