one foolish man & three Magi

TURTLE-SHELL

Henry wakes from an old man’s nap

with a child’s sense of space

& time.  Heart’s relentlessness.

Here be the river; here the wide gap

between whispering grassland, distant sky.

Epiphany.  Three Wise Men

camel out from high Tehran

to find one homeless king, in a spare pig sty.

Tonight the belligerent intelligence of war

sent guided Minotaurs

heat-seeking vengeance.  Stars

were collateral damage (kids no more).

The ragged tent-flap & the drafty stall

are Henry’s flimsy turtle-shell.

His mind & heart a broken spell –

a wasteland shack, no longer fit for Grail

or Calabrian hermit-monk, or Parsifal.

Only bring me the gift, Melchior

of your toy myrrh-nef – your

river-sense, emerald, mercurial;

like a 4-leaf clover made of almonds

interlaced... like 4 canoes

bent to the whirlpool’s

mandala (Itasca spiral of palm fronds).

This Providence of tight-coiled J

anchors the Pacific Ocean.

Knots its rose-clay revolution

to a bottled ship – ensign of Milky Way.

1.7.20

under the Memory Wing

A-FRAME

Henry’s ancient mother in the Memory Wing

shows him how dying &

amnesia are kin.

When coarse indifference is the thing,

my countryfolk, how to redeem the time?

Henry tumbles down with Hobo

to wallow like a gator now

in river muck – fish out the paradigm.

Wakan Tanka, Great Spirit, O

Thunderbird of Red Wing’s

olden days – you being

transcendental I AM – hey ey yo...

The metaphysical is just outside

your A-frame, Hobo sez –

& as such, pivot of the rez

(or any reasonable maze of hide).

You get me, Hen?  Might be

the shadow of that Jonah-

bird – ur-meta-Noah

J’waytroulife, clear to eternity.

So this rough clay my mother molded

with bare hands (these

Mexique 4-face planters)

might morph a continent – dead

rising altogether from each cold silo

into the dream-sponge –

Providential plunge

uncoiling slowly (at Cahokia Ground Zero).

7.28.19

in the gold realm

ASCENSION DAY

My friend Chris in New Zealand

emailed (on Ascension Day)

about that homely display

of bare feet, trampolining to cloud

in the Lorenzetti fresco (or

was it Philip Guston?)

under the superscription

of a proscenium arch.  Flower

of early Renaissance mind

echoing (if necessary)

your mirror-quality

of reality.  Who will so bend

the boarhound from the boar,

Raven from Nevermore?

Is this your last cigar?

Plein air puffs from a planet’s core.

Limestone shreds of the labyrinth

at Chartres were sort of a letdown.

Rough work.  All the gold gone.

The mower set out to mow... absinthe

green, moss green clasping the scent.

The emerald pentagram

shadowed in the sheep’s I AM

quickens the dead husks in a fundament

of everlasting life; & when the Eternal comes

it will be as we remembered

in the gold realm of childhood –

when time swells (the drone lingers, hums).

6.14.19

my circuit is circumference

HONEY-OAK

Sunshine in June – one whole note

melts into the chord

of summer.  In the old

garden of Time, the poet’s boat

extends its shade toward evening twilight.

The golden ratio of the sunflower

stretches to the nth power

(its perihelion); clay speeds to insight,

cartwheeling uphill into angelic life –

that bright-gated City

whose anti-gravity

magnetic North amends all strife.

Through this fan-feathered diapason

of a planet, the limpid figure

of a limping friend, your

sister-dove (gray pebble, midnight sun);

her hazel eye takes in mortality

as a grave garden absorbs

the one whose goldfinch orb

will bend, in parallax fluidity

as rivers from Paradise stream forth

or a mustard seed

flares – life’s high meed –

a sunny gyroscope (balanced from birth).

So the Messiah-bloom of Israel

like Joachim Fiore,

Henry Flower (ey

hey yo) anchors goodness to the Pole

                 *

Star, steadfast over midnight waters;

so Infinite Presence

arcs into salience

turtledoves & fiery matières

de Bretagne (Arthurian hide-&-seek

the Once & Future King

resolves, into a ring

of riven oaks & golden fleece).

