How does one start writing a long "epic" poem? In 1997 I'd already written 2 or 3 not-quite-successful ones. After 15 years of off-&-on writing, I'd noticed that "going back to Mandelstam" often had a renewing or reviving effect on me.

Stubborn Grew began as an act of desperation. For a long time I'd been making notes & more notes toward a long poem. The beginning of Stubborn was finally a kind of "decomposition" : I let myself go. I started imitating the slangy, informal quality of some of Mandelstam's late poems from Voronezh. & I centered myself imaginatively in that same "black earth". Stubborn was a lucky conjunction of a style (Mandelstamish quatrains) & a plot - Orpheus-Bluejay-Henry returning to the earth to "bring back the dead". I had no idea how far those quatrains & that plot would take me.

from the 1st chapter of Stubborn:

11

 
It begins with the headache of a rational animal.
Sepulchred, perhaps, in a whitened rhyme
or bibliophile's musty drawers - reflective rim
or echo chamber, some titanic scuttled shell.

 
And you lose the thread, and this is the thread.
Purpled, from the mordant notebook,
from the charitable extinct awk's
last corkscrew into a cup of molten mead,

 
like lead.  The chorus and audience withdraw.
You are alone with the sound of an evening of a swing.
Here's the church, here's the steeple... here's the door.

As I've often repeated, almost all of Forth of July is an address to, a conversation with, the spirit of Russian poetry, as manifested particularly in Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, & Elena Shvarts. Why is this? Or where does it come from?

I trace it back to the mid- to late-1970s, when I first encountered the dual presence of Osip Mandelstam's poetry (in the early David McDuff translation), and the memoirs of his wife Nadezhda. At the time I was slowly groping my way back into writing, after having renounced it in the early 70s (the aftermath of a psychological-spiritual crisis, which I have described somewhat in an essay in the memoir for Edwin Honig, A Glass of Green Tea).

The work of this pair of writers - the poet & his survivor & memoirist - had what I would call a very powerful "normative" effect on my thinking. Mandelstam's inspired, gorgeous & mysterious poetry is situated, put in context, by his wife's astonishing, razor-sharp, humane, cultured, & resolute literary response to the terrifying era of Lenin, Stalin & their followers, from the 20s to the 60s.

To a young person experiencing extremes of spiritual dislocation & homelessness in 70s America, along with alienation from his own writing talent, these writers came as enlightenment, saving grace. I was able to reconnect to American poetry through them. & the result was, I could no longer respond to the American tradition I was exploring (Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Crane, Williams, Olson, et al.) without hearing these poets through a Mandelstamian lens. The era of 20th-century poetry was a different assemblage of Eliotic "tradition" due to this Russian influence.

The impact of Mandelstam's revolutionary-yet-classic lyricism, his riddling imagery, led me back into my own poetry. This, combined with the impact of the epic thrust of the long-poems of Crane, Pound, Williams & Olson, fired my ambition to re-interpret, to re-shape Pound's "poem including history" according to my own, different, lights. These were the 2 fundamental motivations driving my effort - at least on the conscious level. But poetry works at a deeper-than-conscious level; and my experience of diving into the long long poem involved letting it bring forth its own shape & reveal its own expanded (both high & murky) motivations. Yes, "the plot thickens. . ."

Another section from "Letters to Elena" (chap. 2, Grassblade Light):

         11


  
         When the trembling, expectant overture
 is almost over – when suddenly
 the human song breaks high
 across the brooding score –

  
         then you will remember
 how the word in harmony
 fulfills itself (as poured honey
 streams from youthful hearts forever).

  
         And when you walked for the first time
 out of the summer forest, under
 high humming in the cedars
 where the cicadas droned (rhythm

  
         massed in weightlessness) and
 sound was rhymed with the scent
 of blue-gray pines – it meant
 you would never look back again:

  
         your lot to turn a pirouette each
 way (this way, that way) until
 freedom became a codicil
 encoded in your living will – to breach

  
         each dying fall with a new birth (or
 improvised branching).  Because
 that raven framed against
 the flimsy flow of cloud cover

  
         was drawn by a knife
 with a flowering handle.
 Because that almond stem
 blooms in January... petrified.


      
                                      1.29.99

People want me to be clearer, more comprehensible, include lengthier selections of my poem. It seems to me I've posted quite a bit of Forth of July lately, along with links to longer passages.

Besides, I'm not here to make it easy for you : it's not easy for me! Why simplify a complex game, one which I've put my heart & soul into for years? My poetry is not a fast food franchise.

This is my "free time", provided free to anyone interested. You don't like my product, so long, das vidanya.

I'm used to the put-downs, believe me.

In the same way that Mandelstam/Aristotle's "law of identity" (A = A) marks the tautology of a universe in which Word=Love=Cosmos, the "Orpheus/Eurydice" romance adumbrates or narrates a reality brought back to life by song (Orpheus' lyre caused stones & lambs & lions etc. to sing together) : just as poetry invites its listener into a "Now" of loving creative play. So for the infinitely hungry "Henry" of Forth of July, Mandelstamian Russia is reborn, re-incarnated in the Petersburg (city of the "Midnight Sun") poet Elena Shvarts (etymologically, "shining black") - the heiress of Russia's "black sun" (cf. Mandelstam), Pushkin. The hunt for "Pushkin the black cat" leads through Bluejay back to Petersburg (by a roundabout route).

from the 2nd chapter of Grassblade Light, "Letters to Elena":

         10


  
         Pushkin's catgut stretches taut
 across the wood.  From here to there
 it's a walking game (your
 move, Beatrice).  Astigmatism taught

  
         you better than they knew : Jerusalem
 both here and there.  Many thousand gone,
         one just begun, my Lord.  Is just begun.
 Body and soul, tourist-pilgrim,

  
         heart-mind, lover-beloved,
 promise-desire, shroud-ark...
 Elena, nightmares of the shark
 will never shake your silhouetted

  
         chariot's erratic circuits over Venice
 (like a spiral J at sunset).  East
 to west.  Human-beast,
 animal-flower, water-stone.  Finis.

  
         And a wave-curve emerges
 continuously out of these
 reflections as
 the blurred eye sees

  
         and the blind eyes feel
 and in the adjacent niche
 the icon's eyes reach
 forward toward you... seal

  
         that endless enigma of longing
 sin remorse and imperfection.
 All is resurrection now – and
 a slow walk toward spring.


      
                                    1.25.99

[note: human-beast, animal-flower, etc., and the "circuits over Venice", refer to 3 famous Shvarts poems, "Elegy on the Cardinal Points", "Animal-Flower", and "The Virgin Rides on Venice, and I on Her Back", available in English in the Bloodaxe selection of her work, Paradise.)

Chris Lott finds my excerpts & explanations utterly confusing. Understandable! I warned they were obscure & eccentric.

It's a Song of Myself, a counter-Cantos [cf. Bluejay on Poe & Pound, EP & EP]. & still ongoing.

from July (chapter "A Catenary Arc"):

         – some star – like the articulate
 ghost of my fathers and of yours, who
 could not speak in life, but in the owlish
 afterlife – Ba, Ka, Crow, Lamb... tracked

  
         upstream to Ethiopia, the truth of it –
 manuscripted messenger, papyrus
 Pappy or Osiris sire, Moses ripened
 in the wilderness).  Mountain oak-tree.

  
         Cedar.  Pitch-black tar (for
 mordant).  Bebi, General of the Asiatics.
 Quick-runner, wasp.  Pharaoh's taxi-
 driver. He Who Controls the Rat-

  
         God's Offspring.  Latecomer,
 fast-talker.  Journalist for Delta
 Crescent.  Walker of the tiled
 ink-paths, typesetter.  Market-

  
         rent-collector, solitaire, free-
 speaker.  Literal, exact, exacting
 horsetrading slavestealing tax-
 gathering figure of a reefer-

  
         man, fearful, a-feared.
 Goes down ghost-trails
 under live-oak lairs
 of rattlesnakes... adrift

  
         in jagged eddies of nude alphabets.
 Murmuring to himself, saliva-
 white, spume-frothing blanched
 avalanche easily frozen, baffled, back-

  
         stabbed – easily beloved, won-over.
 And adhesive through the crane bone
 into the gravity waves (nacreous
 mob of carnelian nouveaux

  
         baubles all around the funereal
 sunken canopy of maudit covenants,
 rumors, glittering knives –
 ressentiment scripted into feral runes).

  
         A crossroad of aluminum tubing in the swamp.
 Ping from outer space, deflecting the rays.
 Silence, alligators, flamingos.  Yarns
 and picayune lagniappe – pommes

          
         de terreurs – spooks and voodoo queens
 if you're scared of the dark – a muttering
 broom delta, the sowing of the tombs
 beneath the Gulf.  Steal, sneak

  
         away now, Jim – Julius is sound asleep.
 We're going down the inky path
 toward a kid wrapped up in llama
 tarp and catnap tape, tripwired – peels loose

  
         at midnight – watch!  While my ghosts
 of keen-mauled, kill-skinned, tree-masted
 River-Sixties gather steam upstream
 like a money-caulked coot of wood-

  
         crocodiles, bobbing at the dawn levee.
 Watch – there go the shadows of the swallows!
 Soon the sun arrives, lifting over the lousy
 prism-blocks (Angola, Ethiopia veiled, unveiled).


      
                                           11.22.99

I stumble along slowly through the stubble-field of po-biz, surrounded by my little band of scoffers & mockers.

The triple form of the argument or plot of Forth of July, as I've described it, gets back to question I mentioned a couple days ago : why does Bluejay disappear at the conclusion of the 1st part of Stubborn Grew? After leading Henry on what he thinks is an epic re-enactment of Dante's descensus inferos, into local Rhode Island history?

