Kent's take on the effect of WCW/Rakosi-style prosody (in his essay linked here yesterday)  is the opposite of Mike's & New Formalist theory.  Kent says that the unpredictability of same creates the possibility of clearer poetic perception, less mediated by ego or tradition.   NF theory, as Mike has described it, holds that the metrical patterns & their variations help create the conditions for meaning to emerge.
 
These are basic 20th-cent. positions on the difference between free verse & metrical form.  Pound sought to "break the pentameter", pushed for ideograms/imagism.  Stevens, I think, used rhythm - with both free & metrical bases - as one facet of his own musicality (which also employs phonic values, repetition, fantastic vocabulary, and other means toward this end).
 
The idea that poetry fulfills its function by reflecting natural & divine order by means of measure & harmony is very olde.  It hasn't gone away, either - witness the various theories promoting iambic pentameter as based on biology and natural form  (cf. - for fun - Sir Thomas Browne's Garden of Cyrus for the prevalence of the number "5" in nature). 
 
The general critical take on Modernism, though - reflected in Kent's analysis of Stevens - has been that this intellectual/artistic era had no faith in overarching order or natural harmony : rather, art imposed its autonomous orders as a guard or protest against the violence & chaos "outside".
 
So the free-verse/postmodern/(Taoist, Kent?) position faults metrical formalism on two counts: its idealism and its traditionalism. The idealism layers over nature with an imposed order; the traditionalism blocks innovation & new perception.
 
How to get beyond these (rather worn-out) dichotomies?
 
Rather than arguing that "there is no such thing as free verse", say : all verse is free.
 
How so?  Verse is free in the sense that the poetic word can function as both music and anti-music, as order and disruption.  Poetry can be song, but it is not only or necessarily song.  Poetry can be the closest thing to a curse, or to silence itself.
 
I would say that the activity of the poet is essentially an orientation toward harmony.  But harmony operates on more than one level : there is an intellectual as well as a sensible harmony, and sometimes the former counters, opposes, negates the latter; sometimes sensible harmony is configured ironically to veil a very different intellectual substance.  Intellectual harmony is logical, reasonable, ethical : it may have formal or mathematical or aesthetic aspects - but these elements may be at work to break superficial or oppressive "harmonies" of "nature".  It may be subversive in this sense.
 
Order, pattern, harmony - the interwoven wheels and forms and numbers of time & nature are irreducible facts.  We take physical pleasure - perhaps even physical health - in the octave and the circle of fifths and the pythagorean triangle & the shapes and colors of leaves & sky & fresh air.  But when Stevens, say, writes that "poetry is the sanction of life," I don't think he's granting poetry such prestige simply because of its ability to mimic or model the physical harmonies of nature.  The freedom of the poet to find and articulate intellectual harmony - another name for it might be justice - functions at the active, living center of the purely aesthetic or natural harmonies.
 
So these general notions of the poet's role have some implications for prosody, perhaps.  The sovereign freedom of the poetic word moves toward musical harmony or against it, at will.
 
The general ground I'm trying to sketch out here, though, doesn't support the arguments of the free verse wing any more than it does the New Formalist.  I repeat my comment posted yesterday:  the argument that WCW/Rakosi style imagism or impressionism allows nature or reality access to the poem, in a way that a more rhythmically-patterned prosody (such as some of Stevens') does not, avoids the whole issue of pattern and regularity and form in nature.  The coherences of formal repetition in poetry can represent the fantastically interwoven coherences of natural ecology:  the subsuming of line to stanza to poem can mirror the overlay of forces and powers which move through time and space, and also the overlay of themes and meanings which the poet wants to emphasize or interlace.  These patterns have at least as much reality as the contingent perceptions of the romantic imagist.

I've added Allen Bramhall's tributary to my blog links.  I've been told we may be giving a reading together next month, up in the Hill-uv-Beans to the north (otherwise known as The HuB).  I haven't given a reading in 700 years, to be precise.

He's back at the Hotel. 
 
Latta on Loons.
 
The loon is the poet of that gloomy solitary different (sometimes beautifully bright & clear) landscape (north woods).
 
I've entered loon call contests in Ely, MN & Minneapolis.  With no more success  than the poetry contests, aw shucks.

Kent's essay, noted below, links prosody to what was perhaps the main divide in 20th-cent. American poetries - bigger than that between "raw vs. cooked" or "New American vs. New Critical" (at least before the advent of deconstruction and langpo, anyway) :  the divide between symbolist/"idealist" and objectivist/"realist"  (Stevens/Crane/Eliot vs. Williams/Pound/Zukofsky, for example).
 
The divide represents a sort of inherent conundrum of thought & perception.  B.J. Leggett's book Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory argues that Stevens actually played both sides, pondering & negotiating his way around issues of imagination & reality.  His skill in doing so registered in the fascination, controversy, sheer volume of criticism of same.
 
I'm always jealous of this kind of well-organized well-informed essay.  But leaning as I do toward the Stevens end of the spectrum, I guess, I have a few quibbles.  There's a value judgement being made:  the line which includes Rakosi is supposed to represent a humbler, more active/passive, more direct apprehension of "things as they is"; Stevens' mode is seen as imposing a priori categories of interpretation on experience.
 
A problem with this analysis arises, though, when you grant the possibility that reality itself and the things of reality display order, logos, Dike, Tao.  Then the self-reflexive and circling "prosodies" - the rhythmic patterns which Kent describes so succinctly - may be understood as poetry's function or capability to evoke or represent such a situation of "realities-within-Logos".  And this may be, ultimately, at least as realist as the more indicative particulars of the WC Williams vein.

I'm going to read this essay of Kentjay's on Stevens, Rakosi, & prosody!

& speaking of prosody, if you want to know why Herman Melville was one of the greatest - or at least one of the most technically-adept and ingenious - writers in English of the 19th-century, take a look at Viola Sachs' book Game of Creation.  Despite its eccentricities, Sachs's book makes it pretty clear that Melville's prosody in Moby-Dick involved a level of organization which is nothing short of astounding.  We are talking about symbolic values of syllable-count, numerology, esoteric sound-meaning & etymology, which rival or outdo Joyce.  The book is an immense cipher, a deeply-coded array.  Here is a prosody not based on strictly rhythmic pattern/variation, which nevertheless encrypts layer upon layer of meanings.  Such a "prose" prosody could also find applications in "free" verse.

My two half-beats toward the prosody discussion:
 
read an interesting book once by David Keppel-Jones, The Strict Metrical Tradition.   Focusing only on iambic pentameter, he describes very specific innovations, starting with Spenser, through Matthew Arnold, which made it the powerful mode it was.
 
But every era in language & poetry develops its own approaches to rhythm.  I don't think the special pleading for form or freedom really helps much.  The formalists have done a service by keeping the issue alive at all; but it seems like there may be a fundamental misprision in taking prosodic analysis (which is always belated) and applying it prescriptively to the craft itself.  Even the particular innovations outlined by Keppel-Jones grew out of a specific literary milieu, which is not our milieu today. 
 
I have no problem with Mike's promotion of accentual-syllabic practice; if he can help bring it back into circulation, all power to him.  But the claims that it is better than free verse, that free verse can't express meaning as well (because it doesn't have a pattern against which to project variations) - this seems needlessly categorical.  A milieu that supports both approaches is the one most able to generate new rhythmic discoveries and capabilities.
 
In my own poetry, I've counted beats and not counted beats; I've worked within set patterns (both given forms & ones I've invented), and not.  Everyone has their own distinctive feel for rhythm.  When I think of how I work, it seems to me that I revise a poem intuitively until it has a requisite smoothness or "elegance" according to my own standards; I focus on sound values per se and on the symbolic (mathematical) values of line-count and stanza forms, while at the same time aiming for a rhythm which is not clumsy, jarring, perfunctory or seemingly random.  What I dislike more than almost anything in the poetry I read, is the sort of casual lineation - line-breaks which simply chop up the sentence any old way.  This lazy practice makes for very dull reading.  Rhyme, for me, adds interest and tension to line-breaks.
 
 

Out of the blog loop (or "bloop") these days. Poem (which I've been excerpting here) somewhat in abeyance, have been working on novel novel idea. Using index cards, it feels right. Also reading a lot of Melville & other boat books.

Wrote here a few weeks ago about the book Hamlet's Mill, which explores the links between archaic star-mapping and storytelling (myths). Melville basically replicated this process in his odd puzzle-novel Mardi. All the characters, all the events in the book are personifications of astronomical-astrological readings using the typical star almanacs of the time (an 1845 almanac, to be precise). Mariners were the last great Babylonian star-gazers. This is all brought to light in Maxine Moore's study, That Lonely Game (Missouri UP, 1975). ("That lonely game" is solitaire, or sol-itaire, or writing.)

Have been sort of busy/distracted lately, not much bloggin'.

