Brent Cunningham posted this in one of the comment boxes below:

"I wanted to express some doubt that you could support what seems to be a component of your counter-argument to Ron, namely the idea that the Futurists weren't a central influence on the Formalists. Shklovsky anyway never misses a chance to champion Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky especially, & does connect the formalist method of literary analysis to futurist compositional strategies--this is very clear in VS's Mayakovsky & His Circle (where he writes "I was a Futurist at that time," i.e. 1915) and elsewhere. I'd say the Formalists analyze Doestoevsky or Pushkin as application of their method, but the method itself finds much inspiration in Futurist principles: the valuing of science and the mechanical, the sense of the primacy of component parts, the contempt for Symbolist mystification and transcendence, and also just personal friendship with that older generation. Tho he is maybe not a formalist (tho in many ways a formalist-linguist perhaps?), Roman Jakobsen's My Futurist Years also makes clear the personal and intellectual effect Mayakovsky had on his immediate circle.

Certainly, there was more to it than Ron's crib--yes, naturally formalists intervention in lit crit took place in a different field, where there was a different history and different figures and different debates, etc., that's all true--but for a thumbnail it's not far: Futurism, and Mayakovsky looming as its main figure, was really the great tributary into Formalism, and provided much of the social and tactical inspiration.

Ron's sense of connection between Russian Formalism and the New Critics is, as you suggest, much more debatable. But at the same time it is quite striking, as one goes along reading Shklovsky or Tynanov, to run across so many ideas that are deeply resonant with positions held by Brooks or Warren etc. despite the difference in their politics. Ewa Thompson has a whole book on this from 1971 that is worth looking at."

This is a serious challenge, & it got me to go down to the library today & look into the history of Russian Formalism - for which I'm grateful to Brent. And, after looking at some of the scholarly work on this, I have to agree that the Futurist poets, primarily Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, were closely affiliated with the Russ. Formalists - at least, with some of them - during their early (pre-Soviet) years. The Moscow wing was closer to the Futurists - the circle in Petersburg, however - primarily Boris Eikhenbaum - seem to have been more interested in the Acmeists.

However, these issues are extremely complicated. "Thumbnails" - mine included - easily become reductive distortions. It would be a mistake to project a kind of genetic or domino-theory description of the emergence of Formalism out of Futurism. Many of the ideas which the Futurists & Formalists shared - about the emphasis on the signifier, the autonomy of art from biography or social sentiment etc. - were in the air : one only has to point to the parallel genesis of abstraction in the visual arts during the same period. Moreover, even some of the most "avant-garde" Futurist assertions about the nature of poetry actually echo trends from the fin-de-siecle & decadent-symbolist styles which preceded them. (There's a good monograph on this topic, which I will try to locate.)

In other words, it would be a mistake to look at Mayakovsky as the "father" of the critical movement known as formalism. The poets & the critics shared some common interests and judgements, for a time. Then the critics moved on to refine & apply their theories to literature at large; and both movements traveled toward eventual destruction by Stalinism & soviet realism in the 30s.

So I will have to withdraw, partially, #1 of my proposed list of necessary logical props for Ron's original statement. But #2-4 still stand. First, the New Criticism and Russian Formalism are better described as parallel 20th-century developments, than as a genetic development of the former from the latter. Second, the relation between the New Criticism and Ron's School of Quietude is murky at best : if he's going to argue that the (soi-disant) School of Quietude has "nc roots", then he might as well say that Language Poetry does, too. Thirdly, to label poets like Auden or Lowell as among Brodsky's "School o'Quietude friends" is to misrepresent their work. Auden's neoclassical, social poetry displays the antithesis of New Critical dicta; Lowell's work, after Life Studies, differentiates itself also - toward autobiography, documentary, social chronicle.

All this nit-picking is out of proportion to the sheer nonsense of Ron's "thumbnail" depiction of Brodsky's career, these ersatz ironies. But if it leads myself and others toward a more detailed investigation of Russian poetics & literary history, I have him & Brent to thank. & I find it continually curious to have these debates, with their very faint and distended echoes of the original battles between Symbolist & Acmeist, Acmeist & Futurist, Potebnia-disciples & Formalists. What's ironic to me is that the debate takes place in the context of one of Ron's thumbnail biographical profiles (in which he specializes on his blog) : ie., the topic is molded, not by the literary, philosophical, philological or compositional problems in themselves, but by an author biography. Now this gets back to Kent Johnson's liminal presence in these debates, the way he harks back to ancient quarrels & hurt feelings on a Langpo trip to Leningrad, decades ago... because, considering the emphasis of the Futurists on the "word itself" - Khlebnikov's & Mayakovsky's insistence on the obliteration of the "author biography", the idea that "the poem is the only hero", and the poem itself is just "words as SOUNDS" (zaum) - when you get into this territory, you are getting into Kent Johnson territory : which is to say - away with these "thumbnail" promotion-demotions of individual writers!

So, in an odd & fairly primitive & definitely anachronistic American way, KJ & RS & HG are replaying Futurist/Acmeist debates. The Futurist demotion - in fact their scornful obliteration - of the bourgeois "author principle" & "literary tradition", played (for a while) into the hands of the general Russian-revolutionary zeitgeist - until their time of usefulness to the regime had passed. But the usefulness of such a demotion is still visible in the postmodern poetics coming out of Langpo and some other New American strains - and this usefulness, for his own poetics, is what propels Ron's Futurist-Formalist genealogy. Kent offers a more radical critique, regarding the consequences of such a theoretical move (in poetry). & I still stand with the Acmeists, more or less - unwilling to dispense either with "tradition", or with some purely poetic notion of "personhood", which has yet to be fully articulated.

Interesting op-ed piece in NY Times today about the value of fiction as opposed to (current favorite) memoirs.

I've tried doing that prose stuff, now & then. Started out writing short stories, in 8th grade or so. My first story was a satire on my school, The Blake School (which nomad Maria Damon visited recently). It featured a naive young knight named Miles Blakesley.

But I seem pretty addicted to poetry. It's the mumbling, I guess. Trouble is I'm scattered, numb from work, oldified, uninspired. Cain't make it cohere nohow, lately.

But I ain't given up, not just yet. Them Goulds is a stubborn bunch of mule-headed form farmers.

In case you hadn't noticed (I hadn't, until now) that postcard Providence view from Prospect Terrace, with a WPA Roger Williams extending his hand over the town (his feet are planted in the prow of a canoe) - next to my old photo from Paris, above - is an illustration for the poem I'm supposedly working on.

funny how these lines from the (very different) Brodsky poem, posted earlier, forecast what I'm fiddling with now :

Droning brittle wings, poets take their stations 
At the edge of the cliff – their noise intuitive, innate...

Thinking is one thing, mumbling another.

2.8.06

 
Panels of memory, superimposed
over the valley and the distant ridge
of the view from the terrace edge.
The land stretching out, a huge

 
hobo's supine shapelessness
bathed in light of day, insouciant
(an equilibrium, a universality
of possibility... your hopefulness).

 
I crawl through time there -
cenozoic troglodyte, fossilized.
Survey the incremental waste
regions - map thin air.

"Negative capability : the most lateral of lateral thinking," he mumbled (from the couch).

I fill up notebooks with ideas & plans, & it gets top-heavy. & then I have to start writing out of the side of my mouth.

Here's a new project, maybe, from LP (Lazarus Posthumous):

JUBILEE DIARY

 
2.7.06

 
The view stretches west from the bench
at Prospect Park.  The bench on the cliffside,
the statue at its edge, the edge of the wide
sundown horizon.  The dense hunch

 
of dunce Hen whispers : here commence.
Aloft, above roadside habitats,
drab clapboard rats'
establishments, Providence

 
triple-decker tenements.  Wayside
caves for every surrender (your
habitual morsels of remorse - those
broken seals of very spendthrift guys).

Joseph Brodsky has always stuck in the craw of American poetry scenesters. This guy comes in from Russia, becomes the darling of the anti-soviet establishment and literary lionizee, promotes metrical & rhymed "verse", Frost & Auden, writes mediocre poetry in English, and wins the Nobel Prize!

Sam Hamill wrote a long diatribe against Brodsky for APR about 20 yrs ago. Even though Hamill's probably "Quietude" to Ron, they both showed a similar political spin & knee-jerk resentment.

Jonathan on the Brodsky thread.

The comparison O'Hara/Auden/Mayakovsky is fun, but I think their differences outweigh their similarities.

As regards the rest of Jonathan's comments : I am really tired of this kind of criticism by insinuation, based on very slim knowledge, and even less fellow-feeling, with the poet in question. What Ron might have thought about what Brodsky might have thought about Mayakovsky - what is the point of this? A little research in the Brodsky archives might turn up a totally different, and far more interesting and informed, perspective on Mayakovsky/Brodsky. But we'd rather settle for myth, rumor, insinuation, and the other ingredients for the potential cooking up of literary slander.