Bluejay disappears because Henry must undergo further descents & disintegrations before he can speak & recognize the truth; in the process, the truth becomes first "nationalized" (the dream-journey up & down the Mississippi, the encounter with Whitman, Lincoln, New Orleans, etc.), further "poeticized" (the Orphic drama of raising the dead Juliet & the suicide-poets Berryman & Crane), further universalized (the infiltration of Biblical, Russian, prehistoric-shamanistic, Vallejo-Peruvian, etc. elements), and further personalized (as the motivations, desires & actions of Henry are unveiled, the search for a "lost cat Pushkin" leads, at the end, to an identification with the villain in Pushkin's gambler tale Queen of Spades).

All these developments are prefigured in miniature in various sections of Stubborn Grew (the 2nd chapter, "Ancient Light", is a virtual microcosm of the entire poem); in the 2nd half of Stubborn, after Bluejay has disappeared, the poem subsumes both Pound's Cantos & Joyce's Finnegans Wake in paired parodies delimited by the Falstaffian "downfall" - & hinted recovery - of "Henry" at the very end of the book (finished on Good Friday evening). Before he leaves, Bluejay continually hints & predicts to Henry that he is still unaware of the deeper purposes of their trip.

The emotional affects or effects of this "descent-ascent" vary greatly - basically the whole poem is a set of ring-changes in various emotional & visionary keys - but here's just one sample from toward the end of the poem of the mingled sense of universality & personal displacement or journeying (from July):

         5

  
         You stole through the Hopkins cemetery   side-
 stepping the gravestones   while for 35 years
 you hid a pebble on your tongue   unsavory
 Bosch-man unsavior   unable to decipher

  
         the broad paths of the Republic   nor
 the narrow corridors   footprints of
 one sole's   limping history   interpretations
 of a colorful clan   shaded by particulars of

  
         unacknowledgeable shame   your private
 Halloween mocks you   dog star   a silver
 stake left (pointed, unconnable)   reveals
 a secret ski-pole star   black vapid revels

  
         of unlaminated Pushkin   the wager you bet
 unaware one night   against your neighbor
 and if forgiveness comes (your rubbery rosary
 well-said from sad well's   deep tab's tub)

  
         it must come from her who   rose   a stone
 from the depths   of your fire-tonged
 prison   Henry   for whom you return in
 ash-strewn flame and   a reverse nostos

  
         where the vernal jewel   of a summer submarine
 repels the magnetic pole   downward   toward
 the bull's eye   of your signful urn   (retarded
 twice-embossed   crossed-out   snaildrum)

  
         heart and   hope to die   the children swear
 over the grave   pregnant   beneath layers of
 ice-coated Qs   and endless lines of   wayfaring
 strangers   in a winded   anti-host-figure

  
         to that crossroad   mapped red-eye   trained
 on your heart   dead-central   lemon   a
 cup of green   Teo-Hiawathan T   the scent
 of death   steam-railing toward   a restoration

     
                                       1.22.2000

What is a long poem?

They come in a great variety of forms, obviously, but what interested me in the beginning was how its 20th-cent. American versions carried forward & revised the epic mode.

Northrop Frye wrote a useful summary of its generic attributes. Among them are the epic's encyclopedic & cosmogonic qualities, the aim to present an image of universality.

One of the contrasting or counterbalancing characteristics of 20th-cent. poetry, though, from Symbolism on, was a push toward aesthetic autonomy, self-sufficiency, singularity : the idiosyncratic charm of modernist poetry lies in its assertion of the humble-sturdy beauty of things in themselves, including poems-as-poems. The poem becomes a delightful & useless contraption, rather than a utilitarian medium for something else. This is a particularly American spin on the notion of "invention" - & it goes somewhat against the grain of America's own iron laws of practical & useful enterprise.

& I think this idiosyncratic autonomy is what differentiates my own poem (Forth of July), contra Jonathan, from the prosaic medium of traditionalist narrative long poems.

Forth of July, as a form of late modernist epic, presents an encyclopedic cosmogony of sorts; & I think this was probably the underlying motive propelling its construction. Moreover, it's a cosmogony founded on a strictly poetic equation. A better phrase for this would be "poetic axiom", or poetic given : which, in any realm other than poetry, would probably be considered a tautology. As Milton understood, the frame & plot of epic is built on its "argument"; but in the 20th century, the age of autonomy & self-reflexivity, art focused more than ever before on the notion that its best, perhaps only, "argument", is its ability simply to be : all the assertions and denials which proceed from that are merely corollaries of an irreducible & complex manifestation.

A tautology is a kind of "ring structure", the primordial form of traditional epic poetry; we might liken it also to Mandelstam's (contra Symbolism) "law of identity" : "A = A".

Readers may be surprised at how postmodernist my discourse here is tending. Yet this tautological law of identity is more radical than standard postmodernism allows. Underlying the law of identity is an assertion of unity and universality, ie, "A = A" includes the universe (whereas in postmodern thought, "all" is "nought", and identity is an illusion with totalitarian implications).

The fact that a contemporary long poem has an argument of any kind, no matter how obscured, confused, and tautological, points up a distinction between (at least one aspect of) modern & postmodern; the corollaries of an argument for "identity" (A = A) lead to unities of form & construction which postmodern literature denies. I think this distinction is part at least, of the challenge my poem offers to the contemporary climate.

But can I be more explicit about the argument underlying Forth of July? How is it a strictly "poetic axiom", a tautology?

The argument of Forth of July can be likened, with reservations, to the controversial "anthropic principle" in physics (itself a kind of tautology). The epic journey-story of narrator "Henry" - with the help of spirit-guide "Bluejay" and wisdom-spirit "Blackstone" - does three coordinated things simultaneously. It unveils the layered roots of desire motivating the experiences of personal history ("Henry's confessions"); it unveils the roots of local, national, & strictly literary history as a story of repressed & denied realities (Bluejay's "basement" narration of Rhode Island & United States from the perspective of a homeless black/native American crazed ghost of ambivalent sexual proclivities); and it asserts that global history itself pivots on a mysterious "intervention" in human time & affairs of a Word of Love, analogous to poetry itself.

In this third element lies the ring structure or tautological aspect of the epic argument. For if human time & history pivot or revolve on a Word of Love comprehended by humankind, then poetry is a manifestation or mimetic image of same. The "wildness" of poetry, the poetic license which spins objective realities into dream-speech & fiction, comes round again (the ultimate "ring structure"): turning, as Whitman knew, on the essential, the most fundamental purpose of speech in the first place : to build a home for human beings, through love-speech (mother-love, father-love) - to reconcile the child to the mortal world. Mandelstam called this "domestic hellenism".

I like the lilt of a neat (but not too neat) little quatrain. It's something I learned from Mandelstam, in Voronezh. I've written a few thousand of them.

Jonathan back-forward pedals. I respect him too; but I must say that while caution rules the day, I can't afford caution anymore.

But who cares about that? It's irrelevant, anyway, what my opinion of my work is (nevertheless, I have a right to my opinion). It's not a matter of what I say about my own work : it comes back, always & everywhere, to the quality & depth of a work itself. I've made a big gamble on it, & I stand by my bet. You can call it bragging if you want, you can be skeptical based on what I say about it. . . but I insist that such judgements aren't worth much. Anyway, there's too much literary parlor gaming & gossip based on social pecking orders rather than straight literary awareness. I'm using the bulk of this blog, not for bragging, but for trying to open up what I've done for possibly interested readers.

People who can't be bothered to read carefully or attempt to grasp what a writer does, yet feel qualified to sit in judgement.

Typical dismissive comment from Jonathan Mayhew. I'm very used to this sort of thing.

Forth of July is much closer to the long poems of either the "Pound" wing or the "Crane" wing than to Derek Walcott or most other contemporary-traditionalist narrative poems. But pigeonholes make thinking so quick n' easy...

I've mentioned before the salience of the numbers 28 & 29, the date 5.29, for Forth of July. Speaking of Blackstone, just want to note once again : he was buried on Study Hill on May 28th, 1675. The next day his library/farmhouse was burned to the ground by Narragansett raiders (this was time of King Philip's War). May 29th is Rhode Island Statehood Day.

The entire poem (Forth of July) was finished on 5.28.2000. "In my beginning is my end."

Stubborn Grew. . . The Rose (the Rhode).

This see-sawing back & forth between dramatic action & meditation is repeated through Forth of July, with growing intensity; thus, after the fireworks of July appears the visionary brief coda to the entire poem, titled Blackstone's Day-Book (published with the sonnet sequence Island Road; also in the complete sequel to Stubborn Grew, titled The Rose). Here is a sample from that section:

         7


  
         Your law shines from the depths, a stone
 of mutual promises, dropped ex caelis
 to the navel of the earth, at the sea's
 lair.  There it gathered your gravitons,

  
         gradually, from a massive rug of tangled
 superstrings – Love, from the height
 of night (through funnel of Amphitrite).
 The tiny strings thundered, wrangled –

  
         from the far-off realm of Prester John
 across horse-grass dominions (Scythia,
 Sarmatia) to labyrinthine Pythian
 Rhodes – it was inwound cornu,

  
         your love – sheath of dome,
 ark of Shittim wood – a 28
 nestled in 29, sword-blade
 bent straight again (Rome,

  
         roaming, Romany, along a knife-edge
 trimmed with fish-scales – serpentine,
 sly, undoing Knight and Amazon
 with quintessence of Negus-

  
         mystery).  Where stale steel of the Ossete
 meets tempered gaze of his twin-Tartar
 Amazon upon a span of tears – where
 a grain-bin swells, and sweetly

  
         soars (fluted in stone).  I hear, I hear
 ice breaking, underneath a bridge. . .
 in a land of whirring wings,
 beyond the rivers of Ethiopia.

