I am the Goat

Ours is a golden age of verbosity and explanation.  There is a very smart geek or robot or app for every verbal tic.  I, Blogger, am a part of the slough.

I certainly love music and musicians, but I think I love painters even more.  Why?  It seems more awkward, excruciating and difficult (maybe because I am more of a musician myself).  It seems even more anti-verbal than music.  Painters are famously inarticulate, no matter that they are makers of signs, semioticians par excellence.

My 60-odd year career in poetry swamp might possibly subsist on a few basic touchstones - patterns which survive the various zigs & zags of enthusiasm & commitment.  One of these touchstones is ut pictura poiesis.

My mother in her heyday was mainly a painter, a potter, a maker of images.  & also a reader & a storyteller (to children such as myself).

Three poets who quickened me most surely & steadily : Guillaume Apollinaire, John Ashbery, Osip Mandelstam.

Painting the image.  The sonic image.  The mysterious fanfare.

I feel very strongly that the contemporary whatnot scene, the global blabbateria & confessional cannibal-fest, the photo-shoot, the selfie-group love-yogurt hut, the total hug machine & forthright commitment speechification party, the holy us-v.-them war, has very little to do with poetry, no matter how much it has to do with humanity.  Ut pictura poiesis in this environment is a way of stepping back a little.  The otherness will jar slightly with your Community Jar - but without otherness there is no togetherness, right?  Every schedule needs a goat.  I am the goat.

Telling it slant.  Telling it so slant you don't get it.  You just gonna have to look & listen for a while, like Oblomov lying in a Russian wheatfield.  Life is larger than Tolstoy, according to Tolstoy.

You are not going to "get" my poetry, America.  Summer is here.  Go jump in a lake.

MASON’S PIN

The gray underside of these

dogwood leaves, clustered

over my head.  The blistered,

lingering pussy willow.  Evening’s

repose à Providence, which I

must exit before long.

Into the slough I’m diving...

weedy heartland (lake country).

Roger Williams’ apple-root,

Blackstone’s Yellow Sweeting

will remain.  A meeting

at Swan Point – starry circuit,

milky wheel (Pappy’s birthday

pivots on your mother’s

grave).  Some Vladimir’s

renunciation – icon of clay

starfish, her lambswool tracery

around a baptistry –

Boethius in ecstasy

after the rack is rolled away.

Uncle Henry weaves his spiderweb

out of one gold strand

of maidenhair.  Trebizond

cell for Guillem, Maximus – ebb-

tide for violence, with violins.

A child skips over granite.

Spinning, inviolate

djinn, dynamic Virgo (mason’s pin).

  6.29.15

MRG, painter, potter

Interesting article in the New Yorker this week, about the decline of reading. Refers to new book on science of reading, Proust and the Squid (Maryanne Wolf). Origin of writing in visual hieroglyphs; powerful historical impact of different alphabets; Chinese script stimulates different parts of brain; etc. Effects of decline of literacy & obsession with viz-technology on US culture & politics.

Got me thinking again about ekphrasis, synaesthesia, poetry as "fluent images", blend of sound/vision. Melville's "hieroglyphic" symbolism (see Viola Sachs book)...
all the paintings in my poems... original fascination with Mandelstam by way of his imagery...

Vision and synthesis. Again, the notion of poetry as a kind of speaking painting. (Verbal synaesthesia being a hypertrophied symptom of something larger.) Imagination and dream. The project of the poet - to challenge more discursive, abstract, mechanical forms of mimesis - to absorb both dream & reason into singing. The old shamanic/oracular activity, except it loses its utilitarian motives (archaic, magical) in the process of painting the vast image for its own sake. A free-standing model of reality.

This is a "glose" (from Way Stations). (A Portuguese poetic form. Sylvia Petrie is a Rhode Island artist of Portuguese descent. Her husband Paul Petrie's book, Rooms of Grace : New and Selected Poems, just published, by New Orleans Poetry Journal Press.)

(I was mistaken about the provenance of the image. It was taken from the frontispiece of an old edition of Piers Plowman.)

 On an Untitled Print
    
                              for Sylvia Petrie

 
 The work is finished in the dark.
 The world's invisible, unknown.
 A night of snowfall leaves its mark.
 It will remain, when we are gone.

  
 Inside the silver picture frame
 frozen winter night has come.
 An image like a negative.
 Black ink feathered off, by hand,
 imprints a landscape (winter gloom).
 The traces of your handiwork
 are what gives light – the glowing land
 flows down (from hills to scattered sand)
 in random touches... flick and fleck.
 The work is finished in the dark.

  
 This labor scatters into day
 like Monday mornings – who can say
 what these wayward shapes contrive?
 Triangular, amid uncertainties,
 one tiny house (snowbound, lonely)
 gleams (nestled, shrunken)
 between the looming cedar trees
 and those unclear interstices
 which could be universe – or none.
 The world's invisible, unknown.

