Rose Island Light

HIGH C

Hobo takes his descending path

sloping to the great river.

What can he give her,

steady Delta Queen, to stanch the wrath?

Past frigid walls of enmity

feathered with graffiti –

a rust-red major C

like an iron magnet... Rimini

or Cleveland?  Venice, maybe –

where the blind king lies,

his crazed hawk’s eyes

closed (petrified) beneath the sea.

The crane dance of the manic poets

circles the salted harbors

of the Gulf.  The Earth bears,

pining, their smoldering caskets

toward one windy maelstrom-vortex –

matrix of Rose Island Light.

Human massif, beaming bright

rotating manna-sun, whose Artifex

is spoked with rays like peacock’s eyes;

radiant Ancient of Days

out of the heart of praise

within a ring of living creatures

breathing fire against the cold

accidia, the starved

& shriveled souls carved

with the scar of Queequeg’s mappemunde

                   *

the raven-star, the midnight sun.

& the Nazir of poets chants

one Galilean entrance –

lacustrine circle, Aquarian –

out of the sea as rapt Columbia,

planetary bird of clay;

cloud-shade of Day

for restoration of Terra Incognita.

Hobo beheld this mighty mandala

like a rose wheel of limestone

light, through human bone

& muscle, limbs & ligament, figura –

tattooed by Piero della Francesca

as a mirror for your glance –

as Miriam in moody trance

harbors the light ray’s umiltà.

Like the Hart of Marsden Hartley

in a rose from the sea,

in a sea-knell’s 33,

out of the sunken chest floats free

the vision of immortality –

Love’s salty clarity

spouts from the clay

enchanted unison, octave’s high C.

So Hobo lay in his muddy riverbed

south of St. Louis.

His clay revolved; his

turtledove hummed overhead.

2.28.17

Ashraf Fayadh : #FreeAshraf

I hate to generalize about this, but it seems to me that for many poets everything begins in early adolescence. (Maybe it's all a puberty rite.)

In early adolescence there are no sharp borders between poetry and other kinds of writing, or between poetry and experience in general, or between a writer and his or her comrades in writing.

Classicism(?)... we (or I) need a new word for this. Since the Romantic era youth has been lock-kneed, stereotyped, as rebellion. But the passion of young poets for literature has as much to do with a secret affinity for the voice of experience. Classicism should not simply be equated with realism or world-weariness (though these aspects cannot be denied, either). Think rather of the notion of hard-won experience. The voice of character & wisdom - of the veterans of spiritual battles, of living itself.

New forms of such classicism appear in every generation - the enthusiasm of young poets for their own literary discoveries, their delvings into the past, the obscure quaint voices of the ancients (or even just the previous generation) - which turn out to be unexpectedly familiar - clear & pungent.

Keats we think of as a Romantic... but he was also classic in this sense. The classiest of the classic.

Jack Birss, retired Cornell prof., must be one of the 1 or 2 people on earth to whom, upon meeting for the first time, I have actually said "I'm a poet."

(Sad to say, but strictly speaking, he is no longer with us "on earth".)

I guess my previous post by two tends toward a sense of the poet as some kind of Suprematist/Genius/Original. But let's not over-emphasize all that (nothing new there). What I'd like to express, instead, with this notion of anomaly or originality, is the sense of, for lack of a better phrase,

some irreducible subjectivity : like the blind spot we can't see through. & art & originality emerge from that subjective area of experience, & of necessity come out original & different - because they do indeed flow from that anomaly, that uncertainty situation, that never-before-known because never before realized or existent... shadowy region, Amazon jungle, unknown...

place of creativity & poems - of chasms & leaps -

& a GPS grid simply cannot place this particular but essential aspect of the whole deal.

Going back to remarks of a few days ago...

Sculpting the mask - molding it out of materia poetica - the timbre & range of the voice, the character & intellectual focus of the speaker.

& tying this into the vague notions of sculpture per se presented yestahday.

The poet as the salience of a locality in time & space. A sculptural bump.

As such, only the "verbal representative" of what Everyman & Everywoman yis.

The human person - and analogously, poetic speech - as geological salience. (Mandelstam was fascinated with some such notion. On "salience", see Mandelstam the Reader, by Nancy Pollak.)

To envision the human being as mute. As sculpture. Why? Because I'm thinking of this sort of in Whitman's sense of the poet's identification with "dumb humanity".

But not with the bardic or patronizing meaning of giving a voice to the voiceless. No. Rather to conceive of the "dumb human person" as sufficient unto him- or herself. Why? Because a person's deeds are their true speech. The devotion of ordinary "dumb" (mute) persons to ordinary acts of unselfish charity throughout their lives.

"Piety", in the old sense.

I am wandering dumbly far afield, a stony salience in the furrow.

... in the same issue yesterday (NYTBR), an essay by David Orr on 2 novels in which the perilous plot climaxes hinge on the recital of a poem. I thought Orr's argument about poetry's useful/useless-ness was sort of contradictory & over-subtle. He used the novelists' "application" to emphasize poetry's distance from any obvious utilitarian purposes, and he showed a familiar disdain for the general culture's misguided notions of poetry's therapeutic or "uplift" or political aspects.

