Wallace Stevens' poetry is sometimes orotund, coinciding with the general repleteness & rotundity of WS, as in similar modus William Shakespeare offers a mighty graceful Globe;

and as WS oftentimes mentions the poetry to be found in philosophers,

so, I recommend Nicolaus Cusanus, or Nicholas of Cusa, whose interest in roundness surpasseth all others;

quotes to follow -

Therefore the edge of the world is not composed of points, but its edge
 is roundness [rotunditas], which consists in one point. 

 
Roundness cannot be composed out of points for, since a point is indivisible 
and does not have quantity or parts or a front and back or other differences,
it cannot be joined to another point.

 
Only length and width can be seen.  But in roundness nothing is long or wide
or straight.  Roundness is a kind of circumference, a certain convexity led
around from point to point whose top is everywhere.  And its top is the atom,
invisible because of its tininess.

 
The round world is not that roundness itself than which no roundness can be
greater, but that roundness than which nothing can actually be greater.
Absolute roundness is not of the nature of the roundness of the world, but is its
cause and exemplar; the absolute roundness of which the roundness of the world is
the image.  I see the image of eternity in a circle where there is neither a beginning
nor an end since there is no point in which it would be the beginning rather than
the end.  [italics mine]

Listen to this subtlety :

Moreover unity is more perfect and simple to the degree that it is more uniting.
Hence the Trinity, which is one in such a way that it is also in three persons, each of
which is one, is more perfect.  And unity would not be most perfect in any other way.

similarly :

Consequently you must open up the gaze of your mind, and you will see that God
is in all multitude because he is in the number one, and in every magnitude because he
is in the point.  From this it is established that divine simplicity is more subtle than the
number one and the point which gives the unfolding power of multitude and magnitude.
Hence God is a greater enfolding power than that enfolding power of the number one 
or of a point.

Edward J. Butterworth (rotund moniker) has a perfectly succinct essay in the book Nicholas of Cusa in Search of God and Wisdom (Brill, 1991), clarifying these concepts & relating them to the earlier Alan of Lille, who wrote : Deus est spaera intelligibilis, cuius centrum ubique, circumferentia nusquam. Moreover, Lille :

The creature is called the center because, as time, compared to eternity, is thought
a fleeting motion, so the creature, compared to God, is a central point.  Therefore, the
immensity of God is said to be the circumference, because it disposes all things in
such a way that it encompasses them and enfolds all things within its immensity.

It's possible to find only word games & rhetorical sleight of hand here. But not if you take into account Cusanus' commitment to the (negative-theological) absolute otherness of God. Mathematical terms are applied to simplicity, while concrete (physical) terms are applied to multiplicity (as in Alan of Lille). Yet otherness and the physical universe are joined, related to one another, by shared geometrical terms & analogies (in a relation of material actuality, on the one hand, and ineffable, invisible & infinite (yet intelligible) perfection, on the other). Alan of Lille's "Intelligible Sphere".

Leading (Butterworth illuminates, partly via Einstein) (& around again) to Cusanus' limpid, rotund contradiction :

Therefore the edge of the world is not composed of points,
but its edge is roundness, which consists in one point.

(All Cusanus quotes from
De Ludo Globi (The Game of Spheres))

what's that Dickinson line? "My circuit is circumference" [?]

Busy working on a novel these days. Mother is the invention of necessity. Don't really want to go back to the library, mine exquisite golden cage. & haven't, or haven't applied, any other socially-useful skills lately (like teaching). Wish to write myself out of a hole, or try. It's silly & hopeless, but heck, I can't think of anything else at the moment.

Tempted to talk about it, but afraid to give away secrets of the craft. A story is a gizmo.

Arguments over blogs at the Buffalo Poetics List? Huh.

I think I won an argument with a turnip last night.

Literary phenomena & succession of time-periods. "Who shall have the succession?" (Cantos)

Trying to explain a worldview which emits Stubborn Grew & its sequels, so you might get into it more.

Having Maximus & "A" & Gunslinger before me, and Mandelstam & The Bridge & Ulysses & Finnegans Wake & Cantos & Paterson before me too, slightly further back, and Melville & Dickinson & Whitman a little further back, & Dante & Milton & Homer & Virgil & Ovid & Shakespeare & Bible further further back... not seeing them as "challenges" but simply as absorbing-authentic literary models of reality & totality.

seeing how each new work of necessity "blocks the view" of previous books & simultaneously stands in their shadows. Harold Bloom turns this into a psycho-melodrama-tragicomedy, but in my experience it's more a question of shades of taste... thus I feel what's missing from the style of Olson, say, when I sense the presence, still there, of something earlier & better (stronger, richer, deeper), & yet also see how Olson felt history differently than did some of his overweening or over-confident predecessors...

Anyway, the picture of people and the city & history that I try to present in Stubborn Grew, or the wild directions the poem takes after that, should be recognized as written in the light still emanating from these other books. So for example in the latter half of Stubborn you can recognize when the aegis of the Cantos shifts over to the aegis of Finnegans Wake, and why that might be happening, based on the recognitions undergone by the narrator-protagonist. & these "aegiae"[?] are forms of acknowledgement & also opposing arguments (theirs & my own) about "reality" as I feel it emanating from these writers - Crane & Mandelstam & Vallejo & Pushkin & Shvarts et al. coming forward as kinds of framing "style-testimonies" - some of these writers' influences more pervasive than others'. My own poem's capaciousness having certain architectonic nodes where its own arguments are marked & underlined, in its own strange way.

I still think I found a sort of unusual door through the long poem. It's been hard for me to write poetry at all since then, for the last 2-3 years, but I have hopes for Dove Street as a possibly authentic outgrowth, if I can keep focused (while other projects are underway).

Bluejay & Henry's nekuia, or descent into hell, in Stubborn Grew :

the presence of the rejected, the abject, the detritus, which, curiously, is essential element of a true picture of "America" : that which was evaded, elided, or avoided by aesthetics of "EP + EP" (Poe & Pound).

Bluejay a sort of amalgam of abject or "persecutable" qualities.

Every subculture begins with an act of demarcation, a drawing of boundaries : us vs. them.

But when writers do this, they simultaneously erase the more compelling boundary line : writing vs. world.

James & John go up to Jesus privately & ask, politely, if they can, in his Kingdom, when it comes, sit at his right hand and his left.

Jesus tells them it's not for him to decide. But he says that although in the kingdoms of the world, men seek glory from one another, it won't be so in his kingdom. There, "the greatest amongst you shall be your servant." & he tells them to give alms only in secret, so that "the Father who sees in secret" will reward them.

Reading about social structure of city of Aleppo in 18th century.

Society is... omigod. Society is collective survival by... omigod. In society, in general, what is the status of the literary person? What is the status of the religious mystic or the prophet? What is status, and honor, and prestige, and wealth, and power? Omigod.

Life's continuity... wisdom... smarts... family... luck... talent, skill... charity & love... independence, integrity... omigod. It's all over my head. But you know, this is one of the things that interests me : the direct "confrontation" of poet (or writer, generally) & society-at-large.

The egalitarian otherness of "creation" & "creator" - and the social drive for power, status, dominion, survival (the devil & all his works? not exactly. there's such a thing as good will & loving empathy. Humanity is the animale compagnevole).

Literary subcultures are miniature societies. They don't really address the issue. Only literature itself, in its raw state... maybe the substance of literature is that confrontation.

No, I don't agree with his politics most of the time, but there was an op-ed piece by William Safire in the NY Times today about the Gibson film which was right on the mark.

I often go to Heaven. It's so nearby.

Sitting in miniature cluttered backyard on mellow March 1st coming in like lamb. Yellow-gray pussy willow branch. A downy woodpecker, making a very confident "tock" for such a shrimp.

I look up and say the words vremeni and time (russian & english) a few times, slowly, under my breath. The branches are quiet & the light is soft & opalescent. It's nice not to be at work at this hour. I feel simultaneously like Proust & the madeleine. This is hard to explain. I mean I feel my mortal flesh pronouncing the words for "time", slowly, low & quiet, while that same time passes, slowly, low & quiet.

A sad feeling, something like Ecclesiastes.

I think, "this is something like a poetry reading".

What am I reading these days?

books by & about Nicolaus Cusanus
books about history, architecture, etc. of Aleppo (Syria)
books about Hitchcock film, Vertigo

You tell me!

not really a poem, just a quick sketch today, from Dove Street. Do you have people like this, where you live?

5
      
                                 i.m. Richard L. Champlin

 
He came to rest   (meek one)   in an abandoned orchard
alongside a stone wall   in Foster   in the dog-days
of August   his hand atop a sapling   a full box
of peaches at his side   the perfected naturalist

 
come (ripened) to his hour   out-of-doors
and maybe the orchard   harbored apple trees
like Blackstone’s Yellow Sweeting:  he would know
having discovered a red-flowered Spicebush

 
(Lindera benzoin forma rubra R.L. Champlin)
and the national champion Pussy Willow
maintained records of notable trees
exceptionally astute and persistent observer

 
birds, turtles, and butterflies   very good storyteller
diligent keeper of written records (daily journals 
amounted to 35 vols.)   companion to most
of the old Yankees from northwestern Rhode Island

 
local lore and cultural history   locations of springs,
Native American mortar stones, threshing rocks,
charcoal mounds   reverent, modest, and private man
Redwood Library director   botany, ornithology,

 
mycology, entomology, malacology, ecology
so you might sketch a quick landscape
beneath Yellow Mountain    with the tiny figure
of the scholar   hidden there   contemplative

 
eye   beholding   mirrored   beheld now   in your eye
the absent shadow of your twin    your spouse
(Blackstone for Guillem   Eurydice for Orpheus)
(apples in a cloistered garden   sister-dove)

       
                                           2.27.04

 
*Note:  lines in italics from obituary by Peter Lockwood, published in Rhode Island Naturalist,  
v. 10 n. 2 (Nov. 2003).

