23

 
Sweet Bea hit me with a sidewinder
in the sand, sent me hopping sideways
too.  Estrangement is the maze -
serpentine scratch, remainder

 
from nothing.  Ramirez
applies graphite across tile
floor, straight-edged until
heart-cauterized.

 
Leaves, pesos, paper.
Spring equinox.  Hums
etched fuse.  Magnesium
splinters winter's keepsake

 
sky (plumbs Venetian
blind).  Little myrrh-
box memento-murmur
lifts now toward perihelion.

A mini-essay for the 1st day of spring : 3-D Poetics.

There were values (impersonality, historicity) of the "Golden Age" of the American Moderns (1st half of 20th cent.). One only has to think of Eliot's essays, Pound's clusters of reference-allusion, Moore's exactitude, Crane's epic expansiveness, Stevens' conversations (in the poems) with precursors & contemporaries, his ambition for a "theory" of poetry in poetry... (though they each show as much originality & subjectivity as impersonality/objectivity...)

There have been at least 3 or 4 generations between now and then, during which American poets for the most part (though of course not entirely) were fixated on their own subjective interiority and the private experiences of life in a vast & singular nation. In retrospect, and in comparison, the early Moderns - whether they lived in the U.S. or abroad - come across (to various degrees) as exiles. The 2nd generation lived in their shadow; the 3rd generation rebelled against the New Critical crystallizations of the 2nd; and the 4th generation rebelled against the egocentricities of the 3rd - by the application of protocols or methodologies (the postmoderns, the "post-avants").

Perhaps the next step will be a sort of "silver age" - a 2nd flowering of some of the compositional principles underlying the Stravinskian neo-classicism of the early 20th-century. Methodologies of surface style will no longer be sufficient. There will be a return to "3-dimensional" composition : uniting topical subject-matter with generic modelling with original invention.

22

 
A ballerina pirhouetting weightlessly
spiraling inward on a shrinking radius
or pine tree vertical in somber forest
lifting its green lance (relentlessly)

 
- such are the spin-offs of my mappamundo.
The wayward pilgrim seasoned in chianti
limps and stumbles (April mummery)
and sniffs a myrrh-box (cryptic, chiuso)

 
somewhere in sub-basement of museum.
Light shines in the darkness of the tempera.
An emerald Magdalen looks back at me
from casket sealed by Lippo Memmi. (Womb.)

                            
                 *

 
The mirror in the murmur of the myrrh
is your desire (fletched, arrowed, framed).
And your desire (targeted, tamed)
surges toward sunlight like a conifer...

 
Siena's embassy to Providence
is miniature, mercurial (an emblem
of the light of day).  Semblance
of a pantomime - Sabbath-dance

 
of slaves set free.

As biologists grow more dogmatic (all is brain chemistry), physicists are becoming less confident (all is dark matter/energy).

(See last weekend's NY Times Sunday mag article. The billions of stars, galaxies - the entire known universe - makes up only 4% of existent matter. Physicists are confronted with a cosmos, 96% of which is unknown, invisible - conforming to no currently applicable physical laws.)

Here's a lecture (sound recording) by my neighbor Nancy Kendrick on Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. (Sound values not so great : adjust volume down...) Kendrick is chair of philosophy dept. at Wheaton College.

There was a recent book on the personal/professional relationship between Spinoza & Leibniz - will try to find reference (OK, here it is : The Courtier and the Heretic, by Matthew Stewart). A revisionist-historicist's view(?). Want to find out.

The description of Descartes' proof of God's existence (God = "that which must be", etc.) - reminds me of the passage in the Gospel of John where Jesus says "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." (That which must be = Truth.)

When I was a teenager I thought the fundamental problem in the universe was this : what is the basis of reality - consciousness or matter? I came down on the side of consciousness. I have a clear memory of walking away from camp one evening, on a remote lake in Canada (1967 or so) - looking out at the water, thinking about this.

I don't think I'll ever be admitted to the Heaven of the Humble... but JL gets it right again, today.

Had to subtract a section of this poem (the old #20 - hopeless). So am shifting them around. Here's the new #21.

21

 
Providence rooftops and walls
from the library window (reddish
pink, red-russet, rust-red).  Flush
with autumn, always (old colonial

 
brick-pile).  Not much different
from the brown Siena cityscape
of the fresco (mappamundo,
mappamundo).  Lorenzetti bent

 
his figures around corners - loved
overlaps - the hide-and-seek
(parenthetical hypotheticals peek
like Francisco round his mule's beloved

 
ass).  Like the ambiguous griffin
Dante saw buttressed in Nina's eyes
(humandivine) Providence shies
between your dream and mine -

 
how to explain?  It's not on television.
The box within a box, the wave
beneath the wave, the grave
Agave (brave three-master).

(Agave and Agave, courtesy of Wikipedia)

20

 
The quiet moss-green image of Sassetta.
Aquinas (black hole) kneels before the altar.
Background of cloister-garden, library...
forsaken stage-set now (only a metaphor).

 
Aquinas tempered Aristotle, Augustine.
Sassetta memorized antique (pre-plague)
Siena.  Emblem of a dream, vague
microcosm (innocent, pristine).

 
A tiny dove aligned with Jesus-crucified
transfixes him (his body like a train
or veil of thought, beneath brain
impaled by hummingbird).

                           
                *

 
Hobo rambles through America, surrenders
passport, loses wallet, sheds identity.
Ends up in hospital in San José,
mopping with crayon.  Sees

 
vision of Madonna (open-handed,
mesmerized).  Nature is feminine
and Wisdom in the streets, O Solomon;
the dove (ungraspable) is Understanding.