      
                                   4.6.2000

Blackstone in Forth of July tends to emerge in the aftermath of action, out of the shadows. Thus Grassblade Light, the sequel to the tumultuous Stubborn Grew, begins with its first chapter-panel, "The Lost Notebooks", set in an autumnal-winter landscape with a meditative Blackstone at the center. (The book opens with an epigraph from Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano:

–"Talking of corpses,"– the Consul poured himself another whiskey  
and was signing a chit book with a somewhat steadier hand while Yvonne  
sauntered toward the door –"personally I'd like to be buried next to  
William Blackstone –"  He pushed the book back for Fernando, to whom  
mercifully he had not attempted to introduce her.  "The man who went to  
live among the Indians.  You know who he was, of course?"  The Consul  
stood half toward her, doubtfully regarding this new drink he had not picked up.

Then he emerges again, in the fifth panel ("Of W.B."), following the central double-sized panel ("Ghost Dance"), and before the final nekuia tour-de-force descent of "Giants In the Earth". He transmits elusive, visionary messages, links between the "American" epic of Henry, Bluejay & Juliet, with his own Mandelstamian-Biblical-global sources. Here's a sample from "Of W.B.":

         3
    
                       Heart be ashamed of heart,
               blent with life's foundation.

  
         You close your eyes when the wind blows,
 all ears.  And maybe we are Hagia Sophia
 with a million eyes, he said – a ganglion,
 or gong of ganglia.  Henry goes

  
         back to the school bus (surrounded
 by the profane indifferent gang) after
 the field trip to Symphony Hall.  Were
 they all so deaf, indeed?  Was he all alone?

  
         Heart soldered open by the solemn
 strings, he walked back slowly, hidden
 in that crowd of blasphemers.  A Stephen
 pacing toward his crown – toward Jerusalem.

  
         Each to his own idolatries – candles by night,
 a parasol by day – will fall (in the drift of wind's
 sly invisible eddies).  I labor toward a double-
 bind of iron, or some trans-manual sleight-

  
         of-hand:  earth's core, man's core, heart's coracle.
 Moored Sophie (high-prowed tugboat high
 above the clouds).  Rusty penny-gone-cowpie
 wheeling in the sky (transfixed, transrational).

  
         When the lamb sheds the last patches
 of Joseph's coat and limps toward
 the chimerical, histrionic ford
 (slowly).  Singing catches

  
         of Chippewa canoes, dream songs
 and rainbow trout flickering upstream.
 Furtive Sheba, Phoebe.  Off the dark limb
 of Lemba arrowroot (a lambent Iron Range).

     
                              5.11.99 [p.s. my daughter Phoebe's birthday;
                                          also date of founding of Constantinople]


 4


  
         To close your eyes and see,
 to sink back upstream into foam
 with Maximus, in Byzantium –
 eyeless, both his hands cut off.

  
         A cross-grained infinitesimal
 continuous bridge, salted
 with a mustard seed
 of fire.  Tall,

  
         leering, lowering, limping –
 mother-hearted fisherman-
 brother-father – blind
 in Gloucester (wintering

  
         over).  Toward infinite
 heaven in your palm –
 the coin of the realm.
         One penny (Whitman's

  
         Ringside Indian path) milks
 the galactic glide, sailing
 like iron filings drawn
 into a compass rose

  
         from dust (magnetic net
 threaded from a motherlode
 under the volcano).  And voila!
 the sweet delicate trap is set:

  
         where the meek and sheepish
 toreador tears the veil of terror
 from the red heart of Ferdinand's
 wind-world (snore. . . swish, snore. . .)


     
                                    5.12.99


  
         5


  
         I peer into the neglected garden womb.
 A book of roots, of infinitesimal
 problems.  Lucky to come
 up with something very

  
         small (but more than zero).
 Blackstone's lawbooks follow
 feisty Williams – like the shadow
 of a gnomon hugging a slow ewe

  
         out of the cyclopean cave.  Where
 the clay circulates in angry circles
 (each violent escape you crave reels
 echoing back (each little lever-

  
         tone swollen) on an unreal screen) –
 your children's school a missile site.
 So the tower of Salomé fell.  White
 foam, pigeon-platter.  Hush-bane.

  
         Sill, sileage, loam.  Humus, composted.
 Composed, posthumous.  Plowed by a blade
 like silver water now, continuous.  Wade
 in, break the surface.  Where you situated

  
         the reservoir (Blackstone's heavy book of
 Providence).  At the base of the mast.
 Where the doubloon gleams.  Past
 the greenhouse windows – love-

  
         penny, afloat below, full-fathomed now.
 Like the clear mirror of one New England
 cubic Arcadia salt-savor, world without end
 and all amended.  Mustered.  Beaded.  So (W).


      
                                           5.13.99

The 3-yrs-or-so process of writing Forth of July was preceded by a couple decades of thought & experimentation with long poems & the influence of Crane, Olson, Williams, Pound, primarily. I was always stimulated by local history & landscape, so that Stubborn Grew is in part a local history poem, and some of the symbolic figures of Forth of July emerge from that background.

William Blackstone, the Anglican hermit-minister, scholar, farmer, & early RI settler, is one of those figures. While "Bluejay" emerges as a Hermes-shaman-Holy Ghost instigator-of-adventures, Blackstone represents the search for knowledge, understanding, vision - a kind of reclusive solitary quest for the central meanings of human reality - acting out the scriptural precept, "Make your eye single, and your whole body will be full of light." In Stubborn he stands in the shadows of "Henry's" confessional Lenten shriving. Here's a salient Blackstone section from early in Stubborn:

Rain and wind, wind and the rain. Lent.
Drifting for days, cloudy, over New England.
El Nino.  In my beginning is my end.
And Blackstone rode into exile without incident

 
out of Boston, into Rhode Island, astride a white bull.
Anglican recluse.  Study Hill, in Cumberland.
His Study Hall was Alexandrian -
a nest of books; his morning orchard full

 
of Yellow Sweetings.  It was Eden before Eden,
Ithaca before the Greek was translated, hidden Rome
at the end of roaming, Ethiopian Negus kingdom
nestled high beyond flood-tide... heaven

 
for meditation.  3 Bibles, 10s; 6 English books
in folios, L2.  3 Latin books, in folio, 15s;
3 do. large quarto, L2; 15 small quarto, L1 17s
16d; 14 small do., 14s.; 30 large octavo...L4....5s...

 
Inventory, May 28th (day of his burial).  Body
was hardly cold in the ground.  Band of King Philip's.
Burned Study Hall and all its books.  The earth itself
was all that remained.  A few smoldering ashes... two

 
rough quartz grave markers.  Painfully regret the
destruction... those "paper books".  (Probably ms.)
Left England to get out from under the power of lord bishops,
but in America I am fallen under lord brethren.

 
I looked to have dwelt with my orchards and my books,
my young fawn and bull, in undisturbed solitude.
Was there not room enough for all of ye?
Could ye not leave the hermit in his corner?

 
Study Hill became Ann & Hope (first American
shopping center).  Blackstone went missing - bones
in a wooden box sealed in lead... heavy lead foil.
Its corners were soldered... 12x12x6 inches in

 
size.  Ashes, bones, clay - time past perhaps good compost.

I don't insist on rhyme & stanza etc. for other people. Agree with Jordan & Ron on interesting poems of Lisa Cooper, thank you, Ron.

My long-poem work & poetry in general poses something of a challenge to the supposed keepers of the modernist/postmodern poetry flame. This is, I guess, at least one of the factors behind my longstanding margin-of-the-margins status, from the days of Buffalo List unto the day of Blog.

By having the chutzpa to shuffle the "lineage" with a new long poem, and asserting its legitimacy as such; by counterbalancing the Pound/Williams/Zukofsky/Olson stream with an emphasis on Crane/Joyce/Mandelstam (Russified by a narrative which begins with a search for a lost cat named Pushkin); by insisting on rhyme, and stanza, and narrative, and character(s), & personhood, and continuity, & "readable" (allusive) meaning (at least to a limited extent) - this stance as a whole calls into question any number of literary-historical shibboleths regarding US poetry, its sources, directions, etc.

& yet I have the funny feeling I will win this battle, because I think my poetry is more alive & complex than all their theories, mutual-aid networks & anthologies put together.

John Kerry looks pretty ghoulish. That's because he's an early-60s Kennedy ghost, come back from the grave. I'll vote for that ghost.

Jacket Magazine published a few of the more impersonal, "American" sections of July, here. And some sections from Grassblade Light, here.

& just to give you a sense of the difference in tone between Grassblade Light and July,
here's the opening segment of July:

         1 
  
         Gray skies on a late spring day.  A start.   
         In the parking lot.  Pawtucket?  Cumberland.
 Sound of someone hammering – what?
 Iron.  Waiting for my daughter there,

  
         her tennis lessons.  Nowhere.  Somewhere.
 Out in the open.  Gray skies, hollow
 hammering.  A hole.  A whole
 world (of lonesome rune-moss).

  
         Armor.  Wheel.  Hubcap.  Sky-
 scraper.  Redmen in moccasins
 on rooftops – cashmere
 lamb's quarters and yaks –

  
         kayaks – stitched all around again?
 Like a lake in a corral – your
 coracle – row, row, row
 we go.  I'd like to. . . snag

  
         you, elbow room.  A Huckleberry
 getaway somewhere.  Wide grass
 where the hurt surges – surges
 like active vitamin – Buick

  
         in high gear.  I leaned back
 against the health club wall.
 Low sub-suburb, lawless.
 Clouds moving, carboniferous.

  
         Spaces for eyes.  Flag in yard
 beside white aluminum siding.
 Farmhouse hemmed inside
 clutter.  Derelict, dreary.

  
         But that hammering was happy.
 I was going into the meadows
 again – lose myself for good.
 So long, Julius.  So long, Pap.