Still thinking on millionaire Mel & his Mad-Max Jesus.

I guess my irritation stems in part from a sense of identification. Gibson's "Passion" is his own; this vast expense of expensive spirit stems, as passions will (as Dante knew) from a listening, hearing, reading experience; somewhere in his (or his strange father's) biography there was a response to, & some kind of identification with, the Biblical Word.

In the summer of 1973 I was working on a ranch, haybaling, with my brother, in a remote & beautiful part of Wyoming (Cora, WY, pop. 3). After work, in the bunkhouse, with Jim & the rancher's cocky 14-yr-old son, who wore a cowboy hat & liked to shoot gophers with his .22, & liked to bug Jim & me with his sarcastic comments on whatever we mature 19-21 yr olds talked about, with his twangy "well, wowzee-wowzee-woo-woo!"), I lay there reading the Revised Standard Version from beginning to end.

Why was I reading the Bible? I can't remember exactly when it started. But my biography was no less weird & eccentric than anyone else's. I think I was reading the Bible in an attempt to ground myself more securely, in a literary-historical sense, as a response to psychological shock. Because I really was in shock & mental torment at that time.

I had finished 3 years of college. I had written lots of adolescent poems, but had no concept of a practical future. I had played the fool in numberless ways trying to relate to my female compatriots. & I had read Shakespeare's Sonnets, & received the ineradicable impression that Mr. Shakespeare was addressing me, personally, from some extra-chronological dimension. This experience added to my deep fear & justified concern that I might be out of my mind, to put it euphemistically; ie. insane.

The Bible, basically, in a time of personal crisis, took me out of myself, into its epic & social & deeply practical/political/worldly-ironic atmosphere. It must have been that fusion of worldly knowledge and intense theological articulation - added to the fact that I had been brought up & confirmed in & fallen away from a church-oriented family - which utterly overpowered me.

Imagine a reading experience, at that age, which works steadily through the Mosaic books, the histories, the Psalms, the prophets, the wisdom books, the proverbs - this immense cultural epic - & concludes in the crosshairs of the "New Testament" : a kind of panopticon, or multimedia-dramatic grand finale to the consecutive narrative of the "Old Testament". You can't imagine this, actually, unless in some hidden or not-so-hidden corner of your experience you've been through it yourself, & heard the prophetic & not-so-prophetic messages.

So I do not need a filmic resume which dully & brutally pounds upon my head a literalist dogma about a deterministic scapegoat-atonement. I do not need Mel Gibson's version of "right reading". I've read the Word. It's alive, more than any film adaptation; & I'm still reading with it.

& so today's illustration (Dove Street):

4

 
A washed-out February light   winter floating away slowly
and the sound of a mourning dove   one   one-one
mingled with elisions of an iron brake   life’s nonsense
and my notes   cars on the road

 
a world gone quiet   in my mind   (preparation
for annunciation)   spring’s in the womb
of sister-dove:  limping slowly on the barren earth
she goes   as if she had a stone in her shoe

 
maybe   a stone fallen from heaven
landed in a camel-canopy   Abram’s otfe
out of Ur for good   across the sandy waste
under the fringed silk   she sits in shadow

 
cooing to the warriors   urging them on   to the end
of their beginnings   all the way to Jordan
or Jerusalem   where they guard the black stone
of the scapegoat   (father, son and   intervening angel)

 
another stone   too heavy for heaven   and buried deep
in your corrupted heart, O   horseman, knight:
love is reason   and reason is love,   she coos
and this equality   brings Jubilee,   she whispers

 
where seven iron rings   circle the sacred city
each ring manacled to its own   unbreakability
(like weapons of mass destruction   guarding
weapons of mass destruction)   from the days of John

 
until now    the Kingdom has come with violence
violent men    take it by force   but it shall not be so
with you   murmurs the fragile   enshrouded bird
(grey wing   buried in grey stone   furled   in black)


         
                                       2.26.04

Article in Providence Journal relating local clergy & rabbi responses to Gibson film. The minister, countering rabbi's wish for more emphasis on Jesus' teachings & good works, says that the important thing is the "theological statement". Quoting Isaiah ("by his stripes we are healed") he offers the standard atonement version ("it was God's will that Jesus suffer & die. That's why he was born," etc.).

The language of theology is not simple or reducible to sound bites. But this narrow "atonement" perspective troubles me. If the suffering & death were all part of God's Plan, then human free will, & the human choice to commit sin & evil, are thereby negated. This is a murky kind of absolution, a sloughing of responsibility in the name of divinely-ordained fate.

I don't think it was ever God's will that Jesus be crucified, just as it was never God's will that Cain or anyone after him commit murder. Rather, Jesus may have willingly undergone the ultimate assault of human evil (murder, represented by the Roman crucifix), trusting in God's will nevertheless, in spite of all and in the face of the end.

No, I think God's will was that Christ, enduring, defeat death and evil, a victory represented in the Resurrection. God did not design the universe as a total scapegoat process, or mechanism, in which the death of one liberates the rest of us. It's the spirit that liberates, and we are called upon to "work out our salvation" in that light.

The passion according to Mel opens in 2800 theaters. There's that number again. (Number of the beast!)

Myth wrapped in myth wrapped in dogma wrapped in myth.

I wonder how Rene Girard would interpret this. Iconic scapegoating serving a congruent, broader scapegoating? The Biblical message as a whole (according to Girard, anyway) demythologizes, unveils, & liberates us from the scapegoat trap (the paradigmatic action : the angel prohibits Abraham from sacrificing his own son). In the film, on the other hand, "Atonement" is once again reified into ritual mechanism, releasing waves of ill-feeling & false consciousness.

The actor playing the crucified Christ "doesn't really get killed", as children would say. Macabre travesty. "It is as it was," as the Pope says. Hmm.

I wonder if Wallace Stevens was familiar with Nicolaus Cusanus. There's a paper there for you, kids.

You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Stevens' "makings of the sun" & Cusanus' "conjectural", human-hypothetical, world. Probably some differing conclusions, but also some clear affinities of interest & vocabulary.

Reading The Tale of the 1002nd Night, by Joseph Roth.

And some interesting studies on Nicolaus Cusanus.

Working on Dove Street, the poem. Idea of the epic which ends in state of contemplation. Conjunction of date of Wm. Blackstone's burial & Guillem de Gellone's saint's day (5/28). Gellone & Cloisters Museum in the Bronx. Cloister & metropolis. Thought & action. Soldier & monk. Narratives of epic quest (ie. Odysseus, Orpheus) as subplots of, or figures for, a more fundamental redemptive plot (Everyman "hooked" out of mortality into "kingdom of God"). The dove that floats upon two wings (reason & love). (Emblem for poetry, too).

I've decided to give up being boring for Lent.

This is not going to be easy, folks. Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.

Quid aliud, domine, est videre tuum, quando me pietatis oculo respicis, quam a me videre? - Nicolaus Cusanus

[What else, O Lord, is your seeing, when you look upon me with the eye of mercy, than your being seen by me?]

The Redeemable Players, theater group at my church (Redeemer) across the street, puts on its first production tomorrow night : Les Aveugles (The Blind Men), by Michel de Ghelderode. The one-act brings to life a painting of the same title by Bruegel. Appropriate Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) material. I'm directing.

watched documentary again last night - Let's Get Lost, about Chet Baker. Gifted like Mozart, a natural. wasted his talent; a prodigy who fed (the talent) (off others) like a worm. . . something uncanny about his music. Essence of "lovesickness". Actually, essence of music-sickness. A trumpet-Orpheus, coming up trumps. (Then I found out today my wife had a bunch of her father's old Gerry Mulligan quartet records from early 50s.) In another life I want to play trumpet. From an old poem (In RI):

         This is the voice of nobody, rambling, mumbling.
 And it's hard to imagine the God of Descartes,
             of the Deists,
 a solitary supreme being, remote, Master
 Clockmaker, Big Brother in the sky.
             But language
 is a joint project, a choral endeavor,
 and if thinking is thinking with,
             and perception
 a common inheritance, and under the masks
 of skin color and race and tribe flash
             subtle unspoken
 communications, and if nature displays
 asymmetries of inconceivable
             intricacy... then
 it's not impossible thought might
 outrun matter, and mind might be beyond
             the visible frame,
 and speech might be the mere flower
 of reality, like a morning glory
             or the trumpet
 of an aging poet - the whole body becoming
 a trumpet (wavering, fading) - the life
             an indelible sign.

also watched vol. I of Russian epic version of "War & Peace". I'm starting to understand the Russian, hey. das vidanya.

more Dove Street:

3     
                     Omnia enim universalia, generalia atque specialia in  
                     te Iuliano iulianizant  [All universals, generalities, and 
                     specifics julianize in you, Giuliano]      
                                              – Nicolaus Cusanus


 
A faint gray pencil-sketch   my mother made   decades ago
floats in a blue corner:  two redhead brothers   like twins
almost an octave   Guillem & Giacomo   sit   parallel
each sketching (right-handed)   intent   upon   blank white

 
& Gong Xian   abandoned the field   and the fugue of war
(a change of ancient dynasties   Ming for Shang)
trailing retreat   transmuting each desire
(only flickers   of black horsehair)

 
the Yellow Mountain was   left to your imagination
in grey-black flecks   and war and peace   the blank
spaces   the crooked lightning paths   left up to you
(your willing hand   your loving heart   your sight)

 
Leonardo drew (lefty, mancino) the faintest of red lines
beneath the leaning eyes of Mary   bending down
(seraphic)   toward the babe:   his notes
a kind of mirror-writing (all’ebraico)   with “tired hand”