The One Who Rose from the Dead

lives in our midst –

Who left his Holy Ghost

as marigold, to blaze undaunted

Hagia Sophia (with a million eyes);

American peacock (turkey?)

or Aramaic poppycock (see

how archaic our ways – how wise!) –

only Phoenix-Turtle comprehends

how from dream-song flame

Reality revolves the same

again... as when a potter bends

her starfish over azure sand

& lofting clay from seabed

into galactic Roundhead

Cavalier (old Charley-Horse le Grand)

curling himself into green honey-oak

until the lightning stroke

flashes – where thunder spoke

the wheel that spun Ezekiel (Rose-Boke).

6.20.17

Evocative river

ROGER WILLIAMS

                                    Eternity, O Eternity!  That is our business.

Evocative river, measuring

my time.  If I follow

upstream, to the shallow

infant burble of your beginning

– that rush of spring across bright

limestone, agate, flint –

I might catch a glint

of prism-diamond, rainbow sunlight

out of the meteor from whence

we flew.  I studied greatness

as a bookworm boy; was

wowed by those Prince Valiants

& Teddy Heroes who prevail

(magnanimous & brave)

in moldy Grendel-cave

& gory field (at bookshelf scale);

but not until childhood had passed

did someone jump from stone

canoe, whose doings shone

so implicate with goodness (massed

coordinate with commonweal)

as to rekindle in my mind

each uncreated end

within this flow, earthbound & actual –

as in an icon of the central soul.

Heart-pivot of earth-

planet – integral hearth –

blazing spark in a great oak-bole

                       *

of clay spheres darting from the fiery

kiln (original

Joie, ineffable).

Star of perfection (seal of history).

Heroes in graven books (sustained

by hungry scrivener-ravens).

Yet the remotest heaven’s

slope will be surveyed, garnered, gleaned

by unknown compadres (anonymous,

unheralded).  Servants

beyond themselves – tense

strings, bowed into major chords.

Two things of opposite nature seem

to depend on one another...

the bond of troth, of lover

& belov’d.  Roger’s granite door-beam

on the hillside sinks back into dusky

Rhodus billows.  Nigh

the steadfast stream, two shy

ephebes lay out a picnic blanky;

an early butterfly, black-gold,

skims toward the shore. 

You have hearkened to lore

of skalds who came before – old

poets’ conversation, overheard;

now the river moves

in your own heart – Love’s

glittering pulse, encouraging word.

3.29.16

Remembrances of 1865 (so beginneth Ravenna Diagram Bk 6)

SEA WASH

To turn your glance back, eastward, from

the height of a great orange

pier (Home on the Range

in your ear) – immense Pacific foaming

behind you... like a lookout in a crow’s-

nest – a single burning glass,

a golden eagle-eyepiece

taking in a continent.  Up to Rose

Island Lighthouse (Narragansett Bay) –

to the byzantine capitol dome

in Providence, whose gnomon

is a gold harpooner – looking away

back west, toward you.  Photoshot (still).

As when the sun stops briefly

over Jericho, before they

blow the trumpets, & the walls fall;

as if you stood before a Peto

still-life (intricate

& accurate memento

of complete stigmata-scrimshaw hero).

I hear another sea wash, sighing

round salt emerald shores.

Columba’s Iona (wars

far off, now) laved with dying kings’

repentance-prayers (touch of blessing

for the wounded flutes

of clay).  So lift your lute,

sad Frisco boy.  She’s leeward (glistening).

2.12.16

The Venn diagram of Ra

It is the ever-never-changing same,
An appearance of Again, the diva-dame.
- Wallace Stevens

We look around and we see pairs of things - night & day, winter & summer, man & woman, life & death.  It's as if Nature is posing a geometry problem : draw a line C from point A to point B.  Find the inter-mediator, the golden mean.  Build a bridge across that chasm.

We want to make whole what seems to be divided.  It's a psychic necessity.  Sometimes our solutions are very simplistic, and instigate more fractures than before.  Sometimes our answers are very elegant & abstruse elisions - yet despite the sophisticated technology, we end up sliding into the next ditch.

I've been working on a poem-project in which the two parts of the binary, the two points of the calipers, are spread so wide that I can often seem to lose my way - but it also allows for a lot of creative mulling & curious detours.