It's not enough that Brodsky was, in his own country, an almost dissident-by-default (Jewish, somewhat independent) under a dictatorship, and sent into exile; we have to make efforts to "place" him aesthetically and politically with these little filaments of meaningless genealogy (N.C. to SoQ etc.) and these animadversions of political incorrectness (Brodsky, let it be noted, arrived in the U.S., with his suitcase from China & his rudimentary English, in the fall of 1972 - a little late and a little disconnected from the moral responsibilities of the Vietnam War).

Here's a link to some basic biographical information.

Seems fitting, this time of year, to post again my old contribution to the Yeats/Auden/Eliot/Brodsky elegy round-robin. (from Way Stations):

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 final section of this poem alludes to a Brodsky poem about a boy and a moth, which in turn alludes to a Nabokov short story. Oddly enough, the 2nd and 3rd sections of this poem were written before Brodsky died. The original version was not an elegy for Brodsky : the poem had opened with a section about my adolescent infatuation with Nabokov! So, when you consider that this elegy is part of a cycle of elegies - Auden for Yeats, Brodsky, echoing Auden, for TS Eliot - then this Nabokovian reference forms a second loop.

cf. Mandelstam (in a not-so-great, not-terrible translation) :

Sisters - Heaviness and Tenderness - you look the same.
Wasps and bees both suck the heavy rose.
Man dies, and the hot sand cools again.
Carried off on a black stretcher, yesterday’s sun goes.

 
Oh, honeycombs’ heaviness, nets’ tenderness,
it’s easier to lift a stone than to say your name!
I have one purpose left, a golden purpose,
how, from time’s weight, to free myself again.

 
I drink the turbid air like a dark water.
The rose was earth; time, ploughed from underneath.
Woven, the heavy, tender roses, in a slow vortex, 
the roses, heaviness and tenderness, in a double-wreath.

I've gotten into a tussle over Joseph Brodsky with Ron Silliman. This happens now and then in my life. I wrote a long letter to American Poetry Review back in the 80s, answering a particularly jaundiced attack on Brodsky in that magazine.

Here's the paragraph of Ron's with which I took issue:

"One of the great ironies of this sort of dismissal is that a Joseph Brodsky, whose solution was a return to the formal precision of pre-Soviet poetics & to abstain from collaborating with the aesthetic bureaucrats of his time, easily fell into the hands of the same sort of apparatchiks once he was able to come west. An even greater irony – the new critical roots behind Brodsky’s later School o’ Quietude friends could be traced back¹ to the Russian Formalists & their principle source of inspiration, old “Cloud in Trousers” Mayakovsky himself. Now that the old Soviet Union is no more, of course, they are constructing a monument to Brodsky in St. Petersburg."

(The "dismissal" referred to is Ron's notion that Mayakovsky is not given his critical due because of his affiliation with official Soviet literature.)

Let's have another look at this fascinating paragraph. First, Ron says that Brodsky's "solution" to soviet repression was a "return to the formal precision of pre-Soviet poetics". As I understand this, Ron is applying a familiar template from American poetry - i.e., that there is some sort of parallel between literary experimentalism and political engagement - to the Russian situation. But this does not hold up. The poets responsible for experiments in early 20th-cent. poetry in Russia cover the political spectrum, from Tsvetaeva's White-Russian royalism, to Mandelstam's gradual separation from the regime, to the otherworldliness of Khlebnikov, to Mayakovsky's revolutionary commitment (I don't know enough about Kruchenyk's politics to speak about him). To argue that Brodsky returned to a pre-soviet formalism as a political move, simply does not jibe with the facts. The Brodskian model was neither literary conservatism nor political withdrawal. He did not "abstain" from collaborating : he was sent to a labor camp at the age of 24 for "social parasitism", and his case became a Russian cause celebre when the bizarre transcript of his trial was written down by Nadezhda Mandelstam and published in samizdat. He was eventually released after a storm of public protest, and forced into exile in the West.

Brodsky's poetry developed gradually, and draws on many, many sources. To describe its development as a "return" to pre-soviet aesthetics is a myth. As I wrote earlier in Ron's comment box, Brodsky's most immediate mentors were soviet-era poets (Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva), one of whom (Tsvetaeva) was a tremendous innovator and literary experimentalist.

But let's move on to the next part of Ron's statement : [Brodsky] "easily fell into the hands of the same sort of apparatchiks once he was able to come west". Ron bases the supposed irony at play here on the notion that the established poets who helped him on his arrival in the West (most prominently, Auden) were somehow similar in social position and function to the officials in the Soviet government who deemed him "social parasite" and sent him to prison. Now it helps to have some knowledge of the particulars of Brodsky's trial & conviction in order to understand the full absurdity of Ron's comparison. There are a number of web sources available on that trial : here's one. But what he is implying is that literary figures & publishing organs of the West - those which helped Brodsky find a job, translated his work, helped make it known - were in fact equivalent in some way to the punitive organs of soviet repression : the ministers of propaganda, the censors, the jailers, etc. Without such an equivalence, there is no "irony".

This claim is a reading of literary history and politics which is so extreme, as to represent a kind of absurd, anachronistic soviet propaganda.

But let's move on to the next sentence: "An even greater irony – the new critical roots behind Brodsky’s later School o’ Quietude friends could be traced back¹ to the Russian Formalists & their principle source of inspiration, old “Cloud in Trousers” Mayakovsky himself."

Here we get into some inner workings of Ron's literary genealogy. It goes something like this : Brodsky's new Western friends were part of the School of Quietude camp; the SoQ has its roots in the New Criticism; NC has its roots in Russian Formalism; RF's principle source of "inspiration" was Mayakovsky. QED : the "father" of SoQ is really Mayakovsky! Brodsky's new "apparatchik" pals were really descended from the poet they reject (for his soviet affiliations)! Oh my, how ironic!

This is an example of a sort of idee fixe, which obsessively threads its pseudo-logical needle, without seeing the pattern of facts which contradict it.
What if:
1) Mayakovsky did not "inspire" the literary scholars who called themselves Russian Formalists - but that, rather, he was one among many of their literary objects of study?
2) The New Criticism was not some kind of genetic outgrowth of Russian Formalism, but rather a set of American critical theories & practices, which drew on RF among many other sources?
3) Ron's "School of Quietude" is not descended genetically from NC, but is rather a polemical grab-bag label applied to many kinds of contemporary poetry - including, for example, vast amounts of verse modelled on Lowell and the Confessionals - a poetics developed in direct opposition to the precepts of New Criticism?
4) Brodsky's main friends and mentors - Auden, Lowell, Walcott - practiced various modes and styles deeply at variance with the supposedly a-political, aesthetically self-contained modes promoted by the New Criticism? And, for that matter, deeply at odds with the practices Ron impugns as SoQ?

The fact is, all these "what ifs" are well-founded. There is a lot of evidence to support the historical truth of each one of them. Thus, Ron's interpretation of Brodsky's & Mayakovsky's literary-historical meaning for us seems to be based more on theory than on fact, on fantasy than on history. Thus the rationale for these "ironies" evaporates. We are left with a tendentious, mean-spirited complaint about a new statue for Brodsky, a quintessential Petersburg poet, being erected in his home town - from which he was exiled for life. After his forced removal to the West, he never saw his homeland (or his parents) again.

something mini-medieval from The Grassblade Light :

 17


  
 I built a way-too-delicate
 ship-in-a-bottle and threw it
 into the sea.  Was it Lucky
 or Sophie – or only

  
 Titanic ox taught to float
 too soon toward no one?
 A wheel was borne
 down to the delta (a

  
 paddle-wheeler, lazy
 catamaroon) into New
 Orleans, like an ark of J
 d'Esprit or some Degas

  
 jetty-gazetteer-in-brick
 Isaac molded for gargoyle
 atop Notre Dame.  Soil-
 heavy, a thrown-back

  
 blue-gill forehead-
 figured she-Marie or
 Rust & Rosie O'Green
 maybe – a Marian, sad-

  
 happy-again at the
 cap-tall pen-arcadia
 turkey-shoot.  A florid,
 a rapt – windjimmirror.

  
 Some medieval mother
 wounded by arrows.  Your
 forged seventh to the fourth is
 one loft-angle-barn green anchor.


      
                        6.9.99

... in the last pages of Stubborn, the "voice" of "Henry's father" suddenly breaks in for the first time. He talks about "going to his chamber" in Jerusalem.

Now this is a nod toward a very famous scene in Shakespeare, which you will have to hunt down for yourself. Happy Candlemas Day.

... bringing me to the diagram with which I began the previous post.

What might a "neo-medieval" reading of Stubborn Grew/The Rose (Forth of July) involve?

ut pictura poiesis. Most of my long poems have paintings all through them. (My mother is an artist - I grew up with the smell of turpentine & canvases.)

Think of poetry as occupying a middle ground between painting and the unrepresentable (God's name, Simone Weil's "decreation"). Ekphrasis : in two directions at once.

Chinese characters/brush strokes.

Stubborn begins and ends with "J". (Bluejay : the bird, the man; Juliet, Jonah ["dove", sister-dove], Julie, July, Jubilee, Jerusalem...)

"J", the letter, comes from "i", iota, jot, yhod : the smallest letter of the Hebrew script, maybe going back to Egyptian/Phoenician pictograph for "hand" or "arm". In Hebrew, it's the 10th letter, the smallest letter (jot or tittle), a little dot or black wing-stroke or swirl. A J-swirl.