 
And in the wintry womb   the gray-black limbs
iterate (tired, crooked) against the snow   a backward trail
or trial   a coiled, cold metal spring or   trapper’s guile
(elusive prey   grey shadow   fleeting   glimmering)

 
low cooing   from a frozen eave or   looking-glass
intones an octave   twinned in unison   (some mournful-
silver marriage rite):  a thread of golden lightning
through an ocarina   to a painted ear (and scandalized)

 
announces stormy weather   thunderstorms and   thaw
across the mountains   where waterfalls   rush
past banks of cedars, reeds   (your brush with
fate   by horsehair   led you   here)

       
                                   2.20.04

Dove Street, cont.:

From your node of dove-grey granite   nestled in the Hudson bluffs
above the hustling metropolis   my saint Guillem
where the convalescent painter   painting so patiently
slows time to sweetness   and lights into the depths   I thought

 
I saw   it might be   something like this:
three young ballerinas   in feathery pink and gold   peering
curious and tremulous   around the curtain   on tiptoe
with unconscious grace  (Degas, the Guggenheim)

 
and the young crowd’s eager faces    peering   curious
and tremulous   on tiptoe   with unconscious grace
into the frame:  there   in the feminine mirror   an iteration
of a golden measure   or   benevolent universe

 
the play’s the thing   for melancholy Dane or Orpheus
hooked by the furrowed shadow   of an empty heart;
time slows   and lost is action   to the name, unspeakable
and grey  (like the shimmer of Law   in the dolphin-depths)

 
all’s figures   cries the street-wise idiot
when the heartbroken hero   descends into the grave:
for the one who went before   already lifts him free
in the slivered glint   of every new year’s day

 
and O what mighty wooden O is this   resting on a Sabbath-ship
a ring-dance   ringed around a painted pose   a pause
or cloistered clustering   around a single coiled spring
a noon   where an ink-brush runs   a stream   upstream

 
to a sunny mountain:  what gives   which gives   who gives
and gives   and flows   perpetuum mobile   continuum’s
heart’s blood O   hearty sacrificium   full, complete and
with unconscious grace   (inflected law   of every lovely feat)


       
                                        2.19.04

this is how new things start, possibly (always a maybe). from Dove Street draft:

Close your eyes   and step into my summer garden
(empty, small, forlorn)   come into my cloister
built of whispers   among chunks of dove-grey stone
from Guillem-le-Desert   and listen, now

 
to the cicada-continuum   hidden in leafy shade   overhead
a droning one-one-one   of winged heartbeats   eyes
closed   the threads of sound proliferate and
lose themselves   and then   (returning)   come around again

 
and where the small courtyard   (behind your eyelids)
contains the world   a heavy heart spreads canvas sails,
takes flight   like a gray brush-stroke   toward Yellow Mountain
or   as a fiddlehead uncurls   in chilly mud   toward the sun

 
In the abandoned cloister   your gnomon leads the way
toward noon   thus   at the vanishing point of appearances
a warmth exudes   light flashes in a spring   wounded, unwound
there   and gathering the earth   and all its dusty paths

 
into a balance   graceful, just   barely   there
afloat   like gnats in the evening   over a wide river
the particulars of every dream   that ever was
were there   with you   empty-hearted Orpheus

 
waiting   for the light-fall   the wing-beat
bringing word   of your beloved
from the grave of winter   embedded
in the purling spring   a sign   (J-fragment

 
from a fiddlehead)   the only sign
shrouded in murmurs   of mourning dove
or some Shoshone June   ghost-dance
here   in the empty garden   (at the entrance)

        
                            2.18.04

Curious affinities. I've never felt particularly affined with William Carlos Williams, but his long poem Paterson is echoed in my longy one in a couple places... first of all in his focus on Bruegel, & in particular the nativity painting (Adoration of the Kings), secondly in his poem's concluding focus on the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters Museum, in NY: I discovered in NY this weekend that one of the garden courts at the Cloisters is filled with statuary from Guillem-le-Desert, a remote monastery near Narbonne, in southern France. This monastery was founded by knight-turned-monk-become-saint Guillem de Gellone, or Guillem d'Orange, a hero in the cycle of early French chansons de geste, and one of my remote ancestors (one of Charlemagne's relatives and lieutenants, he is considered by at least one historian to be a descendant of Jews from Baghdad). Guillem figures strongly at the close of Forth of July; his saint's day coincides with the burial in RI of William Blackstone (5/28), the date on which the poem was finished.

Someday when I get my head together I will write an essay about the tradition of the long poem beginning with Whitman in relation to the notion of continuum, going back to the endless ring-structure of the Homeric cycles. Continuum and closure as two symbiotic principles, representing the traditional joining of "heaven & earth" or time & eternity, in the continuous Now of the poem. The unity of these two principles which the long poem, or Whitman's continuous single life-poem, represents.

Cosmipoetics. From an article in Tuesday's NY Times science section:

As they try to figure out how this strange behavior could be happening to 
the universe today, astronomers say the ultimate prize from all the new observing
projects could be as simple as a single number.
      That number, known as w, is the ratio between the pressure and density of
dark energy. . .

You could say that Stubborn Grew (or at least Bluejay's presence in) is about the pressure and density of dark energy. Here's Bluejay, intimating to unknowing Henry what he's about:

Hey!  C'mon Bluejay!  Live ain't over yet!  Let's go -
up to the Terrace!  There's old Roger himself, up there!
Bluejay turned SE to see.  Yeah, I see the ol bear.
He got up and shook himself - blood to flow

 
into his phosphoric, porous feet and hands -
and said:  you know what you doin, Henry m'man?
You know you zigshaggin?  Raven an zigshaggin
a sweetblack rizebury W, man - donch U?  Unnerstan?

 
A what?  Sho.

& then the letter "W" takes on a multivalent quality in many sections of the poem : a shorthand for Whitman or William Blackstone, a reflection of "M" (both Mandelstam & Dante's stellar icon for Justice in the Paradiso), & other things. Here's something toward the end of Forth of July as a whole:

         1


  
         We are coming to the end of Henry
 Navigator's long voyage, Elena –
 circling around an elephant ear (Abul
 Abaz, or Barnum's Jumbo) – see

  
         how everything grows simpler,
 more harsh, more true.  Still
 the well is always there (and will
 be) – like the man standing here

  
         beside it in the dark courtyard
 (strange blooming out-of-season
 almond branch).  A stone,
 a star, a well.  A cup of water

  
         from a rainbarrel (or Tartar
 wine).  A circling dragon-boat
 or scrap of origami writ
 folded to float so lightly... there.

  
         You fold Andromeda into a W,
 a mountain range back into M.
 You cup them in your palm
 to make a diamond, or double-

  
         diamond – cat's eyes, Pushkinian.
 Delicate Blue Morpho wings
 woven with microscopic strings
 of quipu thread (gentian-

  
         gentle, violet, and red).  A knit
 crossroad, then – red, white –
 streams into Cassiopeia's
 mother-night (at last).

      
                               5.22.2000

(Cassiopeia being a constellation in the form of a "W", and linked mythologically with Ethiopia - another thread in the poem - source of Nile, "dark energy", Ark of Covenant legends, etc.).

have been in Big Apple for weekend. Saw fine Russian movie, "The Return". Back to Minnesota roots (it's about fathers & sons & brothers & the worst fishing trip of all time). so sad, so deep, so Rus. The ending is pure Viking. Beautiful film.

I'll be away for the weekend, so happy Valentine's Day to you!

from this day 4 yrs ago, doing July:

         12    

                                  i.m. Tom Fleming*

  
         You would have been glad to be here today
 Fleming   to read the Sunday funnies
 Aaugh!  as Lucy lifts the 12-millionth football
 and Charlie Brown flips   for the 13th time   Bonk!

  
         a little sad too   the way the everlasting ends
 this evening   light   limping so slowly   only lent
 limpid   toward the vague rim of   tonight's Milky
 Way   Sparky's wavery quickness trembling

  
         only lent now   Good grief!   While it's raining the
 Doctor is [IN]   and   you are uncommonly
 weird   like a Red Baron's   flying mach-lemon
 in the mind of a pup   and the rain it raineth

  
         every day   like frogs pummeling our   foolish blind
 shopping carts   ah   for I am sick of love   he
 cried   running down the street in Lisbon
 that twines with a tiny pulse   a nub

  
         like the distant crown of   Shakespeare's head
 a curvature this   pause or sigh   this dome
 between waves or   salient   mud-caked
 seed so small   set adrift   (centuries

  
         surrounded with fire   your burning bones, Tom
 a greenish Copernican   flame in the marrow
 planted   amid the avarice of the pilots   the raw
 and envious violence of Ahab   a mote

  
         that will grow limpid)   you know   there are women
 limping with this   cenacle   (like myrrh   afloat
 upon tears)   (chambered   in the upper tiers)
 (up the stairs)   helical   of their wombs

  
         unknown to us   but only a promise
 when the last full measure is poured out
 beside the shores of great rivers   the trumpet
 sounds into   the depths of that prairie   siempre

       
                                            2.13.2000

*[Tom Fleming, old Minnesota pal since childhood, died of AIDS about 12 yrs ago.]

Op-Ed piece in Times on personality traits of the U.S. generals who did, or did not, become Presidents. Explains a lot (if not all) about my troubles in po-biz land.

The also-rans (Winfield Scott, George McClellan, Wes Clark, etc.) wore their ambition on their sleeves, were stand-offish, took themselves SERIOUSLY. The winners (Grant, Eisenhower, etc.) were modest, easy-going, had the common touch, put their jobs (not themselves) first.