Interesting juxtaposition in this week's New Yorker : excellent review of the "Bush dynasty" books, talks about how George W. views the current situation as a religious war; then in article about contemporary Egypt, quoting confident young Islamist who has the same opinion. Feel like we're regressing to Middle Ages, when there is no distinction between faith and politics, theology and ideology. Where is Roger Williams? Help, Rog!!

latest sketch (from Shakespeare's Head):

16

 
Hobo hides his head in the sumac shade
of deep July.  Way overhead, titanium scouts
penetrate the misty rings of Saturn.  Motes
of moons shepherd the circling parade

 
while Hobo doodles his own star-map, out
beyond Babylon – talking in his sleep beside
the iron railroad tracks, before time was.
Before the golden Cyprus oak was rooted

 
(quercus alnifolia), before Venus turned
and tumbled beneath its limbs, before
the pantheon was knit (the yarns of yore);
when his iron heart (spurned) yearned

 
(magnetic) for the light of those eyes
more gold than golden (slow surprise).

      
                *

   
On a curtain-sleeve (painted in Paradise-
Byzantium) the adamantine letters

   
will not be effaced.  Through shadow
of death and laughter of jackals,
through snarling gods, sheep-killers,
armies of neighbors, they go

   
on shining, they go on shining
through derision, through the dark.
Until that day – Hist! Hark!
I have it! – you grasp their meaning:

   
on that benevolent summer day
in the heart of July, when you know
the bowl cannot be broken:  Love’s vow
rings Time itself with titanic mastery.

         
                                       7.7.04

pure something

Po-biz is hop-lez. Herez sumpin ta read while thugh Indushtry iz on yakkashunn.

from BRANCH, ALMOND



It begins like this, on a dark autumn day.
The wind is blowing, you don't know
where it leads. Pussy-willow, dogwood
wave their last leaves. The lead-gray sky


shrouds the universe in its camouflage
of sleep and melancholy. Ravens
mark your place in the book of dying
and being born. Goldfinch paces his cage.


*


In Bruegel's panorama, the herdsmen
follow a ridge in the foreground, drawing on
their oxen, charcoal outlines seemingly stolen
from the Lascaux caves. In the distance


storms lash a somber, mountainous coast
helmeted with desolate castle;
shipwrecks ornament the entrance
to the harbor. A wintry violence


looms in murk above muted ruddiness,
ramshackle roofs of valley and village;
Bruegel grins in the teeth of all this rage,
shepherding home his cataclysmic canvas.


*


Every leaf bears an image of the tree
(as when the underside of an autumn olive
stands upright, tall – a tiny silver cypress).
Every book bears an image of the Book To Be


and every child bears an image of the singer
(almond-eyed) who left a humming shadow
in the neighborhood – that summer cicada
shrunk to autumn cricket (fading, lingering).


*

Pretty quiet in blogland. Meanwhile, here's another frog hunt for you. 

More wild & wacky summer mumbo-jumbo, fresh from the oven of Shakespeare's Head:

15 (continued) 
 
Entranced by the glittering ferris wheel
(creaking round and around to raucous bells)
you forgot the humble hand you held,
that held you close, that kept it real.

 
The dizzy design is built on spin;
a bent pole points to swirling haze
somewhere near Bear and Hercules,
a Cup pours out a frothing dip of Dragon-

 
breathing vertigo, and here we go
again, sledding down into the Maelstrom!
Big Bang potter’s clay, it all came from –
and soon the Grand Finale (here below

 
the Moon) will row us home, over the water
(when Whale gives birth to Virgin Daughter).

    
                    *

 
The shadow of a mortal mediator
falls across the Great Year’s star-on-star.

 
The hand that raveled the colored threads,
numbered the sequence of time and season,
measured the stately rolling motion –
a painter’s hand, that sketched those heads

 
and limbs, so turbulent, troubled, at the table –
was this the hand you held at the carnival?
Sent by a mind and heart arraying all
in the light of kinship (mirrored, equable)?

 
A rooted flower blooms amidships, nested
in the hold, where the last full measure is
familiar epiphany – homely treasure.
And on the seventh day... that Hand rested.

    
                     *
 
 Behind my eyelids, a strange planetarium.
There’s Leo, sketching (with tiny whorling
J-strokes) a design for a light-swimming
catamaran – delicate lightweight (over an M);

 
and two lads, little gems, in a joy-ride
galaxy, sailing on their milky way –
watching each other, timing their Day,
with 153 (or 4) doubloons in the hold

 
(two weeks’ worth of salmon-mammon).
Paddling up toward Orion (Perseus?
St. G.?  Al-Khidr, maybe?) at the axis
of the matrix – his bare, cubic weapon

 
lancing a wounded, white polar dragon –
there, where birchbark spins around again.

    
                    *

 
Under the ju-ju tree... I don’t remember when...
behind Shakespeare’s Head, before you were born.

 
Under the shade of the paradise tree, in sum;
under the Phoebe moon, the Ur-night sky;
by the rivers of Ethiopia; her epiphany,
the little shady flower – watch it bloom,

 
now.  In a round-dance with her, near the sun,
overhead, like an Etch-a-Sketch, forever
waltzing your ellipse, across, a starry floor...
your doubled love, with a V – the only sign

 
for Victory.  And so the sunny flower lifts
from the surface of heaven-ocean; so the
three or four rivers begin to flow again
(beside an almond, amid snowdrifts).


       
                               6.23-25.04

Something rich & strange (from Shakespeare's Head) for St. John's Eve:

                  15

   
 
                  A shaky hand begins to sketch in summer
  as if emerging out of deep dream-space.
  In the silver of a hubbub universe
  a vast and lumbering cosmos-designer

   
                  plays with the baby galaxies, doodles
  twirly-curls in the arroyo dust.
  Swaddled in a tiny gyro-nest,
  graven in Middle Earth, dreidles

   
                  and paper lanterns, fireworks in the lake:
  the whorl of a dervish crown inspires
  reunions, clowns, processions, choirs,
  love-potions, divination, gypsy music

   
                  spun from the drowsy round of Everyman.
  The spell was cast: Hamlet’s muttering began.

      
                                    *

   
                  Ophelia or Imogen, where the river ran
  to the sea: star-flower, scribbled in crayon

   
                  in the sketchbook of the mumbling ghost
  (invisible hand), at the vanishing point
  where lines meet, where circles pivot –
  at the apex of the beehive (Time’s lost

   
                  sundial in the garden), where two boys
  scramble and play around her knees
  and beneath the stars’ crosshairs:
  twin constellations, light rays

   
                  aligned by a solstice, at the height
  of the parade.  So we read the stones
  from before the Flood, in Babylon –
  in the hammock-canoe, one summer night.
                                    
                                   * 
 
                  Everyman, blind, beneath his natal star
  leans his shadow athwart the night;
  limping, he reads his limp aright
  in pinpoints threaded there – a car,

   
                  a flower, a wheel, a bear... and
  Hamlet plunges to the salt sea-floor
  churning the everlasting tables there
  around the ring, the ring the King bore –

   
                  overturning time’s iron-gilded rule,
  wagering all upon one leading hunch,
  Orion-worm, crawling, inch by inch
  toward a stage set for an antic fool...

   
                  a play-within-a-play, where he must die
  to renew the earth (with equanimity).

      
                                   *

   
                  The love that flowers in a fiery eye
  guides Everyman’s unfailing destiny.
     
                  His hunch, an octave and a unison:
  since each soul is the hero of its dream,
  and cosmos images the cloudy scheme
  like human breathing on a windowpane;

   
                  so Hamlet paces back to Elsinore
  like Jonah stepping from Leviathan;
  so the prophetic soul of Everyman
  throws his constellations to the floor,

   
                  scrying their hieroglyphics in his heart
  before the waking of the summer sun
  lifts, over the trees, earth’s perihelion.
  His muttered covenant will not depart.

      
                                   *

I've been entering literary contests lately, keeping me busy. You see your writing from another angle.

Interesting article in NY Times science section today about math & origami!!

Some more from Shakespeare's Head. I'm trying to focus my attention to continue this, which I left off a year ago.

                  4

   
 
                  There is a struggle toward a common light,
  a frame of reference, a shared resolve;
  the enterprising covenants revolve
  around a painful common sense (of being right).

   
                  So they gathered once at Shakespeare's Head
  (each head, each pair of eyes a theatre,
  a globe) to try each phrase – each character
  puffed out and flowering in air, a wingèd

   
                  moth or butterfly (conjectural, extemporal,
  provisional).  From dialectical balancing,
  an expensive delicate set of riggings
  begins to whistle in the distance, rise

   
                  and fall, as if breathing on the morning sea;
  and the mast answers – tall, tree-like, fatherly.

      
                                     *

   
                  Orpheus knows the moody marsh he mirrors
  is only his own (splintered from flocks of errors).

   
                  And Hobo, with his rusty O-ring, rows
  into marginal shallows, among rustling
  reeds.  Length of arm is the beginning
  of native estrangement – so it goes on

   
                  reaching, into infinity (anonymous,
  primordial, a someone) – still selfward,
  like a hobo's law of identity (A = DUD).
  Like the thingness of things – various,

   
                  ephemeral, enormous.  Like the ring
  itself, gleaming dully in dun-colored
  palm.  Heaven-earth tethered there,
  polar, in steadfast silver – breathing.

