... and as I wrote yesterday, this "Acmeist" trans-historical response has been what it's all about for me (see Alephoebooks). Another reason I was drawn to Hart Crane's The Bridge. He took a sort of Platonic-Dionysian concept from Nietzsche et al. (eternal return - of Atlantis). Thus the Island Road sonnets are a blend of Berryman, Berrigan, & Shakespeare. Thus Stubborn Grew is an amalgam of echoes from several American long poems (esp. The Bridge, but also Maximus & the Cantos), Mandelshtam's Voronezh quatrains, Finnegans Wake, Dante.


Jasper Johns, Hart Crane (Periscope)

Curious resemblance between my expressed motives for doing long poems (see previous post) and Josh's comments on Claudia Rankine. But the methods are so different. There are a lot of poets who use collage and documentary material - it sounds like Rankine does so pretty effectively (I've only read an excerpt at one of the links Josh provides). I did some collage in the In RI poem. Less so in Stubborn Grew & sequels (there, anyway, it's hidden, melded with the quatrains).

The problem for me with Pound's "rag-bag" methods, and their recent extensions into "multimedia", is that the form of the poetry tends to get sort of distended and slack. That's how it comes across for me, anyway. It slides into prose & other forms of communication. For some, this is exciting.

I like the otherness of poetic speech, the strangeness which comes with versification, rhyme, lineation. I guess it is most effective when it oscillates back and forth over the border with prose & everyday vernacular.

The otherness creates a sort of magic circle around the language, accentuates the formal impression and makes for intensity.

I feel this "poetry magic" is inseparable from the vocational path of poets, which I sort of sketched in previous post yesterday. Every new generation, every new poem, erases the past, blocks it out of our attention to some extent. At the same time, every new generation has the capability - various capabilities - to respond to and re-create what was done before.

Why is this important? Well, on one level, it's simply natural. There's a natural fascination in the reading of ancient texts, or the hearing of ancient poems, which still work. The process creates living bonds with what is normative and profound in experience - precisely through the "poetic" process of discovering analogies or resemblances between distant and different things. The plays of Shakespeare or Sophocles come in strange and archaic costume, yet we find ourselves caught up in the crises they present.

I guess this is a sort of prosaic version of one aspect of Mandelshtam's Acmeism. Poetry the vital remnant, a link across time and eras.

I've been posting some images of poets here lately. I did a google image search on Ezra Pound, but didn't find a copy of the little postage-stamp photo of him which I found in my 2nd-hand copy of the Cantos. I don't know where it came from; it looks like an original (though that's unlikely!). Should have it checked, I guess. It's EP in old age, sitting on a rock, holding a white cane.

A lot of my poetry writing during the 1990s was shaped by the notion that the "long poem" is a distinct genre, one I was very curious about. The variety & expansiveness of the models intrigued me. I was drawn to the special kind of seriousness & authority they (& the lives devoted to them) seemed to emanate (mana, charisma). I liked the way patterns or layers appeared - Pound's "palimpsest" - with various generations (Olson/Zukofsky/David Jones, et al.; Pound/Crane/Joyce, et al.; Whitman... and then back to the old epics).

The long poem seemed like a way to engage with public, social & historical issues, to step beyond the seemingly inherent solitude & solipsism of poetry, to try something with different parts of the composing personality (aside from "music", which has always exerted a strong tug on my negatively-capable dream-life).

I wrote a bunch of them in the 1990s. Most of them are in little chapbooks in the Brown Library.

Memorial Day
Spring Quartet
In RI (still in manuscript)
Forth of July (which includes Stubborn Grew)

These projects focused a lot of my energy. In between I wrote some shorter poems.

We each hear and interpret the poetry before us and around us differently; we live each in our own imaginative conception of the po-sphere. But the literary tradition, like history itself, is both objective and subjective; personal and collective; changeless and changeable. At the high points of my travels through these long poem projects, sometimes I felt like I was finding a theme or an idiom which created a genuine aura of interaction or dialogue with what had been done before. In other words the experiments I was doing seemed meaningful in relation to the previous experiments of those poets who had "broken through" (into literary tradition). This, in part I guess, was what I was working for in the first place.