Maybe the main problem is that I identify with these generals at all. Here's my gr-gr-grand uncle Gen. Delos Sackett, with Abe Lincoln, at Antietam. He's the burly guy at the end of the row. (Also-ran McClellan was there as well. He's the nappy little Hotspur in the middle.)

& a very happy birthday to Jordan's Mom, too, here, at the last minute! I wrote a good entry about the beautiful article in this week's New Yorker by Peter Hessler, "Oracle Bones", which also (along with G. Packer's piece) concludes with Walt Whitman. Must have something to do with Lincoln's birthday.

but blogspot deleted it somehow, or maybe I did. anyway. read the Hessler piece, pozhalista! a raison d'etre for the NYkr.

Today: Abe Lincoln & my redhead brother Bill. Happy birthday, fellas.

from July, this time 4 tears ago:

         12

  
         The river moves so slowly   lentamente
 abrazo   over the infinite flatness
 of the plains   and this salient leaf
 of silence   this   Mile   Long   (mental

  
         Minnesota)   Bridge   is flat as the water
 spreading in lagoons of silt and sand
 lateral swamps   where mosquitoes dance
 in vast eddies   their wheezy route

  
         of squeaky violins   a muted accompaniment
 between yesterday's birthday   (when
 a little redhead railsplitter's new
 crown came crowning   a little Quito seed

  
         of egalité   a level plain fieldworker's hidden
 purl of water-born   horizon-bounding
 corazón   or   knot of clover-lava revery
 unraveling into   reverèd silver   undone

  
         yet   all done to be   to be   lent
 to the current   the way a catenary
 arching smile curves up   reticulate
 from my muttering clay   a talent

  
         worth   exactly one penny   no more
 mustered from the bottom of the well
 to bend from the flat surface of the wall
 into a sheep-Ravenna   or   a Roman

  
         adequate flowering   returning what was owed
 the debt of a lifetime buried   in the depths
 of lye   from the ashes   for washing   pith
 drifting from an almond shell   a dowry-

  
         dhow   returned   for a broken vow)
 and a yet deeper pulse:  that green child
 awaiting recompense   on the linchpin
 of   tomorrow's valentine   (crumbled Wovoka)

        
                                2.13.2000

See John Latta's circumspections & link to Dale Smith's reviews for what's happening now.

In both Jarnot & Foust, minimalism seems to enhance "embodiment."

I have my own peculiar take on the "incarnational" nature of poetry.

The figure in the landscape. The hero in the not-so-sacred wood. The word in the woodwork. The curse at the crossroad. Woden hanging from the world-ash-tree.

recent mumble from Dove Street:

Those doves balanced on a winter branch
burble a dialect I can't follow.  Yet
somehow this is where it starts -
everything (somehow).  My hunch relies

 
on a gray triad - wing, sound, breadcrumb.
Wing (which never shed its shadow).
Flute-sound (grieving, loving, low).
Abject breadcrumb (absent swallow).

                                  
                 *

Interesting article in this week's New Yorker on foreign policy, by George Packer. Challenge of fundamentalism as an ideology (rather than terrorism as a tactic), and the different (& inadequate) responses of Republicans & Democrats. Takes historical look at liberalism & postwar reconstruction efforts (since WW 2), limitations of current outlook of both parties.

[p.s. in his conclusion, he cites Walt Whitman.]

Am reading a long Dutch novel called The Discovery of Heaven, by Harry Mulisch. Does this mean I am working on a long Dutch poem? No.

I met Joseph Brodsky once back in the early 80s, after a reading. I spoke to him about my interest in the Russians, and my tepid feeling about American poetry. His advice was, "Read Auden."

Now one can judge this the typical comment of a literary conservative. But I'm using it simply to underline (for emphasis) my previous post. In Auden, I think Brodsky recognized a literary professional in the Pushkinian/Petersburg mode.

I'm sorry, but the culture of poets seems a total bore to me. It's as if we were supposed to be a devoted fan club for some obscure chess association, and required to be up to speed on the personal lives, gossip, awards ceremonies, funeral orations, etc., and that this somehow was the substance of the way of life. . .

& ironically the professed avant or post-avant wing of that society was supposedly dedicated to a depersonalized, politically-critical, collective notion of the role of the art form, against all that decadent & mealy-mouthed artsy narcissistic solipsism of the academicized mainstream. Their "collectivity" is nothing but a farm school or adjunct sub-college or self-help support group for league careers in that same greeny grove.

Something essential is missing when you domesticize & acclimate poetry to its own (sub)-culture. What's missing is its own otherness, its capacity for criticizing, transcending, metamorphosing the social and aesthetic conditions which produced it. This is its originality, and its social function. But now a fake otherness - paralleling "rebel" social behavior in pop culture - an ersatz otherness pawns itself off as the very medium of literary exchange. Poetry subcultures are built upon modes of talking or writing in special ways, distinct side-of-the-mouth idioms, like in-house passwords.

The real challenge is to find a middle ground, a mode of address to human political, social, aesthetic and philosophical issues outside the poetry sphere. W.H. Auden was very interested in a kind of "objective" mode of address, beginning with his leftist sympathies during the 30s, and complicated later by his religious convictions (which permit a kind of general address to the human condition) and by his deep interest in the social & satirical poetry of the Restoration era.

Something is missing, folks. The real radical poet is not the denizen of an idiom-club or the successful careerist. It's the one whose "middle voice" touches a chord in the public at large : an effect of, rather than a betrayal of, originality. This is the continual challenge to the authentic literary professional, not the card-carrying clubhouse member, frittering away time with gladhanding pals & weeping crocodile tears on every occasion. Because poetry does not belong to individuals : it happens to them & changes them.

I admire the "Petersburg" notion of these things (Pushkin, Blok, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva [honorary member], Gumilev, Mandelstam, Brodsky). Pushkin started it. The human being possesses social dignity as inalienable right. The poet, as poet, possesses a particular social prestige or status as a consequence of fame for producing authentic works of art. One should defend the former with one's life, and treat the latter with professional detachment.

My sermon for today. (I know you can all think of contemporary poets, young & old, who do not fit my stereotype or deserve my diatribe.)

Disclaimer

HGPoetics and its incorporeal sponsors disclaim any responsibility for the origination or purported accuracy of the cavalier/roundhead designations outlined below. HGPoetics hails (Hail! Taxi! Say what?) the successful migration of a long-forgotten (in the space of time and mist) American poetry subculture to the 17th century.

WB Yeats : roundhead poet wants to be cavalier so bad he actually becomes one (stays poet)
Pound : guy who wants to be person (no luck) - so human predicament!!
Eliot : roundhead who becomes cavalier (accent, London flat riv. vw. incl.)
Wallace Stevens : who the hell cares! Yam what I yam, fellas (roundhead lemmings)
WC Williams : well-spoken roundhead with cavalier connections (dammit all, I yam the Peeps!)

Dude, where's my hoss?

Robert Lowell : roundhead playing cavalier badly (crabby)
Hart Crane : cavalier playing roundhead badly (fails)
Elizabeth Bishop : roundhead given cavalier bequest, makes most of it (likes opera, won't sing)
Marianne Moore : roundhead overthrowing cavalier for hell of it (in cavalier hat - wants to be cavalier)
John Ashbery : blase roundhead easily mimicking cavalier
John Berryman : revolutionary Finn Lapp; pox on both your houses

Ron Silliman : roundhead
Jordan Davis : cavalier
NY School : cavaliers pretending to be roundheads (O'Hara) or roundheads pretending to be cavaliers (Berrigan) or cavaliers being cavaliers (Koch)
Language Poets : roundheads pretending to be poets
John Latta : roundhead who has achieved cavalierdom
Susan Howe : cavalieresse
Fanny Howe : cavalieresse pretending to be roundheadianne
Bernadette Mayer : cavalieresse who likes the idea of being roundheadianne
Kent Johnson : roundhead deserter with cavalier background & tendencies (esp. heteronyms)
Henry Gould : cavalier with roundhead DNA (roundhead lowbrow)
SoQ : roundheads pretending to be cavalier poets
post-avant : cavaliers pretending to be roundheads (cf. Kristen Prevallet, Lisa Jarnot, Eleni Sikelianos, etc.)
John Donne ; victory through dying early
John Milton : defeat through dying late
Shakespeare : poet pretending to be liberal roundhead cavalier (successfully)

etc.

possibly the only other non-Russian poet comparably preoccupied with Mandelstam was Paul Celan.

note "Magdalen" reference in Voronezh poem quoted ("For Natasha Shtempel").

mandel (almond), magdala, amygdala (seat of memory in the brain?)

almond tree : ancient emblem of Jewish people

mandelstam - "almond branch" (blooms in January)

little tree (cf. Forth of July, various places, & this from Island Road)

David (poet-king), Messiah : "the branch"

For me anyway, the interesting thing about the Superbowl, besides the game itself, was that the profile on the Patriot helmet logo looks a lot like John Kerry. Check out my special JFK conspiracy blog (under construction sub rosa as we huddle) for more on this.

HGpoetics just had its 700,000th visitor! His name is Glubby and he is a 300-yr-old turtle from a small island near the remote island nation of New Zealand! Welcome, Glubby!*


*for the record: hgpoetics utilizes the authorized S-W (sand-wind) Method of calculation developed by Nicolaus Cusanus in 1445 & explained in his treatise De Ludi Glubbi.

my gizmo chariot for some time was an abba quatrain. this is not an abba quatrain, but it is a short poem. (Orfy on his way, down & under.)

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.

[note: broken chariot wheel, Virgilian bees]

Legend has it : when Roger Williams disembarked in Providence after being exiled from Beantown, he was greeted by his Narragansett hosts with, "What cheer, Netop?" [netop = friend]

some very old old quatrains from little HG :

My countrymen, dreaming and drinking down
the livelong day in your smooth Cadillacs,
Americans made of nostalgia, playing the clown
on roads past the high school railroad tracks -

 
go on, play the radio, shoot for the moon;
your little boy up from grasslands not for hire
is building a tricycle in the backyard, and soon
he'll step inside a brand new chariot of fire.