I knew from the beginning the poem was involved with geometry.  I usually do with this kind of thing.  I start getting unaccountably intrigued by certain numbers & their divisors, how these numbers might be fleshed out in stanzaic and other patterns.  It's a kind of numerology.

The poem is anchored in a Venn diagram - the overlap of two congruent circles, each circumference passing through the other's center.  A pun is a sort of imperfect Venn diagram - the overlap of two meanings in one sound.  The name of the poem is Ravenna Diagram (you see what I mean).

I seem to have many thematic motives (over)determining this basic layout.  One of the main motives has something to do with the traditional Orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation.   Here three Persons overlap as one God.  In the Incarnation we have, very roughly speaking, a Venn diagram of the unity of human & divine.

It occurred to me this afternoon that another facet or motive of this design has to do with Time.

A poet, or any writer, always writes from where they are.  They express their place & time - their "Now".  But a poem or any fiction can project another "Now" as well.  Proust dwells on this mystery with magisterial complexity in his great novel (In Search of Lost Time).

For the ancient Christians, I think, Time was duplex, dimensional.  There is ordinary time, the successions & cycles of clock time - & then there is God's time, Eternity.

History, for them, involved the terrific drama of the intersection of these two dimensions - played out as the destiny of Humankind on earth.  There is a subtle concept called in Greek pleroma - the "fulness of time".  This can refer, apparently, both to the "climax" of the plot of sacred history - God's actual historical presence on earth - and to a sense of time as a kind of ripening of eternity within clock-time (these two notions are obviously close kin).

With Ravenna Diagram I have these two "historical" points of the calipers, a pair of points in spacetime.  There is the "Now" of the author, the poet, me - speaking out of my own experience & character, my place in time & space.  Then there is a second "Now" : that of the historical Jesus, the person who actually lived in Galilee and Judea 2000 years ago.  & then there is a kind of aesthetic middle term - a third "Now" in spacetime : the Italian town of Ravenna, where Dante is buried, where he finished his Paradiso - & where towering, awesome mosaics, representations of Orthodox Christianity, glimmer in their cave-cathedrals (some of these glittering icons found their way into Dante's poema as well).

Jesus tells a parable somewhere - & I forget the exact details - but he concludes with a riddle about time.  Something about a man inviting all his friends to a wedding banquet, but everyone makes excuses.  So he flings open the door & invites all comers.  However, some people show up not clothed properly for a wedding - they are tossed out.  Jesus says something like, "the Kingdom of Heaven is like this too.  So when the Eternal comes upon you, make sure you are prepared."

I've probably botched & oversimplified this parable.  But what interests me is this phrase about "when the Eternal comes".  It seems to goad the listener toward attempting to grasp a certain sense of the layers of time.

We live in a doctrinaire & factional era.  Our "side" is always ready to pin a simplistic label on the other "side".  They are deluded idiots.  Fundamentalists are convinced that old books are roadmaps through life's foggy ambiguities.  Secularists are convinced that religious believers are basically mystified by myth.

I think there might be a kind of philosophical, reasonable aspect to this religious concept of a duplex Time - spiritual and material, temporal and eternal.  The stereotype of puritanical Christianity, clinging to the spiritual at the expense of physical pleasure, is a very old cliche - with some basis in history (think of the desert monks renouncing the world).

But it's possible to think of the religious emphasis on the spiritual as a pragmatic counterweight to life swallowed up by the chaos & futility of the purely material.  A balancing, not a rejection : a synthesis.

This is how I conceive of Jesus' admonition about "when the Eternal comes".  The Eternal is always there : it's only as we get older that we begin to sense the limits to clock-time - our limits.  An awareness of mortality is a spur to long thoughts.  Then we start to sense the presence of the Eternal.

I noticed this with my father - not only while he was dying, but actually long before.  There was a kind of intellectual detachment.  Not that he didn't enjoy life, or care about others - but there was this sense of limits, the fleetingness.

Such a sense can result in a reshaping of priorities.  "What am I doing with my life?"  People are always ready with quick answers to this one, too - usually addressed to others.  But to grapple with it for oneself is the issue.