         
                                           12.12.02

                  2

   
 
                  The silver of the Bay reflects the sky.
  As in a Fibonacci microcosm,
  Orpheus reflects the scene (home,
  she's not at home).  One almond eye

   
                  is all of Shakespeare's Globe – quintessence
  in the garden, behind Shakespeare's Head.
  Garden or marsh, Itasca or Shadda (wed
  wetlands and low clouds with innocence) –

   
                  birchbark or balam, long canoe or tarada,
  Mississippi or Euphrates, Hiawatha,
  Haji Hamaid – waters will reflect your
  silvery Dragon's Head, your starry

   
                  mornings.  Rippling conjunction,
  hovering shadow – cradle for the sun.

      
                                 *

   
                  Out of the manger-matrix comes the star
  reflected in the paysans, where you are.

   
                  Reflected in the water by the shore,
  reflected in a waiting shepherd's eye,
  reflected in the sand dunes too, nearby.
  The light was early – never seen before.

   
                  And natural law (in curvature of glass
  slanted to a singer's thirsty throat)
  found balance at the point of rest
  between power and peace – a

   
                  general outline of the lacrimae
  between brute force of interest
  and salty conscience of the just
  (black iris, fiery aureole its eye).

        12.10.02

[Reminder: Shakespeare's Head is a building in Providence. The name referred to a sort of tavern sign which used to hang outside (portrait of the Bard). Was a gathering-place for journalists, literary types, revolutionaries around 1776.]


What does this poetry mean, though, to the literati? I'm outside the committee paradigms and the bingo lingo. Toodles, chums!

Have been out of the bog for a few days, putting manuscripts together, submitting them to contests.

I do this once every ten years or so, & it makes me feel part of the literary scene. Plus I look at my writing in a new way, as if I were a disinterested judge.

I'll try to find another section of Shakespeare's Head to post here.

Hamlet's Mill can be read as an extended improvisation on some astonishing essays by Simone Weil (see her Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks). Despite the profound ambiguities & historical-cultural distortions of her (very Jewish) anti-Jewish bias, Weil is worlds apart from some of the New-Age gematriastic numerological-astrological-gnostical book-biz blah-blah around these topics. Basically, she bears witness to the harmony of Hellenic-Hebraic understanding (the traditional evidence of "psychic wholeness" in "the West"): science/art, knowledge/soul, transcendence/suffering. Though she distances herself from her Jewish roots, she never disavows the "need for roots": nor the centrality of suffering & love - suffering for proud "knowledge" (grace redeeming fallen gnosis).

(This is, as we know from the Romantics, Dante, & others, a traditional role for poets, too: saving the appearances, synthesizing reason & love.)

The HM authors (Santillana & Dechend) acknowledge her as one, of just 2 authors, who has a clue.

Rhody roses for Bloomsday 100.

"There are 29 sweet reasons why blossomtime's the best." - Finnegans Wake 

Have been reading (or struggling to read) Plato's Timaeus, which is really a companion volume to Hamlet's Mill, mentioned here recently. Written in 300 something B.C., it holds, delicately, a borderland between myth & science, poetry & reason... wonderful to hear the ironic paragraph of this person, living almost 2500 years ago, when he differentiates between his own cosmology (built on astronomy & a fairly reasonable defense of the "argument-from-design" : ie. there are living things & dead things; things either move themselves or are moved passively by some other force; living things, as opposed to dead matter, are self-motivated (they move around by their own will); the freedom of self-movement is "life" or "soul"; since the most complex things in the universe have life or soul, then the self-movement of the universe must be propelled by Soul! I love it) & the traditional "gods" of myth - those same gods & myth-stories which Santillana & Dechend (Hamlet's M.) pretty convincingly (to me, anyway) explain, are also symbolic formulations for star-observations & time-measurements - only from an earlier era!

Anyway, all this seems pretty distant from some of the daylight proper concerns of poetry, which have to do with social justice and human values & how these must be defended NOW...

Struggling in my own way to move along, sometimes going forward in writing you have to go backward, to things you've left behind & forgotten. I tend to write a lot, & then find old ms. lying around... this sequence from a couple years ago sort of startled me with its own star-obsessions... so I'm going to post some of it, though some of you may have seen it before on a list-serve, sorry. It's a sequence called Shakespeare's Head, which is a building in Providence, & as you can tell, it's also a sequel to an early sequence (called India Point, another Providence locale).

from Shakespeare's Head

 
1

 
Snow muffles Providence in soft light.
Orpheus-Hobo shuffles through the streets
beneath immaculate rooftops, slanted
toward the drifting sky.  He is late

 
for the wedding.  In his pocket, a gold band
lifted from the sidewalk (in Fox Point,
on Washington's birthday).  In his heart
an image of a toy city - Atlantis, Golden Land.

 
He'll hold it toward you, shivering -
America in miniature, a tiny Ironsides
reflected in a bourbon bottle - shades
passing through fixed stare (his offering).

 
So needy excess issues (crystalline)
just as fireworks spring a constellation.

 
                 *

 
There is no better world for contemplation.
No butter-word for such a battered nation.

 
Only extravagant hobo longing
reaches past fright-monuments
and furniture of Nineveh (arrogant
roar, ablaze with dominion, fading);

 
only the eyes of Jonah will behold
a green star hanging over gardens
buried in slanting dunes, oblivion
(...distant, pining, as of old).

 
The bottle toy will sleep in his hand
until a starry shade stoops down again
to shape a nest for Everyman - and
bring a skyborne Jubilee to land.

 
               12.6.02

Happy Flag Day

Watched the video of the great great Tarkovsky film, Andrei Rublev, the story of an icon painter. Good follow-up to Byzantium show at the Met. Tarkovsky is a cross between Brecht & an Orthodox monk. The film is so Russian, so stringent, such a hymn to the salt of the earth, spiritual asceticism & faith, earthly suffering & fatalistic gloom, Dostoyevskian passionate sobornost (fellowship). You are not in Hollywood in this film, you are in 15th-century Rus.

The old backyard. Once upon a time, in the willow over the canoe, I heard "Bluejay" improvising, which was the beginning of Stubborn Grew/Forth of July, that neo-formalist traditional free metrical postmodern something or other. There's Pushkin, snoozing under the flowers. 

poleRon's complex counter-polemic (in post of today, 6.11) to the New Formalist polemics of Steele & Schreiber, attacks the latter's oversimplifications of literary history and 20th-century practice. However, the elaborate model of prosody Ron builds & defends here (via Zukofsky et al.), combining language/music/speech/writing, etc. in different permutations, serves to obscure one basic point made by Schreiber:

"Phrasing in music works in relation to the beat, not as a substitute for it."

This is a legitimate criticism - offered perhaps most strongly (& originally) by Robert Frost - to the Poundian nostrum of "composition by musical phrase". The correlation of meter & phrase, or speech pattern, is not simply part of the toolbox of optional traditionalist techniques. It is a basic aspect of poetry, and as such, serves as a kind of grounding for creative experiments of all kinds. To deny or minimize this both rules out vast fields of poetic enterprise, past and future, and distorts the evidence of 20th-cent. literary history.

The synthesis of rhythm and phrasing is one element of the overall harmonics to which composition aspires. It can be found in some of the most memorable passages of Pound & Eliot (Annie Finch's "ghost of meter", for example in the contrast of pentameter lines with trochaic beat of parts of the Cantos, or the hidden metrical forms planted in Four Quartets). The same synthesis was worked out more thoroughly and paradigmatically, if not always successfully, by Hart Crane. Crane again and again trumps these distinctions between free & metrical verse, between modernist innovation and traditional forms. Wallace Stevens, too, in his own less emphatic way, melded pentameter & free verse.

Setting up the New Formalist agitators as straw men with which to thump Quietude & plump Post-Avant is itself a polemic which tends to box, pigeonhole & truncate contemporary understanding of technical possibility.

[p.s. ...& then, moreover, what would Yeats say?]

UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGISLATOR PONDERS KINGSHIP

Providence, RI (maybe?) (AP) At 7 a.m. local time, on a green lawn beside the looming Depression-era statue of state founder Roger Williams, local poet and home dishwasher Henry Gould, an unacknowledged legislator of the world, signed new legislation making himself an official acknowledged legislator of the world. Despite the absence of an audience at the signing (except for a single pesky squirrel, which Gould also acknowledged, with his signature "squirrel imitation"), the newly-acknowledged legislator has big plans. "After breakfast, I think I'll anoint myself King of America, for starts," he chuckled. "After that, I don't know. Depends on what's in the fridge." Absently tossing an acorn at the squirrel, he acknowledged, in his husky, inimitable Rhode Island accent (acquired after years of schooling), "Feels good to be king. I can tell that squirrel where to go, no problemo."

I've excised latest late-night crabby post. Should never blog while playing online chess after midnight.