[my father being a patent lawyer (& someone still fascinated with games & gizmos), I grew up in an atmosphere in which inventions were important. I remember my brothers and I (1960 or so) floating the first prototype of the "frisbee" around the yard.]

It could be argued that my own obsession with debating with Ron, proves (1) I am connected with the establishment in the same way he is, and (2) his beef with said establishment has merit.

But even if that were true, it's not the main issue. The point is that it's a waste of time trying to massage & spin these things in a socio-political way. It only establishes new establishments no different from the old establishments, because, really, it has nothing to do with poetry (& everything to do with careers & self-advancement). Only poetry itself, & valid, work-specific criticism, help poetry take its natural & rightful place in the world. Lots of so-called mainstream writers & critics have done as much or more of that than the non-mainstream ones.

Meanwhile, until you're published by Library of America, blog on, baby.

. . . finally (& I know I'm repeating myself from many a previous blog entry), I think the pseudo-battles represented so well by Ron Silliman tend to obscure the harder questions about what constitutes literary value in poetry. In other words, while it may be true that much or most mainstream poetry is absurdly & glaringly poor-quality, undeserving of a real mainstream audience, I assert that much or most non-mainstream poetry is equally fake, elitist & coterie because it's easier to write that way. It's non-mainstream because it lacks the values - intensity, inspiration, originality, scope, relevance - which would deserve & eventually win a wide audience (& I'm not referring here to "accessibility" or "marketability" or other such merely cynical measures of taste).

Jonathan may have a valid argument here. Sometimes I don't have the energy or focus to deal with this stuff.

Yet it seems to me that it may be a good thing that non-mainstream poetry remains non-mainstream; that it's not aimed at a general audience anyway; that the mainstream often has insightful & appropriate things to say about non-mainstream writing (ie. the review of E. Pound's new Library of America anthology in yesterday's NYTRB), which would not be said if naturally "marginal" work were forced into the mainstream; that most non-mainstream writing - even the "high quality" sophisticated stuff - does not deserve a mainstream audience (because it's tailored to a coterie elite); that comparing non-mainstream poetry to poetry which has achieved mainstream or canonical status - whether good or bad - is like comparing apples and oranges; that the attacks on a "cabal" of SoQ literary mavens ignores the fact that literary establishments naturally reflect achieved mainstream examples of mainstream taste - that is, this is not a conspiracy but an effect of publishing per se; that multitudinous avenues of exploration are open to any reader willing to venture beyond the mainstream; that non-mainstream writing often does enter the mainstream, through the efforts of its promoters, but that no realignment of the "system" will (or should) make this an automatic process; & so on.

I myself am not satisfied with elite or coterie audiences for my own or others' poetry. What I believe in, is the fortitude of those who do take up the advocacy & promotion of writers & works of talent, which eventually can lead works worthy of a mainstream audience, to same. That this does not happen automatically or with perfect justice does not mean the system should be replaced by a team or categorical approach to literary prestige, some kind of anti-SoQ counter-establishment. I don't think Ron Silliman or anyone else is in a position to set standards for taste on such a universal basis. This would only mirror the current establishment in a much more corroded form.

General basic structure of Forth of July:

Stubborn Grew : burial
The Grassblade Light : resurrection or (re)birth
July : flight (or flow)
Blackstone's Day-Book : light (summarizing or encompassing the 3 previous aspects)

I guess while most people were watching the Superbowl, Ron Silliman was watching an old Oppositional-School of Quietude rerun (see his 1st note to his post today). Why do I sense both match-ups smell strongly of the locker room? Maybe it's because whenever I read SoQ I hear "socks".

He doesn't realize that his obsession with & resentment about literary pecking orders signals his connection with the establishment. An establishment in which poetry actually plays no part whatsoever. This may sound like zen but it's just basic literary criticism.

This beautiful last published poem in the Voronezh Notebooks of Mandelstam seems to capture (better than I ever could) the feeling I tried to describe in previous post. I recommend these translations by the McKanes (publ. by Bloodaxe), despite the awkwardness. The notes included are very thorough, carefully done. In this poem OM sort of turns the Orpheus-quality inside out. (Natasha Shtempel (handicapped, with a pronounced limp) was a music teacher living in Voronezh, very kind to the Mandelstams. She wrote a memoir of their friendship.

I love this poem.

 
22. To Natasha Shtempel

 
1.

 
Limping against her will over the deserted earth,
with uneven, sweet steps,
she walks just ahead
of her swift friend and her fiance.
The restraining freedom
of her inspiring disability pulls her along,
but it seems that her walking is held back
by the clarity of a concept :
that this spring weather
is the ancestral mother of the grave's vault,
and that this is an eternal beginning.

 
2.

 
There are women, who are so close to the moist earth,
their every step is a loud mourning,
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,
and be first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,
and it is impossible to part from them.
Today angels, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,
and the day after, just an outline.
The steps you once took, you won't be able to take.
Flowers are immortal.  Heaven is integral.
What will be is only a promise.

                            
                                   5.4.1937

I've been posting a lot recently on the long poem, Forth of July. Will probably be slowing down a bit here in days to come, in order to focus on other projects.

There's much I haven't gotten around to yet, such as the character & some details of the 3rd & 4th books (July & Blackstone's Day-Book), what the Native American aspects represent, et al.

Moreover today it strikes me I haven't even begun to articulate the poem's real grain or pith.

The Orpheus plot is truly mythical or symbolic in a certain way. It "stands for" something : perhaps merely for a pervasive feeling or emotion.

The long poem is a poem of longing.

The keynote of "Henry's" nostalgia - situated in a rather cramped little coastal state & dreaming of wide open steppes & midwestern prairies - is also symbolic; it represents or stands for a kind of inherent, continuous radiation or radiating image from the past, from life as a whole, from childhood onward - the dream or memory of Melville's everlasting oceanic "green Tahiti of the soul." (the grassblade light.)

from Mendelssohn (the childhood neighborhood) to Mandelstam's black earth. mendel/mandel = "almond". 2 illustrations from Stubborn Grew, early & late:

The land, the land stretched out toward sundown.
At the end of the forests without end, the sun gleamed.
Magnitudes undreamt
by Greeks, the dry flute flown

 
into moist green, light fern-green
ghosts in the trees.
I'm driving the empty roads
in early May, at dawn.

 
Someone cries out Eurydice, Eurydice
into ramshackle and forlorn wastelands.
Blind joyful grief behind the railroad lines.
All gone to seed.  Oh say can you see.

 
--

 
Upon a Roman rood was fixt
clay lips gone underground.  Still
through the pinedoor, drifted sound.
Her calling me.  A morning rose.  Finixt.

 
Catch us the little foxes, Solomon,
that spoil our vineyard.  Lucky,
true love's the cardinal pt (sd Bluejay).
A monde, almond.  All made.  I thirsty, mon.

Doctus Johannes Latta-day Latta (Dukeh duh Donuts?) hath prethenteth somewhat of a praeliminamalarial Anatomie of the multitudinous incarnadinatusi de Awahnt-Gardes, herein [in re "Japery"].

Rara quidem, et si monstra sint, nos movere solent. - Nicolaus Cusanus

birthday commentary from Heaven (it's Mairead, on parade down the road from me).

cf. the section of July quoted earlier today, some of the layers: it helps to know that Mandelstam, in exile in the late '30s in the little farm-river town Voronezh ("raven-knife"), listened to Marian Anderson on Moscow radio (Marian Anderson, the black diva whose concert at the Lincoln Memorial was almost cancelled by the D.A.R.), & wrote a poem about it (the poem is also about a Leningrad singer whose husband had just been sent to the camps). #45, 2nd Voronezh Notebook.

the reader should be aware by now that I find Mandelstam's Voronezh poems extremely beautiful, like the 3rd movement of Beethoven's String Quartet op. 132.

(incidentally, the "arc of praises" where "love & liberty are married" through the trials & tribulations of a "little school of J" is a pretty good summa of the "law of identity/tautology" poetics I outlined last week.)

1st & last stanzas from the poem, in the McKanes' (clearly inadequate) translation:

I am buried in the lion's den and into this fortress
I sink lower, lower and lower,
listening to the yeasty cloudburst of sounds
stronger than the lion, more powerful than the Pentateuch.

 
*

 
My time is still limitless,
and I accompanied the joy of the universe
like the quiet organ's playing
accompanies a woman's voice.

Ghostly meetings : Brodsky, Eliot, Yeats

I see from Laurable's calendar that Brodsky & Yeats died on the same day, Jan. 28th.

Curious, considering the round robin involved when Brodsky, in his elegy for TS Eliot, closely echoed Auden's elegy for Yeats, both of them emphasizing the cold January weather. (I tried to do the same thing for Brodsky a few years ago.)

 
 JOSEPH BRODSKY   
                     But each grave is the limit of the earth.
       
                   1
  
 You died on a cold night in January.
 It was Superbowl Sunday.  A supine empire,
 Preoccupied with bread and circuses,
 Land Rovers, stratagems of muscle-
 Bound heroes.  Next day, fire
 Swallows the famous opera house in Venice.
 Not with a bang – with a light rustle
 Of red silk, your heart passed the final
 Exam, black-sailed, in the science of farewells.

 Snow falls on the fleeting moiré of the sea;
 It falls on horsemen passing by, on the halfbacks
 Of the dolphins' curved smiles (in a mirror
 Of alien tribes).  Snow falls on night grass
 In the trackless pine forest; it falls with the stars
 Drifting down from unnumbered, shiftless heaven;
 So it fell, and will fall, on those bronze eyelids.
 A guarded glance, coiled in frozen hexagons;
 Shy cedar voice, immured in pyramids.