    
                                            7.15.99 (St. Henry's Day)

It would be pointless for me to pretend to be cognizant of & attuned to the threads in po-biz & blog chatter these days. I'm involved in a very slow process now of trying to orient my own writing & thinking in different directions. Part of that does involve looking back at the long-poem efforts which absorbed me for several years. I guess much of what I say about Forth of July here sounds about as obscure, eccentric & irrelevant as can be. But for anyone who feels like looking into it, these blog notes might offer glancing openings to it. So I'll try to continue to spend a little time each day reviewing my own efforts, for my own benefit & for possible readers too.

I think of Forth of July as working in part by analogy, a structure of thematic parallels. Thus the notion of resurrection, or retrieving a connection with the dead, translates a concept of poetry itself (as a kind of vital experience of creative awareness or imagination) into a theme or a proto-narrative. The attempt to revive or reshape the American long poem & its meanings mirrors or parallels a theory or concept of the meaning of life & history in general. You could compare the process, oddly enough, to a run for the Presidency, say Howard Dean, for example. A heroic narrative (the outsider challenger, the knight on horseback) becomes a vehicle for the articulation of a perspective on broader questions.

In Forth of July, this theme of resurrection is channeled through the Orpheus story. "Bluejay", the ghostly shaman-spirit guide [Bluejay is the Orpheus-like protagonist in Northwest Coast Native American folktales] , leads "Henry" into the world of the dead. What seems in Stubborn Grew to be an attempt to come to terms with a dying marriage, proves to be, in the central book (Grassblade Light), a different psychic process, of coming to terms with the death by suicide of "Juliet" ("Henry's" cousin, who leapt from the Golden Gate on her father's birthday).

The central "panel" of Grassblade Light, titled "Ghost Dance", welds together many of the thematic parallels, in a kind of shamanistic resurrection of dead poets & poetry (Hart Crane, John Berryman), the long poem itself, and at the center, Juliet, bringing them all into the spiritual "now" of the "living, breathing" poem.

July, the third book of the poem, in turn, reckons with the illusions & limitations of the romantic-iconic summoning of the dead found in Grassblade, & goes further into a kind of "pure poetry" of America, oddly shedding/transposing some of the personal elements, while discovering & probing still deeper motives for the effort.

Here's a section from the final panel of Grassblade, titled "Rite of Spring":

         6


  
         The garden seethes with rust.
 The king's litter (a dry canopy)
 transported around a pool.  See
 the young maiden dancing,

  
         as she must – arm lifted,
 hand waving forward
 like a figurehead
 for the delicate ship outfitted

  
         to carry her.  And the ship
 carried on a breath of wind
 this way, that – bound
 on azimuthal slope

  
         to the meridian (one
 angled M-turn
 swollen with
         dying men).

  
         Gnomon of your returning
 Magdalen – to a green gar-
 den (time has never been).
 There's no more dying then:

  
         for the slave is free – fear
 swallowed up in victory –
 your vessel a flowering fiery
 myrrh-box adrift on a tear

  
         forever.  Where the dance
 begins and ends.
 No more dying then:
 the garden seethes

  
         with –

 
                                6.4.99

["Rite of Spring", of course, an allusion to the Stravinsky ballet about an iconic dying maiden, a spring sacrifice, folds into the Russian parallels of the poem, its return to its "Russian origins" - the instigation of Mandelstam's work - as well as the "springing" origins of the narrator - since the Rite was first performed on May 29, 1913, and 5.29 is the poet's birthday, and the numerical structure of Grassblade as a whole pivots on the number 29 - 5.29 being both the date of JFK's birth ("return of the American Camelot king") & of "Black Wednesday", the fall of Byzantium, 499 years before the poet's birthday.]

. . . & then the somewhat airy-giddy febrile lightweight acrobatics of Grassblade Light lead into something both more rounded-out & also more strange/exploratory, in the fireworks-finale which is July. The difference between the 2 books is highlighted by the use of end-rhymes in Grassblade, as opposed to (informal, variable) reversed or inside-out rhymes in July. Here is a section of that:

         7

  
         In the country of his father forgot and
 manacled below decks   to his own
 sole greenish vomitory (so sea-gnostic)
 Hamlet watched the orrery-gyro's   daft

  
         starboard tilt   left, right   a map
 flattened over hiding places
 green paps of   a minatory landscape
 a deep red coracle under palm

  
         of his hand   two red rivers   (north,
 south)   as they meet in a 3-cornered
 (7-cornered) coign of rusted ruth gone
 copper-vernal   a profile thrown

  
         for a Q by   finger of iron   in pool
 of dust   invisible smile of Ms. X
 whispered (doubleyoudoubleyou)
 's barnacled forehead   she loped

  
         into view she balanced a cup of green
 Tahitia-T upon speared iceberg head
 and frolicked like Luba's almost-baf-
 fled grave coronal freed from the grip

  
         of his soiled life sentence   the image
 of his eye landed (orthogradus ad hoc)
 upon ox-back   to pivot there   (a coda-
 clef)   and accompany   his fewny gam

  
         with fear and trembling   beneath the frozen
 birches   and the bridge over the river there
 in Minneapolis   where the star unravels
 in contrition   once   to forge amends in

  
         stony Troezen   slosh a cup of Lent-anointing
 cold   just   once   across your Jordan-brow
 (JB)   or take a snowy gondola (suburban dirge
 or broken fork)   into   the dull canal at last

      
                                    1.27.2000

Large shape of Forth of July. . .

burial
rebirth
take-off & return (counter-time)

Stubborn somewhat like a Finnegan-Wakean burial (the book ended, literally & figuratively, on Good Friday evening). The 7 large "panels" of Grassblade Light, like a slow & gradual rebirth out of death & winter. This section (from the second panel, "Letters to Elena") illustrates to some extent the "syncretic" amalgam of Crane/Russia/apocalyptic time-warp renewal:

         21


  
         An airborne bluejay chasing shadows
 augurs fever's end – a port-in-air
 ship in a purple jar –
 blue joy or sadness, luminous.

  
         Petersburg Mews – nine times around
 with cat in tow – tiptoeing cat-
 o-nines leashed to the bowsprit
 there, where Time swam aground –

  
         your skin warmblooded blond limestone
 uplifted toward one temperate curve
 echoing heaven once again.  I carve
 a window out of sanded syllables soon

  
         through an hourglass formed by one paw
 slipped into yours.  Sound of cello...
 textured... faraway Gabriel's piano,
 all G minor... empty flask, unporous now.

  
         The yardarm swings these shadows...
 as the groundswell of the deep wave combs
 my shears away all hands now comes
 the anchor like a diving kingfisher goes

  
         down toward never-Davy Jonas, and
 the wind turns ready about and hard a-
 loo blew V blue J a whack ralay raloo ra-
 lonniga-lubber galoo baleen – grand

  
         banks of whales above us blowsprit, spout
 brit, sprout out loud and lubricate that
 navigator's coughing chugboat – so
 zesty with taffeta – so transvested with trout!


       
                                 2.4.99

My disparate, desperate imaginary world (Rhode Island, Minnesota, Mississippi, Russia, Byzantium, native America, Ethiopia, London, etc.). . . tied together with puns & rhymes. Pappy Rus. Juliet, jewel-eye, jubilee, Blue-J.

I'm just trawlin down big Muddy for a reading, here, folks, a review of SOME kind. . . because no matter how BIG & MIDWESTERN my old poem is, it's never EVER gonna get a hearing from the NY School of cold fish, nor the wary band of Sillimen. . . hey ho what's in a litterbox. . . cat doo. . .

. . . & ask. . . who is Bluejay? Why does he mysteriously intervene in the 1st part of Stubborn Grew, and then fade out, only to re-appear again & again, elusively, in the sequels (Forth of July)?

Forth of July is among other things a psychic edifice, a large icon, sort of a massive ecumenical mysterium (ecumenical is not the word I'm looking for. . . I hope it comes to me. . . it's on the tip of my tongue. . . meaning, a fusion of different cultural/religious elements. . . syncretic, there we are). An algorithm, built on the basic pattern of the Orpheus myth. . . the idea that poetic speech reaches to recreate & re-enact the origins of everything, driven by an overwhelming longing & sense of loss. . . Bluejay leads the speaker into a myth of America, near the River & the Delta. . . MLK & Egypt & Ethiopia & the MLK-y (Melchizedek-y) Way. . .

. . . from one of the nodes of the poem (in July):

         So you done chased yo feline
 wid a beeline all dis way.
 You done yo jawin an yo yawn,
 read all round a boot, an leafed

  
         every dern throwaway lifesavin
 catamaran catalog down hard
 King Mo alley, right?  Drawn
 them buckets a fearwater

  
         juss like Fogman ordered, huh?
 An here you be.  Argo widow
 woulda gone wid ya, Hen – d'you
 noah that?  Golden Hugh too –

  
         that serial son of ol' Blue J!
 – he woulda gone justa fleece
 the fleas offer yurt coffin, Leif –
 believe you he wild!  Job

  
         for one hardtack or two, ill sea!
 Wid all dem aye-ayes in yo head,
 man, you mighta seen at dear
 befoe slammin – huh?  Yas.

  
         Y'wound un I done wid wood, man.
 Ball upn lance them railleries, an
 linkum all to the she-player.  Nice
 reel!  Cause what happen in Nam,

  
         bro, should be never a gain for no body.
 I been there, saw, felt – done died to.
 Been.  You can thin out the ought
 nought, but it won't play my dobro.

  
         No way.  Cause we allus carryin each
 fo each bit o'honey.  Thas way that pen
 gonna be meltin yo mountain an nip
 yo lie sites.  An – give a chary kitty cheer!

Happy Martin Luther King Day, everybody.