19

 
Siena - Wolf-Town - threefold knot
in the twisted thread of Tuscan roads!
Above ambivalent pools of frescoes
your campanile vaults skyward - shot

 
from earth, a mason's amaryllis;
image of aspiring civitas (exponential
offshoot of such covenants of mutual
encouragement as We the People is).

 
A tiny peasant-pilgrim in the painted hills
clambers up through ninefold rings of
steppe, vineyard, wall, alcove... dove-
sprinkled street... piazza-shell,

 
city hall... radiant mirror-
wall... and there takes a final step 
into vertiginous icon-gyroscope -
a spiralling, unfathomable sphere

 
(an airy labyrinth, a darkling glass, 
a dream).  Tuscany's free-standing
city-state, ripening so, unknowing
what catastrophe was come to pass :

 
what reaper traveled up the pilgrim path
to meet them at the apex of their glory.
Black Death, Black Death, memento mori.
All roads lead through Rome (to Golgotha).

18

 
Out of gray Bruegel-skies, a little snow,
then sunlight.  Old Providence streets
could be 14th century too - meeting 
the mind's eye in a dumb-show

 
dream-vision.  The mind's mirror
and the mirror in the horsehair fresco
mirror each other (squeaky merry-go-
round's warped arrow, errant caballero).

 
An old fumbling sinners' waltz, broken
accordion (my life, my life...).  And
somehow, out of this, expectations
of expiation, civic destiny (Hoboken

 
in Hagia Sophia - pinpoint in a dome
of mordant gilt).  But the dream-key
is the dreamer (Glenn Gould, shy
hobo huddled in igloo-kingdom

 
tinder of snowflakes touching the keys
to Goldberg variants - shimmering
so... so is each tree a rustle
of many trees... tiny hands tickling

 
air, wind).  Lorenzetti
held civic fortitude in his mind's eye
until the commune coalesced - Justitia
a naked femme aloft over complexity

 
of multitudes - a last motif
beyond the turmoil of desire;
the common good entire
our final interest, massive

 
and first.  (Only a tiny hanged man
weighted against the great commune.
Shadow of oneiric dissonance; one
flaw in painful, panoramic span...) 

"Torque", on the other hand, is a method for controlling style, a sort of literariness-gizmo. You spin the axle of ir-reference and ir-reverence, like a wheel of chance. But a style can't transcend itself if it's not aimed, from the beginning, somewhere beyond literature. In a comment to Ron's post today, Curtis Faville mentioned Larry Eigner's cumulative momentum as he writes into the unknown. Seems apropos here. The "unknown" is the theme which draws and compels the writer. But a style which is all technique - only technique - can never surpass itself.

This is a paradox about some of the very subtle and highly-wrought styles in our mannerist and mandarin scene - rather than self-surpassing, they are self-devouring. They become brittle style-displays, rather than the trace of an authentic poem (left behind like a cicada's husk).

Style surpasses itself; poetry supersedes literature; poet runs faster than writer (often into brick wall).

On this date died both Stalin and Anna Akhmatova (she outlived him by decades).

Now there was a poet of surpassing style.

A poem's momentum must surpass its style. A wave is more powerful than the sum of its molecules. This does not mean style is inessential : style makes the wave. (If it has no self-surpassing momentum, the style is no good.) You can go back later, straggle through the beach wreckage, & admire that chilly curve.

These days people think technique (rhyme, stanzas, etc.) is some kind of statement in the style wars, some kind of personal attack on somebody else's style, some kind of catological brandifery, an elitist's rebuff, an affront to ill-educated, resentful yokels...

Technique only becomes useful after the artist has left it behind... I mean what you see as some marvel of virtuosity is really just a side-doodle of some other irreducible motivation, the whale beneath the surface...

Once you start talking about technique, or the obvious elements of style, 9 times out of 10 either you don't get it or the work itself is a bore. A reference to technique is of value only when resolving some very specific conundrum in a particular passage... To repeat, people gab about vapid elements of style in order to praise or bash things they either don't bother to understand or which aren't worth reading in the first place...

If the surface elements of style are working at all properly they enfold themselves conveniently & modestly in larger motions of thematic and affective import - ars est celare artem, as I useta say, "the art is in hiding art"...

Muse gives poet skeleton key to native land. Price : exile.

... this just in from Grand Fenwick...

Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein

(also : There will be a total eclipse of the moon tomorrow...)

17  
     Aquila grandis diceris puella,
     baiulans rostro ramulum virentem,
     nostrorum dira qui devicit bella.
        Salve regina
 
The painters whisper to each other
across the susurrus of the horsehair.
Uproar in the Campo - folded in a mirror
of brittle fresco (where light rays converge).
 
On the tender brow of reality (yellow-veil
female) - eagles, in roundels.  Somehow
got Coppo out of Ghibelline gaol
(burden of my song) to paint beyond the pale
 
of the Commune.  Some oscillation
signified (red, blue, imperial purple);
meek spectrum chanted beneath steep
glance of raptor-Madonna, in suspension
 
between splayed feet of Infant J
encircled by her fingertips - a
nailed impression of Apocalypse
whose furrowed brow echoes aquila-

span.  It doesn't matter,
in the end, who rules Siena,
Guelf or Ghibelline.  Janus-Julia
reigns in the deep (a mutter
 
from the Southern Cross).
The constellation of the Bear
or shining Virgo in autumnal air
reflect upon that earthy ruse
 
- burden of my waking muse; and
Easter's aubade will rouse those feet
to step the vernacular Paraclete
to lead the nine around (O brown recluse).

cf. a painting by Coppo di Marcovaldo in the church of Santa Maria dei Servi, called the Madonna del Bordone  ("Virgin of the Burden") - "burden" referring to the drone-accompaniment to medieval melody. Gianna A. Mina (in Art, Politics and Civic Religion in Central Italy 1261-1352, Ashgate Publ., 2000) argues that the title refers to the fact that the friars of the Servite Order - specially devoted to the cult of the Virgin - chanted their hymns in front of the image.