Antenna Race dept.: Bob Vincent, my inventor friend mentioned previously (6/4), was written up in today's NY Times ("Circuits" section, under "what's next", here). (Bob's a good friend also of Pushkin the cat.)

"Poets are the antennae of the race." - Ezra Pound

Have been reading Wallace Stevens lately, along with Leggett book previously mentioned (Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory). Also re-reading Hamlet's Mill (Santillana and Dechend), the terrific, crotchety essay on very ancient astronomy & archaic myth. Actually, the last 2 poems I've written (& posted here) reminded me of this book (rather than the other way around). (Some of the "deep-dive" adventures in the latter portion of Forth of July drew extensively on this material.)

Thinking a lot about some of Stevens' obsessions - the symbiosis of imagination & reality, the nature of the human myth-making capacity and its relation to religious belief. Pondering the "culture war" with fundamentalist Islam, & our own homegrown fundamentalisms.

Hamlet's Mill is fascinating by way of the window it opens on culture's deep past, exploring how star-reading was really the first form of literacy, and how myths are not merely projections of human relations, but attempts to comprehend real time measurements, and the meaning of time itself, through long & close observation of constellation/planetary movements. Of course now we understand that the ancient notion of movement was kind of an artificial planetarium (the earth as fixed plane around which stars revolved), but this doesn't diminish the incredible complexity & specificity with which ancient cultures tracked the stars.

I'm finding this archaic science of interest (as you can tell from those 2 poems), 1) because it was a global phenomenon, found in folklore of many many cultures, 2) it provides an interesting way to get behind or beneath mythological-imaginative projections & narratives, the rituals by means of which different cultures identify themselves, and 3) because star-gazing & myth-making were part of the traditional "serious" poet's vocation.

I used the sort of ballad-form refrain style in these 2 poems, not because I felt like imitating Yeats or Villon, but because, basically, it can be effective, I think.

TRANSIT OF VENUS


 
 
Morning twilight rings a globe
washed with suffering and joy,
each body under supine mind
replete with reigning images
(Allah, Buddha, Shiva, Christ)
by law and custom so entwined
into tradition’s seamless robe –
while Venus spins by like a toy,
a blind spot in the blinding sun.

 
Noonday trumpets of the West
descant for absent presidents:
gleaming coffins lie in state
resurrecting finer times,
harmonizing untold crimes,
molding echoes, out-of-date.
Shrouded figures, gone to rest
beneath a Star’s indifference,
a blind spot in the blinding sun.

 
Adam, Eve and Oedipus
circle through the fabled fate
spelt within each blistered heart
before a child can walk or talk.
Shadows layered on the rock
by inhuman fiery art
wheel around Prometheus,
lean toward One the veils create:
a blind spot in the blinding sun.

now: find-the-frog! 

I get the feeling that JL, in his post of today over at the Hotel, via Gerrit Lansing quote, exaggerates the contemporary sway of traditionalist poetics. Why? Whitman & "innovation" won that battle a long time ago. Is it like the pebble in his shoe or the nagging return of the repressed? I mean the possibility that "traditionalist" techniques might represent opportunities denied. Denied by partisanship & polemics. The lingering residue of defensiveness from style battles long over. Red & blue state poetics.

Pushkin the cat, immortalized in the famous poem Stubborn Grew. 

backyard peony 

Antennae of the Race dept.:

Bob is a friend of mine. We're proud of him here in little Rhody.

Why is Jim Behrle badmouthing Kent Johnson so much? I don't get it. I looked at Kent's Abu Graibh piece. It's standard political satire, it does what satire's supposed to do: it gets you down into the ugliness & makes you squirm. The last paragraph simply zeroes in on its probable readership (poets) & makes them identify/empathize/squirm too. He emailed me to ask what I thought of it, & I said the weakness of it is it seems aimed narrowly at the in-house poet audience, & that it should include more "emails" from all walks of life.

Behrle's take-off on Kent's last paragraph doesn't rise to the level of political satire, it just makes fun of somebody by harping on their supposed weaknesses.

Now I suppose the Behrle campaign will be mounted against me. I don't know all the "history" gossip or rumor behind Behrle's animus toward Kent, it's none of my business. As I recall, & my memory can be fuzzy, he's mad at me because he didn't like the way I was talking back to David Hess some time years ago (& he didn't like me calling him "Jimby", which I don't call him any more). But that's all water under the bridge. I'm blocked for some reason from his comment box (at his blog), so I won't be able to respond, when the torrent comes. I really don't care anymore about all this piss-ant poet "biz".

Everyone should lay off the badmouthing & recognize they have personality disorders which are not cured by aggression & petty sniping. That includes me, that includes you, Behrle.

[p.s. I see Kent has responded to the Behrle piece over at the Hotel today. Whenever I go to "Hotel Point" I think of some big windy light-filled drafty comfortable mostly vacant old hotel on some point in Lake Michigan. & then I think of the hotel in the "Quaker Hill" section of The Bridge.]

WHEN THE ARK TOUCHED DOWN


 
 
In every town, in every land and tongue
the priests and teachers purify the faith,
instruct the folk, distinguish right from wrong,
observe the ancient rites, deflect God’s wrath,
urge everyone along the well-loved path:
but there was no such pattern of tradition
when the Ark touched down under the stars of Babylon.

 
The sons of Noah often disagree
and quibble over points of subtlety:
Shem, Ham, and Japheth share a history
of tangled speech, disputed property,
and death-by-Cain in field or dusty alley:
but there was no such habit of destruction
when the Ark touched down under the stars of Babylon.

 
The Lord, the Pure, the Power, the Supreme,
the Imageless, the One, the Sacred Dream,
the Holiness Who cleanses to redeem,
Existent God, beyond our fleeting sham:
we shape your profile, still beseech you, Come!
For only a perfect maze managed perfection
when the Ark touched down under the stars of Babylon.

... back to the search for a word beneath the word "image" (by the way, that's when I discovered the Secret of Comment Box : if you want responses, don't make pronouncements - just ask a question) -

anyway, Wallace Stevens is almost too quotable, but I happened on this, from his poem "Study of Images II":

As if, as if, as if the disparate halves
Of things were waiting in a betrothal known
To none, awaiting espousal to the sound

 
Of right joining, a music of ideas, the burning
And breeding and bearing birth of harmony,
The final relation, the marriage of the rest.

This plays with the aura, the resonance, the symbolism, the overtones, the whole or the source of "disparate" imagery...

I've offered many illustrations from Forth of July, many variations in scale & pitch, over time, here on this blog. This one's from toward the end of the poem, in a minor key.

         3


  
 
         I lost the purple thread
 that led to the heaven-stone
 (curled around a cup of golden
 mead... but not like lead:

  
         like honey, heavy honey,
 buoyant, thick and sweet
 forever).  One bright
 bird-voice cried to me:

  
         this lever, Archimedean –
 this little cup of water –
 if you did not offer
 to the least of men

  
         you offered not to Me.
 This lever, a mercy-pivot,
 rocks like a lonely swing at
 dusk... Love was, you see –

  
         and swung the empty swing
 you heard so long ago (one
 summer evening, so
 deep, so slow).  Swing,

  
         little wooden swing...
 my heart rocks too
 when we begin anew:
 Isaac and Abraham, singing...

  
         (and my little dark lady,
 absent one, my little honey-
 tree, my true heart's pivoty-
 stem, swaying so lonely).

                            
                    5.23.2000

- this poem reaches back in response, across about 900 pp. of Forth of July, to one of the opening, initatory sketches of Stubborn Grew:

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.

Here the focus is on the protagonist/narrator alone, and the sacrificial-suicidal plunge he is about to take (into his long journey-poem). At the finale, though he has still "lost the thread", the mead is not like lead anymore, but has turned, alchemical-fashion, into golden honey; and the focus is not on the suffering of the hero, but on the love itself, which acts as "lever" (of justice) and "mercy-pivot", on the singing which it inspires, and on the "absent one", the "little dark lady", its ever-present goal. We have moved from the "door of the church" (in the poet's hands, as in the children's game), to the substance of its evangelic mission (love itself). The cup (of lead/honey) runneth over.

What was the pith of what Pound found & celebrated in "tradition"? The same thing Montale found, that both found via Dante:

Provence, the love-song, the archaic-troubadour springtime mating-call, the epithalamion at the heart of Arcadia or Paradise, the Song of Songs...

the deep natural root of the grand epic-cosmic visions (Homer, Dante et al.). At the center of the Divina Commedia, Dante addresses his theme : What or Who is the real and proper goal of all our willing & desiring & loving (& the substance of our singing)?

[Actually, this forms the overall plot of my own grandiose effort in Forth of July, too, where the poem's path follows the transformations & coruscations of July, jewel-eye, Julius/Juliet, J-El, & so on. The "coming-forth of jewel-eye"]

Stray thoughts on Ezra Pound, in relation to the controversy at Tony Tost's blog:

EP assumed the mantle of the traditional poet, in all its intensity & vatic pomp. Anyone who has heard recordings of his chanting the Cantos will recognize some of the effects. The intensity, the dramatic presence, he instilled into his experimental epic, comes through, even as it works in counterpoint across the free-slapdash, quotational-notational, archival-dustbinnishness & slanginess.

