like Don in Key West

milkweed palms

DOUBLE-DECKER

Hobo lounged by the great gray Ocean

River, his old hide detached

a little from his mind,

like Don in Key West, his one-

time winter host (at the Q Motel).

Distanced a little from the

whitecaps, red & blue,

that molder to a stucco frieze of Hell

sometimes.  He remembers wild violets

that peek beneath gray toes

of an elder copper beech, whose

crown shades Providence; those roots

drill deeper than the black & white

of shaky party platforms.

Down beneath worms

mining resentment & indifference, the bite

of greedy centipedes, the slugs

cold as a winter street

in Minneapolis, whose neat

chewing fattens themselves alone (bugs

do not think about their neighbors).

Whose murmurous gray arms

have framed the milkweed farms

of metaphysical Hope, that anchors

Roger Williams’ canoe –

Love’s almond chariot

that smiling Faith built

out of flocks of can-do

monarch wings, green palms

circumferencing the gray

scallops of yesterday –

twin limestone radials (emblems

of spousal harmony, e pluribus

unum).  Whose tap sinks toward

the center of the gourd,

the hearth Love stokes, wells tears...

& where a voice from her grey mirror

sang in Hobo’s ear –

Behold the Platonic Year

revolve at last, aboard my double-decker

Greyhound!  When the game of suits

& spades & royal clubs

gives way to hearts purple

& ruddy diamonds – twin 52s

orbit an orange origami octagon,

one Chinese lantern, standing

in the night garden – bring

Hobo to the table, then!  It’s done!

He pondered pumpkin murmurings,

& mooned there, by the muddy

banks.  The breeze of poetry...

only a feeling (sighed).  Our burdenings

borne by that humble muse, whose trust

in some deep loving cloud

grey Manitou’s abode

will wave back (Noah’s buoyant crust).

8.15.16

Hoboland

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

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 many, many others) :

allusion, beauty, commentary, complexity, incarnational poetics, literary absolute, mathematics, musicality, negative capability, paraphrase, reader, recapitulation, time...

On we go with the mystifoggy Rest Note Read-Along :

Poem # 5 :

In conformity with the principle of variation outlined previously, we're back with "Hobo" at the cliffside in Prospect Park, Providence (see postcard above, in HG Poetics header).

5.2 : "wordy backbone" - Hobo is on the "spine" of the ridge which runs down the old section of Providence. & he's thinking "cosmologically" about verbalizing a concept of the universe.

5.3 : "Bramble, Tennessee" - vague subtext here, word-games. Hobo is linked with both Lazarus & Teddy Roosevelt (on his "amble" through the jungle, or the "brambles"). & as Moses heard God in the burning bush, Lazarus heard a voice which drew him out of the crypt. "Tennessee" - pun on "see ten". Why? Clementine, on the edge of the cliff - like the "chestnut tree" that Hobo talks to (see stanza 5.5) - is a figure for a sort of muse or Beatrice (Dante : "Beatrice is a nine"), who leads the poet through the nine rings of hell to the earthly paradise. It's part of a narrative structure, too - this poem (Rest Note) is built in part on series of nine sections - which are actually (hidden) tens. Ie. "see ten". If you look at Rest Note # 10, it is actually a section of double length. Each larger part of Rest Note is to contain 19 sections, in the pattern 9-1-9 : but the center section (ie. #10) is double. Therefore each part actually has 20 poems ("see tens").

Got that? Awful turgid, huh?

The rest of this poem is pretty self-explanatory.

5.6-7 : "As every living being..." - Hobo talking to trees in the park, Lazarus listening to a compelling voice from within the grave... these are metaphors for the structural relationship between person & word, poet & poem.

5.7 : "western rim" - from Prospect Park, you can see the western ridge, like the rim of a bowl, on the other side of downtown Providence.

... & it sounds like a rather detached & mandarin approach to poetry, no? Indeed.

Math is only one possible element of composition, obviously. & another way to look at it is this : often the structure interacts dialectically or symbiotically with other elements.