There are clusters of unfortunate obscurities in this poem, which Mina's excellent article (about a very important painting) can help elucidate. She discusses the tiny round eagle-emblems hidden in the Madonna's veil (imperial Hohenstaufen symbols, or subtly anti-imperial (Guelf) scriptural signals?), the way various elements of the painting (including the posture of the infant Jesus's feet) prefigure the Crucifixion and resemble or allude to elements in other paintings by Coppo, etc.

I mosey over here to read about more recent art...

Aiyeee, what am I doing... fewer & fewer people drop by this blog. What am I doing with this old Renaissance lumber?

What a pyramid of blather I've piled up at HG Poetics. But the fluency slowly inexorably 'sgone away, it seems. You need to sense an audience to be able to speak with confidence. I've alienated or been dismissed in so many directions, can't even count 'em anymore. Just an old wannabe-has-been, I guess.

I'm like a trickling fountain struggling to break through my own frozen grime & encrustations.

Worn out at the end of the day I slouch with my little Neo & a few scribbles. I don't know what I'm going to write, I just go into the woods with a list of vague ambiguous directions. Along comes another number, & I like it, & it feels good to be working on something.

Poetry for me (as I've writ before) is a kind of large-scale construction project. Poems are complex buildings or pyramids, strange engineering feats.

So be it.

16

 
Ambrogio ("Honey") Lorenzetti painted
the missing Mappamondo, across the room
from a canopied Maesta (red, white, bloom).
A wheeling disk on the wall, centered

 
on Siena or Jerusalem (we don't know)
surmounted by a bold and burly majordomo
(Guidoriccio) - his horse checkered red-gold,
black (goldfinch caparison).  1352

 
(after the funeral).  City by the Sea,
Castle by a Lake... mute panel-trophies
of the subjugated suburbs; Sienese
big game, hung up in framed humility

 
around a proud procession of possession.
On the far wall, in a niche, kitty-
corner to the Virgin Majesty -
a later friar, Bernardino (franciscan

 
hobo - voluble, acute - Byzantine-
thin-sharp - smirking, barely)
stands barefoot on a mini-Mercator
of his own... modest Napoleon,

 
the self-crowned ruler of himself.
Through a door, the panorama of Good
Government (girlish neighborhood,
primavera ring-dance); then riff-raff

 
of the Palio (thundering hoofsparks
on the Campo bricks) out in the streets
a smoldering explosion of communitas
joyous throngs surging through the parks

 
mincing   jostling   pirhouetting   prancing
Mappamondo, Mappamondo... horsemen
circle round a single steed (your golden-
black caparison)... I'm getting dizzy, going

 
blind.  Still center of yon middle-earth
(Jerusalem) Saena Julia (a sign of J).
A workeman that hath copies by...
might fix my ferris wheel into a wreath.

The Janus-face of poetry. One one side, an art form, with its own raison d'etre and center of gravity. On the other, a social act, a form of participation in the general endeavor of living on earth.

One would think that both poets and critics, in their respective ways, would want to take this doubleness into account somehow.

Writing (and art) can present itself as a sort of Archimedean lever - a means of mirroring/distancing phenomena in order to examine and understand them. With some writers and writings, this can take the form of a moral accounting, an ethical judgement.

John Barr's essay in Poetry, in which he urged poets to get out of academia and root their poetry in life-experience, triggered a lot of criticism (not directed so much at this particular argument, but at his related call for a more popular, populist poetry). It is tempting to couch such exhortations in debonair or rugged iconolatry (Hemingway and all that) - but one could interpret his position as a subset of the broader notion of the Janus-face : that art and poetry stand on two legs (representation and reality, or experience). (Of course, the idea that two such legs exist at all has been the source of vast volumes of scholarly cogitation, debate, obfuscation, and artistic prestidigitation over the last 40 years - ie., aren't they really one leg? Or no leg at all?)

Meanwhile... all this reading & writing about Renaissance Siena has got me in an ut pictura poeiesis state of mind. So I am thinking of poetry, not just as a visual canvas, but as a civic mural in a public space, presenting a dual, dialectical, Janus-like substance.

- slowly, slowly, he bumbles toward some meaningful expression...

15

 
See how those Tuscan cities rise
like dandelions in the April sun,
ablaze with pollinated ben comun,
the solidarity of parish bees

 
sworn to barn-raising (in sweet 
conventicles).  Across a burnt-
sienna chessboard, over gaunt
republican piazzas, the Paraclete

 
(pseudonym for tennis bum
or mild-eyed hobo) poses a zig-
zag clue (lilac for fig), figuring
clematis, climax forest (arboretum

 
allegoricum).  Red bloom
with dusty feet, thorns -
Assisi vagabond (he scorns
not Poverty) - bridegroom

 
dawdling (someday... eternally).
In sheepish green
of roadside weeds - in San
Francisco (Ramirez portfolio).