The whole poem can be understood as an ekphrasis-expansion from the letter J. (When I was beginning to write it, I was heavily influenced by a particular Melville study, titled Game of Creation, by Viola Sachs, which goes into the scriptorial letter-symbolism deeply encrypted into Moby Dick.) A Book of J.

This practice is maybe a new-old kind of neo-medieval classicism : in which the individual imagination is not stifled by dogma, but tempered by the necessary impossibility of representing the Invisible, the Unspeakable.

some hobo thoughts on "neo-medievalism" :

                imagination

      
      poetry         +        painting

              
               natural vision

Nicolas of Cusa, or Nicolas Cusanus, the 15th-cent. philosopher/theologian, is a good psychopomp for neo-medievalism. A liminal figure : both medieval mystic and renaissance humanist, and not quite either. (See poem posted a couple days ago.)

The notion of God's incomprehensibility, un-representability, was curiously empowering, rather than limiting. Like a precursor of Vico, Cusanus imagined a "human universe" : all our conceptions & images of the divine are irrevocably, foolishly human. Thus his doctrine of "Learned Ignorance".

We cannot "represent" God, yet we are (through the Incarnation) God's representatives in human form. Thus God, for both Cusanus & St. Paul, is paradoxical : the "conjunction of opposites" (Paul's "cross").

In neo-medievalism, the confidence of (a somewhat absurd) faith resolves the dilemmas which dogged the poets of Neo-Classicism, Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism, Postmodernism... how so? Because it's a faith like that of Cusanus : it sanctions, rather than denies, the human imagination.

The Romantic poets tended (on a sort of scale from middling to extreme) to exalt and triumph in the human Imagination and the human Self. The Victorians & the Moderns tended to hedge that triumph in - with irony, doubt, despair, scepticism, science, or dogmatic religion.

The Neo-medievals (I must find a better name for them : perhaps Groundhogs?) recognize that there is no dogmatic (or artistic, or philosophical) formula to resolve the dialectic between the human and the divine, between Self and Other. It is a paradox; a conjunction; a symbiosis; a ping-pong.

The self is always in dialogue : the "son" with the "father", the body with the soul. A Person is a relationship. Candlemas is Groundhog Day. More paradox!

(p.s. : I understand, & I truly sympathise, with those for whom this all seems like meaningless or worse-than-meaningless religious mumbo-jumbo mystification. But ever since my "Shakespeare thing", I have lived not only in a "human" universe, but a universe suffused with Personality.)

somebody at the bookstore told me that today is Candlemas. Midwinter day.

HG Poetics : Candlemas

Groundhog Poetics : Groundhog Day

This is the day that, in prehistoric times, little cave children dressed up as groundhogs and dug little caves for themselves inside the big family cave. Just at sunset, they would hop out and yell "prolegomena!" - which was the origin of both Candlemas and epic poetry.

Groundhog Poetics : the inverse of HG poetics.

HG poetics is about the obsessions & obsessional behavior of verbalist HG.

Groundhog poetics is a projection of these obsessions onto Everybody Poet.

HG Poetics is elitist; Groundhog Poetics is egalitarian. HG Poetics is like Chartres Cathedral; Groundhog Poetics is like the bus terminal.

Will ever the twain meet shall?

Check back in 6 weeks.

Reviews of my books tend to alternate in (roughly) 30-year cycles. Back in '79 I got a very positive review of my first book. This one, in '06, is faintly damning. So hang on to your hats - there should be another positive one coming along around 2040.

Simon DeDeo reviews Dove Street. & this is the first review I've gotten in 30 years. I'm glad it's not an excerpt from a blurb.

His take on it seems to quote (without attribution) from this stanza:

  Under the Bruegel-skies of late November
  a hobo stumbles on, hunched-over, broken-
  down, his fortunate misfortune taking on
  a common nature – weathered, as it were.

...an illustration, from Dove Street (apologies for repetition):

NICHOLAS OF CUSA, SAILING HOME

     
       Never suppose an inventing mind as source
       Of this idea nor for that mind compose
       A voluminous master folded in his fire.

 
He was on board ship, sailing from Byzantium
when the moment of illumination came, a flash
of light that staggered him (as happened to Paul
on the Damascus road): when he understood
there can be no ratio, no means of comparison,
no middle term, between the finite and the infinite.
Thus, since God is infinite, we have no means
of knowing Him (invisible, incommensurate); so,
as Paul says, If any man thinks he knows anything,
he has not yet known as he ought to know.
It follows then, for Nicholas (De Docta Ignorantia)
our proper study is, to understand our ignorance.

 
I think of him in Constantinople, looking up
into that limpid sphere, that massive cupola,
Hagia Sophia: gazing back at those gigantic eyes:
Christos Pantokrator, hovering there, magnificent
in lapis lazuli, translucent marble.  He would 
have known that, even then, all-conquering armies
of the Pasha were encroaching on the city gates;
had swept away, already, the last flimsy shreds 
of once-almighty Christian Rome – history itself 
grown incompatible with that triumphant
image glaring down.
                     I cannot know You
as You are.  But when I think of you
I think of Bruegel panoramas: there’s Mankind
(a little, furry, muddy, peasant thing – yet
at home upon the earth – its caretaker – self-
conscious, quick – inventive builder, gardener –
blind governor – your tarnished mirror);
and, as he painted in The Road to Calvary,
you hide amongst us, suffering servant, near
the center of our troubles: buried in the crowd:
one of the roughs (disguised, in camouflage, 
unknown).

Busy with work & worries these days.

I seem to have the sort of mind, if you can call it that, which has to circle around & re-invent the same problems/solutions over & over again.

Like, mainly, the question of God.

These days am trying to get into a long-poem (or simply poem) writing state again. Many causes for discouragement; but it's even more discouraging not to be writing at all, so...

I'm in favor of a sort of neo-medieval sensibility, I guess. Medieval in a good way, that is (there are lots of bad ways too, as we know).

What do I mean by that?

Well, to my way of thinking, the "solution" to the mystery of God's existence/non-existence rests in a concept of what Mankind is.

We have trouble imagining a "personal" God : but there is a way to do it. It has to do with extrapolating from what we know about the personal or personality or personhood in a human sense.

It's a matter of admitting our ignorance : we don't know clearly, or we know only in a very dream-like or subjective sense, what a person really, substantially, is. But we experience persons.

God resides somewhere in the "transcendent" or supernatural realm of personhood.

This, if one can accept it (provisionally), changes how we perceive existence, reality, as a whole. A subjective, personal element is infused.

This is extremely difficult for the modern, "scientific", sceptical mind to accept. In fact it's easy to read it as absurd.

But there is a way of interpreting experience, reality, existence which incorporates this notion (of human & divine personhood). This is what I'm calling "neo-medieval". It could also be seen as an analogical or symbolic or "literary" reading of Nature.

It's possible to see Mankind on earth in terms of a divine/symbolic ecology.

Again, it's a matter of extrapolating or analogizing.

If you consider human consciousness & presence on earth as an anomaly - what makes it so?

Think about this. This is at the conceptual root of the analogical notion of Imago Dei (man as "image" of God). & that is at the root of "neo-medieval" vision.

To many it will sound like I'm talking in circles, talking nonsense, talking non sequitur, talking talking. So be it.

When you read, as I read in the Victorian and Modern Poetics book noted below, about how the famous Moderns (Yeats, Pound, Eliot, in her telling) in substantial ways repeated the formulae of the Victorians (Hallam, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, Pater), and that both generations were still struggling with the dilemmas and ambiguities bequeathed by the Romantic poets (the status of the imagination; solipsism and objectivity; sensation, will and intellection; discourse vs. "the picturesque"; aesthetics and didacticism; etc.) -

well, I know this sounds awfully boring, but...

actually I draw the lesson that the vocation of the poet - & the techniques of poetry - are still very much in play :

& that there are a lot of interesting avenues a poet can take, if in an adventurous and problem-solving mood -

the game is poorly described by the ponderous & pedantic theoreticians of the day (& I'm not talking about Ron Silliman here : but rather of the philosophers & "theory" mongers) -

a panoptical, literary-historical perspective - from within the actual practice of the poets - is more helpful, maybe -

The bohemian and the primitif : two very different animals. Enemies, almost.

John Kinsella translates Rimbaud's poem "Larme" [tear] in the recent issue of Poetry magazine.

The poem employs a number of "conceits" to (simultaneously) narrate & conceal the story that young Arthur spent a lot of time in the woods, and that while he was there, he got drunk on sunlight.

The poem sort of jars with the book I'm reading about Victorian & Modern Poetics, which begins with a history of the dramatic monologue, the persona, as a technique shared for varied reasons by poets from Browning & Tennyson through Swinburne & Wilde.

Rimbaud as far as I know never projected a persona. He was a sort of french Whitman, apparently - naturally endowed with literary savoir-faire.