When the language poets et al. - back in the 80s - were trying to infuse a political stance to their poetry by way of linguistic theory & philosophy, I was doing something simpler : I tried to apply old poetic forms to political themes. Thus I wrote a sestina about homelessness :

DOWNTOWN SESTINA

 
Downtown is gleaming, a nest of glass
Scant refuge for the homeless and the poor
Who trudge along under looming towers
Hungry, frazzled, begging small change
And subject to the better sort of people
Whose eyes reflect the glitter of the city

 
And so many circles animate the city
Captured in the high gloss of the glass
What's taken for the playground of the people
Erases every doorstep of the poor
In sprawling ellipses of loose change
Under the stolid mystery of these towers

 
Under the bright conundrum of these towers
These measuring rods allotting every city
Gyroscopes adjusting every change
By whirling speculation in the glass
The downward spirals of the ornery poor
Set stirring turbid shadows in the people

 
And shuttling promotions of the people
Forecast by divination in the towers
(Who's growing rich and who remaining poor)
Start dancing fevers in the chattering city
And snarl the artist in his broken glass
Frail craft undone by overmastering change

 
When fortune is the favored end of change
Suburbia the limbo of the people
And tender conscience faints before the glass
Rocketing skyward in pretentious towers
To serve the sleek imaginary city
Or swell the sullen rancor of the poor

 
Meanwhile the rhetoricians of the poor
In campus pockets rummaging for change
Inscribe the true authoritative city
And mint sterling mementos of the people
Studies wherein the mind serenely towers
Over safe specimens tacked up under glass

 
So let's raise a glass to the dizzy city -
A toast to towers, and all red-faced people!
And drink for a change among the homespun poor.

(Perhaps this poem only reveals how hopelessly mandarin & ivory-tower I am myself.)

(I came by a very roundabout way to "formalism" - via Mandelstam, to the Renaissance poets, to Villon, etc.)

Busy around here lately with family matters (my daughter is spending half the school year in Bangladesh).

Nothing much to report on the poetry frontier. Enjoying the fibs. Working out some math (I hope) for some extended projects. Am interested in how a math proportion can signify balances or equilibria between different dimensions of a piece. Looking at the rug in the living room for inspiration.

Say, for example, that 7 is the number of quatrains in a section of your poem. That gives you 7x4 or 28 lines. So say you have 4 parts with 7 sections each, giving you 28 sections to the whole poem.

You've thus established a very simple "ecology" or echo-system for the different particulars of your poem : each part reflects the whole (at least numerically, which is one way of starting). And it turns the individual lines of your poem into elements of a web or network.

This is a strange way to write, admittedly. Lends itself to various quandaries & mishaps. But it was one of the ways that Dante wrote. & he could write.

OK, I'm fibbing.

Bud,
stem,
and then
the petals...
soon a sunflower
joins the fibonacci parade.

from the Charles Olson Library :

Olson 1132 Hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico and psilocybin : a bibliography / R. Gordon Wasson. 
Olson 1133 Myth and ritual in Christianity. 

This book, by Viola Sachs, should be back in print. It would sell. I keep trying to find an o.p. copy.

The game of creation: The primeval unlettered language of Moby Dick, or, The whale. (Published in Paris in 1982.)

As my faithful true-blue blabbophiles know, I'm struggling to get out of a writing block. Hope I'm not jinxing myself by saying that mathematics might help.

I'm going back to an approach I used in the long poems, only in a somewhat different order of steps.

It's curious how math & geometry infiltrated my writing, since I was never big on it in school.

When you have a set of themes or images or ideas which seem to be hanging around, waiting to be picked up... when you want to synthesize some material... well, sometimes there are geometrical aids-to-composition.

There's a poetry in numbers, & vice versa.

Formal harmonic properties are found in the way different numerical quantities interact. Thus, if you're interested in "part is the sum of its whole" (or vice versa) phenomena, math can help. There are curious & fascinating symmetries involved, when small quantities are mirrored or analogous to quantities on different orders of scale.