14

 
A little hilltop town somewhere
in Tuscany modelled the Mount
of Earthly Paradise.  When Dante
and his antique guide slowly felt their

 
way (blind men, circling around
the ruined breastworks of a ridge,
following a scroll over the edge
of the known universe) they found

 
themselves humming a familiar tune
(the way potter X's fingers flicker
aslant a red-leaf bole - quicker
than thought figures an X-strewn

 
cosmos).  Love, the rest note
at the foot of ranging harmonies -
the knot in incunabular interstices
of ink, time, jealousy.  The mote

 
in the builder's eye, the tear
in the mosaic... pervasive
octave-frequency, alive
and breathing (here, here).

- yet another riddle for you -

13

 
S. Martini, City by the Sea.
A blue-black sea, with a single double-
sailed vessel.  A puzzle-castle
and a lonely little tree.

 
In the turquoise elbow of a stream
a nude figure with golden hair
(hunched over) dabbles, barely
there - all flowing, fleeing from the frame

 
(except for the red-blue garments flung
upon neon grass).  In Camelot
they married; now she's married not
(in the City by the Sea).  Unsung

 
Hero, waiting by the shore,
she is the negative of charity,
the mirror of the eye's motion -
the molten origin of lapidary lore.

 
Homer felt his way along the walls
of fate, blindly, tenderly.  The earth
is rounder than the measure of wrath
or the squeak of fractious Percivals;

 
what was given from heaven whispers
in featherweight horsehair, the touch
of hand upon brow (to whom much
is given, much will be required, sailors).

 
And tender fingers melt into the clay
spun round, round (even, ineluctable)
til the branch of a ferris-railroad (by
and by) is a goldenrod, crying Crucify.

Spring's on the way (even in Minnesota). An old painting by my mother - 2 old Minnesota babushki. Looks a little Sienese.

I think the books I've been reading over the last few months - about Dante, Siena, theology, & etc. - are helping me crystallize some ideas, figure out what I'm doing. A little light seemed to go on last night (I could be fooling myself).

It's not so much a new set of ideas, as recovering a certain trajectory which seems to appear & fade intermittently.

I'm sort of a transcendentalist. For whom - prior to the details of any religious tradition - there is a more basic orientation : that of the human being facing the fact of a higher consciousness (the "ground of Being", & etc.). (Thinking of Hart Crane, out cold in the dentist's chair, hearing a voice repeating "you have the higher consciousness! You have the higher consciousness!")

And I've become preoccupied with the notion that this kind of orientation has become unfamiliar - difficult for us to grasp. It might be said that the 20th century replayed (in its own fashion) the cultural-psychological egocentricity which so strongly marked the Renaissance. Our civilization has no formed "theodicy" - no way of speaking about God (beyond a sort of religious positivism constructed out of magic verbal formulae). (By this I don't mean to denigrate anyone's faith, or any of the valid cultural phenomena. What I mean is that our civilization is not intellectually comfortable with a transcendentalist viewpoint. The travails and horrors of the 20th century made 19th-cent. Romantic idealism obsolete; but the root of it all - the basic stance toward reality - stepson of earlier stances, which can be placed under the general designation "piety" - has not been effaced.)

The differing entailments for one's sense of life and reality, stemming from these two paths - the one, in which the ground of being is centered in the psychological self, and the other, in which the ground of the self is located in some kind of higher spiritual-intellectual source - seem quite serious (while remembering that consciousness itself is a riddle, and that the boundary between subjectivity & otherness is more like quantum spookiness than Euclid).

Various forms of materialist philosophy & psychology have found ways to avoid this issue, or dismiss it. But I can't avoid it myself.

The little light that went on for me last night was a kind of retrospective grasp of previous notions regarding the socio/political/historical/literary consequences of this basic "transcendentalist" position. I have some ideas (or share some ideas) about the mystery of the shaping role of "the Word" - how it intervened in human history, how it is fulfilled (recapitulated) in personal, individual experience - which I want to set forth as poet and in poetry.

I think of poetry as a form of expression which is specially adapted to reflect the "elan vital" of this stance toward reality. Dante, Blake, Whitman, Hopkins, Dickinson & many others - via many different tonalities - worked in this vein.

The bland little poem posted below - "Riddle of the Ridda" - really is a riddle (a riddle which is not a riddle!). Its submerged meaning has to do with what I see as that underlying form of human life and the history of the world, under the sign of the circling Verb. The "riddle" is sort of shorthand for themes I want to investigate more specifically as this poem develops. ("Ridda" - traditional Italian folk dance - shown in the Lorenzetti fresco in Siena.)

12   The Riddle of the Ridda

 
An eagle slants above a circle of walls
surrounding a ring of dancing maidens
singing a round, around, around (hidden
in shade of a painted Town Hall).

 
The wheel of the Nine (town volunteers
elected every other month) follows
the seasonal round, around - fellows
in harness, their creaking axle veers

 
perpetually.  And the shapely word
drapes a fleeting frame as she pivots
around, around, around - one bare foot
suspended (bright glance of orbiting bird).

Reading Auerbach on Dante's early poetry (Vita Nuova). "In Dante the esoteric lady of the stil nuovo stands forth clearly for all to see; she becomes a necessary part of the plan of salvation, decreed by Divine Providence. The blessed Beatrice, identified with theological wisdom, is the necessary mediatrix between salvation and man in need of enlightenment..." [p. 62; 1st publ. in 1929]

When poetry (Dante's) requires a personal mediatrix for wisdom, two ideas are implied : first, that all (human) knowledge is "incarnated", or mediated by particular individuals; and second, that theological wisdom is necessarily synthesized by the psyche and the imagination - it's not literal, transparent, absolute, in the way fundamentalists and dogmatists insist it must be.