(Rapidly becoming an annual Event) I point you toward this poem from Island Road. . .

My Maximus : Maximus the Confessor (Byzantium), via Kiev (Mandelstam). Poem-icon : Hagia Sophia of the Pacemaker : the water-strider's gait (your heart, your better self). Dome, curved eyebrow, wing. Imago, Black Stone, meteorite : fallen from heaven, hauled into Rome.

Something from Grassblade Light (vol. 2 of Forth of July). I may have posted this before. I like to think of my longish poem as stylistically somewhere between Hartford & Gloucester.

(My life changed after 2000 - watershed. Kenneth Warren's essay one of those goads to put it all back together.)

         4


  
         Orpheus in love goes undeground,
 a demonstration - Blackstone's Law: what's lost is lost.
 Blackstone dives into his pile of leaves, his palimpsest,
 to prove a mother-of-pearly paradox - what's lost is found.

  
         They baptized you outside the colorful cathedral doors,
 a point of light, a peephole in a dreamy spectrum.
 Something other than angel, animal - a hum,
 a hem in someone's seemly seamless smock - hers,

  
         yours, ours.  Henry remembers you, remembers then,
 via the impress of your lack of shade - he floats
 in whiskered haze, within the darkness that you made,
 a Noah, sinking in a sea of bird-calls, in the wine-

  
         dusky seas of Evening Man, winely drunk...
 - at the pinnacle of that majestic oak, bluejay
 or mockingbird salutes a descending starling, sideways
 (choral grackles measuring the distance Henry sank) -

  
         I shall not drink it with you again til Kingdom Come,
 he said to them.  Blackstone footing out the Roman foot
 from here to there:  only a cupful, only a child's foot,
 only the spectrum of a children's toy, he told them,

  
         spinning and coming round again.  A rainbow.
 Noah, Bluejay, Blackstone, Henry -
 drinking together from the horn of plenty
 of memories... old autumnal children now,

  
         old men.  And Orpheus goes down into the chaos
 shod with mercury, to reap the enormous harvest;
 Eurydice, still silent, paces toward the past -
 ghost of his future, empress of all his shadows.


        
                                     10.26.98

Directing a short play at church by Michel de Ghelderode, unusual Belgian playwright. The Three Blind Men; based on a Bruegel painting of that name. (If Bruegel interests you, Michael Frayn's Headlong is a pretty good read. Funny.)

Kenneth Warren's House Organ, issue #45, arrived yesterday. Includes another installment of "The Emperor's New Code", his serial meditation on Charles Olson.

neat cosmic map, neat essay here. Reminds me of some speculations in yon hgpoetics archive, on the "now" of poetry vs. the retrospective "then" of fiction (Proust the prime example).

quark-gluon plasma
(for breakfast)

I suppose considerations on the nature of power could be applied to the literary scenes. If power results from free group consent & alliance, literary creation & response is more like freedom in essence. . . hence the inescapable, persistent disconnect between prestige & taste. . .

Arendt, unlike Gandhi, drew a line between love and politics; for Arendt, love was private, personal - inevitably tarnished in the political sphere, because there it becomes a spectacle of interests, rather than pure disinterested charity & adoration. . .

I haven't nearly done justice to the nuances of The Unconquerable World - questions of cooperative vs. coercive power, love & fear - the quotes from Hannah Arendt are wonderful in their own right -

"While violence can destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it. From this results the by no means infrequent political combination of force and powerlessness, an array of impotent forces that spend themselves often spectacularly and vehemently but in utter futility."

in 1969 she wrote: "the head-on clash between Russian tanks and the entirely nonviolent resistance of the Czechoslovak people is a textbook case of the confrontation between violence and power. . . To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power."

"Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities."

Curious to read about how the parallel-culture philosophy & concrete local activities of the Polish, Czech, Hungarian activists against Soviet domination in the 70s, paralleled the early-70s turn to grassroots neighborhood organizing by the left in the US.

Of course, constructive projects to address injustice, poverty & inequality through local organizing is what civil society is or should be all about. . . today. . . acting not to complain or condemn but to address suffering directly. . .

Antonio Savoradin writes:

I'll quote Christopher Hitchens: "It was on September 11 1683 that the
conquering armies of Islam were met, held, and thrown back at the gates of
Vienna."

Life Imitates Art dept.:


Watched TV last night. A thriller from 1998 called Enemy of the State, with Will Smith, Gene Hackman, Jon Voigt. Rogue NSA officials commandeer hi-tech intel technology to attack innocent bystander-witness. Gene Hackman is lone wolf ex-CIA guy who operated in Iran & Afghanistan. He & Smith (innocent bystander) turn the technology around & use it against their NSA enemies. Film's last words are spoken by a corrupt senator, who had previously supported vast invasive intelligence-gathering on behalf of national security. Now, after the incidents shown in the movie, he has reversed himself, supporting civil liberties & right to privacy. His last words go something like, "they are attacking us in our own homes".

At one point the ID card of Jon Voigt's character, the evil bad guy who manipulates the NSA intel technology, flashes on the screen : birth date, 9-11-40. I did a google search this morning, found a few mentions of this coincidence. But I wonder : perhaps Al-Qaeda actually chose the date 9-11 as a commentary on the film.

In Al Qaeda's eyes, the "state" in question is an infidel imperialist behemoth; the "rogue element" is not merely some bad guys who have manipulated the control system, but the state system in toto; and the plot, involving turning its spectacular intelligence technology against itself & displaying its impotence, is Al Qaeda's own mission.

(As Jonathan Schell brilliantly shows, however - quoting Hannah Arendt, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel, Gandhi & others - violence is not actually the foundation of power, but its opposite. Power is the outcome of group action based on mutual consent and cooperation for shared goals. Violence is more often a symptom of the lack of power than an expression of same. The fall of the Soviet empire is only the most spectacular recent example of the action of nonviolent power based in popular consent. As Schell quotes Michnik or (or Arendt?) somewhere: "the phrase nonviolent power is redundant". Al Qaeda may attack the symbols of Western dominance & oppression with violence, but they offer no alternative to western civil liberties, on which democratic politics are based.)

Watched Bowling For Columbine with my daughter last night. I know, I'm a little slow.

Talk about violence. . . had the feeling that Michael Moore never found the answer to his question (why so much gun violence in the USA?). I don't have the answer either, not yet anyway.

There were the beats & the langpos & the confessionals - now there's the jug band poets. Mike & I will have to put out a CD. We'll ask Jonathan to play the triangle.

Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World is extremely powerful. One of the best books I've read in decades.

If you want to know how nonviolent political mass action based on consent has been at the root of even supposedly violent revolutions through history, etc. If you want to know how Gandhi relates to (& differs from) Clausewitz & Mao etc. If you want to understand the nature of & relations between political movements, violence, nonviolence, satyagraha, insurgency, war, weapons of mass terror, etc. This book is superb, profound, superlative, great. It will enlighten & turn your head around.

into the grassland of innocent whispers. (from another olde poem, "Radial"):

                  Speechless seeing,
  The child's eye
  Obedient, peaceful,
  Nursing in the blood
  Such slow harmonies:

   
                  The rustling elms,
  And houses ripening
  In the summer light –
  Tentative longing
  Rising from the streams.

another little old one from Way Stations (may have sent this before). . .

                  Bees dance above closed lips;
  in the clear shadow of the oak
  wherever they turn their heads
  they follow the bright pattern.

   
                  Quietly, by the granite cistern
  under a crowded canopy of reds,
  in the cool wind a broken spoke
  sways whichever way it slips.

Approaching a 6-month leave of absence (my first in 25 years of 9 to 5, 49 wks/yr) during which, if all goes well, I can write to my heart's content. Rarely have I felt more scattered, enervated, uninspired. Hope I can pull myself together (like Vermont, in the Stevens poem).

Reading Jonathan Schell's book The Unconquerable World. Clausewitz, Gandhi, the changing history of war (total war & people's [guerrilla] wars), the history of global liberation movements, the future of peacemaking.

Extra busy at the Rock these days.

Reading the poem examples over at John Latta's Hotel (evidence for non-binary unpigeonholeability), thinking

there should be a poetics - a theory of poetry in the Wallace Stevens sense - capable of interpeting recent & contemporary literary history - under the aegis of a concept of poetry per se -

which transcends the politico-polemics of the subcultures -

both the modest/minor security of academic conservatism (finicky re-workings of traditional forms for mandarins in the wilderness)

and the bowdlerizing, vulgar blare of all these callow oppositionalists -

said poetics would go beyond particular notions, such as my remarks here recently about "dialogic" resurrection of past poetries - this is only part of the story - & would "explain" the relations between a beautiful, well-wrought, careful style, the sense of an addressee or audience, and the conceptual/aesthetic transformations made possible in the process of reception - based perhaps on an underlying notion of the synthesis of speech, language and beauty -

a more rigorous general poetics might create a context for closer attention to what a particular poet is trying to do - a frame for criticism rather than promotionals -

A thin layer of white on the garage roof next door this morning. Frost rhymes with rime.

Frost, antique farmer
becomes antic Lowell
unwell amid antiques

I've been thinking of snappy 2- and 3-word rejoinders to the edifice of Sillimanism:

Robert Frost

Wallace Stevens

Hart Crane

William Butler Yeats

John Berryman

Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Robert Frost (in Russia, meeting Akhmatova)

Joseph Brodsky

Anna Akhmatova

Les Murray (mustn't forget Australia)

Osip Mandelstam (vs. russkii-amerikanskii futurism)

Robert Frost

Busy here in the Rock today. Meanwhile, another simple old poem from Way Stations :

                                 from a cave

   
                  Such a small voice,
  I would not stop to hear;
  the sun was going down, and
  there were no houses near.