As such & so he was assuming a mask, the mask of the ancient epic vates; a very unusual & curious endeavor. I think he did this under the influence, & in the partial shadow, of Yeats, and somewhat in conscious contrast to Eliot, whose Anglified urbanity presented another version of "tradition".

What I find interesting is just the wildness of the project itself, the way this something of a swamp Yankee upstart sloughed off his own Americanness to become a sort of eccentric-yet-representative "figure" for the West at a certain and particular historical crossroads; and the way the contradictions involved in assuming such a pose are reflected in the grain of the poem's (the Cantos') style and "plot", the excruciating way it tries to meld archaic Europe with US political developments, in an overall world-epic of consciousness.

Pound thus presents himself as an inescapable, pivotal literary-historical phenomenon. But what remains valuable is not so much the substance of his own world-view, or his pronouncements, but the example of engagement he offers. Not the engagement with politics (which revealed both his shrunken capacity for empathetic humanity, and his misguided authoritarianism) but the stance he took, his attitude toward poetry as a living tradition, as something of continuing relevance and importance to the world at large. He wasn't satisfied with his own dialect, his own experience, his own land, his own local business: for him poetry engaged the whole world and the whole past and future; Dante & Homer & Spenser et al. were still living literary forces, spirits he encountered. Olson was right to argue that Pound was so tied to tradition and the past that it distorted his understanding of contemporary reality; but the weakness of Olson's technique, in comparison to Pound's, shows how much was lost by shrugging off Pound's vatic mantle.

Focusing so much on poetry & painting these days, I should re-read Elizabeth Willis' Turneresque. I see Catherine Daly is working on a review.

         ...there
Everyone knows, serious life
Is elsewhere.

small world dept.: someone requested a copy of Nedge #4 yesterday. Someone in Senegal.

Of course, was reading BJ Leggett's fine book again today, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory : the chapter dealing with what Stevens drew from Charles Mauron's book Aesthetics and Psychology, in particular the bit about the usefulness of obscurity:

the poem must resist the intelligence
almost successfully...

- which section pretty much contradicts everything I've been saying here. For Stevens, at least during a phase of his career, poetry opposes paraphrase and explanation... but I can't adequately paraphrase this excellent study right now...

"Resonance" and "Symbolism", Jonathan & Kent - they both seem relevant to the process I'm trying to outline. Resonance closer to Stevens, in that it has no implication of fixity of "image"; Symbolism - Yeats was clearly a symbolist of a sort - but the word seems too systematic, like allegory - for what I'm thinking of. Actually Greg's definition of "vision" seems about right.

The poem integrates its parts in such a way that they begin to resonate overtones of "symbolic" meaning, they are iconic pointers, aspects of a whole representation, with which the reader can identify or feel-with-affinity in several ways at once.
Such that a context is provided for individual images proper, or strings of imagery, which begin to echo in the reader's sensibility.

"Aura", writes Catherine... now that's hovering somewhere between resonance and vision!

I'm searching for an equivalent to the word "image" as applied to poetry, which is not limited to the sense of a visual picture or illustration.

What I'm thinking of is the way a poem indicates, points toward something, by way of suggestion or allusion or evocation. That "something" may be a physical thing or an idea; but what the poem does is offer a verbal embodiment or gesture or narrative.

In painting, the wholeness of an image is valued (the way the parts of a picture are subordinate to or supportive of an integrated whole): the painting projects a unified image, something the viewer can grasp as such.

If there is something similar in poetry, we would have a verbal embodiment as a kind of accessible or recognizable whole: there would be a substance (intellectual, sensible) imparted by the poem to the reader.

Some poems impart that substance purely through harmonics. That is, there may not be much of a visual element at all; the verbal formulation may be abstract and discursive; but the language may work through its harmonics to create this kind of embodiment, which I'm relating to the idea of "image". Sound, rhythm, and diction alone may create this harmonic envelope.

Yeats was very interested in this notion of poetic holism, the formation of images which are both exact and precise, on the one hand, and full of open implication, on the other, and the holism of the entire poem, and groups of poems (see good book by Engelberg[?], The Vast Design).

I'm interested in how "embodiment" - whether through actual visual images, or through allusive, evocative language - lends itself to natural vision & sensation, returning the poem to the ground of ordinary experience. A poem's finish or fitness would seem to have a lot to do with its capacity to transfer a complete embodiment or image from poem to reader.

And it seems that these concerns are not emphasized in poetry much these days : there's more focus on baroque distortions of diction and syntax, jarring juxtapositions or rhetorical exaggeration for effect (I know there's a term for this out there... - catachresis, I thought of it!), the dilemmas of undecideability. These all seem like surface phenomena. There's less focus on holistic embodiment and its transferences, and more on immediacy, shock, surprise.

Various bloggers are coming down on the SF Chronicle review of Jeff Clark book. (Let me repeat once again that mocking a reviewer's own poetry is not a legitimate criticism of a review; rather than dealing with substance, this kind of attack is a form of ad hominem.)

The argument that an avant-garde is in a precarious position if there is no establishment to advance ahead of, seems to have some merit. I agree that poetry will always be making itself new; I disagree that avant-garde art & poetry will always be a conspicuous feature of every period. Rear-guard critics are mistaken in saying "you can't make anything new because newness has become the new cliche"; however, we should not ignore the fact that a big element of the avant-garde stance as we have known it consists in saying "you can't write like that anymore". The characteristic gesture of postmodernism is the shrug. Well, it's better than the finger-point, I guess. ("dry branches crackling")

Do HG's Poetics show any consistency? Since I'm aware that there are vast ranges of feeling & experience & speech which I'm not very good at writing about, I have to try to counteract that.

So when it's said that you can't write sonnets & sestinas anymore, I write those;
when it's said you can't write long obscure epics anymore, I write those;
when it's said you can't use rhyme & meter anymore, I use them;
when it's said you can't write free verse anymore, I do that;
when it's said you can't imitate Hart Crane, James Joyce, Ezra Pound & a Russian poet from the 20s all at once, I do that;
etc.

(John Berryman once described his poetry career as consistently doing the opposite of what everybody was supposed to be doing. I know what he meant.)

I'm working on short poems with simple clear diction & an interlocking, over-arching set of themes. Do I have any consistency? I'm interested in the integrity/harmoniousness of the image, the image as synthesis and correlation of parts, as yoking of opposites (spirit/nature, time/eternity, reality/dream), the image as cosmic building-block or integral structure, and the role of poetry as presenting versions of this cosmological reality, this harmoniousness. Despite the prosaic flatness of my own poems lately, I'm bored with self-indulgent, talky, oh-so-sophisticated discourse in poems; give me the well-turned, rounded image. As Wally Stevens puts it: "Imago. Imago. Imago." An old poem from Way Stations :

  The child honoring you in dreams,
  embrasure of innocence, tender shoots
  of early radiance – your figure
  landscape, unfamiliar town, scent
  of May lilacs along a worn road.

   
  Not to be known yet,
  only a heavy cloud pregnant
  with summer rain
  (iron mortality, rust
  of decline not yet to be);

   
  gathering up your skirts
  you make your way, slow path
  beyond the jealous decorations,
  fever of scorn, offended pride,
  dry branches crackling – a bonfire.

At the Byzantine exhibit I learned about "hesychasm" - a movement in the Orthodox Church of that era (12-1400s), which taught communion with God through contemplation. Hesychasm translates as: "quietude".

Had a great time riding the train to NY, looking out the window.

Rare moment, when your vision relaxes into what you see, you yourself sort of dissolve into the trees & iron structures & people on platforms, anonymous.

I really can't put this into words. Sort of calm seeing, sensing. Thought that maybe if angelic life exists, this is something like what it might be: this sort of calm-ecstatic interpenetration of point-of-view & things seen.

I have a little souvenir icon (glued on particle board, the kind of thing you might find in a museum gift shop), which Elena Shvarts sent me once. She said it's St. Michael (& that "he will protect me"), but the image is clearly derived from the great byzantine Angel Gabriel icon, which the Met is using on its catalogue cover (shown at the link below).

(Now I see it is Michael, though. He's holding a sword, rather than a red wand (as in the Gabriel icon), and "Archangel Michael" is written in cyrillic over the top. But the figure is definitely derived from the earlier icon.)

Saw the great Byzantium exhibition at the Met. Spent 4 hours there Saturday; had to go back Sunday (so much to see I got too tired before the end on Sat).

Don't feel up to commenting... anything I say will leave a hundred other things out.

Found the icons-within-icons room VERY interesting.