The poem seems to be shifting gears somewhat, so I've taken off a couple sections I just posted... (they may be back).

Reading (again) Erich Auerbach's Dante, Poet of the Secular World. He sets a very high standard (one of the great readers & critics of all time). Still, even after reading Auerbach, I feel OK (for the time being) about this Fonte Gaia poem.

Dante & Henry VII - literary strange attractor localized in Siena.

Good reading on Sienese art & the cultural-political background - Sienese Painting, by Timothy Hyman. Very helpful to me. (I know I've mentioned this before.)

City-republic vs. politics of Empire, Aristocracy & Church. The comune of "the Nine". Art history from the Sienese vs. the standard Florentine perspective (Vasari).

Duccio's art was the last of the Byzantine & the first of the Italian. Sienese fusion of mystical remoteness and urban street vernacular.

I'd like this Siena to take shape as a metaphor for America (& for Providence, & for experience generally).

Byzantium : Mankind is the imago of God. Siena : art is the imago of humanity. The dialectic of these two positions, played out in the symbolic-psychological sphere of religious ideology (iconolatry, iconoclasm, idolatry)... still with us today. (ie. are the words of "sacred books" to be taken literally or symbolically? Or somewhere in between?)

Red-blue states. Imperial purple. On the nether side of Duccio's Maesta altarpiece, in the scenes of the Passion narrative, Christ's garments are always red & blue (except in the Transfiguration & post-Resurrection scenes, where they are gold).

There's a method to my madness (& vice versa).

The gnarly, devious, rhymy-rheumy quatrains form a wall from which I toot my independent trumpet. Stand back - I'm having a fit.

They owe something (forever) to Mandelshtam's Voronezh poems.

The method owes something to Nicolas Cusanus's Game of Spheres (9 circles & an asymmetrical wooden ball).

I'm building a labyrinth to hold Theseus & Minotaur, Daedalus & Icarus. And the reader.

Fonte Gaia... rivers & streams run through all my run-on poems of the last 10 years. Maybe now I'm reaching the source (an old Italian fountain).

I'd like to be a successful writer someday, but for the time being I'm fascinated with the trumpeting, shapely otherness of poetry. It's good to be working in the Outer Limits, despised, ignored, condescended-to, defamed, etc. As long as I can stand it. (The Goulds of my tribe are known to be a very, very stubborn bunch. & I'm right in there with 'em.)

I work in humble isolation at the edge of despair. I don't despise other poets or the literary scene - no, I want to be part of it. But on my own terms.

I'm not publishing my poems to the blog simply to be different, or to take the easy path to dissemination. I'm well aware that people don't really want to read poems blasted out over the internet - that the sensible thing is to work patiently behind the scenes & then look for a publisher. The trouble is, I'm not sensible. & it's a serial poem I'm working on. & putting it on the blog has become part of my habit of composition. (That may change overnight, who knows...)

# 11 was a lemon - sorry, dear reader. Removed it from here.

Think I'm going to call this poem-in-progress Fonte Gaia.

Siena has always had problems with water supply (not near a river; up on hilltop), so when they managed to siphon it to the town square (via large tunnels called "bottini", dug between the soft sandy soil (tufa) and the hard clay layer beneath it) - they had a big celebration in the Campo. Hence the name given to the fountain eventually built there ("Fonte Gaia").

I'm celebrating the end of a long dry spell myself.

10

 
The shadow of the campanile (Torre del Mangia)
sweeps across the Campo, a silent sundial.
The soaring tower, the feminine seashell...
and at the crown of the piazza - Fonte Gaia.

 
Through Roman bottini (clay and yellow tufa)
they channeled water, finally, uphill (1342) -
and danced and sang around the fountain - Fonte
Gaia, Fonte Gaia! - bubbling up - miracola!

 
Tower and seashell... apposite coniunctio
where snorting horses of the Palio
rush round and round... a rondo
or riddle (for braincells in the Palazzo).

 
Dante, Plato, Aristotle too -
what set of all sets contains itself?
What infinite eagle's wing serves as parent-
parenthesis (under what oaken aegis, bow of yew)?

 
Blood surges through the crippled horse's neck
and through the local channels of the soil's
prolific prodigal (hill town) : soul's free potential,
Aristotle notes (Thermopylae to Alexander's wreck).

 
Freedom burbles in the wellspring (Fonte Gaia,
Fonte Gaia!) of the spark of understanding
as the utter Indeterminate, the winging
Unaccountable (king-servant, shepherd-pariah)

 
folded into the heart of an origami bird
or papyrus flight.  Distant voices (Fonte Gaia...)
from a frozen waterfall; far reaches (Primo
Mobile).  Alter ego of an altar (trumpet-word).

Martin Ramirez, ultimate outsider artist, remained mute during the decades he spent in confinement in a California mental hospital. Observers said he mostly hummed. But he did speak occasionally. He was visited exactly once by a relative (a cousin) during that time. His cousin asked him if he wanted to come home & see his wife again (in Mexico). He replied, "tell her I'll see her again in the Valley of Jehoshaphat".

9

 
Those large, pensive eyes... that gaze
goes back to Byzantium (ripple of pebbles
on a curving dome).  The Emperor trembles
in her presence - offers his prize :

 
a little model of Byzantium.  Jasper walls,
carnelian towers, sapphire gates.  A rainbow
slipped like dew into its dream (tomorrow).
A teeming beehive spun from its own entrails

 
(immaculate and blind).  It was Byzantium.
O city of sea-walls, washed in salty spray!
Here you are (Siena-California) on display -
Ramirez matrix-vortex... (hear the painter hum).