Poets of the 19th & 20th centuries (& 21st, I guess) assume various counter-cultural and bohemian poses - which are, paradoxically, very limiting. (C. Christ discusses this.) The mask, the dramatic monologue, the persona - for these poets - counterbalances the (bohemian) pose.

This is complicated, I know.

Hart Crane tried to juggle all these elements - but he seems pretty close to Rimbaud in a number of ways. They were both extremely tough, in an odd way.

Rimbaud rejected both the sophisticated, hypocritical, "dramatic" literary world of the poseur, & the Rousseau-ish romance of a narrated childhood. For Rimbaud, childhood was too real, too profound, too immense for sophistry.

I guess something similar could be said for Proust. (Proust prevailed against all the febrile worries about "personality" & "subjectivity" & "narcissism" etc. which beset the 19th century. He only talked about himself.)

Started reading an interesting (& nice & short) study by Carol T. Christ, published by U. Chicago Press back in 1984, titled Victorian and Modern Poetics. (Book was referenced in the Langdon Hammer Crane/Tate book.) Explores the extensive continuities between Moderns & Victorians (despite pervasive & very influential Eliot/Pound attacks on their predecessors).

Both literary generations wrote in shadow of the Romantics : that is, within a practice of poetry which focused on, & represented, a personal/imaginative response to the external world. Both were wary of the individualism and subjectivity of this approach, and tried to find ways to counter it.

Just getting into it. Maybe such a panoptic perspective will help me write some more mini-essays at some point.

Two incredibly good poems by Rimbaud in latest issue of Poetry, translated by John Kinsella. They stopped me in my tracks, so to speak.

Children should be taught how to write from, say, first grade through junior high school. After that, teaching should focus solely on how to read.

Poetry is for dilettantes and amateurs, sorry. Others need not apply.

The Thousand and One Nights is, I guess (I'm not an expert), structured on the idea of saving life by wasting time : idling it away with stories-within-stories, told to keep the tyrant amused - distracted.

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

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

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

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

Responding in part to Robert A.'s interesting post on public/private manners & mannerisms:

Here's a passage from an essay that TS Eliot published in The Egoist in 1919 (& never republished):

"This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with a passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person...
...We may not be great lovers, but if we had a genuine affair with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love... We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition."

- this is quoted in Langdon Hammer's Hart Crane & Allen Tate, as part of his history of Crane/Tate/Eliot's ambiguous-subliminal erotic psychologies. Crane responded (as a gay man) to this early Eliot; Tate, on the other hand, to the reserved, impersonal, authoritative Eliot of "Tradition and the Individual Talent".

I post this to point to the contrast between this, on the one hand, and the informal, relaxed familiarity of the NY School approach (which RA describes). Poet-friendships, there, are not surrounded by an aura of ambiguity, romance & taboo.

This "demotic" attitude seems connected with the general relaxation (or vulgarization) of sexual mores : the taboos have broken down.

The idea that private name-dropping in poems, etc., impinges on the boundaries of traditional public speech is true in more ways than one.

I think it's possible to send private, personal messages & public messages - separately - in one and the same poem. The overuse of obviously private messages seems kind of slack, in a way. But it may also be a realistic acknowledgement of the limits of a poet's reach & impact. & it reflects, back to us, the quality of our own private lives.

Eliot's passage above, by the way, seems like a script for my own comically-representative experience (I mean Mandelstam's impact, & the "Shakespeare episode"). Shakespeare's ambiguously erotic & narcissistic sonnets literally knocked the wind out of me - & threw me back into the Biblical fold.

Oddly, Eliot here seems sane & healthy to me. He's talking about love, not "eros" or sex (hence his phrase, "we may not be great lovers" - funny). Love may involve passionate erotic energies, but it's not only that. Contemporary mores often simply reduce love to eros.

One of the old, "pre-epic" poems in Way Stations, which (in very partial illustration of previous post) contains a kind of vow to Mandelstam:

 
  The wind exhaled, this world
  sprawled – a spring disaster, flocks of embraces
  in the garage, under the oil refineries
  hospitable sirens, waltzing on broken silver.

   
  And night deepened around the temple,
  a yellow-black wafer, crust for the swans;
  and the wind circled the olives, a morning watch
  all night by the Kedron, all day by Euphrates.

   
  And we'll meet again by the wintry river
  where we swaddled the sun in a double wreath,
  cedar and lilac, tangled in a knot of beaten
  gold – sea-roses, breathing in Jerusalem.

(sounds like an OM poem passed through an Eliot-modifier)

So... I guess when I think about my own long poems & what I have tried to do, I fall somewhere in between the paths laid out by Crane & Eliot -

since I tried to carry on with Crane's affirmative-visionary stance, yet I share, in certain ways, Eliot's faith.

My whole poetry life has oscillated between, & tried to integrate, faith & imagination, faith & poetry - since the days of the "Shakespeare ghost" (1973).

& since it was my response to Mandelstam which set in motion the terms of that synthesis, he has remained the key to the "plot" of my long poems.

So... if somebody ever takes the trouble to read, seriously, Stubborn Grew, and The Rose, & the other things, they will find out what I am talking about. (All handy over there at Lulu !)

It has to do with seeing poetry as one door to inward or spiritual renewal, & the renewal of time & history in that light. & it has to do with an interpretation of faith which is in most ways diametrically opposite the stance taken by Eliot & Tate & the other conservative religionist-poets.

If you look into my long poems, you'll see a "ghost dance", where the impulses & writings of Whitman, Melville, Twain, Poe (& others) are aligned with those of Crane, Mandelstam, Berryman (& others) to represent a sort of symbolic "epic America-Russia" (RUS-US), rooted in Crane's, Melville's & Whitman's awareness and acknowledgement of the American Outcast as the spiritual key to America. Where Eliot & Tate experience their faith as a kind of spiritual hierarchy, separating them from modern life, I understand the Biblical tradition as a prophetic framework, or verbal model, for human equality and mutuality. (Melville's Ecuadorian doubloon nailed to the mast of the Pequod; Mandelstam's "gold coins of humanism".)

But my long poems have yet to be read & taken seriously, I guess. I went into a tunnel for about 8 years in order to prepare for & write them. So that made it more difficult for me to write short poems, or interact, as poet, in the magazine culture.

"Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay." That's how it starts.

I meant "moral substance" in previous post in a vague sense. What I'm thinking of, I guess, are artistic or aesthetic approaches which do not intentionally close off moral-ethical ramifications, or meanings in general. Such intentional hermeticism has always been an option for poets and schools of poetry, to one degree or another. A defensive maneuver. You can see it in the so-called "decadent" aesthetes of the 19th-century fin de siecle; in some versions of Imagism; in New Critical valorizations of the autonomous "aesthetic object"; in aspects of the NY School; in latter sections of The Maximus Poems; in Language Poetry & other postmodernisms.

You can see it also, in a way, in the bourgeois-boho, fashionable epicureanism which Robert Archambeau recently analysed. What he describes is certainly not hermeticism : but it's a set of cultural codes which restrict artistic implications to a very narrow range.

I am not trying to criticize these defensive aspects of poetic practice just for the sake of being negative. I have practiced them in many ways in my own writing. Rather I'm trying to make room for the recognition of other possibilities, other avenues - the kind of thing that Langdon Hammer attributes to Hart Crane's project (which was over-compensatory & extreme in its own way). I mean the approaches akin to what is referred to as (or used to be called) "seriousness", "the grand style", epic, heroic poetry.

Any substantially affirmative poetry would have to be willing & able to grapple with the deepest, the most unbearable, the most intractable evils & sufferings & injustice.

This is the problem with blogging - you feel the urge to respond before you've thought things through. I want to respond to Bob Archambeau & Mark Scroggins & Ange Mlinko & Josh Corey & Ron Silliman all at once... but I can't put it togedda!

I want to tell Bob that I still have misgivings about the grid project, since it seems like some kind of critical trespass, an over-reaching into the domain of the poets. How so? Well, for one thing, because there is a quiddity & a particularity to individual poets & their work which is more than the sum of their placement on a chart; in fact, perhaps the central literary strategy, for some of them, has consisted in transgressing the boundaries of previous charts! How does that fit into the snowflake?

More importantly, the grid is a power-move. It reifies poetry, & in so doing, achieves its own (upper-hand) purposes. The aims and teleologies of individual poets, paradoxically, often transcend literature-as-system. The grid, on the other hand, boxes them in (to a critical GPS location).

But I'm repeating myself.

& what I really want to talk about is the L. Hammer book, & Hart Crane, & the meaning of it all. But I can't. It's too complicated.

Eliot, Allen Tate, the New Critics : they tried to create a new version of pure poetry, of Symbolism, of autotelic art. Under the sign of a backward-looking, authoritarian (anti-democratic) religious perspective. It was a neo-classicism, which rejected Romantic-humanist-renaissance notions of world-renovation and the (Blakean) power of the imagination.

Crane was their opponent & their scapegoat.

The poetry movements of the 50s and after broke up the NC monopoly. Now poetry was personalized, democratized, psychologized. At the same time, the institutional "craft" approach of the New Critics helped establish academic support for the newly-popular poetry professions.