I think I had several motives for taking this sort of roundabout route or method of composition. For one thing, I wanted to frame a conception of reality in poetry which included history as a form or frame of Time itself. This sounds very vague & portentous, I guess. I was looking at Dante, Milton, & Pound & Olson, as poets who tried to set their own cultures within historical frames, which themselves were framed by philosophical or metaphysical conceptions. & I wanted to do something like that. I wanted to do something holistic. Because I had my own puzzled, inchoate notion of history, which differed from these others'. Where it came from I suppose is in part explained by the travails I went through in the 70s, as described sketchily over at AlephoeBooks.

This quote from Mark Rothko has stuck with me...

I paint very large pictures.
 I realize that historically the function of painting
  large pictures is painting something
        grandiose and pompous.
 The reason I paint them, however - I think it applies
      to other painters I know – is precisely
because I want to be very intimate and human.
 To paint a small picture
  is to place yourself outside your experience,
to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or
        with a reducing glass...
  However you paint the larger picture,
    you are in it.
    It isn't something you command.

New writing has been slow going for me since about 2001, with many false starts & stops, for a variety of reasons, most of which I don't understand. Probably you steady sloggers of this blog have had an inkling of that, considering how much I dwell on things written in the previous millennium.

While continually pondering what to do & where to go with it lately, it struck me once again how, exactly, the longest of the long poems got started, at the beginning of working on Stubborn Grew (around 1998 or so). It struck me again how decisively the whole thing began with an act of mimicry. Any Russian poetry-reader, I'm sure, would find no such echo there, since it was a kind of fantasy, a role-playing, rather than a careful form of copying or transposition. But I was trying to re-write Mandelstam's Voronezh poems - both theme & style. That is, it was, first of all, the earthward, earthy, black-earth theme of the Voronezh poems which I picked up on - the landscape - both as leading toward a sort of Orpheus re-do, and as something I felt connected with personally (rural Midwest). Secondly, I tried to channel a certain tone I heard - a talky, informal, intimate, sweet-happy-melancholy tone. Of course it led off in another direction... but that was the sound I was "listening" to as I started writing.

Met last night with Karen Donovan, editor of Paragraph, at the Red Fez (Prov. restaurant) to talk about a her ms. "Clay Tablets", a sort of long-poem/ceremony set in ancient Mesopotamia. A talented poet, with background in biochemistry, which is coming back into her writing. Cell-division, fertility & creativity. Working now on a new poem-project which links the 20 amino acids with the 20 letters in the Ogham tree-alphabet. She looks like a cross between Anna Akhmatova & Bertolt Brecht (thin, thin face, bright blue eyes, short straight black hair combed forward). Life goes on in Grand Fenwick.

Haven't perused Josh's most-recent report on the Z conference yet. But thinking of the focus on Zukofsky long-poem & gender questions.

*

The critic, the interpreter, seeks out a logical architecture (this leads from that). Necessary even for full aesthetic appreciation of a work.

*

Each poet's personal "tradition" hinges on those affinities with other poets, whose work inspired immediate love & admiration & desire to imitate. But perhaps underlying this process, lies something infused more tightly with both psychology & the character of poetry in general : ie., maybe what we love in the predecessor or the model, is the flicker or intimation of Paradise-Utopia, the lost equilibrium or childhood or Heaven or ecstatic state or spiritual beatitude or Peace at heart or Jubilee. . . & this is the charismatic or the perfect goal or quiddity hidden in poetry or faintly echoed or represented by poetry.

*

The epic is a literary game, representing the ultimate "return home". . . thus Joyce's Ulysses points emphatically to Homer; and underneath "Bloomsday" is a kind of apocalypse - a World-Day in which time stops & turns toward Joyce's particular image of happiness, blessedness.

