I dream a general restoration

CONTRA-DANCE

The early ice on the Mississippi

forms a maze of frozen

eddies, a chaos of cotton-

wood leaves on glass, all dark & ripply.

Somber November drawing on

toward JB’s Janus-mouth.

Slight man, moth-

light, leaf-blown from iron span.

I dream a general Restoration

cousin, cuz.  Because

our love that never was

lies crypted in a deeper congregation

of earthworms... Earth-life...

this pumpkin-celebration

where each seed is someone

like a minuscule canoe (collective

buoyancy, anchored in agape).

Not that Cyclops-utopia

ice-locked with Satana

– imperador del doloroso regno, nay!

Rather a contra-dance of Earth

& Sky, a balancing

of stillness with evolving –

clay vase molded into mirth

by humble presence of the king

(of servant-kings).  A single

molecule of brine (NaCl)

is tabernacle bread & wine (of everything)

                            *

& you will meet her in the ordinary courtyard

of the everyday (she’s Everywoman-

Everyman).  This is a vision

of figure & ground.  She’s walking toward

you, now... like Roger Williams, stepping through

twin pillars on the Terrace...

Providence, a place

of mercy & discretion (fair & true).

I cannot put it into words, this waltz

of swirling time & high

eternity.  It is the sky

spanning the sea.  It is the salt

in everything; it is the molten dove

dive-bombing into clay

who joins you in a sway

of hurtling dancers (Milky Way

a-sarabanding, up above).  I cannot

put it into words.

The brutal violence

(stone-hearted ignorance) surds in a knot

of self-destruction, planetary waste

& You must turn & repent

cries San Francesco, bent

upon his imitatio Christi (feet laced

with scars).  It is the Via Francigena.

You will walk back to the river

sped with such a pulse... her

springing from the graveyard (Magdalena).

11.7.19

Mark also makes some astute observations on Hart Crane (btw I'm 53, Mark - y'gads!).

Just got in to work, & want very much to respond carefully to this (want to give Crane his due), but will probably just go on off the top of my head as usual.

There are stretches of bombast & sentimentality in The Bridge. There are also lines & passages of overstuffed diction which are hard to pronounce, much less swallow.

Yet I think the poem succeeds as a distinct long poem despite its weaknesses. It succeeds as a sustained reading experience, as a lyrical plot, as a continuous reading pleasure - in ways that the efforts by Pound, WCW, Olson & Zukofsky do not.

What is the secret of difference here? It may have something to do with Crane's continued use of metrical lines - tetrameter[tks E.S.] & pentameter iambics. The metric offered a bass line, a foundation, for a very crucial extension of the lyric poem into the longer sequence, and the sequence into a sequence-of-sequences, to make up the whole.

What Crane's method does is stimulate a sort of "lyric objectivity". In Cantos, Paterson, "A", Maximus - by contrast - the poet is always in the foreground - maddeningly, ironically - despite the poet-histor's best efforts to import tons of supposedly objective, historical, documentary matter. (Zukofsky is probably a special case - ie. he worked his way out of this situation. But what laborious effort shows!)

Pound, if you listen to his recordings, really aimed for the ancient-Yeatsian vatic chant. But oddly I think Crane is more successful at melding antiquity & modernity, by sticking closer to the orotund pentameter of Shakespeare & Marlowe. (He practiced this beforehand, very effectively, in "For the Marriage of Faustus & Helen".) This vatic manner bore fruit - because, astonishingly, the little frisson of beautifully-made small lyric poems was extended & expanded into an epic-odic manner, the grand & ecstatic singing of many sections of The Bridge.

Finally, there is humor in Crane - but it's subversive & veiled. See Paul Giles, Hart Crane : the contexts of The Bridge on his multivalent puns. Other essential studies:

Lee Edelman, Transmemberment of Song
and especially : Werner Berthoff, Hart Crane, a re-introduction

Crane's letters to Yvor Winters (before Winters repudiated him) are terrific technical shop talk.

But perhaps Mark & others remain unmoved for reasons other than technical & musical. Mark mentions something about the authoritarianism implicit in Crane's mode of Platonic idealism. I don't see it. What I see instead is a certain vulnerability in Crane's faith in the capability of poetic vision to offer a finished image of Eden or Paradise. The stock-in-trade of Pound, Olson & WCW is to invite the reader into the poet's unfinished struggle with the unfinished project of world-renewal. (Zukofsky, again, is a different case.) One participates in the poet's heroic though necessarily incomplete agon.

Crane's whole approach is different. He offers the image of the Brooklyn Bridge as a kind of analogical token or icon - the "Ever-Presence", the earthly, human gateway into paradisal reality. The equilibrium of the poem depends from (I should say "suspends" from), & partakes in, this glimpsed sphere of perfection. The bridge was the summa of the whole effort of American 20th-cent. writing, epitomized by Waldo Frank's paeans to Our America, etc.