So say you have a theme or some subject-matter you want to interweave with something else, which may not appear immediately relevant : you can find ways to echo & balance or contrast things, geometrically.

Add to this the symbolic qualities which are or can be invested in numbers, and you're really getting somewhere. Because you can apply both your own symbolic values to particular numbers, and you can draw on traditional or other applications : you can combine them. Soon your art work will start to resonate with its own obscure & secret interconnections.

& this is all in addition to the rhythmic aspect (metrics).

Painters & architects & musicians, of course, have been doing this for a long time.

Right now I'm messing around with the mysterious number which pervades Finnegans Wake : 1132.

So why am I getting back to this? It's not just that math & geometry can help a writer organize material. Numbers, shape & symmetry can lead you along. The blank space can help you find what you're looking for, even before you knew you were looking.

As I've mentioned before, Alastair Fowler wrote a series of books on this subject, as exemplified in Renaissance poetry.

Fred's Castel del Monte has a total of 56 facets (8 walls, with 48 sides on the 8 corner towers). He also died at age 56.

A man's his castle. (Birthday numbers... my poem's full of 'em.)

Each little section or canto of The Grassblade Light can be likened to an image, like a coin, cast in a mold. Not only are there 8 (in 7) parts : each part contains 28 (+ 1) sections; each section contains 28 lines (7 quatrain stanzas). (This is the template, anyway; there are some meaningful variations in the pattern). The central "+1" or 29th section of each part is designed as 4 x 4 quatrain stanzas (or 64 - 8x8 - lines).

28 x 2 = 56.

(One obvious pitfall of this kind of form is the temptation to fill in the pattern (with filler). Did I avoid that? Dunno... maybe.)

This is my goulden coinage of poetic value, Mandelstam's "gold coins of humanism". It's worth one penny, Penelope.

It's a rule : all big poems have to be modelled mathematically on the architecture of a building (or part of a building). For Dante it was the mosaics in the chapel in the Ravenna cathedral (there's a good book on the numerology of this). For Pound it was the Malatesta crypt. For Crane, of course, it was... you know.

I modelled the middle book of Forth of July (The Grassblade Light) on the Castel del Monte.

(Frederick II had many negative qualities. But in my poem he & his Castel represent a principle which both Dante & Roger Williams stood for : the separate, dual & independent spheres of church & state.)

Can I pull any threads together from the jumble of last few days?

- mountaineering

- the "Math World" comparison

- going to the boundaries

- poetry : civilization (part : whole)

- Acmeism (humanizing the earth)

It's a mess! & the bit about Russell's Paradox & etc.... way too mushy & vague.

Later...

Poe, mirror-master, doppelganger-haunted ("William Wilson", Poe+Poe), is the poet of the number 2;
Whitman ("doubleyou-doubleyou"), singer of cosmic Unity, is the poet of the number 1;
Dickinson, of course, at the vanishing-point (Eternity/Zero Hour), is the poet of. . .

I love this weather, not too cold, cloudy, moist, yellow leaves, or none, or few.

Sun Returns to Womb.

Driving through Jersey wastelands near Newark Airport over the weekend, had old recurrent impulse to dig cave in abandoned area (say near freeway off-ramp), start fire, live there. Kind of escapism. Poetics of hobo-ism (as distinct from homelessness).

Island Road begins in this weather. The "structured" meanings of this sequence have yet to be explored. Reading a poetic text re-enacts death/rebirth. The time-design, the seasonal "year" of Island Road, culminates in the Shakespearean "year"-echo in the section called "To the Green Constellation" (based partly on Fowler's numerological readings of The Sonnets). Sonnet-rebirth; Shakespeare-Now.

But you already knew that, and so does Prof. Hinkel.

I read lately :

Game of Creation by Viola Sachs. Riveting study of Melville's ciphered language in Moby Dick. Puns, gematria, magic squares. . . the book is an eccentric combination of amazingly acute deciphering & intuitive thinking, with a pretty simplistic, reductive set of conclusions. Maybe faced with the labyrinth of Moby, one is tempted to resolve its meaning(s) too quickly. But I love this book. I would buy a copy, but it's very hard to find.