  
 The picture hangs against a wall
 where afternoon light sometimes falls,
 and sometimes (strangely) time will give
 instead of take... and I can see
 what you were doing, after all.
 Through curving space, look
 back... into reclusive memory.
 This house, this hill, this endless sea
 were yours.  Engravèd.  Cold and stark.
 A night of snowfall leaves its mark.

  
 We grow away from home forever.
 Epitaphs for each survivor
 elevate the long perspective.
 Parallels we harvested
 return.  As in a childhood fever
 everything we once disowned
 (what seemed frivolous, detested
 chaos) now coheres.  Nested
 on a hillside, sloping down...
 it will remain, when we are gone.

      
                              3.23.97

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.

Chagall, "The Poet". Remember seeing this in Minneapolis Art Institute. Wrote a poem about it once back in 70s on a manual typewriter. Haven't been able to find the poem for a long vremya.

p.s. 5.22.07 : still haven't located that early poem. I wanted to send it to the Art Institute to see if they could use it for a poster. This may be a task for future scholars : find Henry's lost poem about Chagall's "The Poet"!

Enjoyed today's lecture at the Hotel.

I keep thinking of the Middle Ages. Must be the time of year or something. I don't idealize the Middle Ages; I'm just vaguely, sleepily aware of some affinities.

Sienese painting as opposed to Florentine realism.

John writes about change & its dominion... I think about the force of time & seasons - as regulative, urging us back into a round. I think about peasants & farmers & Bruegel & my ancestors. The oxen of Saturn. Reading in Mazzotta's Dante book about the dual character of Saturn - its influence over the sort of dry leaden durability & materialism of workers in the earth, on the one hand, and its mystico-spiritual influence over theologians & poets, on the other (the "Age of Saturn", the Golden Age, the Edenic time of Adam & Eve the gardeners).

Reading fine book, Sienese Painting, by Timothy Hyman (a painter himself). The miniature narrative images - saints' lives, journey of Dante, Virgil & Beatrice - resemble graphic novels of today. In one scene, reading from left to right, you'll see a figure in three different actions (falling sick, visited by angel, cured...), like a cartoon.

Siena loved the Divina Commedia (maybe partly because Dante was so hard on his home town Florence). Public readings were given outdoors on feast days.

John Latta at the Hotel on Abstract Expressionists, Zukofsky's object-at-rest. I just finished reading N. Cusanus's Compendium, so offer his simple four-foldity :

point / line / plane / solid object
letter / syllable / word / sentence

(& more obscurely : Capability / Equality / Unity / Similarity - which I suppose could be figured as:

Power = point/letter
Equality = line/syllable
Unity = surface/word
Representation = object/sentence

Cusanus writes : any shape - a line, a circle, a sphere - is an image formed of equality.

The Redeemable Players, theater group at my church (Redeemer) across the street, puts on its first production tomorrow night : Les Aveugles (The Blind Men), by Michel de Ghelderode. The one-act brings to life a painting of the same title by Bruegel. Appropriate Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) material. I'm directing.

more Dove Street:

3     
                     Omnia enim universalia, generalia atque specialia in  
                     te Iuliano iulianizant  [All universals, generalities, and 
                     specifics julianize in you, Giuliano]      
                                              – Nicolaus Cusanus


 
A faint gray pencil-sketch   my mother made   decades ago
floats in a blue corner:  two redhead brothers   like twins
almost an octave   Guillem & Giacomo   sit   parallel
each sketching (right-handed)   intent   upon   blank white

 
& Gong Xian   abandoned the field   and the fugue of war
(a change of ancient dynasties   Ming for Shang)
trailing retreat   transmuting each desire
(only flickers   of black horsehair)

 
the Yellow Mountain was   left to your imagination
in grey-black flecks   and war and peace   the blank
spaces   the crooked lightning paths   left up to you
(your willing hand   your loving heart   your sight)

 
Leonardo drew (lefty, mancino) the faintest of red lines
beneath the leaning eyes of Mary   bending down
(seraphic)   toward the babe:   his notes
a kind of mirror-writing (all’ebraico)   with “tired hand”

 
And in the wintry womb   the gray-black limbs
iterate (tired, crooked) against the snow   a backward trail
or trial   a coiled, cold metal spring or   trapper’s guile
(elusive prey   grey shadow   fleeting   glimmering)

 
low cooing   from a frozen eave or   looking-glass
intones an octave   twinned in unison   (some mournful-
silver marriage rite):  a thread of golden lightning
through an ocarina   to a painted ear (and scandalized)

 
announces stormy weather   thunderstorms and   thaw
across the mountains   where waterfalls   rush
past banks of cedars, reeds   (your brush with
fate   by horsehair   led you   here)

       
                                   2.20.04