*

It needs no repeating, that my "tradition" seems like Mandelstam closely joined by Hart Crane & Joyce. . . thus, for Joycean example, Forth of July hinges on many signal dates, and a particular date (4/7). . . aiming toward Jubilee. . .

*

& the logical architecture - if you want to read this 1000-pp poem as a nice short poem? 4 books in 2 Parts:
1. Stubborn Grew
2. The Rose;

or, dying & rebirth;
& built on what? Family dynamics. . . gender relations. . . ie. tragicomic love song (Orpheus).

The figure of Elena Shvarts as incarnation of the Russian Mandelstam-model;
the figure of Juliet as poetry ghost-bride of a lost-&-found (native) America;

- these are like variations on a theme, the theme of the abandoned Orpheus-poet harping on his losses & mistakes & dreaming of a vast reunion.

& this logical architecture in turn, to repeat, intimates or stems from or allegorizes the general action or character of poetry per se, poetry as a phenomenon (the flicker of a Paradisal state).

speaking so friendly of the big poem arena, Allen Bramhall rightly points to Rachel Blau du Plessis. There are many others missing from my list - hoovers I should know better. How could I leave out Susan Howe's historical collage-researches, for example.

Maybe that's why I had one of my occasional poetry dreams last night. In this one, a young blonde poet named Debbie(! - no relation to actual person that I know of) shows me her work, cut from some magazines like coupons. In fact, a couple of the poems incorporate coupon-phrases.

In this kind of dream which I have now & then, I read actual poems. I see them close up, line by line. "Debbie's" were so clever, witty, tender, brimming with sheer playful joy & verbal verve - I felt humbled & awkward offering my praise. I woke up wondering what remote & now inaccessible brain-region evoked all this.

The Cantos
The Bridge
Paterson
The Maximus Poems
"A"

- here's a stack of them. How, how well, do they represent social/city life? How well do they evoke "utopia"? quick notes:

Cantos have a sort of tragic grandeur, as well as a hectic energeia which sometimes captures the quick rough quiddity of experience, the plunging violent unpredictability of urban reality. Also a practiced lyrical-cantando-enchantment, esp. describing nature, feminine allure. Still, as Olson pointed out long ago, the backward-looking antiquarian preciosity, as well as the authoritarian politics, push the Cantos toward a sort of ever-living obsolescence.

The Bridge, in my view anyway, succeeds pretty well in blending lyric proportion, emblematic history, and Gotham immediacy (the Joycean day's dream-journey of the narrator) - so that the reading experience itself reproduces its locale (how shall I put this: when you read The Bridge, you have the pleasant sensation of being-in-NYC-reading-The Bridge. Sort of Borgesian, that way). Its technique, however, is refined and ironic - so that much is left out which its competitors here try to include (there's a study on puns in The Bridge, though, which argues that a lot of that excluded mundaneity comes back in by the back door. Paul Giles, Hart Crane : the contexts of The Bridge). Crane's trans-chronological "Atlantis" is a sort of poetic summation of 1920s "Our America" idealism. Still beautiful & hopeful.

Paterson is best of these in evoking city as a collective-psychic organism, where drab dailiness overlays historical-geological fragments & dreams, an arena of contingencies & possibilities. WCW's sharp eye & humor help, but for me the language is too flat & derivative to be very moving, & his cautious analytical bent doesn't do much for me, though others will savor the stringent-sour critical awareness of this social & egalitarian poet. His empathy often strikes me as tepid & careful, the attitude of the professional medical man (many will disagree). He also tries too hard & too obviously to remodel his models (Eliot, Pound).