   
                  Such a strange voice,
  whispering out of the ground –
  familiar, though it seemed
  unearthly, utterly profound.

   
                  Such a sweet voice,
  twining my cavern ear;
  a vine for water jars, when
  all the wedding guests are here.

I'm not repeating myself, because I'm repeating what Prof. Hinkel said (quoting me).

Poetry is a resurrection game, an art of giving life to dead letters & blank pages. And of bringing the "mana" of past poetry and a past time back to life in the present. I was impressed by Philip Guston's assertion, at the height of abstract expressionism, that painting is an "impure art", that we live in images and are "ridden" by them. & also by the ways he continually re-worked & re-encountered both his Old Masters (Uccello, Piero della Francesca), and his own early imagery, & that of his contemporaries (Max Beckmann, Krazy Kat...).

The question of an innate American "disruptiveness" (opposition, resistance), which Gary & Josh have been discussing, should maybe be looked at in the context of a more fundamental dialogic principle, rooted in this encounter with the creative emblems of another, earlier time & place. When a poet brings artistic "resolution" to his or her own time - within their poetry - this achievement sets up a dynamic of echo/response in the present, for poets now.

I see Ron S. has mounted another defense of his heroique historie of anti-School-of-Quietude Americana.

Last year I started this blog with a critique of the oppositional mentality.

Ron believes there is a reactionary-establishmentarian cabal which is holding back & resisting the triumph of oppositional poetries.

My idea as mumbled here last year was, that "oppositionalism" in the poetry world is a mental prison-house more fearsomely fortified with dulness & blinkered thinking than anything a supposed cabal could come up with.

The enemies of poetry : dullness, boredom, hypocrisy, fakery, lack of talent, lack of inspiration. Neither the redoubtable resources of these enemies, nor the forces that poetry arrays against them, have anything much to do with institutions or bureaucracies of supposed progress or reaction. To turn poetry into an illusory rivalry of factions is the best way to render it too petty and negligible for any serious public (or private) purposes.

Talent and dedication and sensibility will come to the fore in the arts, on their own merits and by their own efforts. No program or critique will ever keep up with them.

Happy New Year, everyone. Happy Birthday, HGpoetics.

Went into NY last Friday to see the Philip Guston retrospective. Happy me.

This little blog will be 1 year old on Jan. 4th. I'll be away until Jan. 5th, so y'all come on back around then, hear?

Have been flued out for some time. Advantages of illness : wrote my first children's story. People have been telling me to do that for years. Look out, Madonna.

Rumor has it the Schooner of Quietude will try for a comeback next year. A flotilla of iamboids was sighted off Chesapeake Bay last week. Word circulating (anonymous Topper) a sonnet mole has penetrated Buffalo. Gangs of Strong Monsieurs heckling Lang Pos reported in San Jose, of all places. Peace, O my people.

Live it up & party down (cough, cough) - Happy New Year, where'er ye be!

Still bugged out with bad virus. No whiskified egg nog for me, thanks [sigh].

Watched PBS magical-mystical program last night on origin of 3 Kings. Magi may have been Zoroastrian astrologers from Babylon & environs. On April 17, BC 6, there was an eclipse of Jupiter by the moon in the constellation of the Ram (which signified Israel). Gold : royalty; frankincense : holiness, priesthood; myrrh : death & burial. Lo & behold, there on the program as one of the commentators was William Dalrymple, whose book I mentioned here a few days ago (From the Holy Mountain).

Here's a very old HG poem :

Proverbial


 
I give you the parables as I received them -
my mother's voice, the nursery rhymes,
the memorized rhetoric and the anthem
leading us like sheep to death sometimes.

 
The mystery ringing in our ears,
the noise of the cultivated howl
of ubiquitous unknown lusts and fears,
the music of monkey, wolf and owl.

 
In silence before music and the word,
a voice already prepared to save
delivers you into a pastoral world,
out of the dank and bestial cave.

 
A cadence I cannot repeat just right -
the pristine choir of many morning birds,
or the patience of children in the dancing light
performing the ritual of careful words.

Looking around at home, I found these curious precursors of the long river-poem (Forth of July). Sections of a poem called "Octaves":

4

 
Is it the sea or is it a voice,
or is it a sea-voice (rocked
by heartbeats long ago docked
in petrified wave-lengths, ice-

 
water)?  Or the wind in a tree.
That one, rising like a broken delta.
Speaks through me.
Rafted away now...  Huckleberry.  Selah

 
6

 
Mississippi, Mississippi...
Gravel and silt slide down the stream. 
Mississippi, Mississippi...
Spell it out, spell out your dream.

 
Why should I spell it out for you
(New York - D.C. - California)?
I hit the road before you do.
(Minnesota...  Alabama...)

& finally, here's an couple of odd (as usual) bits of something for the day, from The Grassblade Light:

21

 
The snow covered the ground like the shoulders
of his white bull, only colder, colder; he saw a cloud
of ice breath, chill between warm heartbeats.  Old
Blackstone, in clear December light, ponders, ponders.

 
Some penetrating sound, a loon-call through the aether,
or... some answer to a riddle, rectifying denouement,
perfect solution... some snow-crystalline all right,
like the moon sailing across deep soothing black... or...

 
Good King Wenceslas looked out
on the feast of Stephen
when the snow lay round about
deep and fresh and even

 
High clear children's voices above the dark
tops of pine trees, as they make their way
through snow from house to house.  Gradually,
slowly, peacefully (in the cold night).  Hark

 
the herald angels sing...  He looked out toward the mangers
of the world.  There... on the outside of the inns...
in the cold, among animals, straw, the thin
coverings, the sparse walls... the hungers, the dangers.

 
And like Balthasar astride his mule (riding west
and staring east) old Blackstone thought:
what One is this? - as, bright-wrought,
an arc of moonlight moored above that nest

 
(a lowly nef, berthed under a lofty shell).
An airship, or some hovering bell... it shed
a sweet, translucent music overhead.  And
music changes everything (as Wenceslas could tell).

                       
                     12.24.98





 
22

 
In December, in the snow, in the clear cold air,
everything grows double, everything is allegorical,
like those distant crows, high over the Bruegel
valley, and the hunters turning home, bare

 
bodkins, empty-handed; a half-moon, small
and delicate, glows through a haze,
and the stiletto of one star beside it says:
behold tight-woven final acts of good and evil

 
here now passing... upon theatrical soil.
Here simplest things are full of profundity:
hungry wayfarers, winecellars of reality...
gypsies, flocks, shepherds... an angel.

 
Meanwhile, under the dome, the black stone
of Isaac waits.  And gathering specific gravity,
to the city - through Stephen's Gate - comes Jubilee,
like spring streams down from Zechariah's canyon.

 
And he will stage these holograms of Incarnation
(strange attractors, gathering wise men toward one
star's dark matter)... cask them, roll them on board,
until the ark of Wenceslas is full, and Stephen's crown

 
goes round again, millennial - in those meadows 
where Time does not run down, but circles...
where May Goulding conceived, and Stephen's bulls
are papal, Romany... where Blackstone throws

 
his final boomerang : a child is born,
and everything is changed.  Come down,
you shepherds, to the manger now, come down,
behold - how God is cradling Isaac like a son.

                         
               12.24.98

Wishing you holiday cheer & lights - *

HG down with respiratory bug past few days.

reading My Name Is Red, by Orhan Pamuk. I like his style, have read most of his novels.

also immersed in tomes from library about medieval Aleppo & Islamic history. Aleppo, I love that name. Comes from arabic word for "milk"; legend has it Abraham stopped there on his way from Ur, & offered goat's milk to his neighbors. Many ancient shrines to Abraham in the area.

"That in Aleppo Once..." - short story by Nabokov. (A quote from finale of Othello.) Birthday of Nabokov & Shakespeare : April 23rd, St. George's Day. Patron saint of Russia & England. St. George a curious mythical figure : related in Islamic culture to the mysterious saint Al-Khidr, or "Green" : figure of strength & vitality, spring fertility (St. George & the Dragon). Shrines to Al-Khidr in Aleppo too.

"Milk", MLK, Melchizedek, Melchior. . . a motif in my poetry (Island Road, Stubborn etc.).

Happy solstice. It starts to get lighter today. (Just so you know. Prof. Hinkel told me.)

& speaking of heaven, I just finished Wm. Dalrymple's travel book, From the Holy Mountain (Owl Bks, 1997). He retraces the steps of 6th century peripatetic Byzantine monk named John Moschos, who kept a journal of his own (The Spiritual Meadow). Dalrymple's book is a remarkably vivid 1st-hand report on the fading (or maybe surviving - some of these hermit monks are amazingly resilient) remnants of various strands of ancient eastern Christianity still hanging on in monasteries scattered through Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel & Egypt. A unique lens on the Middle East.

Mairead Byrne's blog Heaven has been added to my list of links, which is hardly universal & rarely used by me. But I noticed over at the Buffalo poetics pen (where there's a "Keep Henry Out" sign) that she felt left out of the blogland link whirl. So there you are, Mairead. Merry Christmas, ho ho ho, from the highly-networked blog-Santa club.

It's been a quiet day in blogland, but I couldn't resist furthering the knowledge and love of cheese among poets & poetry/cheese lovers everywhere, with this quote from today's AP wire services, courtesy NY Times:

Back in Connecticut at the Abbey of Regina Laudis, 
nuns raise sheep, work the fields and sing Gregorian chants 
eight times a day. Marcellino, who is also an accomplished 
vocalist, was assigned to make cheese. The scientific interest 
came later.

 
In the 1990s, Marcellino won a Fulbright scholarship 
to study in France. She eventually spent four years 
here studying cheese fungus, going from farm to farm 
collecting samples. Her fame grew, and she was profiled 
in a documentary that coined her nickname: ``The Cheese Nun.''

