plague stalks the King

PIN OAK

When the great cities are covered in grass

& nomads return, to forage & hunt

will they remember President Blunt

who saved them from civilization?  Alas!

President Blunt is anonymous too

his towers demolished

where servants once polished

his golden doorknobs, his superb statue.

What happened?  A corona followed him home

from the golf course, one day…

did his nation betray.  Now

his dogie named Money no longer will roam.

Plague stalks the King, going blind

as of old.  Old Oedipus

(our homo sapiens rebus) must

die for the herd (driven into the blind)

& civilization, our slave-driving hub

must await the next trickster

to merge at the mixer

& shatter the wiles of absurd Beelzebub.

Thus time-gravity, suffused with vertigo

informs our animale compagnevole

how pride goeth before a fall.

The voice you heard (long time ago)

out of the cave, whispering low

was your own ghost, human.

Soft-yodeling Robin, on

pin oak branch (before Cahokia).

3.13.20

O more than moon

LITTLE ROOM

90 years ago today

Papa was 5 weeks old.

Lindbergh took off, bold

Icarus... Spirit of St. Louee.

Daedalus built his labyrinth

to keep the Minotaur

at bay.  OK so far.

Only minor casualties – 8 millionth

civilian, 1913 (unknown

poilù).  Our engineers

built expensive tears

into delicate ships, Apollonian

on combers like phosphorus, behind

the shining cranium

(a sort of No-See-Um

mosquito zone).  Dear blind

(icky) Eddy posed this question

to himself : Who’s my father?

Phoebus compiled a rather

complex artifice (Olympic Stadion

to be Demolished Tomorrow)

in order to swim again

beneath Shoshone moon –

just 8 light-years away (somehow

we’ll get there, Apollinaire).

She’ll do her zephyr flute-

dance (Bonfire En Route)

as lithe fiery planetary star

                *

Stravinsky set for 8 août

– he had to settle for

the 4th (Madame Bouvier

demand) – juillet, or thereaboot.

Guillaume bowed to the plumèd crowd.

Jesus on autopilot

rose... began to float

over la Tour Eiffel (meek, not proud).

Lindy surrendered all his clothes,

like Francis (to his father

dead) – rose further

in mondaine esteem – only to close

that gap between our earth & moon.

Bright mother of reflection,

pearl of intellection

(pupil Christ within your black hole zone)

my jottos ink into Francescan gloom,

your caved-in grotto

on my kitchen plot.

Light tenders mercy in that little room.

O moon, your melancholy face

reminds me of my lost race

to perimeter of grace.

Mayflower, constant Falcon-Ace...

paternal covenant of trust.

O arrogance of youth!

To jettison the truth

like so much ballast (bursting dust).

5.20.17

Willow River twilight

ANOTHER YULE

Civilization is a natural good.

Valleys are honeycombed

with anthills – tombed

with moral titans (Lincoln would

live up to his Memorial).

Government’s innate,

then – our pleasant fate

to be so compagnevole,

says Alighieri (after Harry

Woodpecker).  D.C.

marbled with majesty

will have a double Jubilee

this year – May 29th (the K

of Camelot’s birthday);

crowds cry hurray

up to the pint of vanishing

& glory glory hallelujah.

I love my country too.

But pride, you know,

leads oft to suicide – King Saul,

alas, fell on his sword, & Henry’s

Clover (sad antithesis

of photosynthesis) was

mortised into concave penury

(her veil of Isis hoovered out

of Iowa).  Her star

twirls like Ishtar

above a Willow River twilight

               *

where gold prairie meets the far

horizon (at the green

mountain, where shriven

penitents climb to the door).

Pride be the world’s blockade.

Banners of orange black

& green (by Jasper Jack)

are complementary, not made

for nought.  Pete? Smoky Pete’s

still lively, though John’s

jotting paper crayons

with encaustic slivers now.  Wheat’s

blonde for Brother Jim’s Great

Purple Hairstreak – what

a butterfly!  Yet

there’s no sketchy moral shortcut

to self-centered celebrations

for a nation, in this world

of woolly worms curled

into cottonwood canyon-

cocoons.  No idle soul-solace

– an oxymoron in

the China cookie tin.

True penitence proceeds apace,

slowly, like Frank’s old shaky mule

inching to San Francisco.

Sorrow made your child go

sailing.  Grief tacks up another Yule.

3.16.17

west of St. Louis

MASON JAR

& the word came out west of St. Louis.

Kind of hokey, like

a dust-devil psych-

out on eccentric orbit.  She was US.

The weird windlass twirled due Nord

into a wilderness

of cedar & watercress –

deserted road, iced-over, hard.

Held up on a tiny pinhead pine-

needle of sunlight, she spun

like a gyroscopic moon,

beholden to none.  She was fine

to behold, like a mason jar, with her G-

fitz-G major Eyelash Curl –

a square-dance whirl

around an Irish jug (from C

to C minor & back again).

She spoked light so lightly

all the ire of unspritely

iron nations (dusty canyon

grandeur in a pride of lions)

molted into Phoenix

ash & rainbow peacock’s

eyes – & I can’t write these lines

without tears wide as Okeanos

coursing planetary curves,

as Stella Morris swerves

another starfish into star (yes, yes!)

                  *

2.8.17

The Arrogance of the Poet

"The arrogance of the poet."  Has a ring to it.  Also a history.  I think of the arrogant William Blake's remark, that Milton was "of the Devil's Party without knowing it."  In other words, Milton, in Paradise Lost, expressed, perhaps unwittingly, some admiration and sympathy for the arrogant Satan he imagined.  Not that I agree with Blake's assessment : I think Milton was completely ironic about his angelic anti-hero.  But this is a recurrent motif in the operatics of poetry.  What's at the root of it?