Maximus Poems. When Olson tries to improve on his masters - Pound, WCW - he often does so. He's a genius at turning the obscure historical footnote into both vivid fragment and portentous psychic extrusion-symbol. Better than the rest is the feel for working-class poverty, necessity, & odd moments of liberation. Olson really does succeed at turning a literary mask into an emblem of some vast cosmic order. Where he loses me, most of the time, is with his actual language use. The personality that comes across sometimes - overbearing, pompous, pretentious, eccentric, sneering, vulgar - seems like a weird oedipal reaction to Pound & Literature - an effect like a bad habit, rather than a genuine reflection of Olson the better man. But it's off-putting, and for me, gives sign of minor rather than major poetry. Olson was a kind of hero, in a heroic & lonely struggle for origination & powerful mantic speech - but I wonder if he was up to the battle he chose.

"A" - I haven't read this carefully enough to say much. Zukofsky has an incredible ear for rhythm & sound on the syllabic level. Using it, he takes the civic and the utopian experience and - taking direction from Pound & Joyce & going much further - internalizes, subjectifies those experiences. A sort of quasi-Orphic process, I think: reality is completely absorbed into A-Z's limping, limpid, familial-household mumbling. What bothers me about it is precisely what made Z. appeal to the postmoderns : the turn to pure sound, the recherche Mallarmean-Symbolist aestheticism. Its action is almost diametrically reverse to that of The Bridge : whereas the latter incorporates the reader into an imaginary NYC-America, the former absorbs all things - the world, the reader - into Zukofsky-sound.

Let's gab some more about long poems, OK Hen? OK.

Both Warren & Dale Smith, in that issue of House Organ, point toward the messianic/utopian. Smith, in asserting a bond between the poet's line & the actual (natural/cultural) locus poeticus or environment. Warren, more specifically, seems to judge the "messianic" as a sort of aggressive ethos-formation or ideology, formed in conscious or unconscious conflict with deeper psychosocial forces (patriarchy, anti-semitism, anti-Catholicism). (I think Warren displays sort of a Catholic-Jungian syncretism, in which apocalypse, messianism, utopianism are "outer" phenomena, which fall short of a more complete & substantial inner integration or paradisal state. But I'm sort of guessing here, having given his essays only a cursory & intermittent reading.)

The long poem, with its collective & holistic ambitions, applies itself especially to utopian aims.

Seems to me that in order to approach such aims, any such work would have to have:

1. some kind of cosmological worldview, social-scientific philosophy, or religious base.

2. some kind of holistic or encyclopedic representation of social life.

(Northrop Frye & others have written a lot about such generic requirements.)

How do the American examples stack up in this regard? More in a minute.

Olson, Zukofsky. . . the epic boys are in the weather.

Very curious how Olson is still a living psychopomp in some circles: Kenneth Warren, at least, keeps the "drama" of Maximus Poems compelling, wherein the encounters of Maximus & his agonisti are mythic, iconic Kultur-ectomorphs.

Kent points toward some of the wider rings - Dale Smith, Stephen Ellis, Ed Dorn. . .

Zukofsky too, in his way, as the centennial celebration shows. Ron Silliman's post of yesterday begs the question : is the big-poem-epic deal a men's preserve?

Traditional literature in general was a men's preserve for a long time, obviously. How much is the mode of heroic culture-quest even more so? There are elements of "Iron John" role-modelling involved. Zukofsky clearly modelled his work on Joyce & Pound, as ephebe-challenger.

This is not necessarily bad. I suppose what's sexy today is the inquiry into what slanting illuminations or criticisms these heroic (& anti-heroic satirical) works bring to gender dynamics.

long poems, epics, the writing & reading of same - a way of overcoming the jadedness referred to earlier? By absorbing all forms of discourse & narrative - a voracious counter-pressure. Turning knowledge to account & back toward lyric state.

I guess this is a problem I have, talking too much about my own writing. I come across as self-centered, selfish, solipsistic, egotistical. Too true, maybe. The accusation has been made. Then again, maybe you could look at it as someone caught up in his work.

I don't write much about contemporaries. Some poets around my age are much better at that, much more attuned to the other poets around them. Again, perhaps egotism could account for it. On the other hand, the path I've taken - as I see it from inside, anyway - led through the poetries of the late 60s & early 70s, back through the Bible & Shakespeare & Renaissance poetries, then the Russians, then the Moderns & some postmoderns. . . & in a way I feel satiated with poetry & as if there's enough there already to inspire, annoy & motivate me. . .