I've read it before. There's a lot of Melville in Stubborn Grew et al.

It was a good day to walk to India Point today. The grass still green, the leaves just coming out. A lot of activity in the harbor : tugboats, dredgers, freighters. I bought some mini-binocs just to watch them (feel free to notify Homeland Security). There's a Russian sub there, used in film "K-19", now a museum, complete with Soviet flag etc. : the Julietta 484. The center book of the Big One, Grassblade Light, is an octagonal Russian-style poema, plotted on an Orphic search (by way of Petersburg) for my cousin Juliet. Sort of like Kafka said, sit on a park bench & the world will come & lie down at your feet.

Translato-logorrheia : Stubborn Grew et al. happened because one day I was able to pick up a Mandelstam mask & put it on.

Rhode Island has more hair salons per square inch than. We're a very small very Big Hair state. Passed one coming back on Hope St: Hairoglyphics. As I may have mentioned already a hundred times, RI Statehood Day is May 29th. The state motto is "Hope". Bob Hope & I share the same birthday (5/29). He's the stand-up, I'm the sit-down.

Grassblade Light has 7 chapters in 8 sections. Each section has 28 poems of 28 lines each, with a center poem of 64 lines, making 29 poems total, in a [14/1/14] array (there are variations - it's a matter of broken symmetry - but the total lineation is almost exact for each section). The poem moves generally from RI to Russia to the Mississippi delta up to MN (the "North Star state") and back to RI. The central chapter 4 is a double chapter, 2 sections centered on a single line : Love is our North Star high up above.

The experience of making Island Road was, for me anyway, a demonstration of this concept of tradition/"Nowness". Writing this sonnet sequence had its roots over 20 years before, in a "strange encounter" I had with Shakespeare's Sonnets - a sense of the author's "presence" which precipitated sort of a nervous breakdown. (I've written about this in an essay in the Edwin Honig festschrift, A Glass of Green Tea.)

Part of what I was doing was asking myself, how would one write a sonnet sequence today? Every poet who tries, finds their own answer to this. In my case, I wanted to re-experience Shakespeare's sonnets - re-write them. At the same time, I had more contemporary models to hand - Ted Berrigan's, John Berryman's (he wrote a set of sonnets before the Dream Songs) were the ones that intrigued me. I tried to apply Berrigan's jumpy, scattered syntax; I also developed sort of a Berryman's "Henry" (from the Dream Songs) to frame an indirect narrative, a journey through winter darkness to spring, to an encounter with both Shakespeare & the "dark lady". In the penultimate section, "To the Green Constellation", I implicated or imbricated allusions to individual Shakespeare sonnets in a systematic way, based on a study of the calendrical-numerical architecture of the Sonnets by Alastair Fowler (Silent Poetry) : Shakespeare's "day" becomes my "year". The numerical design is noted in the prose opening to this section:

"61 Henry's Dream

In my dream, Everywoman was an icon. We were at a conference on the malaria epidemic. Urban locale--refined, old European (Siberia?). We walked past the coffeeshop at 99 19th Street, around the block, past the museum at 145 10th Avenue, & entered the Birch Tree Grotto (126 Verde Triangle)."

These numbers refer to specific sonnets, which are markers in the pyramidal design Fowler describes.

So what is the point of all these compositional details? I'm showing how the poetry-making process is an activity of producing Now out of time & tradition. My attempt to fuse Shakespeare with a "Henry-redivivus" - a fictional character out of a dead poet's oeuvre - is a process of making Now anew.

The poet Gabriel Gudding emailed me about my book Stubborn Grew, & I replied with some info on its design. I emailed back to say that the story formed a "W": a sort of double W, in that while following the protagonists (Henry & Bluejay) on a geographical zigzag W across a hillside in Providence (mapping a W), the structural or numerical design formed a textual "W" : that is, the center of Book 2 (the asterisk on p. 137) forms the apex of the center of a narrative-numerical W (zigzagging from optimism/pessimism, happy/sad, etc. - the "nadir" of the 1st descending (tragic, pessimistic) stroke of the W on p. 133, written on 4/4/98 (anniversary of MLK assassination: "44" Chinese number of death) - from which nadir it begins to ascent toward the apex (p, 137) & then descend again. . .