Somehow I think he may have missed the real point the novelists (through their characters) were making : which is that on some basic simple & essential level, we are all poets : we think poetically, we want words which work poetically, we read life itself poetically. I was reminded inevitably (by the fictions' plots) of the woman in Georgia a few weeks ago, taken hostage by a man who had just shot to death 3 people at the courthouse, who talked him into surrendering to the authorities, by reading to him from an inspirational book. Everyone is a poet on some level, it's a human trait.

The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

- Wallace Stevens, from "Men Made Out of Words"

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"!

Tu dunque, che levato hai il coperchio
che m'ascondeva quanto bene io dico,
mentre che del salire avem soverchio,

dimmi dov' è Terrenzio nostro antico,
Cecilio e Plauto e Varro, se lo sai:
dimmi se son dannati, e in qual vico».

«Costoro e Persio e io e altri assai»,
rispuose il duca mio, «siam con quel Greco
che le Muse lattar più ch'altri mai,

nel primo cinghio del carcere cieco;
spesse fïate ragioniam del monte
che sempre ha le nutrice nostre seco.

Euripide v'è nosco e Antifonte,
Simonide, Agatone e altri piùe
Greci che già di lauro ornar la fronte.

Quivi si veggion de le genti tue
Antigone, Deïfile e Argia,
e Ismene sì trista come fue.

Védeisi quella che mostrò Langia;
èvvi la figlia di Tiresia, e Teti,
e con le suore sue Deïdamia».

Tacevansi ambedue già li poeti,
di novo attenti a riguardar dintorno,
liberi da saliri e da pareti;

e già le quattro ancelle eran del giorno
rimase a dietro, e la quinta era al temo,
drizzando pur in sù l'ardente corno,

quando il mio duca: «Io credo ch'a lo stremo
le destre spalle volger ne convegna,
girando il monte come far solemo».

(from Purgatorio XXII)

(translation, by James F. Cotter:)

"You, then, who lifted up the covering
That hid from me the great good I described,
While we have time remaining yet to climb,

"Tell me where our ancient Terence is,
Caecilius, Plautus, Varro, if you know;
Tell me if they are damned, and in what region?"

"They, and Persius and I, and many others,"
My guide replied, "are with that Greek to whom
The Muses gave more milk than to the rest,

"In the first circling of the darkened prison.
Often we converse about the mountain
On which our nurses always have their dwelling.

"Euripides is with us, Antiphon,
Simonides, Agathon, and many more
Greeks who once wore laurel on their brows.

"We see there of the people whom you noted
Antigone, Deiphyle, and Argia,
And Ismene, as sad as she once was.

"Hypsipyle, who showed men Langia’s spring,
We see there; Thetis and Tiresias’ daughter,
And there Deidamia with her sisters."

Both the poets had by now grown silent,
Intent once more on looking all around,
Free of the climbing stairs and of the walls;

And by now the four handmaids of the day
Were left behind, and at the chariot-pole
The fifth still steered its fiery tip upward,

When my guide said, "I think that we three should
Turn our right shoulders to the outer edge,
Circling the mountain in the usual way."

My personal concept of what a poet is & does, allows for a different definition of "reader, reading"... like the old medieval technical term, lectio, lector. A "reader (lecturer)" in theology, philosophy, etc. The poet as solitary, hermit - making poem, making book. The poetry reading as a late event in life or career.

No one wants to go back to that subdued era when poetry was limited to verses in print, & middle-aged profs mumbling at a lectern; nevertheless, I think the pendulum could afford to swing back a little now.

The term "poetry" covers an enormous range of activities & forms of writing/performing. I guess that theory of poetry appeals to me which sets the bar at the highest level of human doings, I mean just under prayer & acts of charity. Dante & Shakespeare & Dickinson & Whitman - their language art places them somewhere at the "brow of reality", so to speak - capable of engaging directly with, & on a par with, all the other forms of spiritual, intellectual & practical activity. Eliot was right when he said that this doesn't happen without the expenditure of great labor & devotion - no matter how much talent & facility the artist starts out with.

In this context I find something slightly jarring in the atmosphere which uses poetry as means to advance improv comedy acts, literary funfests, "scenes". Sorry, that's just how I see it. (I suppose I need to get out more. It's just that I find most poetry boring & narcissistic, & most artists vain & pretentious. & I include myself in that category.)

I don't want to upset anybody, or stoke the fires. Will be glad to return to philology, soon. I learned at the start of the Iraq war that, by jiminy, not all poets think alike.

The Poet qua (quack) Poet has 2 genuine emotions. I am about to detail them in detail forthwith, if you will just control yourself, you whippersnappers & snappywhippers, for just just one unemotional moment, please:

1. Frustration (when the Poet quack Poet is unable to express the fleeting ghostly surges of response triggered by unaccountable uncorralled. . .)

2. Gratitude (this is actually an emotion, and it is actually felt when yawp = op, at least in a mystical sense anyway, which I will explain frothworth).

p.s. Technology Note:

Honig was a teenager in Brooklyn during the Depression. Once I heard him say:

"When I was young I thought I'd become a poet, because the only tool you needed was a pencil."

(p.p.s. And about writing implements: see Anastasios Kozaitis's blog - read the poem by Oksana Zabuzhko (read it to the end). AND (meanwhile) Anastasios' curious counter-intuitive comment on reading long poems (LPs). "Momentum."