It may be this Platonic-national idealism - the substance of Crane's argument, which rhymes with his notion of aesthetic beauty - that postmodern readers find hard to accept.

You can't blame poets, though, for making gestures toward a messianic realm. That's their main job, I guess : evoking a utopia hidden in plain sight.

Forth of July moved the long poem from the coast to the interior. Gunslinger is over there to the left, in the arroyo, being weird. Atlantis/Utopia = Day ob' Jubilee.

The Cantos
The Bridge
Paterson
The Maximus Poems
"A"

- here's a stack of them. How, how well, do they represent social/city life? How well do they evoke "utopia"? quick notes:

Cantos have a sort of tragic grandeur, as well as a hectic energeia which sometimes captures the quick rough quiddity of experience, the plunging violent unpredictability of urban reality. Also a practiced lyrical-cantando-enchantment, esp. describing nature, feminine allure. Still, as Olson pointed out long ago, the backward-looking antiquarian preciosity, as well as the authoritarian politics, push the Cantos toward a sort of ever-living obsolescence.

The Bridge, in my view anyway, succeeds pretty well in blending lyric proportion, emblematic history, and Gotham immediacy (the Joycean day's dream-journey of the narrator) - so that the reading experience itself reproduces its locale (how shall I put this: when you read The Bridge, you have the pleasant sensation of being-in-NYC-reading-The Bridge. Sort of Borgesian, that way). Its technique, however, is refined and ironic - so that much is left out which its competitors here try to include (there's a study on puns in The Bridge, though, which argues that a lot of that excluded mundaneity comes back in by the back door. Paul Giles, Hart Crane : the contexts of The Bridge). Crane's trans-chronological "Atlantis" is a sort of poetic summation of 1920s "Our America" idealism. Still beautiful & hopeful.

Paterson is best of these in evoking city as a collective-psychic organism, where drab dailiness overlays historical-geological fragments & dreams, an arena of contingencies & possibilities. WCW's sharp eye & humor help, but for me the language is too flat & derivative to be very moving, & his cautious analytical bent doesn't do much for me, though others will savor the stringent-sour critical awareness of this social & egalitarian poet. His empathy often strikes me as tepid & careful, the attitude of the professional medical man (many will disagree). He also tries too hard & too obviously to remodel his models (Eliot, Pound).

Maximus Poems. When Olson tries to improve on his masters - Pound, WCW - he often does so. He's a genius at turning the obscure historical footnote into both vivid fragment and portentous psychic extrusion-symbol. Better than the rest is the feel for working-class poverty, necessity, & odd moments of liberation. Olson really does succeed at turning a literary mask into an emblem of some vast cosmic order. Where he loses me, most of the time, is with his actual language use. The personality that comes across sometimes - overbearing, pompous, pretentious, eccentric, sneering, vulgar - seems like a weird oedipal reaction to Pound & Literature - an effect like a bad habit, rather than a genuine reflection of Olson the better man. But it's off-putting, and for me, gives sign of minor rather than major poetry. Olson was a kind of hero, in a heroic & lonely struggle for origination & powerful mantic speech - but I wonder if he was up to the battle he chose.

"A" - I haven't read this carefully enough to say much. Zukofsky has an incredible ear for rhythm & sound on the syllabic level. Using it, he takes the civic and the utopian experience and - taking direction from Pound & Joyce & going much further - internalizes, subjectifies those experiences. A sort of quasi-Orphic process, I think: reality is completely absorbed into A-Z's limping, limpid, familial-household mumbling. What bothers me about it is precisely what made Z. appeal to the postmoderns : the turn to pure sound, the recherche Mallarmean-Symbolist aestheticism. Its action is almost diametrically reverse to that of The Bridge : whereas the latter incorporates the reader into an imaginary NYC-America, the former absorbs all things - the world, the reader - into Zukofsky-sound.

Let's gab some more about long poems, OK Hen? OK.

Both Warren & Dale Smith, in that issue of House Organ, point toward the messianic/utopian. Smith, in asserting a bond between the poet's line & the actual (natural/cultural) locus poeticus or environment. Warren, more specifically, seems to judge the "messianic" as a sort of aggressive ethos-formation or ideology, formed in conscious or unconscious conflict with deeper psychosocial forces (patriarchy, anti-semitism, anti-Catholicism). (I think Warren displays sort of a Catholic-Jungian syncretism, in which apocalypse, messianism, utopianism are "outer" phenomena, which fall short of a more complete & substantial inner integration or paradisal state. But I'm sort of guessing here, having given his essays only a cursory & intermittent reading.)

The long poem, with its collective & holistic ambitions, applies itself especially to utopian aims.

Seems to me that in order to approach such aims, any such work would have to have:

1. some kind of cosmological worldview, social-scientific philosophy, or religious base.

2. some kind of holistic or encyclopedic representation of social life.

(Northrop Frye & others have written a lot about such generic requirements.)

How do the American examples stack up in this regard? More in a minute.