Also the strong contrast between the Byzantine art and the northern European painting (van Eyck, van der Weyden), despite the fact that the northerners were influenced by art works brought from Constantinople by the Crusaders (during their rule in Byzantium - the Latin Kingdom, 1200s). The Byzantine icons overwhelm you with their emotional immediacy; the Flemish masters distance the image somewhat, by means of, paradoxically, their realism. Van der Weyden's "St. Luke Painting the Virgin Mary" seems pivotal in marking that difference. It takes the earliest tradition (St. Luke himself was credited with the earliest drawings of the Virgin), and combines it with elements of realism, naturalism (such as the landscape in the background with tiny figures irrelevant to the religious image, ie. the man taking a leak against a wall; or the fact that the figure of St. Luke is a self-portrait of Van der Weyden) & reflexivity (there's a painting-within-the-painting: the sketch in Luke's hand).

I wrote a poem about this painting, posted here a couple weeks ago; it was great to see it in the Met show.

Many of the icons are beautiful in the extreme. Painted on chipped wood, like a form of folk art; amazing colors. Stunning miniature mosaics. Tremendous imagery (especially astonishing Russian icon of "Man of Sorrows" in black & white).

[I've removed a rather bilious late-night post from yesterday.]

Today is the saint's day of Guillem de Gellone, who began appearing somewhat to my own surprise toward the end of the longy-long poem Forth of July. He pops up in some of the shorter poems too lately.

He was a military officer under Charlemagne, who later took holy orders and founded a monastic community in southern France, on the coast near Narbonne (Gellone). His real &/or legendary exploits in Charlemagne's Spanish campaigns turn up in several of the early chansons de geste. I like to think that he's an (extremely distant) ancestor (which was traced through my maternal grandmother's family by a genealogist on the web).

This is also the anniversary of William Blackstone's burial at his Study Hill, in Cumberland.

Tomorrow's the 551st anniversary of the fall of Constantinople (1453). I'm going down to NYC to see the Byzantium show at the Met tomorrow, for my 52nd birthday (5/29).

DANTE


 
 
Spiral, whirlpool, maelstrom, Medusa’s
hair – these metaphors of curvature
(like paint dust afloat from Siena’s
nearby mural) only remind you where
you are: in Hell.  The sordid images
(once disgust subsides) become pure
pathos, after all.  Where desire rages
sympathy begins, and as desire is
mother to the deed, the deed rampages
in the shadow of your own hot fire,
Dante.  The flame, your Beatrice says,
travels in a circle on its wire

 
and where that scintillating comet goes
you follow, wheeling (as the wind blows).

The Magpie on the Gallows


 
 
Bruegel willed his last work to his wife.
We look down a slope of leafing trees
toward a weatherbeaten gallows, where
a small black-white magpie has alighted.
A group of cheerful peasants goof and
tumble waltzing down the hill, merge
with the background (sketchy, indistinct).
Beyond the rickety gray wooden frame
a May-time vista opens wide (vast, mild,
serene) to mountains, sunlit castles, sky.

 
Everything returns at last to the wife,
the bride, the mother in the landscape.
Mendelssohn – a dream my mother had
(her miniature oils were its expression,
the world I recognize is their reflection).
Out of summers buried deep, the longing
streams: the tripod of the firmament
rests on a point of irrational blind
balance: the magpie rumors – wars, 
scandals – skitter across an icy surface.

 
Bruegel’s image seems to say, the world
outlives our quarrels with our dying;
our quarrels and our dying flit away
enfolded in a subtler nature (one
we cannot fathom yet, but witness
here – peering into the limpid curve,
the tender distances, the calm horizon).
Remnants of an ancient controversy
teeter on the hillside... but the magpie
(casual now, indifferent) soon vanishes.

This was probably the third sonnet I'd written. I had just been reading James Wright's selected poems, sort of browsing through it. It occurred to me that his voice sounded something like an old bear, and at that moment, I opened the book to a poem about bear cubs in springtime. So I wrote this sonnet. I know it's a little ponderous... oh well, it was an early effort.

A VOICE


 
 
A voice moves in a heart fallen asleep,
murmuring there like a thawing rivulet.
I heard your voice, fluent in the deep
sweetness of the land, compassionate;
flowing beneath our cold, intemperate
harshness, the icebound lake of our death.
Meekness, only; poverty in spirit;
and over the abandoned towns, a breath
of life... When you placed a simple wreath
of memory upon this common ground,
I heard a wholly other spring, beneath
these grasslands, waiting to be found –

 
a vernal undertaking.  We might bear
from hibernation something we can share.

So we pass through 2 decades of "postmodern" poetry (see JL's continuing reflections). & then comes along Franz Wright, carrying around some of the traditional charismatic baggage of the poet-figure (lost son of famous lost poet, confessional survivor, with psychic limp) we were supposed to have left behind. A sort of diminished echo effect of the "traditional office".

Yet maybe diminished is not the right word. His poems are quite effective; you can hear that same sound of rueful emotional directness, the strong feeling and simplicity (I identify this with the midwest) in some of his father's poetry.

Paula's iambic pentameter - smooth, adept, capacious.

Listened to Franz Wright interviewed on NPR this morning ("The Connection"). Enjoyed the poems he read very much. Synthesizes "wit" or pithy statement, with something like his father's "deep image" - the patient, sensitive evocation of an image of nature suffused with feeling. I like the way such images sort of hover, half-autonomously, within the flow of the poem's discourse. This was one of the things which initially attracted me to Mandelstam, too. I think this effect goes way, way back, linked both to the riddle and the folk song.

Was struck by his comments in response to a caller, in which Wright underlined how important to him were values of clarity and accessibility. Said something like, if his poem didn't seem accessible to just about any reader in the world, then he felt there was probably something wrong with it. What a contrast to the claims for "post-avant" experiment vs. mainstream, etc.

ST. GUILLEM'S DREAM

 
 
 
The City under siege
the Sultan bearing down
two mighty armies rage
around the sacred town.

 
Our walls are under-manned
the hard-pressed Captain cries
without some helping hand
tonight the Empire dies...
 
O Lord, let it be me!
the sleeping hermit said
as (rousing fitfully) he
gripped his wooden bed.

"Anita's" other blog. Belated happy discovery.

How many of you have visited this?

(She was much-published in Nedge, years ago, which was an honor for Nedge.)

(p.s. "Anita Rust" is an anagram.)

my favorite blog.

We note the perfect discord of line #8. ("He'll teach them to sing out what we hold dear.") This line, despite its iambic-pentameter basis, is a metrical disaster.

There, I've simplified the syntax now, it's better. The poem pivots on lines 7-9. I think it's OK... The opening octet focuses on the (only half-believed) "logic" of supposedly "winning over" the torture victims (making them sing in unison). The sextet discounts all that, replacing it with the more basic goal of squeezing out useful information. The final couplet underlines the greater folly, the more egregious illogic, of the whole process.

This idea of making prisoners "sing" is sort of a Hieronymous-Boschian parody of the "attunement", the spiritual "octave", alluded to in previous poems (posted here over the last few weeks & months).

"Torture Logic" should maybe be titled "Tortured Language". Too much of a leap to the sextet ("Be that as may be..."). This is hard to do smoothly. The sonnet doesn't really work without awareness of Frost's model. But maybe that's OK. (Closet readers will note the almost-circular logic of the end-rhymes, etc.)

I wonder who reads my blog (I know you do). Feel as if I've gone off on my own track now, no longer have much affinity with the other poetry bloggers, nor do I sense they do with me.

another slight revision to sonnet posted previously.

where except in blogland could you do something like this? (I read Jonathan's reading of Frost's sonnet first.) In German poetry it's called widerruf, or widderruf - a parody or drastic recasting of another poem. (Celan is my context here.)

(To squeal is to sing, and the torturer (like Eve, in a way...) is teaching them to sing.)

TORTURE LOGIC


 
 
He will insist, and can almost believe
that if these surly, scrawny, naked men
absorb the special lessons they receive
their time together in the holding pen
(the soakings, burnings, beatings, and the rest –
the stench, shame, hunger, sleeplessness and fear)
will not have been in vain, as some have guessed.
He’ll teach them to sing out what we hold dear.
Be that as may be, he is in their face:
whoever they are, whatever game they play
he’ll screw loose information, leave no trace.
As for the stubborn... always another day!
We don’t know yet who’s causing us such grief
but causing pain will surely bring relief.

Jonathan offered a fine reading of Frost sonnet yesterday (5/18) ("Never Again Would the Birds' Song Be the Same").

Just got an email from Elena Shvarts : singing bird-clock arrived safely in St. Petersburg.

Greetings from Minnesota. Took a walk today along Mississippi; saw 3 scarlet tanagers.

The birch & poplar leaves just coming out up north; faint light green very pretty against white bark, blue sky. Russia.

Upper midwest seems so spacious, a little sleepy, calm, moving toward brief summer. Tugboat pushing double barges down still green Mississippi, blue heron passing overhead.

Back in Providence on Thursday.

MIRROR LAKES

       
          For now we see as through a glass darkly; but then face to face.


 
 
There were two of them, always there
every season, on the Mendelssohn border:
in summer, we fished for primitive life forms;
in winter, with blonde Heidi and Holly, we
skated figure eights from end to end.  A
curved ridge covered with spindly apple trees
shaped their frame, sent gradual shadows
across their length at dawn, dusk; the wind
ruffled their surface, scattering in quick squalls
miniature images of clouds, sky, trees.  Nature
formed those natural mirrors; now (after half
a century) I’m holding their image in my mind.