But what is this "W"? Is it a burning Bush? (see section 5 on p. 49, written in Feb. 1998). I wrote to Gabriel about how the narrative follows "Henry's" search for a lost black CAT (Pushkin) kidnapped on Halloween, into a CATabasis (journey to the Underworld) with Blue J. The "W" is many things: for example, it's the reflection in moonlight of a heavenly "M" inscribed on the landscape (Dante's M of the eagle of Justice, Mandelstam's M). Combine an M & a W and you get a pair of cat's eyes. A "W" is also the outline of a CATamaran (combining 2 V's: Venus, Virgo: becoming a constellation: Cassiopeia, with its Ethiopian (Pushkinian, Bluejayan, MLK) themes.
& Cassiopeia/Ethiopia/Blue J/MLK-Melchior leads back to the Ark of the Covenant, or the ship-shape of a CATamaran.

The "W" inscribed on the landscape in Stubborn casts a shadow in the structure of the larger poem. That is, see pp. 137, the center of Bk 2 of Stubborn: the last words are: "Thy will." This unfinished sentence is only completed in the 3rd book of sequels (July), in a symmetrical mirror-image at the center of its 1st section, the last words of which are: "Be done." These nodes form the nadirs of the larger "W" design of the entire poem. The exact numerical center is found at the center of Book 2 (Grassblade Light), in a single isolated line (referring to a star).

These mappings are summarized in Book 4, the shorter "coda" to the entire poem ("Blackstone's Day-Book", found in the vols. Island Road & The Rose). They circle around many motifs, including MLK, Ethiopia, the Ark, the ship. . . Melville's American-prophetic underside. Here is a sample of what I'm getting at (from Blackstone's Day-Book, toward the very end of the long poem):

IV.1

We are coming to the end of Henry
Navigator's long voyage, Elena -
circling around an elephant ear (Abul
Abaz, or Barnum's Jumbo) - see

how everything grows simpler,
more harsh, more true. Still
the well is always there (and will
be) - like the man standing here

beside it in the dark courtyard
(strange blooming out-of-season
almond branch). A stone,
a star, a well. A cup of water

from a rainbarrel (or Tartar
wine). A circling dragon-boat
or scrap of origami writ
folded to float so lightly. . . there.

You fold Andromeda into a W,
a mountain range back into M.
You cup them in your palm
to make a diamond, or double-

diamond - cat's eyes, Pushkinian.
Delicate Blue Morpho wings
woven with microscopic strings
of quipu thread (gentian-

gentle, violet and red). A knit
crossroad, then - red, white -
streams into Cassiopeia's
mother-night (at last).

5.22.2000


The focus on the catamaran-ark is a focus on Jubilee (Bluejay-inversion), or the coming of justice & redemption & the kingdom of heaven. The angelic reality requires a vessel of some kind (shelter or modus operandi, womb or Grail). I realize this sounds a bit wacky & obscure.

This week's NYorker has a brief review of Marsden Hartley show in Hartford. "the master of Dogtown is having his day". Did Charles Olson notice? Hartley did a lot of painting in Dogtown.

"the middle voice". not elliptical. where on the Virgilian wheel is the impulse? see, simplify, speak. meter-making argument. sound & sense & pressure of experience. he paints a blue mountain.

My kids' mother Francesca born & raised in Lewiston, Hartley's home town.

"By the fragrant Androscoggin,
clogged with noise & smoke. . .
Lewiston High School. . ."

Numerological symbolism in his painting for Hart Crane ("Eight bells"). Eight bells means noon, time he jumped off the ship. 2, 9, 33.

Crane the other side of the coin from Eliot's alloy of traditional/modernist. the flip side.