WCW, Pound, Crane, Olson. . . all of them felt strongly the dilemma of balancing the contemporary with the past achievements. In large part in reaction to Eliot's powerful schema for same. & simply put, I was greatly influenced by the readability, flair, intensity, sound-richness, of Crane, in relation to these others. I liked the organic consistency of The Bridge in comparison with some of the flat & slack stretches of some of the others, the way it climbs & climbs.

Why poetry? I mean, why do we do this?

We take aesthetic pleasure in words, what language does?

That, and something else. With language we acknowledge, define, order, shape what we experience. This is a techne intimately fused with that which it represents. With poetic speech we "surround ourselves with domestic utensils, the warmth of the hearth" (Mandelstam's description of the poetics of Acmeism - "domestic hellenism". He was doing this in deliberate contrast to the more otherworldly & abstract qualities of Russian Symbolism).

The equilibrium of artifice - craft, techne - and nature is at the root of civilization.

So perhaps we can recognize a certain solemn (&/or playful) objectivity, disinterestedness, at work in poetry - a reflection or emanation of the poet's serious effort to follow & express truth - the poet's equivalent of the philosopher's or scientist's activity.

The image of "the city" in art (as I said, I'm reading about medieval Siena), representing an ideal of equilibrium between know-how & nature, individual & community. (And hidden within every image of the city is that of a garden.)

The word bears the techne of a global equilibrium (Mandelstam also foresaw this). When he talked about the poem as "like unto an Egyptian bark of the dead, carrying everything necessary for life" - he was talking about the word-itself as a sort of Noah's ark.

The curious focus in the American long poem on the local, the city. The unavoidable and only shared "here & now" where any real equilibrium (political, cultural, natural) becomes possible.

Reading Keith Ward's book (Religion & Revelation) mentioned here recently. A lot of food for thought.

A Christian perspective, but develops a concept of revelation which is inclusive without relativism, acknowledges parallels & affinities with other faiths. Fascinating commentary on Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism.

Faith can't be simply equated with a body of opinions, information or knowledge, which a person can accumulate and then assent to, and assert to others. If God exists, revelation is a divine self-revelation, meant not to convey information but to enter into a relationship, to change your life.

Thinking (in this space) about my "poetry life" through this book's lens. My relations with "poetry community", so ambiguous, ambivalent, sometimes conflicted & frustrating.

A large part of it is simply my ornery personality. Another aspect, though, has to do with the fact that religion has played such a big role in my life. For some, this is less problematic, since they understand how to keep a seemly distance between creative literary efforts on the one hand, and their faith-commitments on the other.

For me it's been more complicated. My "faith life" has been stormy & dramatic (at least for me). Charismatic events when I was in my early 20s had an irreversible effect on my view of things - and those (personal) experiences were tangled up with poetry and writing. A poet is a communicator, a purveyor of speech & verbalized concepts : with me, literary ambitions and religious commitments have been mixed together, mixed-up & confused sometimes (much times!).

Aside from my personal quirks, though, I think that another factor in the aforementioned ambivalence arose from an inherent dialectic - a contrast - between religious vision and poetics or literature per se. This dialectic was brought to the fore, in my case, by the simple effort to balance or combine the two. Magnified also by something in the genres themselves : the prestige or authority of the epic mode, as "poem containing history". Because Christianity, more so than some other faiths, is rooted in particular historical events (though their "historicity" is highly contended). One doesn't need to be obsessed with "the historical Jesus" to grasp that this particular faith - in which the Divine enters directly into history in order to save humankind and creation itself - and which calls believers into a new spiritual Now - might result in epic shapings quite different from those offered by Pound, Crane, Zukofsky, et al.