 
Here in the old backyard, the flowers, ferns
and groundcover are swelling from below;
bees and other buzzing bugs maintain their
hum of collective industry.  Mendelssohn
was much the same:  a hive, nest, bursting
with dreams:  with love and desire,
with respect and emulation, with pride 
and skill and ambition, with joy, hope,
laughter, boredom, gossip, pettiness,
bigotry, fear, sorrow... all somehow
interpenetrating, fused in seamless
neighborhood (of time, place, world).

 
Hidden away, somewhere in our midst,
a spiritual Sabbath, Sunday by the lake:
where the mind dove down to its muddy
origin, the murky bottom of the pallid,
chilly pond.  Here was the free soul’s
habitat:  among tadpoles, bass and
carp, lurking along the very bottom.
Out of deep dreams, unconsciousness
your motivation stems – to grow, to be...
to measure every separate deed and thing
by means of that same scrolled snail shell,
that early foreignness, that ur-estrangement

 
– so you burst from the freezing water.  Now
Mirror Lakes reflect a new reality:  the old
one, seen anew.  It is a wheel of seasoned
light, turning around a rooted tree (apple
or almond, oak, pine) whose branches
are a candelabra, spinning sweet
brevity of mortal play to mold 
for eternity: a wakeful courtyard
where servant-bees already gather
to attend their tasks - unheralded,
unproclaimed (– lovers too, intuitive,
becoming those servants thoughtlessly).

 
I’m holding an image in my mind:  Heidi
and Holly, skating across clear ice like
dancers.  As the sunflower grows
by golden degrees, so the dying world
(so teeming full) casts forth its beams
of radiant being: the profile of the ridge
that shaped those lakes remains (like the smile
of a skater, hovering in the mind long after dark).

well, of course, on the other hand, art has to be for art's sake in order to be for Pete's sake, for heaven's sakes! [sigh. so complicated]

Art is not for art's sake. Art, for Pete's sake, is a response to particulars of experience otherwise deflected, packaged, ignored, misunderstood. Inevitably runs up against inimical authorities, if there are any; inevitably outlives those conflicts; ineluctably represents crises of moral choice and vocation.

I'm getting this from Shattuck's book about Proust (who was, he says, often lumped, wrongly, with the purists).

If you're not an aesthete, does this mean you have to dumb down your rhetoric and vocabulary, write for someone other than yourself, become "accessible"? No; but by the same token, take care that your ornamentation, your felicities of style, are not merely designed to impress a coterie. They're not worth the trouble.

HG Poetics : is this my version of "silence, exile, cunning"?

Maybe I should get a site counter after all...

wondering at how distant what I'm doing is from the mainstream fringe.

But I'd better quit wondering & get back to it.

(This is a pea for under-sanding!)

Tomorrow I go to Minnesota for a few days, until the 20th. Up to the woods north of Duluth. Will report back on any readings given to loons, tree-frog conferences, bears, etc.

Have been reading much about Netherlandish art lately. Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden. Startled by how closely the images from Abu Graibh prison, with their grinning, leering guards and piles of naked prisoners, resemble pictures by Bosch and Bruegel (see The Mockery of Christ, for example).

A decision was made (at high levels, it seems) that the circumstances of the war on terror justify dehumanization of the enemy, the abrogation of human rights. Now it's beginning to have unforeseen consequences.

writing a lot today.

HEIDI, PRACTICING ACROSS THE STREET



 
 
Spring plays slow scales, waltzes toward July.
The leaves obscure the branches, and the shade
obscures the leaves.  Time’s intricate façade
a busy undergrowth that blurs the eye.

 
Footnotes and erasures cannot clear away
her dense disguise, your camouflage.
Only a few piano chords, a forlorn page...
we’re magnifying figures in some Book of J.

ON THE OCTAVE


 
 
This limpid morning belongs to the flowering dogwood
drifting white petals stained with a gash of purple
to the center of the sleepy backyard garden.
Hidden somewhere beyond chattering sparrows and
yodeling robins, a solitary mourning dove fingers
an ocarina, like a version (in minor key) of the Angel
with Flaming Sword, at the Garden gate.
                 So Mendelssohn
would become his composition:  a furtive green island
seen as light through water, as fingers extend
to the muted bell-tone
of a final octave.
    So I would travel back
aboard the swift smooth chariot of a single note
to where the ghost of a charitable father turns
to the image of a faithful son, in pure
attunement:
     by deep foundations of the sea
lifted from the grave, as was decreed
before the waters were divided from themselves:
when the soul of every man (Mary, Eurydice,
Persephone...) emerges from the sepulchre to meet
the gardener again.  And now a heavy lilac scents
the air, like limpid light through water; as if
to say
 you must translate and be translated,
the pillar of smoke and the pillar of flame
become your own:  for the only sign
is the sign of a mourning dove
at the edge of the garden.

Today marks the anniversary of the founding of Constantinople in 330 A.D. But more importantly, my daughter Phoebe turns 21 today.

sketching, sketching...

IN THE FIFTIES


 
 
Mendelssohn: a playpen,
a grass-green child-rearing
zoo.  Rows of pastel ranches 
pasted on remnants
of farmland, speckled
with fading apple trees.

 
Everything designed
for us: big yards, swing-
sets, sandboxes, baseball
diamonds... Little
League, Girl Scouts...
the enchanted island

 
ordained by the Bible
(Dr. Spock).  We
watched much TV,
played “army” every 
day, suffered shame
and sibling rivalry;

 
we did the picnics,
the infinite Sunday
afternoons (listening
to the four of them
– Mom, Dad, Grandma,
Grandpa – chortling

 
quietly over the bridge
table)... so much
you know already.
But you might miss
the careful oils
my mother made:

 
glowing grass; kids
akimbo (playing
“statue” under
the sprinkler); dark-
leaved oak trees
swaying overhead.

Reading Roger Shattuck's book about Proust (again). Kerouac's contradictions (alluded to in previous post) echoed in Proust's everlasting dialectic between art/idolatry and experience/suffering. That is, Kerouac's suspicion of "poetry" is similar to Proust's ambivalence about art & its aesthetes. Art is the lure, the drug of the inauthentic; the false fulfillment of envious ambition; etc.

Unless the art is true. He goes into his cork-lined room for 14 years.

BEYOND GHOST WOODS


 
 
I would walk out of Mendelssohn westward
along parallel dirt tracks around the swamp
through Ghost Woods, up the sandy slope
to the ridge that lay between trees and
cemetery.  From there, standing in chest-
high weeds, I could see all Mendelssohn,
and beyond, the tall skyscrapers downtown
where my father worked.  It was summer;
no chores or school; only that high lookout
between graveyard and neighborhood.

 
There’s an old war between generations:
between children, trusting all in play
and grown-ups trusting only in money:
children knowing nothing of hardship
and grown-ups, forgetting what joy is.
A battle tiresome and intense by turns:
adults impatient with insipid offspring,
children scornful of parental blindness...
time itself the substance of their quarrel.

 
Across a blank page I retrace those steps
since somehow walking through woods
to a vantage over tombstones (where both
parties cease their play at last) eases the
bitterness – settles for a while that strife
of labor and delight (thinking of my father
in his far-off gray tower, and of myself
smudging a white page with gray marks).
Time steeps labor in forgetfulness.  The 
only coin in memory is understanding.

JL again, on Harvey Shapiro's review at the time of publication of the (Donald Allen) New American Poets anthology:

He calls particular attention to the poets of the New York School, noting James Schuyler’s insistence on “the connection between the New Poetry and the ideas behind abstract-expressionist art”: the canvas / page as a space “in which to act,” the painting / poem as (he is quoting from Harold Rosenberg’s essay “The American Action Painters”) an “act inseparable from the biography of the artist.”

(- you could consider my poetry a special branch, an offshoot of that direction. see, for example, sections from Dove Street in the archives for 2.20 & 2.21.04)

the guy with the big shades - that's me in Paris, a few (uh, no, more than a few) years ago.

I keep enjoying John Latta's historical reflections on recent American poetry. Great details & documentation.

At the end of today's post he puts this:

"Late nights with Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46. Which bursts into lyricism, bravely defying its own somber bitterness: “I was coming back home to Lowell. It was November, it was cold, it was woodsmoke, it was swift waters in the wink of silver glare with its rose headband out yander where Eve Star (some call it Venus, some call it Lucifer) stoppered up her drooling propensities and tried to contain itself in one delimited throb of boiling light.”

And you know Kerouac just stepped out of himself and time for a moment there. (As he admits, chagrin’d, new paragraph: “Ah poetic.” Why the American propensity to thwart that outburst, to mistrust it?"

Seems that Kerouac's writing here, & his own reaction to it, contain the tendencies of both the "New Americans" and their New Critic critics. Americans tend to be Protestant Rebels, which means they are iconoclastic - image-rejecting - while at the same time rebelling vociferously (emotionally, imagistically, self-centeredly) against their culture's puritanical strictures. A stance with inherent contradictions.