When you try to write a poem or fiction with two such compass-points, you are immediately handed a wealth of difficult artistic/philosophical problems.  How do I represent my "Now" - and that other "Now"?  But hopefully I put my trust in the creative process.  The whole impulse of poetry is toward integration & wholeness - to enter the rapture of the mesmerizing song.  My pleroma & that other Eternal might in some sense be one & the same, or at least connected.  After all, some such conundrum was the challenge Beatrice threw down before Dante, too...

Mosaics in Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna

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

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.)


There are many others...

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

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 others): icon, Peirce, subjectivity, "J"...

Josh Corey has been conducting an interesting improv on the differing time-effects in prose fiction & poetry. He suggests that good fiction involves an experience of "time-forgetting", whereas poetry always brings us up short with its focus on the fine grain of speech and language, the music of performance.

I've written some on this topic here at various times. What has struck me is that, while good storytelling does encourage us to lose ourselves in the story & forget time, nevertheless fiction tends to make time a theme of the story, so that the experience of reading it is double-edged : we lose ourselves (& time) in stories which describe the effects of time's power. The Odyssey and In Search of Lost Time are, I guess, the prime examples.

Poetry, on the other hand, does not simply intensify our experience of time : poetry changes the basic character of that experience. Prose may demolish our awareness of time; poetry seems to demolish time's very objectivity (as sequential, historical, impersonal phenomenon). Poetic time is a kind of performed Now, in which language spirals back reflexively on itself - and in the process, reshapes perception, knowledge, the sense of self and others.

I think it's worthwhile to emphasize these distinctions between the time-effects of prose fiction and poetry. And to repeat that the experience of a pleroma or a fulness of NOW (containing pasts and futures) - the recapturing and transmuting of past into present, chaos into order - is a theme of major narratives. Thus a notion of poetry is implicit or encrypted in the substance of fiction.

The poetry of quietude is intimately related to the vague intuition that the poet's mission is to relive and revive the great and very old and very intricate language of the poems found in books.

This intuition has dual roots : first, in the encounter with the Bible (the book), experienced as a moment of personal destiny and rebirth; second, in the realization that every reading experience is an echo of the best moments of a lost childhood (when you were reading a story).

Thus the poetry of quietude is involved in a project of conquering or redeeming time.

Woke up around 2 a.m. last night, was thinking about some comments in the Vico book (by Mazzotta), having to do with memory. Mazzotta writes something about the nature of memory, as the sign of a break or fracture between present & past. Memory registers the separation or distance between them.

This seems fairly obvious, but it got me thinking about my poetry ("memory, mother of the muses"), and about memory and space.

It might have something to do with having lived my adult life half a continent away from where I grew up. My sense of memory is always connected with distance in space as well as time.

I think about Proust's (heroic & mock-heroic) rendering of memory. Not that I'm a Proust expert, but I have the idea that with Proust, the action of memory is a kind of bridging & retrieval, an absorption in a past state, which sort of blossoms on its own.

My own sense of memory's action feels more like a distancing : as if one were closing one's eyes & going up in a balloon, or gaining some kind of bird's eye view of oneself, from far away, in a landscape or vast context (of time/space).

This is all rather vague, & maybe I should try to work up an essay or something. But as these notions were occurring to me last night, I also thought of Jonathan's comment of 11/26 :

"So much of reading poetry--and writing it--is ruminative and fragmented. An anxious, frustrating searching through books and magazines. The attention flags. There is not that unitary 6-hour experience of reading a novel, or the novelist's feeling of writing through a certain portion of the narrative."

I'm not sure what he means by "ruminative" here. But I understand the sense of a kind of jumpy or fragmented response to short poems & etc.

& I'm hoping that my own poetry somewhat works against or counters that kind of experience. I mean that these books & sequences of mine aim for a more sustained impression - of vastness - space & memory.

The first (& one of the only) reviews my poetry has received, was in a Brown U. student newspaper, written by an undergrad about my 1st book, Stone. I don't have it in front of me (this was almost 30 yrs ago), but she started it out with something like : "Henry Gould takes his time. He waits until the poem is ready." What she meant, I think, was that I composed slowly & quietly; the poems are sort of calm, without flash, bells & whistles.

I still like those little comments very much, & I think they relate to what I've tried to do.