 Snow mixed with tears signals a hearth somewhere.
 Not in the street, not in this Byzantine air
 Of columns and cenotaphs – no.  Just a home
 By a river of marrying streams; a certain Rome
 Where tongues descend – ascending voices mingle
 In companionable flame.  This friendly fire
 Eats brotherly dusk, shakes fearful ether
 Into evening wine... one hawk's cry
 Screams – and melds into the Muse's profile.
     
                  2

 Life's flimsy laundry, easily
 Unraveled.  Transparent butterfly net,
 Wing of a moth, how slyly they
 Trap the hunter, iced on an alpine sheet.

 You fight the droning in your head
 With all the cunning you can muster;
 Turning its power against itself, you lead
 A life Laertes would approve (bluster,

 Business laboring for acclaim)
 Only to drown the voice above the trees.
 Relentless, impervious to shame,
 It finds you out, brings you to your knees.

 And like the heavy signet ring,
 A chieftain's ring, that hidden in hand
 Sealed Hamlet's heart (O molten, circling sting) –
 The droning issues forth its stark command.

 You listened, followed.  A shuttling pencil
 In a nighthawk's beak – a spear in your side;
 And a huge sea-moth with crossbone stencil
 Shattered your lamp.  Died.

 Summer ends, the droning subsides.
 The ruthless tango of prose and poetry
 Is dead.  Cicada shells, butterfly hides...
 Some leftover spider's ecstasy.
     
                   3

 In the depths of the Soviet winter, in the ponderous cold
 Of Siberia, a boy cups an abandoned moth in his hands,
 Born – to die a few hours old –

 Into a false firewood springtime.  Its delicate wings
 Are only an affront to the divine benevolence; he understands
 Nothing; his hands, like an insect coffin, bear the stings

 Of the nails themselves; like a dry cocoon, absently,
 They drift to the shack wall, and the fingers fan,
 In unison, a camouflaged figure in the pinewood pantry.

 This tender sign... a tenderness snuffed out.
 This heavy icon, then... true mimic of an action?
 Or only the swollen, distorted wings of a parasite?
  

 Or only the screech of broken chalk on slate?
 Droning brittle wings, poets take their stations
 At the edge of the cliff – their noise intuitive, innate...

 The butterfly is gone.  Its form was here, immaculate;
 The hands tracing its flight, aimless, serpentine,
 Mimic its undetermined motion – late, late –

 Since that double-woven fountain, afloat with indirection,
 Surging, sparkling, translucent, seeks its mate
 In a signal heaven – a camouflage beyond dissection.
      
                                     2.2.96

the political aspect of Forth of July hinges on premonitions of Jubilee.

         12

  
         Deep drone of train   or iron cicada
 across an infinite prairie   steppe or
 taiga   and where do the past
 and future   of these parallels   ascend?

  
         Accompanied by mute organ-pipes
 in Voronezh   or an anti-telephone
 in Moscow   (making superluminescent
 waves)   or just my new triangle on the barn

  
         banging and banging like an old tin can?
 The rapture of the universe   is on
 the radio tonight   everybody knows
 it   (even the D.A.R., Grandma)   it's Marion

  
         singing there   in Washington
 under the Depression   and the shadowy
 long hands   long face still   washed
 with kindness   twinkling like a star

  
         his homely lonesomeness
 is in her voice also tonight  a silky
 charity-chariot   with   malice toward
 none   we'll ride it home Bluejay   forget

  
         the bondage of the 44   rail-split and
 quartered in a milky map
 rivers and forests in your palm
 life-lines and   spirit-trails

  
         deep into tracklessness   a limber
 timbered   everlasting habitat
 we'll make it home   to bathe
 again   in that spring water   Abraham

  
         as the drone rises   to the tops of the oaks
 in an arc of praises   love and liberty
 are married there   a tribal tree of
 tribulations   crowned   a little school of J

      
                                     2.8.2000

from Dove Street:

Now the snow (pure, blinding).
Water slown down, retarded to
star.  Yet I know you're there,
under the gleaming ring,

 
unseen.  Where images fade out.
Puffy doves purr, tut-tut, bunched
on the ridge of a tree-branch.
Having you left... you're all I've got.

                          
                *

 
The war goes on, outside the brain.
Where the grey dove of Bran or 
Bretagne once dove in.
The mirror's extra dungeon

 
for X, of X, in X:
stage envies, accomplices,
maybe lateral damages.
Machine read-out: You're next.

                          
                *

 
As if you were there with me on the branch
I'll mumble and purr, puffed-up in the cold.
Because you're not here doesn't mean
you're not there.  Unfold, again.  Branch,

 
little tree.  Tomorrow's always,
and always is your birthday
and this is all I have to say -
your birthday, always (little tree).

 
                                     1.29.04

I wish my prose didn't so often make my own eyes glaze over. there's something in it, but awkward.

Issues with a theory of poetry founded in "tautology", or analogy with metaphysical Love-Word:

1. Mental prison-house of identifying the divine or holy with our images of it, one of which is "God-as-Word". Bible itself gets around this in at least 2 ways : first, intense emphasis on God's ineffability, unaccountability in human terms, prohibition against images. 2nd (Christian approach), a kind of constructive formation (Trinity) in which different aspects are shared among Persons in a mysterious fashion (in a Mystery), ie. God-as-Manifest-Word is specifically Christ's incarnational role, not the Father's exactly or the Spirit's, exactly.

2. Word itself is an elusive entity : it can be understood as always dialectical, ie. a form of gesture toward or response to an other. Thus perhaps the most interesting poetry is also a form of reportage on some otherness, howsoever sophisticated or para-literary. Another way of considering this particular problem is in terms of the undeniable importance of Keats' negative capability : the poet as passive vessel for forces, responding to other forces.

Poetry cannot be some expression of boring self-revolving monism or unmotivated, self-satisfied unity. One cannot define love in these terms either. So perhaps there is hope for my poetics no matter how important a role is played by this medievalesque analogical "identity/tautology" which I described a few days ago. Because the other side of the "Orpheus" analogy reveals its hungry driven-ness, its unappeased desire, which propels the whole plot, which creates its duration.

Part of the political aspect of such "disequilibrium" or dynamism, which comes out more fully in the 3rd volume, July, has to do with the dialectic between empire & equality, between "Julius" (Caesar) and Bluejay/Jubilee. Of course this has historically been an inescapable theme for serious poetry & its "unacknowledged legislators" : to speak divine Equality to Power. (Mandelstam took very seriously his role as people's poet-vs-Czar, echoing Ovid vs. Augustus.) (Part of my attraction to Crane, as opposed to Pound, & my interest in "bringing him forward", was the absence (in Crane) of the nostalgic, reactionary, elitist, aristocratic, authoritarian delusions. . . - though of course it must be said that Pound was utterly divided against himself, & some of his best poetry narrates the destructive consequences of pride & power.)

NY Times front page photo today (lower half of page : kids in snow). Sarah said, there's a Bruegel for you -

I've quoted quite a bit this cold January from "Letters to Elena", retracing that 5-yr-old snow-trail. Soon we may continue into the delta mysteries of ch. 3, "Palm Sunday". yup. & we haven't even talked about July yet. ("The pants were big in the waist and the shirt ballooned out, for my brother Julius had a fat chest. I wiped my sweat with a handkerchief stitched with a J." - Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift)

from "Letters", the conclusion:

 
                          *

  
         It is finished.  The dove will not return
 to the empty sanctuary.  My blue pines,
 my frozen childhood firs... a saw whines,
 a wolf howls, Elena, in that forsaken

  
         garden.  I whisper to myself alone,
 I say.  Just then – the darkness wanes.
 Gratitude swells... through windowpanes,
 the shadow of a hand grows light toward dawn.


 
                                   Providence
                           2.5.99

from Grassblade Light (ch. 2, "Letters to Elena"). written 5 yrs ago. the "star of free speech" : a leading Petersburg democrat & feminist, assassinated as she returned home from work.

         14


  
         It's cold here, Elena.  Almost like Minnesota.
 It must be cold where you are too, and dark.
 Where a star of free speech fell – look,
 she breathes... no more.  At her own door.

  
         Like More, or Marlowe, murdered for a candle.
 Free mind, flown out the window, gone.
 And now the sun is gliding down.  In
 honeycomb cubbyholes you bundle

  
         up, bound tight around the spindle
 of Aurora Borealis.  And wound
 upon wound, as mummy-cloths are wound...
 the spiral tunnels into Shakespeare's wonder-

  
         brain... an unknown worm or summer soldier
 wintering through night upon a polar sledge.
 Against this tested light what need to rage
 – is only a promise.  Only a promise.  Dear

  
         limping leg of the stony trail toward Lent,
 dear crutch, dear rhyme-enfrosted heart!
 At midnight we shall pilgrimage (start
 now, in PJ's) toward the dark tent

  
         of heaven.  Yoked with uncertain
 flutters planted there – each
 crossroad underwritten – search
 your own mosaic microcosm!  Then

  
         into the black stone of Jerusalem,
 where blind eyes and seeing fingers
 hear, feel the running waters – tumble,
 froth – break forth – gush forth for them.


       
                                       1.30.99

Dream Song 317:

Henry with joy lay down for his next bout of rest,
in happy expectation of the next
assault on his divided soul.
Does the validity of the dream-life suppose a Maker?
If so what a careless monster he must be, whole,
taking the claws with the purr.