Rev. Jo-Ann Drake made this comment in her sermon this morning:

the actions at the Abu Graibh prison have appalled everyone, with their flouting of basic respect for human diginity; and they are indeed appalling. But last year's photos of Saddam having his tongue & throat inspected - the humiliation of the dictator-prisoner which made the world laugh - from Pres. Bush on down - these images, & the world's response to them, were also appalling, for the same reason.

I've circled around these little problems all my life. But sitting out in the backyard, reading a tanned paperback of an old Eric Ambler novel (ca. 1937: Background to Danger), it occurred to me once again, that I've never changed, I've always been a slightly effete bookworm, a reader, not a doer, while my whole family is predicated on doing, doing, doing, and this is, in fact, the secret of a mens sano corpore whatever.

Hamlet & A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (did I get that right?) & Don Quixote - perhaps the greatest literary works of all. & what are they about? Sickly writer types, who "lose the name of action". Frustrated dreamers.

Dynamic symmetry, golden section... the new spring growth of Nature... applies to this narcissism-mirror-problem too.

Mim-mim-mim-Mom & Sis-mimesis. the ultimate st-st-stutter.

I had to interrupt the previous blogosition to let Pushkin the cat outside (it is nice evening here, & he was whining).

My God, my God, my whole weird life has pivoted on this hair's-breadth. I am not kidding, nay, not one bit.

The poetry of Shakespeare & the Bible drove me out of college into the wilderness. The poetry of the NY School got me into college (Ted Berrigan imitations : he grew up a couple miles from my alma mater).

Zen & the Art of Information Maintenance.

voice/text
art/knowledge

Gospel: Jesus (the Nazir - not the "Nazarene", but the Nazir, the ecstatic singer-prophet) - speaking of the future, says, offhandedly: "Knowledge shall increase." Oh, heart/mind. Logos/pathos/ethos. Mimesis vs. analysis.

One of the best books I've ever received was a gift from a carpenter-photographer high school friend, who dropped out of college in the early 70s & came to NY to get into the art scene: The Nazarene : Studies in New Testament Exegesis, by Eugenio Zolli, Univ. of Rome (publ. Herder, 1950). On the Hebrew/Aramaic context of the poetics of the parables.

In my blunt statement about poetry & academia, I neglected to mention a third (& mediating) factor: the enthusiasm for knowledge, the pleasure involved, shared alike by teacher, student, poet. "Poetry is the scholar's art." (right, Wally. He also said that academic poets were "kept men".)

Yet knowledge & poetry ain't the same, eggzackly (as JL, whose comments instigated this thread, points out). The original NY School can be understood as a sophisticated effort to do an end run around the professionalization of poetry, which was promoted by Eliot, Allen Tate (whose style strikes me immediately as that of a canny academic imitation of Hart Crane) & the New Critics (Janus Face of Modernism, an excellent study of the Crane/Tate dynamic & its aftermath: I forget the author's name, unfortunately...).

Poetry is the sabbath-day of consciousness. Pleasure & rest & fluent bright activity all at once. The only thing didactic about it is what is didactic about every thing : every thing teaches by example.

So what's all this about the relations between the academy & poetry writing?

Seems like the academy is one of the sources of socially-sponsored, officially-accredited writing. It gets this authority, obviously, due to its assignment to teach the young. Teaching requires books & knowledge; a school is, for one thing, a publishing (book-sponsoring) & book-collecting center.

Poets also make books, & teach too, in a way. So you can see how a symbiotic relationship occurs there.

I suppose a major element in the development of a meaningful artistic style involves finding a way to avoid, overturn, deny such authorization. Why? Because formal education is one thing, and the school of hod nicks is another. These two also have a symbiotic relationship. Teachers bring to school what they learn on the outside: if they didn't, school would be even more boring than it is. Poetry has to come from outside, too.

Excised fussy whine from previous post. Probably too late: sorry, dear bloggoner [sigh].

Catalogue of Comedic Novelties : a good title for 20th-cent. poetics. I've met Lev Rubinstein a few times, & heard him perform at the Hoboken conferences (Russ-Amer poetry). He's quite slight, like a baby bird, about 5 ' tall. Elena Shvarts' twin, actually. (They don't eat enough over there, sadly, & they smoke too much.) Remember the two of them walking together up the NJ sidewalk in close conversation, like a couple of pigeons.

As Shvarts & Rubinstein, so Acmeism & Futurism. Not one without the other. (Stravinsky & Shostakovich?)

When I practiced piano on the old upright in the ancient blue-green living room, my back was directly facing the screen door (mentioned in previous poem). Heidi Johnson (blonde daughter of chicken farmer Dale) would usually be practicing too, across the street: sometimes we sent each other musical signals.

IN MENDELSSOHN


 
 
The little forsythia in the shade of the fence
is losing its gold sheen already.  The only
sign of spring in Mendelssohn: when
we tumbled through the screen door
without our coats.  Light green, it glows
now in thought like an icon, beckoning.

 
Like ancient priests with their rituals
or primitive soldiers hypnotized for war
we were sleepwalkers – playing, playing.
The bold spring sun infused each one
with silliness, joy, anarchy – with 
daring leaps, with fledgling flights.

 
I lounge now in the old backyard
like a dried-up husk or hollow pupa,
papery wasp's nest.  The sun still
shines in Mendelssohn – awake, awake...
We were dreaming then.  I’m sleepy
now (my only desire: to dream again).

An "incarnational" poetics, which is what I'm concerned with, would circle around this asymmetrical symbiosis (voice & text) - but with a different emphasis from that of the postmodernists, post-structuralists, etc. A different "reading" of the evidence of experience, a different notion of what the poet is about.

I know this sounds simplistic, polemical, unfair. It is. But these are tendencies, not sharply-drawn distinctions. & I'm just trying to resolve my own problems of composition & style.

Between ordinary speech and literary artifice : always this balancing act.

Didacticism of the Moderns (Pound, Eliot). Contemporary poets inherited from them the notion that experiment & technique are something separable and to be acquired. I think earlier poets considered these things something you learn in your apprenticeship & don't talk about too much.

Why? Because in the older sense of style, the aim was a holistic impression - a seamless unity of voice, manner, technique, subject. The complex becomes simple and the simple is complex; the poem resolves itself into a singleness, a unified impression, a whole.

Why I'm attracted to poets like Stevens & Crane, who are sceptical about the idea that technique + novelty = originality.

Sent another bird-clock to Elena Shvarts in St. Petersburg. Apparently she had a fire in her building, lost a lot of books & personal things, including the bird-clock & little blue & white wooden bathtub ocean liner, Sophie, which my mother had made 50 years ago.

[p.s. addendum, 5.18.07 : years later, my mother's wooden boat was lost forever in a major fire in Elena Shvarts' apt. Ah, Russia!]

feeling a little better about the poetry today.

perhaps I should build on those very elements that seem out of style at the moment: simplicity, clarity, ordinary speech, the lack of flashy & baroque "technique". ars est celare artem.

Profound discouragement. Must take deep breath & continue making same mistakes.

Responding to John Latta's notes on "ambiguous figures":

yes, the characteristic quality of poetry is its reflexivity (its way of being something rather than simply pointing to something); but the shortcoming of so much postmodern poetry is that it simply turns this into a dichotomy ("poetry must not be mimetic since it is reflexive, self-mirroring"). What happens then is it gets further and further from ordinary experience & feeling, accenting its function as intellectual game.

The real puzzle, it seems to me, is how poetry can be both mimetic & reflexive.

How come I never heard of the poet Susan Stewart? duh... thanks, Ron Silliman. She looks very good, from the few samples I've read on his links.

Interesting article this morning in Times science section, about film diva Hedy Lamarr. Did you know that (along with being "the most beautiful woman in the world") during WW 2, with composer-friend Georges Antheil, Lamarr developed a radio-jamming device based on randomly changing frequencies - they called it "frequency hopping" - which would utilize linked pairs of player piano scrolls - one in the ship, one in the torpedo? & that they patented this & took it to the Navy, which eventually classified it? & that the idea helped lead to aspects of internet & cellphone technology? & that Lamarr was given a Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997?

In a black mood lately. Trying to think positively about this: maybe it's the sign of a new direction. This has happened before.

The poems written in the last month, for the most part, are well-meaning & workmanlike, but also quite stuffy, stodgy, giving the impression of forced effort. With a couple weeks' distance they feel alien & clunky.

Seems like I've lived several lives in poetry already. Sometimes the mountain seems too large & cold to move.

When I'm in this mood it's better for me not to observe the "scene" at all.

It's a good thing I can play some music. Five of us now: piano, guitar, fiddle, accordion, harmonica, jaw harp, saw (yes, saw), kazoo, jug, washboard, bass (have started playing bass, finding it fun). We're sounding very jug-zydeco-afro-pop.

Though this too is just a distraction... "nobody knows the trouble I've been."