Underlying the turmoil and spiritual angst of the 20th century was a philosophical problem : what is the relation between reason & faith? Between logic and imagination? The Enlightenment never completely resolved the deeper issues, which stem from medieval and archaic (prehistoric) times, having to do with the human conceptualization of what is real (myth? superstition? faith? science? rationalism? realpolitik?) The modernist quarrels over the proper attitude toward art & poetry are really only epiphenomena of these deeper unresolved issues.

Now we have a broad-based popular many-sided poetry scene, with no official dogma and much uncertainty. As I understand it, however, there are two fundamentals which underly the good poems. These are:

1. Pure literary skill. The best poetry displays an awareness of past efforts, and re-makes them - with its own originality, elegance, intelligence, beauty, pathos. It carries forward without losing or denying the past; instead, it wins the past for the present. (This is part of the platform of literary (Russian) Acmeism.)

2. Moral substance. The poetry gives evidence of a personality, engaged with human problems, above & beyond the functional, acquisitive, superficial values of someone else's (debased) measure of literary prestige. This poetry, in contrast, reveals its own inherent values. It may do so with great malice and spite : but it shows awareness, nevertheless. It aspires to ends beyond itself - within itself.

It may have to keep very quiet, considering the braying noise of the jumpy & yakkety culture surrounding it.

Then again, it may find a way to be epic & heroic again. This is what Crane proposed, and tried to achieve : a new grand style, a contemporary form of spiritual affirmation through the poetic Word. That (neo-Romantic) aspiration is what the neo-religious poets (Eliot, Tate, Winters et al.) found so threatening. In a sense, they were searching, too : but in the climate of the 1st half of the 20th-century, for those aspiring snobs, only a very dogmatic and reactionary religious attitude seemed possible. It was a time of war on all fronts.

But the religious (and, equally, anti-religious) imagination can work synthetically, too - with reason, with imagination, with individuality, with communal norms and laws. It reconciles these things, shows them to be still viable, makes Earth a veritable home.

I think this was a basis for Crane's generally positive, yea-saying, visionary attitude. I think John Berryman, also, was working, terribly and agonizingly, & humorously, in this direction - toward freeing himself, toward spiritual liberation. His late poetry encapsulates, sums up that struggle.

It's the autonomous strength of the imagination - Stevens' giant, Stevens' lion - which carries both the threat and the redemption. Because faith only becomes nourishment (that is, truly reasonable) when the imagination can assimilate and accept it; and only the imagination dares come close to expressing the (dangerously) inexpressible.

Very interesting post over here today.

Robert's approach seems to parallel what Langdon Hammer does (in Hart Crane & Allen Tate) with respect to an earlier generation. I mean he looks at the relation between a poet's ambition to address (or create) a certain social class of reader, a social group with certain habits & assumptions - and the effects of this ambition on style, subjects, philosophical attitudes.

I wonder if that "pebble cabinet" I liked so much in the Guggenheim Russian show was, in part, a sly nod to Mandelstam. There are so many "stone" & pebble images & themes running through his poetry! The "stone fallen from heaven", the stones along the Black Sea shore, the "unloved grey pebble" (unknown soldier), the sand sifted from hand to hand (in the poem for Tsvetaeva), the stones of Roman builders & other architecture, the title of his first book (Kamen, "stone", acronym for AKME), and so on.

Sarah's German tutor (from Russia) gave us a box of (terrible) Voronezh chocolates for the holidays - she said "Henry will like them". Well, I liked the brand name. I asked Sarah to bring my copy of the Voronezh Notebooks to class tonight, & have her read the last poem out loud ("To Natasha Shtempel") in Russian. I hope it wasn't too much to ask.

Those obscure liminal charismatic experiences, when I was around 19, probably helped protect me from the literature industry. One of the things Harry Howe said at the time has stuck with me : "It's because you're a poet, and you can't deal with it yet."

The years when I gave up trying to write, & went into community organizing. I have a master's degree in that. One of the signal aspects of my poetry is that it came out of a slow return to writing, by way of Russian poetry. Everything written after 1975 - and that means everything except one college chapbook & a few scattered college & high school poems - stems ultimately from Mandelstam. Even my interest in Crane, which led to my interest in long poems.

(Oddly, though, there was Nabokov, even before then. In my high school lit mag (Talisman) for 1969 or '70, there's a little prose sequence which is a primitive pastiche of Nabokov. In one scene, some school friends jokingly re-enact scenes from War & Peace in the snow in a Minnesota park. So those Russkies were always lurking nearby.)

Now, thanks to changes in communications technology, I have my little literary niche here, even if no one publishes me other than myself. I'm privileged. I have my day job in a well-stocked Ivy League library on the East Coast.

Which has its costs, too. Now, when I go around scrappy old Providence, I'm seeing scenery from my youth - those affects & experiences of a rougher world, slowly thinned-out by the routine of a campus sinecure.

That kind of (political) dissonance could be the motor for a whole cycle of epic poems. I mean the distance between the old me & the young, between the campus & the town, between this street & that street, between the known & the unknown. So Ulysses measures the distance between Joyce & his father, between Dedalus & Bloom.

Jeffrey Bahr writes:

"I've posted a challenge to any who would engage seriously in the attempt to -- if not reconcile, then at least identify the goals -- among the disparate views of what poetry is, should be, must do."

Tall order. Definition is power. Criticism creates the vocabulary and context for understanding & reception. With such a large abstraction ("poetry") fitted out to explain such a diverse phenomenon, the resulting contention is inevitable.

Langdon Hammer's book mentioned here yesterday presents a sort of close-sociological comparative analysis of the interrelated careers of Crane, Tate & Eliot. Hammer starts out by demystifying some of the reactionary-traditionalist rhetoric offered by some of the big Moderns, Eliot & Pound in particular. Rather than looking at them as defenders of tradition, or backward-looking medievalist-traditionalists, Hammer tries to show how they were pioneers of literature's New Class : entrepreneurs in the business of culture. He talks about how their differing attitudes toward established sources of cultural reception (Eliot's embrace of English establishment, Pound's opposite tack) influenced the amazingly contrastive outcomes of their careers (Eliot the lauded Nobel prizewinner; Pound the jailed treasonous crackpot).

He then looks at the differing responses of Hart Crane & Allen Tate to the cultural atmosphere which Eliot did so much to invent. I'm just getting into this section of the book. He contrasts Eliot's (& Stevens') ability to separate making a living from their identities & prestige as poets, with Crane's theatrically conflicted background. (I will never get over this iconic conjunction : Hart Crane, the son of successful Cleveland candy manufacturer - inventor of the Life Saver - dies a suicide-by-drowning in the Caribbean. Poets' lives often have such strange symbolic-fateful resonance. This is a real cultural-psychic phenomenon, if not an act of Providence.) Crane's path was marked, early on, for the taboo-scapegoat-genius-outsider role.

Hammer argues that Allen Tate's own conflicted response (on many levels) to Crane's example only spurred him to emulate Eliot's career path, and take it further - firmly installing (along with John Crowe Ransom & others) the presence of poet-critics in the English Departments of American academia.

The poet-critic was a new kind of professional person, who combined valuable technical knowledge of two kinds : poetry-making and scholarship. With this dual capability, such a professional could be included in the intellectual power-structure of the "New Class"; with anthologies and textbooks like Understanding Poetry, the ground was laid for the next generation's innovation : the Creative Writing Program.

So I'm just getting into Hammer's book. It's really a "close reading" of the literary biographies of these men, and the consequences for poetry and for "poetry careers" generally. I think it's a wonderful book; provides a kind of lens for viewing today's different atmosphere. Hammer in the early pages focuses on the paradoxical prestige and authority which accrued to Eliot's forms of detachment & disinterest. Because he was neither an academician nor a professional writer or journalist, his criticism augmented the sense of poetry's (and the individual poet's) independent cachet, its cultural autonomy.

In thinking about this, alongside Jeffrey's challenge mentioned above, my first vague thoughts in this direction circle around the idea that whatever poetry offers a society at large must be grounded in some kind of imaginative and intellectual empathy. Poetry has to present a fiction of its own independent momentum : that is, independent to some extent of the poet's individual background, capable of understanding and interpreting others. Yet, at the same time, poetry, if it is to fulfill its purpose, has to be a kind of end in itself : it has to be a source of pleasure for its own sake. And here the special verbal and intellectual capabilities of unique and individual poets are brought to bear. Take, for example, a fine poem in the current issue of Poetry, by Carolina Ebeid, "Reading Celan in a Subway Station". In this poem, with metaphorical sleight-of-hand, the poet fuses listening to an accordion player in the subway with the emotional atmosphere of Celan. It's a very curious magic.

So these dual imperatives - the ability to penetrate history & experience beyond the private & personal, and the ability to raise personal (poetic) expression to a highly-integrated state - seem to underly what poetry is about.

The question about the "professionalization" of creative writing - has been very controversial. When poetry becomes an institution, and part of a larger institution, and a kind of business... what is lost, what is gained? I guess there are no simple answers or single truths about this.