My own long poems are probably too wayward to be acceptable as "Christian" works. But the background motivation is there : to re-write the American epic on a very different ground. One way to look at Forth of July is as a "transumption" (sort of a surpassing-through-osmosis, or stealing) of Modernist epic. I "underwrote" Crane, Pound & Joyce in Stubborn Grew: I contextualized them in the plot of a Mardi Gras/Lenten shriving/redemption : and then in the sequels I practiced a kind of ghost dance/resurrection spiritual ecstatics, flying off into deep American vision-space.

To take on the epic this way was a fairly radical gesture, I'd say, within the "progressive" poetry community. Radical in a religious sense, also: for the Christian, "the Word" is not a material-in-itself, an aesthetic commodity, but something else entirely.

I realize that to blend discourses this way, to speak so baldly of faith, is a recipe for alienating others through misunderstanding and settled notions (especially in today's divisive, overheated discourse world). But this is my form of "personism", like it or not.

Literary phenomena & succession of time-periods. "Who shall have the succession?" (Cantos)

Trying to explain a worldview which emits Stubborn Grew & its sequels, so you might get into it more.

Having Maximus & "A" & Gunslinger before me, and Mandelstam & The Bridge & Ulysses & Finnegans Wake & Cantos & Paterson before me too, slightly further back, and Melville & Dickinson & Whitman a little further back, & Dante & Milton & Homer & Virgil & Ovid & Shakespeare & Bible further further back... not seeing them as "challenges" but simply as absorbing-authentic literary models of reality & totality.

seeing how each new work of necessity "blocks the view" of previous books & simultaneously stands in their shadows. Harold Bloom turns this into a psycho-melodrama-tragicomedy, but in my experience it's more a question of shades of taste... thus I feel what's missing from the style of Olson, say, when I sense the presence, still there, of something earlier & better (stronger, richer, deeper), & yet also see how Olson felt history differently than did some of his overweening or over-confident predecessors...

Anyway, the picture of people and the city & history that I try to present in Stubborn Grew, or the wild directions the poem takes after that, should be recognized as written in the light still emanating from these other books. So for example in the latter half of Stubborn you can recognize when the aegis of the Cantos shifts over to the aegis of Finnegans Wake, and why that might be happening, based on the recognitions undergone by the narrator-protagonist. & these "aegiae"[?] are forms of acknowledgement & also opposing arguments (theirs & my own) about "reality" as I feel it emanating from these writers - Crane & Mandelstam & Vallejo & Pushkin & Shvarts et al. coming forward as kinds of framing "style-testimonies" - some of these writers' influences more pervasive than others'. My own poem's capaciousness having certain architectonic nodes where its own arguments are marked & underlined, in its own strange way.

I still think I found a sort of unusual door through the long poem. It's been hard for me to write poetry at all since then, for the last 2-3 years, but I have hopes for Dove Street as a possibly authentic outgrowth, if I can keep focused (while other projects are underway).

Curious affinities. I've never felt particularly affined with William Carlos Williams, but his long poem Paterson is echoed in my longy one in a couple places... first of all in his focus on Bruegel, & in particular the nativity painting (Adoration of the Kings), secondly in his poem's concluding focus on the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters Museum, in NY: I discovered in NY this weekend that one of the garden courts at the Cloisters is filled with statuary from Guillem-le-Desert, a remote monastery near Narbonne, in southern France. This monastery was founded by knight-turned-monk-become-saint Guillem de Gellone, or Guillem d'Orange, a hero in the cycle of early French chansons de geste, and one of my remote ancestors (one of Charlemagne's relatives and lieutenants, he is considered by at least one historian to be a descendant of Jews from Baghdad). Guillem figures strongly at the close of Forth of July; his saint's day coincides with the burial in RI of William Blackstone (5/28), the date on which the poem was finished.

Someday when I get my head together I will write an essay about the tradition of the long poem beginning with Whitman in relation to the notion of continuum, going back to the endless ring-structure of the Homeric cycles. Continuum and closure as two symbiotic principles, representing the traditional joining of "heaven & earth" or time & eternity, in the continuous Now of the poem. The unity of these two principles which the long poem, or Whitman's continuous single life-poem, represents.