I just want to say one last thing tonight, before 28 becomes 29, which is, that, beyond all my glibbery explicationary activity hyarabouts, there are 1 or 2 or 3 levels or aspects of Forth of July which remain & will remain classified. I have not discussed & will not discuss them. As Akhmatova says about her long "poema" Poem without a Hero, "it's a casket with a triple-false bottom", or some such. secrets of the life-raft (or Nile barge, cf. OM)

in the pine trees. . . so try this (inching along, hesitant, grieving).

from Dream Song # 313 :

Heaven made this place, assisted by men,
great men & weird.  I see their shades move past
in full daylight.
The holy saints made the trees' tops shiver,
in the all-enclosing wind.  And will love last
further than tonight?

from Dream Song # 308 (An Instruction to Critics):

My baby chatters.  I feel the end is near
& strong of my large work, which will appear,
and baffle everybody.
They'll seek the strange soul, in rain & mist,
whereas they should recall the pretty cousins they kissed,
and stick with the sweet switch of the body.

Do you hear Yeats there? Here's cousin Julie & Henry.

As a matter of fact & conjecture, dear patient Reader, I think we're just beginning to discover
the weirdness of it all. . .

Henry goes back to Berryman, looking for traces of himself. . .
& discovers anew what Berryman was doing
with his long poem. . .
which was in part to answer Pound & Eliot et al.
with the spirit of Yeats (whom they thought to have superceded)
& to answer the spirit of Yeats
with Berryman (& Shkspr, & Spenser. . .)

why is this important?
because the silly men et al.
have got it all wrong. . .

Berryman, Dream Songs:

25

 
Henry, edged, decidedly, made up stories
lighting the past of Henry, of his glorious
present, and his hoaries,
all the bight heals he tamped -    - Euphoria,
Mr Bones, euphoria.  Fate clobber all.
- Hand me back my crawl,

 
condign Heaven.  Tighten into a ball
elongate and valved Henry.  Tuck him peace.
Render him sightless,
or ruin at high rate his crampon focus,
wipe out his need.  Reduce him to the rest of us.
- But, Bones, you is that.

 
- I cannot remember.  I am going away.
There was something in my dream about a Cat,
which fought and sang.
Something about a lyre, an island.  Unstrung.
Linked to the land at low tide.  Cables fray.
Thank you for everything.

& then Henry, when he talks too much, also becomes a parody of "Henry".

Part of the misconception that Jonathan & others seem to have of Henry & "Henry" as being way too self-absorbed & narcissicistic - which of course is true, as it is of many artists - is that it's as if this long poem is simply an ego project. I'm spending time & energy defending & explicating it here not so much because it's me or mine - but because it's something that happened to me. This is partly what I was describing to Kent, below.

I suppose this is not very believable. Anyway, I'm also defending it because of my crazy faith in its objective worth as poetry, which value jars with its objective (non)reception in the literary world.

What I like about it anyway is not so much "Henry" or the biographical material or the birthdays, etc., but the simple music of the lines, stanzas, cantos, books - the way it changes, the way it hangs together.

Kent Johnson emailed me the following question, & suggested I post it with my response here. I'm doing so, despite misgivings : I don't like using the word "shit" in public (or private, actually). But according to such august authorities as Yeats & Akhmatova, this is where poems come from. . .

Henry, so all these connections and layers-- layers connecting and connections 
layering... You seem to be able to verify it all and with impressive empirical 
aplomb. 
> 
>  
Did you plan it all out, or did it just happen? 
> 
> 
 (A bit of both, I suspect, but could you talk about how all these tropic and 
allegorical interweavings were woofed on the warp and vice versa? You might 
consider this a follow up question to our interview at Jacket.)
> 
>  
Kent

 
Hi Kent,

 
it's hard to explain, because as you know writing happens in sort of a liminal 
area.

 
I remember a key moment when I was reading the Mandelstam Voronezh poems again, 
about "black earth". I have a feeling for that kind of landscape, coming from 
where I do. Who knows, maybe on a certain freudian level it's all just playing 
with shit (like the kid in the poem I published today, playing with mud between 
her legs)!!

 
But there was a moment when I was identifying with the sound & imagery of that 
rural place which OM was evoking, & I linked it with "letting go", & going into 
the earth, & somehow retrieving all the broken things in my life from the past & 
dealing with them (unrequited love, divorce, Julie's suicide, etc.) - & doing 
this through the Orpheus thing. all that plus actively "mimicking" a certain 
sound I thought I heard in the Voronezh poems.

 
At that moment, when I think of it, I was at a point where all my somewhat 
unsuccessful efforts were behind me, as PRACTICE & preparation, & something new 
was about to unfold.   The best way I can describe it, is that it happened - all 
those layers & connections - the way an algorithm works. A fairly simple 
combination creates a certain energy-stimulus : and that energy AUTOMATICALLY 
starts to spiral & complexify. That's what it felt like to me. Those 3 yrs or 
so writing this poem, I was exploding with connective energy.  It wouldn't let 
me go. I certainly didn't "plan" it all. when I finished Stubborn Grew, I 
thought it was done. Then when I finished Grassblade, I thought it was done. 
But only a few days after finishing each book, the next book would come at me 
like a giant WAVE. I felt a kind of dread when that happened because I knew how 
much time & energy it would involve, totally absorbing. "one thing led to 
another".

stay warm,
Henry

the official motto of the State of Rhode Island is : "Hope." its emblem is an anchor.

from "Letters to Elena" (Grassblade Light, ch. 2). sort of an orphic credo.

         12


  
         A child playing in muddy Paradise.
 Lost in the mudpies there between her legs.
 Where a word is a profile, and a dog's
 cocked ear is the letter J, sideways –

  
         or upside-down.  Your birthday
 every day, under the clean azure U:
 no harm shall befall you,
 says the fortune cookie

  
         oracle.  In the shadow of a little tree
 it all comes back to me – you too.
 This balm, this grief, these nettles,
 this rue – light lives and heavy

  
         dyings – as though we were all coracles
 of hide and willow branches, all sails,
 all canvas – from earliest first
 bells, launched – infant disciples

  
         summoned to swim toward the shy
 vortex of the shadiest voice.
 To carry the freight of despairs
 toward... how can I say it?

  
         One almond eye.  Noah's canoe –
 lashed forever to your own eyelashes
 in the morning mirror.  Hush.
 A curving ellipse will show

  
         how the crown of child's play becomes you.
 Wear it (your diadem) in truth –
 while buried root and blossom both
 from the muddy earth are borne anew.


       
                                  1.30.99

Berryman, Dream Song :

79

         
             Op. posth. no. 2

 
Whence flew the litter whereon he was laid?
Of what heroic stuff was warlock Henry made?
and questions of that sort
perplexed the bulging cosmos, O in short
was sandalwood in good supply when he
flared out of history

 
& the obituary in the New York Times
into the world of generosity
creating the air where are
& can be, only, heroes?  Statues & rhymes
signal his fiery Passage, a mountainous sea,
the occlusion of a star:

 
anything afterward, of high lament,
let too his giant faults appear, as sent
together with his virtues down
and let this day be his, throughout the town,
region & cosmos, lest he freeze our blood
with terrible returns.

Nadezhda is Russian for "hope". Nadezhda Mandelstam. Hope Against Hope.

John Latta's earthbound empiricism a healthy thing. But America has always been closer to Pascal than to Montaigne.

Remember flying home from college in early 70s after nervous breakdown, singing the mealtime hymn "Praise God from whom all blessings flow. . .", with my poor long-suffering father in the seat beside me. A woman came up after we landed & said "Thank you so much - I was nervous about flying too."

& flying back to Providence a few days later with a pistol & ammunition hidden in my suitcase (it went into the Providence River).

Desperate for God the Father. Jesus Freaks.

Generational question. Hard for younger set to comprehend how a turn to the Russians might be driven by the double-whammy of personal history & literary climate.

I grew up in the Age of the Confessionals.

America was the House of Suicide. Russia - via Nadezhda Mandelstam - was the House of Life. Hope Against Hope.

Berryman, from Dream Song # 136:

The sage said 'I merit long life if only because
I have never left bread-crumbs lying on the ground.
We were tested yesterday & are sound,
Henry's lady & Henry.
It all centered in the end on the suicide
in which I am an expert, deep & wide.'

[it should be remembered that Berryman's father also committed suicide, with a shotgun, in Florida, & that his son found him.]

Whereas, from Mandelstam's Octets (translated by yrs truly):

I'll whisper it - in an outline.
Its hour has not yet come.
The chessgame of measureless heaven
is mated with sweat - and wisdom.

 
And under purgatory's transient sky
we grow absent-minded - forget
that lucky heaven-vault on high...
- is a limber, everlasting habitat.

                  
[ - 1937, in exile, a few months before his death in a labor camp]

Kindness of Jonathan, after all that.

Sadly, I predict he'll be disappointed. . .

I admire his generosity.

some of the Dream Songs were written in Rhode Island (like #61), when Berryman was at Brown.

When he died, Edwin Honig organized a memorial reading, & invited me (an infant freshman) to host the event.

almost pointless to take snippets from the Dream Songs. the whole thing is a commentary on Forth of July - or I should say, vice versa is the case.


from # 103:

I consider a song will be as a humming-bird
swift, down-light, missile-metal-hard, & strange
as the world of anti-matter
where they are wondering: does time run backward -
which the poet thought was true; Scarlatti-supple;
but can Henry write it?

John Berryman, Dream Songs:

354

 
The only happy people in the world
are those who do not have       to write long poems:
muck, administration, toil:
the protototality of an absence of contact
in one's own generation, chiefly the old & the young
persisting with interest.

 
'The Care and Feeding of Long Poems' was Henry's title
for his next essay, which will come out when
he wants it to.
A Kennedy-sponsored bill for the protection
of poets from long poems       will benefit the culture
and do no harm to that kind Lady, Mrs Johnson.