Spiritual truths, down through history, have shown themselves rather disruptive to social arrangements. And sometimes poets must experience life outside the circles of privilege and custom and family and economic self-interest, in order to speak with any authenticity or imaginative empathy about the conditions and lives they encounter. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (discussed in current issue of New Yorker) is an American classic which confronts this issue head-on.

I know, I know. I need to find a new hobbyhorse. a new hamster cage.

Reading Langdon Hammer's book again, Hart Crane & Allen Tate : Janus-faced Modernism.

I want to deal with 2 main arguments made by RS (quoted in previous post).

The first argument (to paraphrase) is that American poetry bifurcates into two paths, lines, traditions, models - the Romantic/Amer. Renaissance/Modernist/avant-garde/post-avant, on the one hand, and the "School of Quietude" traditionalists on the other.

The 2nd argument is that the traditionalist camp exerts an inordinate power & influence over the cultural scene, through control of major awards, publishers, etc.

In order to accept the 1st argument, one must, at all costs, put aside any detailed sense of the flow, and the particularities, of American literary history. But it's not that hard to retain a sense of such flow, such particularities : all you have to do is open up what is probably the best-selling, mid-20th-century poetry anthology, re-issued decade after decade, used in countless classrooms, bought & read by thousands : the Mentor Book of Major American Poets, ed. by Oscar Williams & Edwin Honig. Here you will find "avant-garde" moderns (Cummings, Pound, etc.) side by side with Frost, EA Robinson; Whitman & Longfellow and Dickinson & Bryant; Stevens & Marianne Moore & Auden. Of course it's not inclusive - the poets are white, & mostly male. It's from 1950 or so. But you can learn a lot more about the variety & vitality of "central" American poetry - even from this dated collection - than from Ron's historical dichotomy.

Ron wants to pretend that the vital midstream of American poetry history never existed. Why? So he can use his reductive labels to exaggerate the importance of his chosen canon. If you can somehow deny the impact of mid-stream, "populist" poets of the 20th century - the powerful careers of (just for example) Auden, Berryman, Lowell, Merwin, Dickey, Bly, Wakoski, Piercy, Rich, Gary Snyder - I'm thinking of the standing-room-only crowds at their readings, the big sales of their books, 1950s-1970s - if you can somehow pretend those things never happened - then you can present a simplified version of that history, which is really an insult : both to the intelligence of readers, and to those dynamic & resourceful careerist-poets themselves. They didn't depend on some cabal of old white guys at Lofty Publishing Houses to make themselves well-read, famous & influential. But... but... if they never happened, then look how Important the "New American Poets" (Olson, Beats, NY School, post-avant) suddenly seem to be!

And I haven't even begun to dismantle the simplifications involved here. The idea that American poetry somehow subtends like a spider from either the early American experimentalists (Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville) or from stuffy old Anglos (Tennyson, Housman, Kipling) is just utterly ridiculous. Where do you place Eliot in this scheme, and where do you place the New Critical dominance of mid-century poetics, which one could quite seriously argue developed out of Eliot & Pound by way of Frost & Stevens (or vice versa!)? The fact is, American poetics developed a dynamic of its own, filled with crosscurrents & dichotomies & contradictions, drawing both on Eliot's notion of "tradition" and on Emerson's notion of "invention" (see Langdon Hammer's wonderful book Janus-Faced Modernism, on the interplay between Crane & Tate, and the consequences for the academic poetry establishment, for just one example of the "particularities").

What irks me no end about Ron Silliman's conspiracy theory of American poetry is the odd image of a displaced "canon" or "prestige" which haunts the background of his polemic. It's as if his theory is built on a single primitive, unrecognized ideal image : that of a mythical Avant-Garde Classic Period, when people like Pound & Eliot could be both heroic, iconoclastic innovators, and supremely prestigious cultural authorities, at one and the same time! Thus the strategic thrust of his complaint : if only we could break down the walls of that whitened sepulchre, the SoQ Establishment, why, then we - the New Americans! - we will be the arbiters! It's a dream of power (oddly parallel to some of Poe's late-career fantasies, when he wandered drunk down Benefit St., here in Providence, trying to woo a bride/benefactor for his projected Great American Literary Magazine...).

As I have tried to imply, the best antidote to a-historical conspiracy theories and fantasies like this, is simply to read 20th-century American poetry, in all its ample complexity and capacious contradictions. And why do we need such an antidote? So that "future American poets" can work in an atmosphere of openness and possibility, rather than within such melancholy, theoretical corridors, dank with the perspiration of resentful struggle - rank with the odor of imaginary, puzzle-palace stratagems.

Here's a long quote from Ron Silliman, posted on his blog on 12.23.05. I post it here because it's a pretty good summary of his approach, which I've been criticizin' for years now:

"I come along at the end of August 2002 and start posting to my weblog, reviewing maybe four books a week at the most, but often enough approaching the issues active in poetry from other perspectives – such as looking at Seth’s self-described “rant” on his weblog. Over the course of a year, it’s conceivable that I might actually discuss – at best – ten percent of a given year’s books of poetry. I’m not at all systematic, but I am informed, at least to this degree: as a poet, as a writer, as a reader, I come out of an identifiable tradition that stretches back pretty much unbroken at least to Blake & Wordsworth & Coleridge, and in the U.S. to Whitman, Dickinson, Melville & Poe. It’s not a random list, tho there are gaps that often strike me as yawning chasms of my own ignorance. My interest in Houseman, my interest in E.A. Robinson, my interest in Ted Kooser, my interest in Glynn Maxwell is pretty darn minimal. I read the Pound-Williams tradition, for example, as leading directly back to that quartet of 19th century Americans, whereas the School of Quietude (SoQ) leads instead to Robinson, Houseman, Kipling, Tennyson. But neither heritage is simple or unbroken – Gertrude Stein is a disruptive presence in the Pound-Williams tradition, for example, as is Joyce. The disappearance of the Objectivists in the 1940s – the first major modernist generation to virtually vanish, if only for a time – represents a crisis in modernism that I think we have yet to fully understand. I sometimes suspect that the shift from an avant-garde model, ushered in by the Preface to Lyrical Ballads in English & by Baudelaire’s prose poems in French (hijacking Bertrand more than following him), which ultimately is a military model, toward what I’ve termed the post-avant, which is more community focused and not inherently allergic to fessing up to its own sense of heritage, was triggered precisely by the absence of the Objectivists at the moment when the New Americans came along. Language poetry, my own generation of the 1970s, came along as a break within the New American vein in the name of that generation’s own higher values – it basically ditched the fetishized “I” and looked at the materials of writing with some of the same cold analytical eye that the abstract expressionists had used with a canvas & Jimi Hendrix used on a guitar. Somewhat inadvertently, it also exposed an inherent conservativism even within the New American tradition. Since then, we have seen a tremendous expansion of American poetry, fueled by an influx of women and people of color and different backgrounds. There are more poets now, and more good ones, than ever before. And the scene doesn’t look even remotely like what it did just 20 years ago when In the American Tree was about to be published.

I have been, I hope, reasonably out front about my own predilections, my likes & dislikes. I’ve insisted on a concept like School of Quietude because there is, and has been for over 150 years, a disequilibrium of power in American letters predicated on control of the publishing lists of the trade presses – the Gang of Eight I referred to in my note on the New York Times last week – and, at least once upon a time, around jobs within the academy. The most destructive and oppressive thing an elite group can do in our society is to pretend that it is the unmarked case, as if Robert Pinsky and John Hollander wrote poetry, but Kasey Mohammad wrote post-modern or New Brutalist poetry, Geof Huth wrote vispo, Erica Hunt & Harryette Mullen wrote langpo. That allows the unmarked set the opportunity of acting as if its monopoly of such traditional institutions as the trade presses and the awards conferred by the publishing industry – there’s that Gang of Eight again – were “normal” & anything outside of that were “exceptional.” In fact, the SoQ is one interest group among many, privileged more by history than by the bad acts of its current practitioners, but real nonetheless. It’s a little like white males coming to own their own whiteness & their gender. It really will be good for the SoQ to own their own heritage – they have more disappeared poets to recover than almost anyone."

I'm going to think about this a little today, in between work-work, and write a little response, I hope.

I began HG Poetics 3 years ago today. How time blogs!

Lately it seems like a substitute for thinking, studying and writing. An escape, via digital gab.

Others don't have this problem; but I feel scattered, unproductive.

In fact I must get back to work right now. Perhaps I'll think of something to blog about, one of these days.

[I mean I gotta get back to My Own Private Quietude.]

I'm ready to turn over a new leaf.

Any "poetics" has to be exemplified in practice.

The us vs. them agon is just... boring.

I went down to New York to see the Russian art exhibit at the Guggenheim. My favorite things were the Guggenheim itself, and something from the 70s - a little museum case with scattered pebbles inside, covered underneath with old faded exhibit-cards (like library card-catalog cards), hand-typed with various odd (numbered) descriptions. I should have written some of them down, & who the artist was. ("This pebble fell in love with rock #12"; or "Found in Mesopotamian tomb after falling from Mars"... like that, only better, funnier).

Interesting how Kandinsky, Malevich et al. were doing NY Abstract Expressionism 50 years earlier.

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

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

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

quiet days of...