I've been posting a lot recently on the long poem, Forth of July. Will probably be slowing down a bit here in days to come, in order to focus on other projects.

There's much I haven't gotten around to yet, such as the character & some details of the 3rd & 4th books (July & Blackstone's Day-Book), what the Native American aspects represent, et al.

Moreover today it strikes me I haven't even begun to articulate the poem's real grain or pith.

The Orpheus plot is truly mythical or symbolic in a certain way. It "stands for" something : perhaps merely for a pervasive feeling or emotion.

The long poem is a poem of longing.

The keynote of "Henry's" nostalgia - situated in a rather cramped little coastal state & dreaming of wide open steppes & midwestern prairies - is also symbolic; it represents or stands for a kind of inherent, continuous radiation or radiating image from the past, from life as a whole, from childhood onward - the dream or memory of Melville's everlasting oceanic "green Tahiti of the soul." (the grassblade light.)

from Mendelssohn (the childhood neighborhood) to Mandelstam's black earth. mendel/mandel = "almond". 2 illustrations from Stubborn Grew, early & late:

The land, the land stretched out toward sundown.
At the end of the forests without end, the sun gleamed.
Magnitudes undreamt
by Greeks, the dry flute flown

 
into moist green, light fern-green
ghosts in the trees.
I'm driving the empty roads
in early May, at dawn.

 
Someone cries out Eurydice, Eurydice
into ramshackle and forlorn wastelands.
Blind joyful grief behind the railroad lines.
All gone to seed.  Oh say can you see.

 
--

 
Upon a Roman rood was fixt
clay lips gone underground.  Still
through the pinedoor, drifted sound.
Her calling me.  A morning rose.  Finixt.

 
Catch us the little foxes, Solomon,
that spoil our vineyard.  Lucky,
true love's the cardinal pt (sd Bluejay).
A monde, almond.  All made.  I thirsty, mon.

John Berryman, Dream Songs:

354

 
The only happy people in the world
are those who do not have       to write long poems:
muck, administration, toil:
the protototality of an absence of contact
in one's own generation, chiefly the old & the young
persisting with interest.

 
'The Care and Feeding of Long Poems' was Henry's title
for his next essay, which will come out when
he wants it to.
A Kennedy-sponsored bill for the protection
of poets from long poems       will benefit the culture
and do no harm to that kind Lady, Mrs Johnson.

 
He would have gone to the White House and consulted the President
during his 10 seconds in the receiving line
on the problems of long poems
Mr Johnson had never written one
but he seems a generous & able man
'Tetelestai' said St John.

How does one start writing a long "epic" poem? In 1997 I'd already written 2 or 3 not-quite-successful ones. After 15 years of off-&-on writing, I'd noticed that "going back to Mandelstam" often had a renewing or reviving effect on me.

Stubborn Grew began as an act of desperation. For a long time I'd been making notes & more notes toward a long poem. The beginning of Stubborn was finally a kind of "decomposition" : I let myself go. I started imitating the slangy, informal quality of some of Mandelstam's late poems from Voronezh. & I centered myself imaginatively in that same "black earth". Stubborn was a lucky conjunction of a style (Mandelstamish quatrains) & a plot - Orpheus-Bluejay-Henry returning to the earth to "bring back the dead". I had no idea how far those quatrains & that plot would take me.

from the 1st chapter of Stubborn:

11

 
It begins with the headache of a rational animal.
Sepulchred, perhaps, in a whitened rhyme
or bibliophile's musty drawers - reflective rim
or echo chamber, some titanic scuttled shell.

 
And you lose the thread, and this is the thread.
Purpled, from the mordant notebook,
from the charitable extinct awk's
last corkscrew into a cup of molten mead,

 
like lead.  The chorus and audience withdraw.
You are alone with the sound of an evening of a swing.
Here's the church, here's the steeple... here's the door.