Hartley & Max Beckmann. Painting in Minneapolis Art Institute ("The Departure").

Blackstone was born on March 5th. He was buried on May 28th. Blackstone serves as the genius loci or presiding spirit, Henry's Lenten "shriver" (Blackstone was an Anglican minister); this is "Blackstone's Law". Book 3, "July", ends on March 5th. Book 4, "Blackstone's Day-Book", ends on May 28. The basic unit of Book 2, "Grassblade Light", is the poem of 7 stanzas, or 28 lines. The basic unit of "July" is the poem of 28 stanzas. 28 is a "moon-number": silvery, reflective, hermetic. The structure of Forth of July is built on 28 and 29.

Both Anna Akhmatova & Joseph Stalin died on March 5th.

I want to write a little more about the longo pome which took up so many years of my life (Stubborn Grew & its sequels).

In the early 90s rhyming became easy through a lot of practice. Should rhyming be easy? Probably not, but as any musician knows, momentum is important, & in my poetry it was compositional momentum which rhyming & repetitive stanza forms helped along. I was also very interested in Alastair Fowler's studies of numerical & ring structures in Renaissance poetry, & using these techniques became another way to keep momentum. These techniques give the poet permission to take a deep breath & really EXPAND the poem.

However, in my trial runs in the early 90s ("Spring Quartet") I discovered I'd written long stretches in which the techniques took over, leaving me with a sort of facile, tinny, superficial rhetoric. The same thing sometimes happened in shorter poems where I used a special form (pantoum, sestina, etc.) - but they were good practice.

When I came back to these methods in the later 90s I tried to be both more careful & less subservient to the techniques. But again, what triggered "Stubborn Grew", what really gave me entry, were Mandelstam's late poems (Moscow Notebooks, Voronezh Notebooks especially). Two things in particular appealed to me. First was the notion of drafts & sequences - short lyrics which were also parts of a larger set. That gave me the idea I could write "chapters" of a long poem based on this idea. The second, and more important, was something M. accomplished under duress, in the Voronezh poems. It was a conjunction of opposites he achieves in those brief, notational lyrics. In a word, they combine finality with contingency. On one hand they are brief, contingent, composed under conditions of extreme stress and suffering: they radiate the intense feeling of being "on the road". Yet on the other hand they PAUSE: the poems are contemplative moments of stasis and awareness. Actually the title of my book of short poems, "Way Stations", typifies this conjunction.

What this manner I found in the Voronezh poems gave me, was a means of starting out with "Stubborn". Rather than over-planning or calculating, I let the short poems come as they would, keeping in mind the general threads of where I was going. So the first "chapter" of the poem leads into the narrative by means of this sort of glancing notation. & I was really amazed, much later, to see how those early note-poems prefigured the larger structures & themes of the poem as a whole.

What also happened later was that the note form became formalized or stylized. By the time I was writing the first sequel to Stubborn ("Grassblade Light"), I was able to combine the same sort of aleatory approach to the individual units, with a much more articulated & formal set of ring-structures. "Grassblade" is a set of seven panel-chapters; each chapter laid out around a central section; the fourth (central) chapter is a double chapter (so in a numerical sense there are actually 8 sections). Each individual poem has 28 lines (7 rhymed quatrains). Each chapter has 28 poems with a central section (making 29). There are variations & planned "breaks" in this symmetry. & there are thematic elements & calendar dates (of composition) which relate to this symmetry (the design was actually modelled on an octagonal castle in southern Italy built by Emperor Frederick II. Sounds kind of silly but there it is). The 3rd sequel - "July" - revises this kind of patterning & takes it further. The final sequel - "Blackstone's Day-Book" - a brief coda, finished on anniversary of the day William Blackstone (Anglican hermit-pioneer-exile-scholar-preacher, who settled in RI before Roger Williams) died: 5.28.2000. Also the saint's day of an ancestor of mine, Guillem de Gellone, one of Charlemagne's generals turned monk - celebrated in the French chansons de geste (the Chansons de Guillaume d'Orange) (sounds kind of silly but there it is).