REST NOTE : AN EXPLANICATION (1)

Because it's a quiet day at the library (students gone). Because it's not easy to read (this poem). Because only 12 people a month visit this blog any more - most of them from Mars (because I've lost interest in febrile wrangling?).

Why am I writing this poem, which is so recalcitrant? The sameness of structure & syntax - the vagueness of reference...

Well, I'm just getting into it, myself. But with every step I have to try to increase the resistance.

Who are these people - Lazarus, Hobo, Edith, Teddy Roosevelt? Figures, I guess, representing renewal. Renewal in a sort of all-encompassing sense. Renewal as a concept.

Art, well, it seems to be self-reflexive, if that's the right term. Folds back on itself, renews & extends itself through echo-effects. Implication.

So a poetry will try to renew itself by writing about renewal. Lazarus will sing himself out of the grave. With help.

This basic image (Lazarus) is meant to represent aspects of reality in general. "Lazarus", in a sense, puts a person - a particular image of the person - near the center of one's imaginative image of (cosmic) order.

& philosophical consequences result from that ordering choice. What they are I am only beginning to be able to articulate & defend.

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Besides - does the poem so far really exhibit sameness, etc.? Well, maybe so... I seem to have a taste, a habit, an appetite, for the sound of it - at least for my own way of sounding. Maybe no one else hears it that way.

But, as mentioned, I want to make things difficult for myself, to find the resistance (which is related to reflexivity). So the aim would be to move toward a betterment of style. In some ways the serial mode helps allow for that possibility, along with many more negative outcomes (logorrhea, graphomania...). ("...he that of repetition is most master.")

That's part of the aim, & part of the difficulty. As one can tell from the nervous blur of the openings of Rest Note, I'm anxious about it. I've had too many false starts, & too much resistance (in myself & my life) toward writing anything at all.

OK, now I've probably gone & jinxed myself.

So... I guess when I think about my own long poems & what I have tried to do, I fall somewhere in between the paths laid out by Crane & Eliot -

since I tried to carry on with Crane's affirmative-visionary stance, yet I share, in certain ways, Eliot's faith.

My whole poetry life has oscillated between, & tried to integrate, faith & imagination, faith & poetry - since the days of the "Shakespeare ghost" (1973).

& since it was my response to Mandelstam which set in motion the terms of that synthesis, he has remained the key to the "plot" of my long poems.

So... if somebody ever takes the trouble to read, seriously, Stubborn Grew, and The Rose, & the other things, they will find out what I am talking about. (All handy over there at Lulu !)

It has to do with seeing poetry as one door to inward or spiritual renewal, & the renewal of time & history in that light. & it has to do with an interpretation of faith which is in most ways diametrically opposite the stance taken by Eliot & Tate & the other conservative religionist-poets.

If you look into my long poems, you'll see a "ghost dance", where the impulses & writings of Whitman, Melville, Twain, Poe (& others) are aligned with those of Crane, Mandelstam, Berryman (& others) to represent a sort of symbolic "epic America-Russia" (RUS-US), rooted in Crane's, Melville's & Whitman's awareness and acknowledgement of the American Outcast as the spiritual key to America. Where Eliot & Tate experience their faith as a kind of spiritual hierarchy, separating them from modern life, I understand the Biblical tradition as a prophetic framework, or verbal model, for human equality and mutuality. (Melville's Ecuadorian doubloon nailed to the mast of the Pequod; Mandelstam's "gold coins of humanism".)

But my long poems have yet to be read & taken seriously, I guess. I went into a tunnel for about 8 years in order to prepare for & write them. So that made it more difficult for me to write short poems, or interact, as poet, in the magazine culture.

"Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay." That's how it starts.