The complete article can be found at the Times site (for which you might have to register), here.

Jordan keeping up on cheese situation. There appears to have been a drop in interest in cheese poetics of late, both here and in Limburg. I attribute this to the recent focus on V-neck sweaters (I mean in the archival sense, of course : the V-shape being an ancient symbol of many things, including early "holding & lifting" tools, such as the Akkadian steamshovel). Prof. Hinkel's recent study, Molten Hermeneutics : Melted Cheese Metaphors in the Life & Work of Amalia Lamia (Left Overbie Univ. Press, 2004) should bring the recent dropsic malaise or aphasic lassitude in cheese poetics to an abrupt (top-broiled) end. Happy Holidays, Prof. Hinkel!

Mike & Jonathan continue good dialogue on fiction/poetry and the relative merits of Yeats & Milton.

Seems to me that Mike's demurrals might apply more aptly to the whole late Romantic/Symbolist poetic ethos, of which Yeats is probably the best exemplar. That is, the supposed weaknesses he sees in Yeats are representative of a larger phenomenon.

The advent of fiction signalled a split between poetry & prose. It's no accident that "Romanticism" referred originally to a return to medieval poetic romances which were analyzed, parodied, mourned & mocked in the greatest "modern" novel, Don Quixote.

Cervantes inaugurated the role of novel as analytical instrument, and with the progress of the social novel, marginalized poets began to see a parallel between the disenchantment of life brought on by science & industrialization and the dominance of "prosaic" values in literature. In a manner somewhat comparable to the development of abstraction in painting, poets began to emphasize their social role as avatars of pure imagination. The fact that, as Mike mentions, Milton had finally to choose between scriptural revelation and the book of nature for a "true" poetic representation of cosmic reality anticipates the Romantic attitude.

The core of the Romantic argument was, that prosaic, analytical description, whether in literature or science, actually fails as mimesis, is somehow untrue to the Real, because dull prose could never represent the ecstatic, mystical wholeness & beauty of Creation : only the inspired imagination could foster the images of innocence, sympathy, synthesis & unity, worthy of that ultimate reality.

Yeats' fascination with George Berkeley (the Irish idealist philosopher), and with the effect of imaginative symbols, are attributes of the "classic" Romantic stance. The Romantic poet registers a protest against the falsity of objective description : "we murder to dissect". This is fundamentally a religious attitude, which asserts the sacredness of reality against the profanation of (a scientific-Faustian) detached objectivity. & in my view this confrontation between poetic imagination and "objectivity", between prose & poetry, is not yet completely played out. Some of Wallace Stevens' gnomic aphorisms (about the "poetry of reality") still speak very tellingly to this issue.

I


 
LOCKE sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
Out of his side.


 
II


 
Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium’s mouth.
Out of nothing it came,
Out of the forest loam,
Out of dark night where lay
The crowns of Nineveh.

On Saturday morning I had an odd premonition, thinking "They're going to find Saddam before Christmas." Turns out they were finding him at the time.

Here's some semi-doggerel formality, from Way Stations, on the general theme of falling kings:

         Ballade Royale


  
         "The enemy is seething at the gates
 and all our stratagems so sorely tried
 have surely failed, and rebels – ingrates! –
 spit at us, and slink away, deep-dyed
 in treachery."  So courtiers sighed
 and muttered dreadful news, in sheer
 despair.  The king was full of foolish pride.
 All eyes filled with dismay – each heart with fear.

  
         "Let's go unto the king – it's not too late,
 perhaps..."  So down stone corridors they glide
 sharing the doom-filled business of the state,
 to find their king... lolling, side by side
 with his luxurious and mocking bride.
 His eyes feign drowsiness as they draw near.
 He snores – or mumbles something crass and snide.
 All eyes filled with dismay – each heart with fear.

  
         The great king disentangled from his mate
 and leaning on one elbow hoarsely cried –
 "Bring me my harp, O cowards that I hate!"
 The instrument appeared.  His fingers plied,
 and with his long arm's curve struck, chord
 on chord, such harmonies! – so sweet, so clear,
 his servants melted... floated on a cloud...
 All eyes filled with dismay – each heart with fear.

  
         "Miserable souls – your anguish I deride!
 When I am gone to rest – upon my bier –
 you'll curse your God I ever lived – or died!"
 All eyes filled with dismay – each heart with fear.

Good blog day. See Bemsha & the Sonnetarium in debate. I like this from Yeats:

And I declare my faith:
I mock Plotinus' thought
And cry in Plato's teeth,
Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,
Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar paradise.

& on Beauty & Form, me sez (in "The Granary"):

         We were twelve-year-old friends
 When I became your apprentice –
 Careless for numb noon,
 Caught up in steady response
 To crafty forms and riddling shades.

Jonathan yesterday, on "tolerance." & speaking of Beauty & Tolerance, the flap in Paris over Muslim veils in school will surely be one for the history books. Si francais! A thousand Mata Haris, au centre d'haute couture, using their coy Oriental veils as a wedge for political Islam!

Tolerance in governance, oh, it must be the key. A public space of universal equal rights requires, paradoxically, a generous hospitable attitude toward ethnic pride. Finding the balance between group interests and the interest of each & all : civilization - life itself - based on wisdom & mutual acceptance among "others".

& in regard re-finding the past, see interesting comments on Baxter Hathaway & Lyn Hejinian at Cornell, over hyere at the Hotel.

Form is discovering beauty as fate.

 
The plot of a poem is the beautiful resolution of its form.

                            
                              *

Discussion
Intellectual Form is moving :  logos reveals that pathos 
is ethos, and vice versa.  (This is the Theorem of Integral Beauty, 
the Golden Section, the Goulden Rule).

We love words
and "form" is simply having fun with words.

Thus my Mandelstam obsession
is merely an expression of "nightingale fever"
(ie. the joy of speech for its own sake).

Ovid (et al.) frames the meaning of politics & social life
within a context of happy babbling.
That's what poets do.

". . . for lack of what is found there."

The great forms
are great imitations
of greater forms
(like fern leaves).

Kasey writes about the dumbing-down of poetic syntax & thinning-out of tradition among contemporary poets.

In terms of getting a perspective on the contemporary scene, these phenomena (along with, I would add, the loss of "depiction" or mimesis among the post-avants, which I've been harping on here) seem more important than the supposed divide between mainstream/experimental or Quietude/quirkitude.

But I'm not proposing another critique based on badmouthing. Let's look for the poets who do rediscover & synthesize great "finds" from previous poetic eras.

It's not a matter of stylistics alone. It's recreating & reliving something perennial, having to do with the immediacy/presence/role of poetry in human experience (both individual & collective).

Am reading John Latta's & Dale Smith's engaging table-talk in conjunction with these pronunciamentos.

another little bit from "My Byzantium", written late 90s.

3

 
The crowd was moving beyond the guardrail
and surging up and down in gleaming escalators
between the two unmatched exhibits

 
I was in the crowd and with the crowd
memories between the tracks of the trekking pilgrimage
statuesque in lived postures of waiting and looking.

 
At the eastern pole of the great museum lay
Mondrian.  There was a tree in a Dutch backyard;
branchlets billowed a crisscross scandal until

 
with the lantern of his lifelong devotion
a surprise habit was to kiss Mrs. Ernst unlike
a monk, erring, earnest, in the back of a NY cab;

 
while at the western pole was to be beheld
the family album of Alfred Stieglitz –
not Venus not Diana emerging black and white

 
beside the dock in skinwet bathing suit,
or the two dignified old dames a-walk
down a country lane away from the horizon.

 
Choose:  your home movie extracted lovingly
undamaged from the real?  Or the concrete circumflex
of a node of apposite contraries?

 
What are we looking for in glasses?
"there is always something deeper, a little deeper,
in the waste places, along the roadsides"

 
It was a crystallization
of hope longed for, one
something

 
one, what was the number
of the archway
upheld

 
crumbling
unspoken
yet

 
flit, still
as, as
if re

 
me
mbe
red

which mayhap brings me back to Byzantium & "walking through the pictures". This is from "My Byzantium" (you may have seen it before. . .):

 
7

 
On Valentine's Day on my lunch break
I walked down the hill to the School of Design
to see the Crucifixion with Two Thieves
by the Master of the Providence Crucifixion (Dutch, circa
       1450).

 
After 500 years the colors still bright as a dream.
Jerusalem in the background, strange towers of mauve, beige,
violet, the high walls flecked with scrawny trees
(no goldfinch near), the line of horsemen
in blue Martian armor (or Flemish 1400's) appearing
out of a crevice in the pale
green, springlike fields
    
                          and surrounding the crosses,
crowding the stage, the gray horses, their necks
like tensile steel with unknowing beast grins,
the fop soldiers and gawking onlookers, the boy
(or dwarf?) reining in the horses for the lords
staring in gratified excitement
at the three hung men, a swordsman
(realistic touch) ready to hack at the calves
of the thief on the left - the three men
of exactly the same build, only
Jesus more deathly pale, calm, as if asleep.

 
In the foreground Mary faints, weeping
(like the women outside the execution arena
in Afghanistan today, NY Times 2.14.96),
her arms hollowing, ready to become
a bronze Pietà; two of the soldiers
peer sidelong out of the picture frame,
but John and the Magdalen look you in the eye
out of hell, still, out of 1450.

 
Beside the Crucifixion a little gilded wooden niche -
relic, even older (Italian, 1250 or so, hand
of Lippo Memmi) – a blonde in a red cloak,
sky-blue undergarment, holds a little casket
(myrrh-box? urn?) and gazes with almond eyes
from under her hood at me,
the blush on her cheeks still faintly there,
her look still veiled and distant, yet looking, still
    
                            B
       M  I  N  E

 
(A little further down the hill below the museum
you in the yellow t-shirt under a black sweatshirt
circle the gargantuan monolithic pile of the Supreme
Courthouse in a banged-up Falcon only
to look through the corner window
behind the iron bars hoping
to catch a glimpse
of a certain Irish cop
– like a goldfinch
tethered to the law.)