 
He would have gone to the White House and consulted the President
during his 10 seconds in the receiving line
on the problems of long poems
Mr Johnson had never written one
but he seems a generous & able man
'Tetelestai' said St John.

I could quote the Dream Songs all over the place, but I'm tired of blogging today. signed, Henry

HGpoetics readers might well be bewildered by all this emphasis on dates, birthdays, numbers. etc. What's the point?

I go back to something I mentioned at the beginning of this present run of blog entries on the long poem : that Forth of July is built on a kind of analogical thinking. The myth of Orpheus - the original poet, who brings stones & trees & animals to life with song, & goes singing into Hades to retrieve his wife Eurydice - this myth, in Forth of July, "narrates" a poetics, or a philosophy of poetry, in which the poetic word is in turn analogous (A = A) to the creative Word of Love, which - intervening - renews, resurrects, recreates life itself.

"Henry" - & I use the quote marks consistently, out of a sense that I, Henry Gould, author, am sort of dramatized/translated in the process of the poem into something else, a figure in the song, "Henry" - re-enacts the orphic myth through what I described earlier as a process of "decomposition" - a simultaneous unveiling, unearthing, & exploration, combining personal & historical realities within a "song-framework". Thus the experience of mortality is reconfigured by song (5.29 mingled with 7.4 and 1.6, and with everything those dates (& others) come to represent) into a pattern of confession, hope, renewal, victory, and a kind of cosmic image of reality shaped by the Word. "Birth-days" marked by death & hopelessness (Juliet Ravlin's father's birthday & her own dying-day; John Ravlin's birthday/John Berryman's dying-day) are gathered in memoriam into a new day, a new shape of time. This is the reproduction of the orphic action which is the poem itself (Juliet to jewel-eye, or J-ley...).

One can analyze & talk about it forever, yet only the poem alone can justify itself, in itself, by itself, being what it is, a song. As the old poem from Way Stations has it:

The poet is monotonous, his head
resting on her empty sleeve,
his voice out of the mineshaft
muttering rumors of precious gems.

 
And stars shine in the black sky,
peacefully, released at last
from that deep unspoken gloom
by his aimless, undying lament.

Another structural note: noticeable, the design of Grassblade Light, based on 7 panels each containing 28 sections of 28 lines, 4 x 7 = 28 : 7 quatrains of 4 lines each : title of book is Forth of July, ie. 7.4 : the "coming forth of Julie, jewel-eye, Bluejay...".

Forth of July is "incarnational", ie. grounded by numbers & letters & places & persons & names & dates.

5.29 intersects with another pattern of dates, around Epiphany (Jan 6th). Several sequences from the opening of Stubborn Grew initiate this complex. The "narrative" element of Stubborn Grew actually opens with an elegy for James Ravlin, "Henry's" maternal uncle, father of Juliet Ravlin:

6

                 
                  i.m. James Ravlin, 1912-1997

 
Light quick mosquitos speed flitter
and slide at latter-day angle easily
mounting every corniced ingle and
fuming, spuming, better, better and better.

 
Mosquitoes there were in Saskatchewan,
where you were born, between
Granddad's grain
elevators, Grandma's steel-eyed span.

 
Those clever, clever lips hovered
in camel smoke
like a Cheshire hookah, smiled.
And tumbled out an accent stranger

 
and stranger. What flute
troubled earth to bear him?
The bare tongue-footed ague of him?
The sweet-eyed flourish, the high note

 
of his Viennese liner?  Where now,
sailor-man, handsome PT-boat boy-o?
He sleeps in his long canoe.  He is
scattered... a late Minnesota snow.

 
Unmoored from the height of land,
drifting from Lawrentian divide,
blueberry, pine, air-filled
cliff, the taste of iron.

 
The cherry trees and the dogwood
bloom now in this sinner-town.
Pale green sprays tender
over the graveyard.

 
Soon come the clever mosquitoes,
the new swarms.  I inch along.
A snail, with prairie on my tongue.
Hesitant, grieving, stubborn grew, the rose.

Proceeding directly after this poem comes the first invocation of Juliet Ravlin, "Henry's" cousin, daughter of James Ravlin, & the presiding spirit of the orphic "ghost dance" at the center of Forth of July. Juliet committed suicide off the Golden Gate bridge at the age of 19, on her father's birthday.

James Ravlin's father, John Ravlin, engineer builder of bridges & grain elevators, was born on Jan. 7th (1889, I believe). On Jan. 7th, John Berryman leaped from a bridge into the Mississippi River, down the block from & within sight of John Ravlin's home on River Road. "Henry" has been recounting these strange birthday stories ever since. From the 2nd chapter of Stubborn Grew, titled "Ancient Light":

Bruegel.  Adoration of the Kings.  1564.
In the National Gallery in the heart of London
in the hands of black Balthasar in a green
conch on a gold nef.  Is that a monkey there?

 
And the scrawny peasants and the bourgeois tubs
staring at all that gold and frankincense, miraculous!
O clever, clever, clever calculation - and finesse, too!
The has-been, burnt-out Wise Men ignore the rubes

 
meanwhile - have eyes only for the grinning pug
hidden in swaths of shrinking violet or
marigold blue (I can't remember)... for He
shall Rule the Nations - snug as a bug in a rug.

                     
                          *

 
And Henry... what about Henry?  Is he ever
coming around again?  I wonder.
Around Epiphany, his mind began to wander,
they said.  Still have a Q in his quiver?

 
On Twelfth Night he remembered his grandfather's
birthday.  Granddad, Builder of Grain Elevator,
pere apparent of his mother - of the
grainstock of generations, ruler.

 
Hardy pioneer, flower grower.
Opera lover.
Mother's middle name - Elvira.
Clay vine of Ravlin violin - e vero.

 
The higher you go the more grain implodes.
Spontaneous combustion fertilizer
mounts to flood tide and none the wiser,
the straight line of inheritance erodes

 
and out of stumped Henry begins to drift
an example of poor penmanship.  Bark
of a splintered retriever out of work
and out of time in London's night shift.

 
So many neighborhoods of rotisserie syllables!
Nobody needs your babytalk victories, your
bosky driftwood, boy.  Work another hour -
or metro enthused back homeless to Minneapolis!

Forth of July turns calendar dates & birthdays into structural numbers. Thus May 29th : "Henry's" birthday, also RI Statehood Day, JFK birthday, day after Blackstone's burial, day after saint's day of Guillem de Gellone, Black Wednesday (5.29.1453), etc.

A bald list of such conjunctions seems rather meaningless. But the calendrical "rhymes" are elements in the construction of a narrative & thematic whole : "a 28 / nestled in 29". "Henry" represents the poet in a pattern of orphic returns or resurrections, a "ghost dance" for the American long poem, for the poet-suicides (Crane, Berryman - the author of the "Henry" Dream Songs), for Juliet (the poem is a "coming-forth of Julie"). That the entire poem is completed on 5.28 "fixes" the conjunction Blackstone/Henry/Rhode Island ("the rose" of Stubborn Grew/The Rose).

The structure of the central book of Forth of July, Grassblade Light, consists of 8-in-7 large chapter-panels, each consisting (with variations) of 28 sections of 28 lines each (7 quatrains), centered on a 29th section of 4x4 or 16 stanzas. The entire book is centered on a single stanza at the center of the doubled panel "Ghost Dance", in the following section:

28

 
As the whirring shape of a hummingbird
like a miniature bluejay overhead or
bee suspended over the clover
whispered

 
Love is our North Star high up above

 
I heard and
(as the rustling of that honey-mover
swelled across a grass-clay sheep-door)
lay in the sweet soil listening for your word.

                    
                        4.10.99 [note: Stubborn Grew, the previous book, 
                    was completed on 4.10.98, the year before]

Thus the entire poem is oriented at its center on the "North Star" (in Minnesota, the "North Star State", at the headwaters of the Mississippi) - which as this 28th section relates, represents the "tautology" (A = A) - Love/Word/Cosmos (explained a few days ago on this blog).

not really a good idea.

the artist may intuit something. . . but it's as much moving toward as escape from.

"Life, friends, is boring." [Berryman, Dream Songs]

Literature starts here.

The idea that the writer - like the jazz musician - intuitively - already "gets" it; & art is an effort to escape that knowledge.

Many are called, but few are chosen.

Is it possible that the best art stems from ambivalence (I love it - it bores me). Only the artist who exhibits both responses escapes the realm of Boring/Being-Bored.

Did you know that "dream songs" is the phrase used by the Ojibwa (of Minnesota) to describe their poetry? Where Berryman ended up, in winter, drinking a lot.

from "Ghost Dance" (chap. 4, Grassblade Light):

         17

  
 A silhouette on the snowbound bridge
 or sunlit there in San Francisco.
 With a cube of memory we go
 toward the grain meadow – strange wedge

  
 from elsewhere creases time now
 in the hollow between beats.  Pause,
 suspension... what was
 scrapes (stubborn resin on the bow).

  
 As in the spring mystery dream
 what was a morsel of death begins
 to thaw.  Shapes in the mind's
 eye – forms of human frame –

  
 Leonardo in the octagon, or
 Minnehaha among the hanging
 rocks.  You're hypnotizing
 together a borrowed Vermont –

  
 guest dancing again – while
 my heavy draft of burning lead
 (a buried man) dives head-
 first toward the ice-real

  
 echo in Kosovo (an evil double
 of Melchizedek unveils his
 haunted prairie... citadels
 of graves, villages of rubble).

  
I lie in warm air under the cedars.
 My body remembers what my heart
 forgets.  A tiny square of salt
 becomes – a black and rocky kingdom.

  
 There's where Abraham relented.
 Jesus dreamt his resurrection.  Michael
 intervened - there, where a bluejay spiral
 modulates... into my body.  Cedar-scented.

     
                                         4.5.99