[p.s. Vico himself might demur from such an individualistic notion of memory. For him memory & history & anthropology are all combined somehow.]

Everything can be explained, probably, by Nebraska. "The plainness of the plains." [Mandelstam] A different landscape of emotional perception offered by small Midwestern towns & farms - different from the jazzy coasts, or the steamy South. The near & the far, the vast & the small, interpenetrate. Time slows down. Childhood is another country.

Kees was an only child, maybe a happy one. Some of the bitterness could stem from exorcised nostalgia. Look at this poem:

1926

 
The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking.  Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

 
An orange moon.  I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

 
I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon.  Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.

Milton & Doris were movie stars of the time. Childhood another country. How doesn't this terse, somber poem shed a certain slant on the art & life of Frank O'Hara? (& on Tate, Ashbery, & all the permanent children of American poetry? Myself included!)

When I say that we should consider poetry, not so much as always pioneering out new spaces in Time, but rather as bridging two separate regions of time (time-as-movement and eternity) - I'm saying we should take the notion of the soul into consideration.

Once upon a time, "world" and "eternal soul" were measured against each other: this was the basis of both moral freedom and personal integrity.

But that was back when we had persons.

glNotes Toward...


I want to elaborate on yesterday's post. I'd like to try to do this in a way that doesn't wear both of us (you & me, dear reader) out. So I'll try to limit myself to short propositions or statements.

1. A new poetics would have to start with a concept or understanding of what modernism & postmodernism are (or were). Let's think of them in terms of their relation to Time itself. Yesterday we sketched a very simple diagram: modernism was an aesthetic effort to "catch up" with contemporary reality understood as accelerated time: accelerated industry, science, social activity, and especially, communication. One facet of this accelerated communication involved the displacement of poetry by prose (journalism, fiction, scientific discourse). Suddenly romantic-victorian poetic discourse seemed irrelevant to the new realities. Poetic modernism was in part an effort to reassert that relevance by catching-up with contemporary time. Literary postmodernism, on the other hand, exhibited symptoms of uncertainty: once art had caught up with contemporaneity, it was faced with more essential doubts & questions about its nature and purpose.
.
2. Modernism exhibited three basic strategies in its response to modernity. I will use a Russian schema to diagram them:
a) Symbolism. This strand posited a clear split between worldly time/material life, and eternal time/spiritual life. Poetry's strategy was to withdraw from worldly time into a realm of poesie pure - anti-prose, anti-journalism: attaching itself to music (somewhat like a leech) in such a way as to fuse beauty with non-referentiality ("supernal beauty").
b) Futurism. This strand opposed symbolism in dialectic fashion. Modernity and modern time were understood as irresistible force and materialist vitality. "The word itself" would act as a speed-machine or flight-mechanism, imitating technology in order to reproduce, in art, the existent vitality considered as ruling force or the primary order of reality.
c) Acmeism. This strand sought a middle path between the first two. Acmeism recognized essential distinctions between Word and Matter, Word & Time; but rather than surrendering (or transcending) matter & time (as in symbolism), the acmeist believed that poetry could accept, incorporate, celebrate, and finally transfigure time & matter by means of the word. The Word is the binding, illuminating force between two distinct realms - time & eternity. The existence of eternity sets limits on futurist contemporaneity; the mediating role of the word liberates poetry from symbolist otherworldliness. Acmeism is grounded in a Bergsonian concept of reality as itself grounded in a time-transcending spiritual vitalism (consciousness).

3. Elena Glazov-Corrigan (in her book Mandelshtam's Poetics : a challenge to postmodernism - Univ. of Toronto Press) conducted an extensive interpretation of Osip Mandelshtam's theoretical prose. There, over time, Mandelshtam worked out the acmeist credo in terms of more specific poetic practice. I can't reproduce her complete exposition here, but I will note a few of his basic propositions as they relate to poetry and time:
a) Poetic production evolves out of a process of reading, and reading involves forms of subjective time-reversal: the distinct "verbal time" of the poet's model (what is being read) begins to absorb the reader, to take priority over the reader's own time.
b) The poetic word or logos is always dialogic, in that it spans disjunctive times or aspects of time: the model's and the reader's; eternity (or recurrence) and clock time. Mandelshtam's primary example is Dante, whose poetic process M. describes as a continual shuttling - an experimentation - between scripture and physics, between the assertions of faith and the experience of earthly time: essentially, the poetic logos bridges the disjunctive realms of nature and grace. What philosophy & theology propose in speculation, poetry asserts in verbal action: the harmony of poetry exhibits the actuality (the aesthetic "proof") of this bridging process, this dialogue, between two phases of reality.