I remember the legend (apocryphal?) of Chaucer, toward the end of his life, renouncing all his poetical works as worldly vanity.  A sort of flipside image of the traditional cultural authority awarded to poets & poetry : Chaucer's work may have been vanity, but it was also exalted as the incomparable mirror of its local world & time.

I often think in this regard of these lines of Ed Dorn :

To a poet all authority
except his own
is an expression of Evil
and it is all external authority
that he expiates
this is the culmination of his traits. 

Which seems an elegant encapsulization of the arrogance in question.  It's close to Emerson, & Stevens, & Coleridge, & Whitman - the idea of the poet's Adamic imagination : a primal, primary, "original" power to envision the true "order of things", and put it into words : utterly "new" words.

This is the intellectual arrogance which that proud & powerful poet T.S. Eliot strove so mightily to curb, exorcise, & transmute into spiritual humility.  We are weak mortals, sinful creatures - actually blinded by our spiritual pride, the idolatries lurking 'neath our mighty visions.  Thus spake Thomas Stearns.

The poets' characteristic bent goes back, I guess, all the way to prehistory.  The shaman, the seer, the oracle... the chanted evocations & summons of archaic ritual & magic... the cosmologies, genealogies of the gods, tales of the tribes... the ancient poets "speak" the logos of the universe in a manner analogous to the I-am-what-I-am of Genesis, who spoke & it was made.

In this arena, there is obviously an erotic, ecstatic dimension, vaunted for example by Nietzsche : the tension between the wise claritas of Apollo and the fertile eros of Dionysus.  Here Orpheus & the poets are the original rock stars - lords of the bacchanal, the goat-gods, leaders of the sacred dance...  all pretty clearly related to the famous-liminal social status of the poet (since the goat-dance is a reminder of the goatishness of Milton's proud Satan).

Are we getting any closer to the mystery here?  Don't ask me, this is just my blog.  We're looking at shards in a dusty kaleidoscope.  Let me apply some personal allegory.  Around age 16, I fell for the arrogance of poetry with all my heart.  I felt it in the New York School poets (the Big Red Book anthology, and others).  I had taken to it even earlier, in that wonderful, playful 60s anthology for schoolchildren (A Gift of Watermelon Pickle).  Poetry creates a powerful, mesmerizing, occult force-field... out of the purest, wildest, most liberated & crazy free speech.  This I suppose was a basic attitude of those times, of the generation just before mine, and of my own (I turned 18 in 1970).

& in my mild-mannered way, I lived it.  For my requisite high school senior "Chapel speech" I wrote and recited a mini-epic poem.  For my college application essays I sent... poems (& somehow got into Brown U).  In college I skipped most classes other than Shakespeare & Creative Writing.  By the beginning of my senior year I went through a full-blown Robert-Lowellish manic breakdown, complete with personal visitations by the ghost of Shakespeare & the Holy Ghost.    I dropped out of Brown, bummed around, worked (very) odd jobs, applied for a lead guitar slot with the Rolling Stones.  Came back to Brown & graduated 3 years later by the skin of my sheepskin.  Meanwhile I filled crates of spiral notebooks with poems, thoughts, plays, & so on.  I married the daughter of a poet & became a VISTA volunteer (until Reagan came along).  My last real job, before retiring (to the library), was "professional resume writer".  I have been an arrogant poet from day one.  My only humility in this regard was the knowledge that I could never combine being a poet and teaching literature, or writing.  But of course that humility too was just an expression of my arrogance.

& so how does the allegory of my life illustrate our topic here?  I think the poet cuts a figure in the world which is determined by his or her vocation.  & what is the substance of that calling?  For me it resides in this stance of undetermined freedom & originality.  The sacred Word emerges from nowhere, because it is everywhere : the divine Word is a creative act - the original creative act - of the One who uttered it.  The poet in this sense is a sort of limited & faulty imago of her Onlie Begetter.  Limited & faulty, in that we are a work-in-progress, or a work-in-mystery : that is, we see this divinity only through a glass darkly.  We are copies of an original - an original which I am happy to identify with the historical & trans-historical Jesus, with the Trinity.  (This confidence, I am lucky to say, may help protect me from the flipside of that glory - the verso to which all vainglorious poets are susceptible : that dead-end, sulfur-stinking, foolish pride, which arrogates the ultimate originality to my Self alone.)

We take joy in the freedom of the poet & of poetry, because that playful freedom reflects (if only very partially) the dignity of our human status as creatures of a Creator.  Osip Mandelstam meditated on this in his unfinished essay "Pushkin & Scriabin", where he writes that the Redemption - that historical event - liberated Western art.  How?  In the proclamation that the whole world had been saved, the redemption set Art itself free from any kind of determinism : the artist was now free to "play" like a sheep in the fields of the Lord, to play, as Mandelstam puts it, "hide-&-seek with the Father".

But there is something humble, not arrogant, about a sheep.  So here maybe we have a reiteration, in another key, of the old Greek dichotomy between Apollo & Dionysus.  Here Christ is both the host at the wine-fest, the Dionysian leader of the dance, as well as the pivot of divine Sophia, Holy Wisdom - the Apollinian moderation & measure of the cosmic Logos.  That arrogant inspired humble saint Simone Weil wrote tellingly of this process of mediation, how in this mode Jerusalem & Athens embrace, Love and Knowledge are joined as one.

Arrogant young Dionysius, ca. 1975.  (Shortly after Chris Kraemer took this photo in NY, I flew to London, to talk with Keith Richard about music & religion.)