...as I try to figure out where I'm going with this Siena poem, I keep thinking of the fact that most of the famous long poems - whether verse dramas or narratives - are stories (or groups of stories). & since Don Quixote at least, poetry has faced a big rival in the novel.

Long narrative poems continued to be written through the 19th century. Thomas Hardy was maybe the last of that line, with his King Arthur verse novels (though there have always been a few verse epics & novels here & there - Archibald MacLeish wrote one, I think; Stephen Vincent Benet...). Frost wrote little verse short stories, and others imitated him.

In an essay over yonder I wrote about the theories of some of the Chicago Critics - in which they offer a sense of "form and content" almost diametrically opposed to the received 20th-cent. notions. With them, the verbal surface (the diction, style, figuration, verbal texture etc.) is, paradoxically, the content (the material out of which the poem is made). A poem's form is the complex intellectual-emotive gesture or shape which emerges from the combination of theme (argument) and plot. In this sense, an achieved poem's form is unique and inimitable.

What I'm thinking (tentatively) of doing with this Siena obsession is constructing a sort of altarpiece. Sienese pre-Renaissance art is well-known for multiple narrative perspectives. They will have a set of small pictures showing vignettes from a saint's life - or even cartoon-like action sequences, showing different stages in a single dramatic event. These little pictures will surround the large group image (Madonna & Child often involved); then there will be another whole set of images on the reverse side of the altar.

So the idea is to present a mosaic of lots of different small insights or perspectives, leading toward a larger, enfolding set of themes or design. What that design is I am not at liberty to expatiate on at this time.

The difficulty here is that this kind of long poem seems to lack narrative drive. Or it takes a heck of a long time to get the momentum going in that direction. This is an example of a problem with current poetry generally. It's like an art form which has had its top layer taken off (& shunted over to fiction). What poetry is left with is primarily anecdotes. Diaristic, essayistic responses to actual events in the real world. The similarity between much contemporary poetry and private journal-keeping - or journalism per se - is perhaps something poets tend to avoid thinking about. What myth-making and fiction used to do, was establish an imaginary surround - within which the elaborate thematic and allusive powers of the poet could flourish & play. I don't want to suggest that contemporary poets lack the wit and imagination to re-work the real world in very playful and effective ways... in fact, the opposite may be the case. Necessity is the mammy of invention : in the desert of the (un-fictional) real, poets have to play even harder.

What "Siena" might do for me (I fervently hope) is offer sort of a parallel, indirect version of that "imaginary surround" which a straightforward narrative plot provides for fiction.

little old poem for Valentine's Day (from Way Stations) :

                            in RI

  No one will blame me
  on the whispering shore
  for lingering so long
  near your small rose island.

   
  Bees' slow honey
  is the measure of summer;
  morning and sundown,
  by that rose double-arch.

   
  And my tongue's dark island
  leaves a late russet shadow -
  dry relic of the voyage,
  our lips' broken compass.

Finished The Underground City, by H.L. "Doc" Humes (published in the 50s). This book is what they call a "sleeper". Probably soon to be re-published, in tandem with documentary film coming out about Humes, produced by his daughter Immy.

A huge book, over 700 pp. Set in wartime & postwar France. Big panorama of Resistance fighters, Communists, US Embassy & military people, etc. Probably one of the deepest & most knowledgeable, subtle evocations of the French Resistance written (at least in English). The style has Gallic clarity and simplicity. But it's a strange, melancholy book. The protagonist, "John Stone", an American officer working with the underground who gets caught up in postwar scapegoating and political machinations, is a curiously affectless, absent personality. Maybe related to the literary atmosphere of the time (Camus, Sartre, Existentialism...). He's also in shock during & after his wartime experiences. Furthermore it's clear Humes is grappling with questions of American direction in the shadow of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. Striking foresight in the way he focuses on the relation between "security" and civil liberties. Humes brings his characters & their situation to life with tremendous, vivid realism. Questions of loyalty & betrayal are at the core of this novel steeped in war and soldierly values.

8

 
Think of it - in the heart of town
in the well of the piazza's madeleine
in the inner chambers of Siena's
nerve center : a fresco-sun.

 
Shines through the Black Death night
(vale, Brunetto).  He was a bookish
city journalist, his panoramas flush
with tags, encomiae, Italo-Latinate

 
cartoon balloons... memos for precepts
to be kept in mind, aides-memoire
for puffy counselors (collected there
within the glow).  Dream-ships -

 
papyrus-barges of the word (parchment
and ink the lifeblood of the civitas);
packets of ben commun, epitomized
in pithy brush-light (air apparent).

               
               *

 
Shines through the Black Death night
an image of measurement (wisdom's reproof).
The mind (unclear, uncertain... pregnant, aloof).
And it is not enough.  The anchorite

 
in solitude, the nurse in the Baghdad ward
reach understanding in extremity
deeper than any rational city
can celebrate (cerebrally).  Hard

 
is the path, and narrow is the way
- or Ramirez, the immigrant
in the mental hospital (with his crayon).
In the Beginning was the Word, Jose.