4. Mandelshtam's poetics is simply the most theoretically elaborate and exemplary version of the modernist stream I am calling acmeism. This approach to poetry is found more generally wherever poets assert the reality of two things: a) an eternal time ("duration", "eternal life") distinct from successive clock time; and b) the capability of the poetic word to represent such duration. The approach can be found strongly in Emily Dickinson, for one example: she is continually meditating on and mimetically "harmonizing" disjunctions/conjunctions between natural, seasonal, human clock-time, on the one hand, and eternal duration on the other; she repeatedly addresses mysterious absent interlocutors in the most forceful, anachronistic way, asserting the capability of the poetic word - as a kind of Bergsonian vital consciousness - to transcend clock time.

5. Once a poetics asserts this more complex or duplex notion of Time, it must of necessity move beyond a simple reproduction of either modernist "catch-up" or postmodernist contemporaneity (stasis). The motive or function or role of poetry moves beyond merely a mimetic representation of contemporary active reality; reality is understood as more than either "contemporary" or "active" (in the futurist sense). Reality itself appears approachable or representable only through a kind of double vision, or dialogic bridging process, which is the harmonic action of the poetic word itself. Thus, "innovation" or "modernization" (in style, in technique, in subject-matter) are revealed as insufficient as a basis for aesthetics, since the duplex reality of time is not exactly subject to the progress or succession of eras or periods. Poetic style, aesthetic technique, will result from the same interrogation, the same experimental bridging process, as was applied by Dante in his time. This humbling of "modernization" will eventuate in a period of literary "catch-up" organized around a completely new frame or time-scale.

Issue #10 of Robert Archambeau's magazine Samizdat arrived today, always welcome. In it he has one of his "thematic reviews" titled "The New Modernists", covering books & anthologies such as Manifesto : a Century of -isms (ed. Mary Ann Caws), 21st-Century Modernism, by Marjorie Perloff, & poetry by Kruchenykh, Moxley, Salerno, Strickland & others.

Archambeau's general point, in simplified summary, is that literary Modernism never died (contra Postmodernism) and that an array of good poets carry on its methods of innovation & renovation. In his discussion of Moxley, he notes how her allusive style, her attachment to Hart Crane, her melding of Romanticism & the avant-garde, and other characteristics underline a poetics in which all time (in art, at least) is simultaneous - which Archambeau calls a "profoundly modernist idea".

This last is true: but I don't think he takes it far enough. There are a number of ironies inherent to the whole modernism/postmodernism question. Literary modernism could be described as poetry's attempt to catch up - technically, thematically - with the social/scientific realities of the 20th century, with the speed of the zeitgeist. It was, as they say, a "modernizing" effort. It was an heroic & dazzling endeavor. But now it is also "historical". In a sense, poetry has caught up - and the "modernizing" effort, as it fades into historical memory, now becomes oddly dated itself. This is one of the insights of postmodernism, the motto of which might be, "OK, now what?" Because postmodernism provides no answer to its own question, it abides in this limbo or symbiotic dependency on its predecessor. Thus to suggest a proper title for advanced poets of today to be "the new Modernists" - as Archambeau wants to do - adds another layer to this Zeno's paradox of labels, since clearly a new modernist has still not quite "caught up" with the zeitgeist, is still engaged or identified to some extent with the heroic laboriousness of an era which is now past.

It may be a modernist critical cliche that "all time is simultaneous", but, as time goes by, such articles of faith sound more and more like just that, articles of faith. And we know that in poetry, or art in general, faith is not enough : we need the "proof" provided by aesthetic rightness, the "certainty" of the achieved art work. The question for contemporary poets may not be the postmodernist one ("What next?"), but rather - "if time is simultaneous - How so?" Is there some aspect of spirit or self which measures/transcends time? Is there some aesthetic equilibrium (beauty?) which really (or only metaphorically?) supercedes or triumphs over clock time? How, exactly, is this revealed in poetry?