 
Snow is falling today on Providence,
it comes down gradually from cloud to ground;
soon Mardi Gras, then Lent, a drop of ash
on seared forehead; and through the
mirror of a dusky glance I see
one green-eyed almond Magdalen –
a chalice in her hands, she holds
this dying light in pale green fields,
while snow falls slowly over Providence.
 
                         2.14.96

My affinities (based in "optimism") may also imply certain resistances to various idioms of disaffection & resistance among my contemporaries.

Mandelstam & Crane, in Henry's mind. Very old news to some of my blog & poetry-list interlocutors. Must seem like tunnel vision, combined with backward-looking reification/idolatry of a couple of Modern Masters.

But the summary here today is just that, a simplification of my perspective, & I make no apologies. Myriad paths crisscross in poetry land. The era can be read with different lenses : feminist, multicultural (shorthand for many perspectives). I've been drawn to & inspired by scores, hundreds maybe, of other 20th-cent. writers.

I'm writing here, rather, about a couple of 20th-cent. poets who (along with Akhmatova, Berryman, Berrigan, Shvarts, Honig, Stevens, Montale, Celan, Brodsky - a few others) exerted a special guiding or pivotal or modelling or inspirational effect on my own writing.

& why or how did they do that? By means of a fusion/combination of worldview & poetic expression. Poetry remakes - reinterprets - the world with its discoveries & commitments. & our homemade "pantheons" have motives & consequences.

the most thorough study of Mandelstam's critical writings that I know of, is Mandelshtam's Poetics, by Elena Corrigan. her book doesn't deal with M's famous tribulations under Stalin, or his poetry per se, but focuses on his theoretical prose and its relationship with contemporary poetics (postmodernism).

I guess my glibness is back.

How do I understand the perspective that informs my "affinities"?

I'm a sort of melancholic optimist, that's how I see it. A metaphysical optimist, due to engagement with religious ideas & experiences. A political optimist, due perhaps in part to happy childhood in the exact middle of 50s Middle America (plus naivete or complacency? you be the judge). Melancholic also by nature & experience.

Perhaps a religious perspective not that far from Eliot fills me (in contrast to him, it seems) with metaphysical optimism. Which partly explains my fascination with Hart Crane's response to Eliot (as opposed to WC Williams'). (Williams strikes me as a kind of populist-empiricist. Crane more like a visionary-idealist. Crane's idealism has religious connotations which I don't find in Williams.)

I found similar "major chords", a similar optimism, in Mandelstam. Not a superficial but a profound saying YES, different atmosphere from Eliot.

Pound also has some grand & wonderful major chords. Along with an almost total mis-reading of religious & humane values in history. Or, should I say: Pound seems to display quite thoroughly & openly how passionate humane impulses are twisted & destroyed by a combination of aristocratic snobbery & wolfish aggressive (un)realpolitik.

Pleasantly snowed-in here for a few days.

I guess people reading my entries about Byzantium, Mandelstam, etc. would have to overcome a sense of obscurity, incoherence, hobbyhorse-ism.

Someday maybe I'll write a My Mandelstam, like Tsvetaeva's My Pushkin or Howe's My Emily Dickinson, & try to render some coherence to it all.

In poetry, I do two main things, I guess. Under certain favorable circumstances, I write poems. Otherwise, I think in "poetics", which is a jumble including my own taste in reading & my response to other writers & traditions (not just an aesthetic response but a personal response, which includes aesthetics, politics, "world-view", a sense of kinship, etc.).

This is how it is for most poets, I figure.

I've probably absorbed as much of the general assumptions of my time & generation as everybody else. Thinking about it off the top of my head this morning, I think I tend to orient myself as part of an era or a century - and an era which is either ending or transmogrifying into something else. This era began around World War I ("the real, not the calendar, 20th century" - Akhmatova), and was characterized by a new kind of self-consciousness, perhaps a sort of apocalyptic thinking, which simultaneously recognizes its alienation from the previous age, and tries to comprehend or interpret or summarize it in a new synthesis, for a new era (ie., Modernism).

In the atmosphere created by the modernist poets & those who followed (up to our own time) I guess I make certain choices & elect certain affinities or models, like everybody else.

to be continued, maybe. . .

I grind the crystals of copper carbonate, the azurite or verditer, the famous mountain blue of the receding planes of aerial perspective, and paint my way, blue by blue, up to the distant sea, where my ship lies waiting.

- Michael Frayn, Headlong

. . . & the difference between Byzantium & US being, of course, Roger Williams of Rhode Island (theocracy vs. church/state separation). it circles around like that in my poetry (around the snoozing head of Wm. Blackstone).

. . . then again, of course, in my poetry, the Byzantium effect is a subset of the Russian theme. . . with me everything begins, & begins again, with Mandelstam.

the thrill at the heart of Wallace Stevens' "first idea" : that's what this art/nature oscillation is all about. . .

My longstanding haggle with Language Poetry & post-avantism (admittedly a form of shadow-boxing with my own peculiar version of those amorphous phenomena). . .

a crux there being that a kind of littery literalism of the letter became a cliche or dogma over the 80s & 90s. . . & one of its affects being that the trope of self-conscious literalism (even as irony) tends to disrupt representation or mimesis. . .

so there is no "walking through the pictures" anywhere. . .

which seems to attack or cancel out perhaps the most interesting aspect of art in general, which is the oscillation between art & nature - the mimicry & confusion of the two. . . & the theological mystery at the root of this oscillation (what is "creation from nothing"?).

so it's interesting to me anyway that the theme of "Byzantium" runs through much of my writing in the late 90s (both in a political sense of US being a latter-day or parodic Byzantium, and in the sense that the old Byzantine aesthetic/theological issue of iconoclasm/iconophilia is so fascinating in itself). . .

I think of the post-avants & the postmodern theorists as iconoclasts (in the Byzantine sense). . .

& the aesthetic values which got sidelined during this period of iconoclasm included representation, mimesis, "thick description", direct presentation, narrative, etc. . . things I've been interested in. . .

(- just a little horn-tootin' polemics, for a Friday afternoon in frozen Blogland. . .)

Odd (or just repetitive) how plot of both Stubborn Grew & long dream-poem "Grain Elevator" pivot on a "spirit guide" of some kind (Bluejay, my grandfather's ghost) leading narrator Henry through & into a painting (30s prairie storm picture in the latter; Renaissance Magdalen miniature in former).

See also 2nd "chapter" of Stubborn ("Ancient Light") : the whole thing is about interaction between people & artworks (in London).

         "Leave it for lost!  It's gone for good!
 Come on, come with me!  Move, move
 And walk – walk through the phony frame!"

Am reading the entertaining Headlong, by Michael Frayn, about a fellow who discovers a missing Bruegel masterpiece in a very Bruegelish out-of-the-way English rundown manor. I see the protagonist is doing just what I do! ("Bruegelizing" what he sees.)

It's about to start snowing. . .

Old poem from Way Stations :

         The Granary
       
                                          for J.P.
    
         There were huge comfortable rooms,
 dusty with archaeological bric-a-brac,
 brass rubbings of the Black Prince,
 and a photograph of your tiny sister
 smiling, holding a shard in a trench.

  
         I loved the cozy smells of your house,
 perfumed with antiquity and your mother's
 potato cooking, her high throaty
 European sparrow voice, calling Johnny!
 Johnny!  Dinner's on the table, boys!

  
         Your father a kindly cultivated man,
 modest, his speech dry and bright
 like a cello – questioning us
 at the table with witty attention –
 a doctor who treated Guillaume Barré.

  
         We were twelve-year-old friends
 when I became your apprentice –
 careless for numb noon,
 caught up in steady response
 to crafty forms and riddling shades.

  
         You inhabited a cloudy solitude
 like a meditative Leonardo, yet you
 marshalled all the armies of Europe
 in brilliant colors for us to survey,
 clashing and surging across the floor.
 
 And all history lay buried in the big
 Egyptian attic, that family granary
 of Time, steaming through the deep quiet
 sustained chord of Minnesota summer,
 the dense last hours of childhood.

  
         All except for the room set aside
 for your older brother, with the bright
 football pennants and the trophies –
 a father's eldest son, whom I never
 met, who never came home from Vietnam.

Me, Bartleby?

Emotional realization yesterday : I don't have much going in the world other than poetry. Better lay off the chess for a while.

Noted here a few weeks ago that Anny Ballardini, mysterious unmet angel over yonder Italy-way, had taken it upon herself to translate my bk-long poem In RI into her native tonggue.

Any publisher out there who might be interested in doing a bilingual ed. of a long documentary sort of poem (vaguely Patersonish) about New England 1630-1640s, with Rog Williams, Key Into Language of America, Canonicus, Miantonomi & Narragansetts, w/divagations on Salem witch trials & King Philip's War, Anne Hutchinson, church/state separation & liberty of conscience, founding of RI, RI/Boston rivalries, RW & Milton, etc. etc. (poem written in early 1990s, now transmogrified into lingua di Dante)? Well, my email is listed on this blog. Otherwise we will probably self-do it, Nedge-style.

Not feeling very inspired nor glib toward the blog these days.

Poetry seems distant.

I read novels, plan prose projects, play online chess (when I'm not working).

Hope poetry comes back (it may).

Perhaps I'm going through a long-term natural (d)(r)evolution.

Seems to be no "context" for what I've done or haven't done, in the neighborhood. (I'm sure this is a familiar feeling.)

The battlefield is empty. A field seething with wind & crickets.

Disconnected from EVERY scene (except yours).