PAID MY DUES

I learned how to play the 2-handed quatrain from my uncle Jimi Poe, way back in 1938. Uncle Jimi was something else. Nothing he couldn't do with a basic 4-liner. If I could play a tenth of what he could, I'd be more than satisfied. As it is, I do the best I can. Many's the poets tout their theoretical chops these days, make hay in the college circuit, jive around the little-ary co-Z clubs, what all. As for me, I've got my riff down, & that's all I care about. They can't dress like me.

7

 
The little city-states were local politics,
the politics of local knowledge, local pride.
The brick town blossomed on the green hillside
empurpled like a bursting grape.  Natural genetrix


 
or gesture of dominion, the campanile soared
toward imperial skies (burnt sienna blaze
of civic energies) to match that enterprise -
a local rebuke, rooted (immemorial, round).


 
There, in crested shields and emblems,
dragons, eagles, intricate insignia,
the might of unaccountable dominion
met midget heralds of a parish realm -


 
the merchants of the Nine - and lost
their sway (temporarily) to a democracy
(partial).  Upstart, vain, swaggering city
complained Dante (from a rival Boast


 
of Italy) - forever seeking access to the Sea
(irascible wasp still whispering denunciations
in the shade of an eagle's pyrotechnic turns)!
Meanwhile Lorenzetti freres (in their piazza


 
seashell) turned sunlight inward (against
the walls of the Palazzo).  Soothing massage
of frescoed radiance framed a stern message
for elected lords : rule by violence


 
results in anarchy (and desolation,
finally); rule by justice (on the other wall)
results in joy.  It was a note to the imperial
Henry (in the end) : peace is earth's foundation.

...talking to myself again, through you (& vice versa).

6

 
As he brushed in the crown of the steep-
combed hills' rust-green, Lorenzetti
must have felt like those travelers he
scribbled across them (ready for sleep

 
in his own bed, finally).  And when Martini
(daubing patriarchs, bordering the Virgin
Maesta) scrolled a miniature stern
warning for all subtle, muffled mutiny -

 
malevolence against the commonweal -
there in Palazzo Pubblico (Sala
del Mappamondo) - he spoke through Maria
herself (like an infant Word through the royal

 
She).  Pure color glows like a proverb;
the gesture represents what's bent
too shy for speech (abiding, swelling up
sometimes).  Angels lift bowls of herbs

 
and flowers toward them, under their canopy
of red and white, of royal blue.  The sky 
is midnight.  A mirror of the old country
glimmers (signing) in your old unhappy

 
heart.  The sun shines there, also -
intermittently.  Your heart's a mappemunde
(scan it and weep).  Where the sea resounds;
where your hand reiterates a silvered blue.

(p.s. "Ramirez" in previous post : reference to Martin Ramirez, subject of marvelous show
currently at American Folk Art Museum in NY)

more perturbed quietude from Siena...

5

 
When droning sages dared to speak of God
they seared their tongues (sappy mountains
of audacity).  They stumbled - they incensed
the panicky demons (with their babble-screed).

 
God shrugged, and turned his back.  A vast
crescendo of dry leaves (frail Armada) sailed
out of the library.  Humble, inconsequential,
the serviceable word.  It accumulated (ballast).

 
Words and spittle split the world's contempt.
Only harsh masonry of absolute dream
(prestidigitation, Midas massage, scam
of platre-de-Paris effigy) appeared exempt.

 
From anemone-whorls of spooky midnight blue
on the edge of the highway, to zebra-
stripes of an ineluctable cathedral
the dumb world answers back (I see you) -

 
I see, I see chants Dante too
in the celebrity fresco of Ambrogio
- there like an angry bee (gone solo)
thrust from the hive, pacing his peripetio

 
(longhouse-home).  Playing hide-and-seek
in marble rafters painted with images
of marble rafters, in the troubadours'
hill-town nestled (hidden) in peaks

 
of hills (with Beatrice).  Horsing around
with pals of Palio - cantering across his
can-can-cantos - toward a Ramirez ferris-
wheel, in Mexico (tiered vale of Jehoshaphat).

4

 
The quiet in paintings... more quiet
than whisper of hand and horsehair.
Sound of small waves, the patter
of rain.  Vanishing point (silent).

 
Something labors at the perpendicular
of the planes... where sweet cacophony
of vernal streets extends coarse (funny)
tendrils in a chorus of counterparts

 
the sea-depths of the air beckon
into tremulous reaches (embodied
cloud-light).  And the painter's eye
steadied so (calm reconnaissance

 
of lion-glance) edges toward
molten serpentine... where
a principle (urbane particulars'
hewn symmetry) is its reward :

 
dead reckoning of dancers in a round,
or masons of a bow-taut campanile.
Dread judgement of the Nine (final).
Eagles' mantle (burial mound).

3

 
A sky-backdrop of mordant turquoise
smudged with bronze rust.  Ivory
balcony intersects curved alcove.
In the background, pink battlements.

 
The center of gravity sits in the High
Priest's triangular white-gold cap.
Hesitant hands of aged Giuseppe,
young white-frocked Maria

 
hover beneath that woolly patriarch's massive
beard-fountain.  By the door old Joachim is
fending off a pack of jilted hoodlums.
Striped heralds blow bull-roarers.  Conceive,

 
conceive... conceive she does, like light
through glass (mirrored in the Lago al
San Leonardo).  This painterly minstrel
(Lippo Vanni) had a feel for multitudes -

 
bees swarming (droning) in the chancel below
barely distinguish between his perfect scene
and the pellucid serpentine of the marble barn
enfolding same (step into the dream, Tommasio).

 
And the Glory of the Lord shone round about them.
In the pluperfect of her girlish gown... veil
of wellspring everlasting.  Mist, maze, riddle...
slant of glancing eyes.  Jerusalem.