My own sense is that what will be really "new" in the near future is not a new modernism, in which innovative technique is foregrounded as a gesture toward the modernizing value of invention. The "new" poetry will explore and reveal the meanings & values - on many different levels, both thematic & technical - of "literary time", as something characteristic & distinct from clock time. When this contemporary work comes into its own it will be a new era, distinct from both modern & postmodern. I don't have a name for it.

Our mini-mini-essay is dedicated to Gravity Probe B, launched today (cf. para-sestina posted here last week, "A Waiting Game").

A WAITING GAME

 
           Sic tempus, cum sit mensura motus, mensurantis animae est instrumentum. 
           [Thus time, since it is the measure of motion, is an instrument of the
           measuring soul.]  - Nicholas Cusanus
 
 
Each day has its particular gravity
as each time varies with each local place.
Hours gradually slow to an eternity,
sometimes.  Traveling home again, to face
an April rain in Providence, obscurity
of vision seems to gauge a waiting grace.

 
Once Nicholas Cusanus figured grace,
chance and will within the gravity
of a game (De Ludo Globi).  You’d face
a ring of nine concentric spheres: eternity
rolled into an ovoid ball you’d try to place
in the central O.  The game’s obscurity

 
(exactly equal to the general obscurity
of everything) exemplifies the grace
inherent in defeat, since chancy gravity
haywires the ball: no one loses face
who tries their best.  And if eternity
is the reward of a long wait, my place

 
is assured:  master of running-in-place,
rolling these spheres of absolute obscurity
(always slightly imperfect) with the grace
of an also-ran, I know there’s gravity
in the fall of a sparrow. (Look, face
the sky next Monday: almost an eternity

 
of scientific patience may win eternity
of fame (almost), if the rocket can place
those perfect balls of quartz past gravity,
perfectly aligned with IM Pegasi (grace
go with Gravity Probe B!), in the obscurity
of silvery space... where I would hide my face

 
34 years to see the shadow of your face:
veiled double, in the foyer of eternity,
polishing your mirror over a last place
called Providence: circuitous obscurity:
dove-like sister: light, gray-winged grace:
pebble, black hole (waltzing gravity)...

 
and if there’s gravity in the thought of your face,
I’ll find my place on the ninth hole of eternity
nestled in the obscurity of your blind grace.

 
                                  4.13.04 

The Now, the Eternal. A moment of awareness in the past, perhaps in childhood. Something in the present triggers a recollection of that prior awareness. This present puts that moment in a new context of perception. The twinning or overlapping of two moments in time creates a sense of liberation or adds a new dimension to the simple unidirectional passage of time. Theme of Proust, Nabokov, Four Quartets. Dante spoke about the denizens of Inferno being separated forever from the ben del intelletto, the "good of the intellect"; maybe this experience represents an analogous (aesthetic) "good of perception". Prose (or poetry) designed with such hidden overlapping patterns creates a reading experience which re-enacts the same process. We read along in a forward motion but are given pause by these "time-rhymes". Perhaps all art encourages these moments of contemplative stillness.

Thinking of my own long poems : the re-enactment (through writing) of a reading experience - reading Hart Crane or Mandelstam or the Cantos or Finnegans Wake - which in part is what Stubborn Grew is (since the plot of a "search for the lost cat Pushkin" is a kind of thematizing of the Mandelstam-mimicry process) - triggered my own memory-poiesis in its sequels : the spooky coming-forth of cousin Juliet (the "Forth of July").

I remember very clearly listening to my mother once, back in the late 60s, sitting on the couch saying "I don't believe in Time". She was a big Nabokov reader in those days.

Speaking of present tense, have been reading an interesting study by Vladimir Alexandrov, called Nabokov's Otherworld. About the nature of VN's "metaphysics" & its influence on his art. Although Alexandrov emphasizes the novelist's originality, he mentions Proust's fiction as showing some similarities in their presentations of time, eternity, nature, the afterlife. That "the present" is not what it seems in an everyday sense, as neither are life nor death, and that art gives an image or a form to a reality of mystery, "simultaneity".