Here's an old poem by, for, from, & about Quietude. I've posted it before. ("Ocean State" - the phrase - is on every RI auto license plate.)

OCEAN STATE


 
 
Here the waters gather along the shore.
They meet the land breathing in foam,
and roll the sleepy pebbles and shells
back into long sand waves as before.

 
Our moon, casting her antique spells.
A motionless iris in the whale’s eye
of the sea, her unspeakable name
sinks to the bottom of lonely wells.

 
Her low whispers frame the deserted dome.
Her light covers the circus floor.
And she lifts, with one nocturnal sigh,
the heaving swells in a silver comb.

Pushkin the Poetry Cat
(finest fur in the cosmos)
on Christmas

There is a dimension in poetry which Ron, for all his genealogical & antiquarian research, knowledge, & passion, just does not get. & I know my own b-b-b-b-log is tedious with Ron-demurrals. Nevertheless I want to say it, just like I want to say, as an aside, that Louis Menand (in his essay in this week's New Yorker on the sociology of literature & prize-giving) does not get it, on a certain level.

What's wrong with Menand's very familiar thesis? The age-old mistake of the fore-brained philosophical proseur : to confuse the woman's dress & make-up with her physical beauty. Menand pretends to reduce art to power, commerce & good old ordinary human venality (how enlightened, how sophisticated, how worldly-wise, how regular-guy!). He forgets that the retail of literary commerce is rooted in the wholesale of aesthetic beauty; that the insane ego-trips, kultur-trips, money-trips & power-trips, which distort every human social interaction, don't actually touch or influence the formal elements of beauty (which are untouchable because formal - because rooted in nature) - elements that both the craft-work and the inspired genius of art are bound to emulate & reiterate.

& what do I want to say, again, about Ronville Sillimanville? What is it he doesn't get?

Ron reduces poetic history to a squabble between competing "schools". Essentially, this is a rationalization : a reduction of something which is more accurately, if more vaguely, termed "tradition".

Poetic tradition is ecumenical and welcoming : that is, membership is open to individuals from nowhere, everywhere. Yet once in the door, tradition is extremely demanding.

How so? Well, you cannot become part of the tradition by joining a school or a trend. In order to become part of the one great global tradition of poetry, you have to make poems. And poems are made with inspired poetic genius, gift, talent : because without these powers, the attainment of the particular order & beauty which inheres in poems is impossible.

Poetic beauty is so dense with articulate sensible conceptual order - like the synthesis of a coherent dream, raised to the nth degree - that its accomplishment is not available to the human will.

The literary theorizing which subjects poets & poems to the discourse of schoolish rivalries is similar to the Marxist narrow-mindedness which channels human industry & commerce into its particular video fantasy-battle between Good & Evil. That is, the model is inadequate to the complexity of the truth.

The poet is dedicated to the service of beauty; his or her productions bear witness to that dedication. This is not a board game to be judged by tyro-hobbyists.

The poetry of quietude is a weasel in the storeroom of Pharaoh, and a serpent in the garden of Babylon.

The poetry of quietude is a noodle in the soup of po-biz, a rancid odor in the hospital waiting room of MFA programs.

The poetry of quietude is the sibillance of pre-tornado poplars. It is a tongue on the earlobe of the Old Man of Crete.

The poetry of quietude is an unspoken word in the cafe of atrocious laptops, and a whisper in the cavern of deceased conscience.

The poet of quietude is not necessarily a librarian.

The selflessness of the poet of quietude has nothing to do with the philosophical yeast of overweight & burdensome theorists. It is not the reiterated, regurgitated pattern of a sociology of the postmodern self.

The selflessness of the quietudinous poet stems from a hidden devotion, an unwilled love : a possession, which does not elide or evaporate the self, but refines it, revealing its inward substance (spiritual freedom).

The poetry of quietude tends toward silence : the silence of unknowing.

The quietude of the poet is formed by the chasm (or ravine) which separates the soul from the world.

The poetics of quietude is hierarchical and elitist in the extreme : no one is allowed in after the door is shut.

The poet of quietude shuns the crowd of arrivistes, the purveyors of ersatz yeast, the empty talkers, the fakes, the hypocrites, the entertainers, the word-jugglers.

The poetry of quietude exists in a rarified thin atmosphere - of texts, produced by ancestral ghosts, the ghosts of the quietudinous poets who came before.

The poet of quietude refines speech - by means of a kind of spiritual possession, which is an inner scourge & discipline.

To recite a poem : how does it feel?

It feels like stepping on a grave.

Like standing in a forbidden circle, on the far side of a taboo.

Weird conjunction of word & flesh.

How fearsome is the poet's quietude! How tainted the one who reads the poem aloud, in all its quietness & nakedness, in all its vulnerable mere wordiness! No wonder the mob shuns the poet! No wonder the poet-mob rolls out all its tawdry tricks, its bells & whistles, its hubbub of pretensions - in order to deny the very quietudinous & abject & formidable thing it is!

The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near, point A
In a perspective that begins again

At B: the origin of the mango's rind.
It is the rock where tranquil must adduce
Its tranquil self, the main of things, the mind,

The starting point of the human and the end,
That in which space itself is contained, the gate
To the enclosure, day, the things illumined

By day, night and that which night illumines,
Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,
Night's hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep.

- Wallace Stevens

What is missing from American culture? Quietude.

The simple, unadorned, undistracted, selfless, productive quietude which provides a matrix for creative labor.

The blessed quietude which allows the imagination to confront that which it cannot easily fathom or absorb... and eventually to comprehend & absorb it after all.

The quiet perfection of a work of art, which shines with a radiance & profundity drawn from that nourishing... quietude.

Ron Silliman continues to get a lot of discursive mileage out of the term "School of Quietude" and the general concepts which impel same. Sometimes the topic has to do with style, and sometimes with the marketing/access/reception of poets & poetry.

It occurred to me as I strolled to the coffee shop this morning, trying to perk myself out of the poetry/blog doldrums, that the conceptual architecture which grounds this notion is not really about either aesthetics or literary influence. It's about politics.

The idea of a New American poetry as distinct from a mainstream American poetry - of an embattled, experimental, avant-garde poetry rising in opposition to a staid, conservative, middle-brow poetry - what I think this really represents is the assertion of an idiom which speaks for & about particular levels of society, or communities within larger society. It's the proposition that there exists a tribe (or tribes) of poets who are peculiarly authorized - through their manner of speech, or their bohemian lifestyle, or their ethnic background, etc. - to speak authentically about certain realities of American life, realities which (supposedly) are ignored or smoothed-over or denied by mainstream poets.

I think this ideological predisposition or framework tends, along with a lot of other & related attitudes (displayed by many poets), to inhibit the desire for, the creation of, or the recognition of, forms of poetic making (thought, language, address) which are not pre-programmed or channeled toward particular audiences.

First glance at a book noted by Anastasios over here : Stephen Cushman's Fictions of Form in American Poetry. Cushman hypothesizes (in the epilogue) that maybe poets & poetry aren't taken very seriously in America, not because Americans are (stereotypically) vulgar & materialistic & philistine, but rather because they take words so seriously (a revolution & a constitution being the founding events, rather than an endless stream of time & traditions). Poets are kept at arm's length because at some level Americans sense that the poet's words might shake things up.

Sounds like a stretch to me, but maybe there's something to it...

Wondering on coffee break about why I react this way to the grid method of criticism.

Seems important to decide what is the purpose of your device. Critics love to qualify & compare different writers (& baseball players), but the project of appreciating, reviewing, or evaluating a particular poem, book, or poet should, it seems to me, try to develop a complete or holistic critical response (as far as possible). This inevitably involves responding to unique & peculiar qualities (originality), the sum of which (the oeuvre itself) cannot, without extreme abstraction & caricature, be reduced to a point on a grid.

If, on the other hand, the critic's purpose is to evaluate or characterize general trends or period styles, then I guess a grid of opposing qualities might be useful. A grid presents a certain facade of objectivity or impersonality; the critic is offering judgements, the authority of which is not based on supposedly subjective rhetorical qualities (the style of the critical discourse), but on a sort of "scientific" literary GPS system.

But a grid has a certain freeze-frame fixity to it, which seems to pose problems for its accuracy or applicability, when you think of the diverse & distinctive powers & talents of different poets. As I stated in an earlier response to the method, it seems that interesting poets transcend or overcome the faults of "period styles" from any quarter of any grid - so that the GPS system no longer applies - they are off the map.

[Nevertheless, I do also recognize that there is some creative fun involved in devising these diagrams...]

The flip side of literary narcissism is judgemental literary puritanism. Both are self-serving : they just take different paths through the infernal thicket.

Robert A's latest grid over at Samizdat is more interesting (to "the me") than previous schemata. Hinsley's essay sounds good too : I like the idea of revamping the application of the term "doggerel".

However, I think you have to take schemes of general trends, or bracketing of kinds of poetry or qualities of same, with a big grain of salt. Do we really need or want to evaluate poetry, in comparative terms, based solely on specs derived from an ethical-philosophical measure of the status of the self?

How do we determine the mixture of literary guile involved in a poetics of the non-self (say, in various versions of Language- and & other postmodern poetries), which is, nevertheless, an act of assertion rather than one of empathy with an Other? How do we evaluate - except on a case-by-case basis - the ambiguous admixtures of narcissism and detachment, sentiment and irony, which emerge from the practice of writing?

It's possible that a grid of such contraries could help a critic orient him/herself toward a more decisive ethical or critical judgement. But I'm afraid the more likely result is a practice of pigeonholing individual writers; snap judgements; labelling; the formation of spurious & unnecessary lumpings-together : unique poets into handy groups.

Why do we keep circling back, repeatedly over the decades, to these formulae about "the self"? This is a conundrum. Does it have something to do with the difficulty of apprehending and judging sincerity and emotional authenticity through the detached medium of a text? Isn't this the problem with reading in general? Isn't this why authentic poetry exhibits an awareness of emotional/ethical/epistemological complexity, through a comparable rhetorical complexity?

[p.s. even "complexity" has its complexities. A style which comes across as blunt, simple, direct, idiomatic - even vulgar - may be propelled by a very complex and ironic literary strategy. Yesterday's complexity may not be today's.]

Following Robert Archambeau's "modernity is disinterest" thread. Sceptical about the distinction between Western & Middle Eastern (Islamic) thinking. The idea of some kind of M-E unitary or indivisible mentality sounds suspiciously like earlier Western imaginings of the "noble savage". The Other is always greener on the other side of the fence.

The divisions & splits between (ethical) self and (social) role seem inherent to moral dilemmas of every kind, in every culture. One could just as easily talk about the traditionalist-tribal fathers who kill their own daughters in order to maintain archaic Arab "honor" codes. One can imagine quite a psychic split there between self & social role.

Mazzotta's book on Vico, which I've mentioned previously here, is focused on Vico's challenge to modernity (in the shape of Descartes, Bacon, Machiavelli, Hobbes). The argument of The New Science (to oversimplify) is that poetry, as imaginative (re)making, presents an image of world-renewal, based on wonder & creativity, which is at odds with the disenchanted, utilitarian, and arrogant realpolitik/scientism presented by those avatars of Modern "disinterest" & detachment. At odds with them - but aligned with Dante (Mazzotta's other hero).

Okay - the final final tiny improvements have been made to formatting of Stubborn Grew, Dove Street and Way Stations. Readers, start your engines. You may begin ordering millions of copies NOW.

[p.s. & now fixed the links above -]

(trying out instant blog recorder)

Returned late last night from unexpected unplanned trip to Toledo, Ohio. Had to post bail & find a lawyer for someone involved in anti-Nazi march protest. Strange trip. Waited around by myself at Lucas Cty Jail for 3.5 hrs. Watched jailor shift change; feel I know the entire Toledo Police Dept now, along with several recent arrestees.

In Toledo you pay $100./night for the courtesy of incarceration. The Radisson was cheaper.

Toledo reminded me architecturally of Minneapolis (i.e flat; snow; cold), with a little less going on. The homeless shelter (Cherry St. Mission) was literally jammed with skinny men, in for warmth & dinner : packed into both sides of long tables in dining hall. They are doing God's work there.

Getting more samples of my Lulu bks. I must keep tweaking the design slightly; a few minor glitches. Some of you will soon be lucky recipients of test-run pre-first editions...

The thing about imagination & war has, obviously, been with poetry from the beginning. The nobility & vanity of the Homeric heroes. Rilke's poem about the dead cavalryman's beautiful shako.

We want history to conform to a child's dream of heroism. The youthful perception of beauty incorporates all kinds of disparate elements. The focus in the Gospels on the power of childish (imaginative) vision. "They behold their Father's face."

Blake, of course, was into this...

A happy childhood forecasts the doom of the world.

I feel a big weight off my shoulders having produced the Lulu books. Sending out some review copies here & there. It's kind of amazing to me how it works. When I can afford it, I will improve the distribution channels even more.

This sort of thing is probably a big temptation to younger writers. It might be better to go through the editorial hoops for a while, the disappointments & the reality jolts. But I've been at it so long, & written so much, that I just want to shape it my own way now & put it out there.

Chapel Hill is a strange duck, a sort of semi-fictional memoir, or semi-memoirish fiction. One of the themes running through it is the idea of history as the work of a child's imagination. The contrast, the clash between historical "facts" and the beautiful & naive dreams which children make of them. A "coming-of-age" story, which circles around between history & family history, & fiction & poetry, in the mixed-up way of adolescent perception. Set in the 60s. About, among other things, two boys & their obsession with toy soldiers, & playing "war", while the older brother of one is off in Vietnam.

I started connecting this the other day with my recent reading in Vico. His way of thinking about the power of the human imagination (as it changes & develops) over cultural behavior. For Vico, according to Mazzotta anyway, "poetry is history" (& vice versa, I guess).

The seemingly innate drive people have, starting in childhood, to make sense of their experience, to recapitulate it, to turn it into story & history, to interpret it - to play with it. & the destiny of the poet & poetry : to judge the doings of individuals & nations through the prism of poetic speech. This seems like a source for both poetry's "seriousness" and its power to lighten & console.

This "historical" aspect of the poet's social role is undermined, sometimes, by so much acidic despair & scepticism, which often seems to turn contemporary poetry into intentionally vapid or superficial cadging & jokery. It's rare in poetry to find a fusion of both clear-sighted irony and hope.

Anastasios Kozaitis takes an interesting, wide-angle look at the form/anti-form history in American poetry, in an essay over at his blog, thisbetown. I want to check out some of the books he mentions.

I've taken what I think is the best music from the 2 Go Little Sparrow cds, and put it on one disc (& reduced the price).

OK - I think I've made the last little corrections & improvements. Everything here at Lulu looks very good!

Going back over these ms. for Lulu-publication, I was surprised (once again) by the degree to which my reactions to the same passage can change, from reading to reading. Weather, time of day(?). "Subjective response." Makes me realize how complex & subtle the activity of literary criticism can be.

Tweaked the formatting for Way Stations, Island Road, Dove Street and Chapel Hill. Now they are even more beautiful (he sez).

Maybe my literary life has turned a corner (it's been a hard 5 years). Maybe American poetry has experienced an imperceptible change! I am impinging on it, slowly & unsteadily. It will never be the same!

Get ready, world - Stubborn Grew is back in print!

I received 2 of the new Lulu productions in the mail today. They are a big improvement over the earlier versions [sigh of relief!]. But I want to tweak the formatting a little more. Will keep interested members of my cult following (I know you are out there, fellow Rotarians!) posted.

Finished typesetting the new version of Stubborn Grew today. Huge chore. Now I can get back to other things. I want to see if I can inset the collages which were printed in the Spuyten Duyvil edition. Either way, I hope to have it up & available by next week.

Curious evening of synchronicity. I spent all day (secretly, at work) feverishly formatting Stubborn Grew - from a scanned glob into a text-glob, in Microsoft. Took me a long time to figure it out. Took me a longer time to edit.

This afternoon I reached the halfway point, where Bluejay & Henry finally emerge, at last, from the abandoned railroad tunnel under the East Side (smelling of bat manure, etc.), beside the Carrie Tower (up the street from where I was doing this work, at the library), across from the HP Lovecraft memorial stone. The whole thing is a take-off on Dante & Virgil's descensus.

Now Sarah had been reading The Dante Club, a mystery set in 19th-cent. Boston - Longfellow & pals. It got her interested in Longfellow's translation of Divine Comedy. So I got v. 1 for her - Inferno - out of the library today.

& I got home after a long day of reliving Bluejay/Hen's catabasis, sat down with a glass of cheap chianti (from Siena) & opened up the Providence Journal. & there was this picture:



& here's how the story (by Projo reporter Mark Arsenault) opens:

"The video feed from the bottom of the shaft could have come from Fellini's most abstract and mind-numbing movie: a 30-foot gray wall of shale and sandstone that, on occasion, emitted small puffs of dust. The accompanying soundtrack was a racket like ball bearings being sucked into a Shop-Vac.

The story lay behind the wall of shale, at the bottom of a sewage overflow shaft 260 feet below Calverley Street, not far from Providence Place mall.

For more than a year, a 690-ton tunnel-boring machine had been heading toward the construction site at Calverley and Okie streets, cutting its way underground through solid bedrock from Field's Point as part of a 22-year sewer overflow control project."

Two RI senators & other luminaries were on hand to celebrate the big breakthrough. & I really felt a part of it all.

Working like a maniac to edit & re-format Stubborn Grew for a new Lulu edition. Had to scan it from scratch.

Good for me to see it again, in pre-book form. Struck by how monumentally silly this poem is. Especially as it warms up, in the beginning : those thumpingly obvious rhymes... the scramble for a shtick...

No wonder nobody has seen fit to review it. It's very much out of every loop I, at least, can think of. Like a James Merrill play-acting at populism, so it starts out... I mean the whole tone of the thing, the goofiness. But the tone changes in the different chapters - gets better, relaxes, settles in... then spirals out of control...

Surprised again at the internal logic - I mean the way it forecasts the future (the future of the poem, mostly).