                             
                  *
  
Spring sweeps like a flowery bas-relief
along the stony reaches of the porticos.
Emblem or enactment?  No one knows
how tender fingers melt to solid grief. 

- new installment in current poem (Autumn Door, tentatively) -

2
                   San Leonardo al Lago, c. 1370

 
Four sides of a barrel-vaulted ceiling
are filled with angels singing - playing
archaic, bulbous instruments, leaning
upward (past vermilion-winged

 
seraphim) to the apex of the vault.
Presentation, Betrothal, Annunciation and
Assumption.  Dense veinèd marble (amended
by dream).  Revolving riddle (spectral salt).

 
Magnetic occlusion of an infant kiss
seals the fate of the Chosen One
(matrix of surprise design -
absolute one-day fresco, this)

 
on the nether half of the altarpiece, the cross-
hairs of the children's stories (crown
of the skull).  When he comes into his own
(the worm quartet, the limbs of Lazarus).

Still trying to figure out what I'm doing. Sincerely sorry for all the comings & goings of this blog. I love this medium but I'm in a creative miasma-turmoil-block. Will continue to try to be quiet...

Annoyed with both Jim Harrison & William Logan pieces in NYTBR last weekend. Logan tries to knock Crane off his always-shaky pedestal. Harrison the successful bon-vivant novelist makes fun of academic poets. They are fair game (I've done it myself occasionally), but when he writes "Vallejo... a grander poet than any now living on this bruised earth"... fooey. Excuse me, Jim, but how would you know?? Stick with hunting quail, buddy. Poetry's out of your league.

Reading H.L. Humes, The Underground City. He's better than Pynchon, John (speaking as one who hasn't read Pynchon).

Here's a new chapter from untitled fresco-in-progress.

1

 
Like the famous rose out of the dried-up swimming pool
the thought of you comes to me with the approach
of your birthday.  The planet spins just out of reach
of the sun (path of a dizzy potter's wheel)

 
still warming with evening light the flaking fresco
(framed by gilded oak) in the old Town Hall
where the phantom image of a pax municipal
is captured in a ring of dancing girls... come & go,

 
come & go with me they sing, in their clear soprano
silence of pastel.  And so I would indeed...
out of my fated rounds (Providence, decreed
in faded characters - Dante Street, Hope, Gano...)

 
and across the squared improbable city
harbored in every heart - toward you
(my dancing absence, skipping beat, blue
J).  From shallow deeps and minor bays to blazing C.

Essay in progress over here : "How to Read a Long Poem" (responding, in part, to Reginald Shepherd's recent post on the subject).

yet once more unto the breach my friends

I'll probably be going quiet here at HG Poetics, for a while. That's the plan for now, anyway.

Had a clear realization today (& I don't get many clear realizations) that I'm not really the same person I was when I started this blog 4 years ago, or when I wrote my long poems, or my short poems...

Please understand, this is not related to the fact that I've posted more recently about faith & religion here. It's related to the thought that I need to make some practical changes.

I'm treading water, not writing or doing what I'd like in that vein. Not really taking part in any poetry scene, even in the small ways I once thought I did. And it's not enough, anymore, to observe & comment on other poetry blogs, fascinating and fun as some of them are.

I need to find another way to write, or not-write. It's a big world out there, beyond the library. I must try to shake myself out of old patterns.

Thanks for visiting, friends.

(p.s. am reading interesting Russian novel - Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman.)

more porch music

It's been dark
gettin little lighter now
waitin on the Jubilee

It's been long
gettin little brighter now
waitin round to be free

B-blues

Yadda da deeda day (variation from last year)

from winter solstice a year ago

Yes, that's me, in New Orleans, after Katrina. Lucky to be there.

Chet Baker on a bad night, trying to sound like Henry.

chance chords (re)discovered by ignorant musician

I repeat myself too much. The Moevs book is very, very good (Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy). It helped me understand certain deep & complex ideas. Let's leave it at that.

Here's more strange stuff that nobody will understand, from Autumn Door. (I re-post this in order to rid my blog of what appears to have been a spam comment, which has showed up on several poetry blogs. Have to figure out comment moderating, I guess. My apologies to Andrew Shields, who sent an authentic comment to the same post.)

9

 
The murmur of the tree, the consolation
of the air.  When you've finished all your assignments,
after the last test.  It rustles through the tents
of Abraham (your dream)... the Shekinah, the One. 

 
I too am a jealous guy – I too have a heart
(corrupt desperado).  Heap dust on your brow,
then, princely one – no time like now
for self-abasement, snarls the shopping-cart

 
lady, she of Lebanon cedars, whose twin
towers (swelling roses in her blouse) navigate
the raging, reckless nations.  Her familiar fate.
Deliver us (Virgin, Saena Julia) from our vapid sin.

 
A flowerpot fashioned on the fastest wheel
in the West or on the Nile goes into the kiln
for the kill – by kinfolk driven (everyone
wondering, Everyman).  Your Achilles, heel.

 
When you lose your job.  When the air
feels clammy, absent.  When you lean your head back
and peer up toward pinpoints in the black night,
on the prairie, on the steppe.  Cold, bare.

 
At the last moment.  At the midnight hour.
Up (down).  To you (alone).
Keening wind.  Frozen
lake.  Weeping willow.  Empty tower.

 
So shape up your conjecture (17-mile donut-
loop under the Alps) – Kaluza-Klein
gluino squarks, or sleptons for the winos in
dark matter horns (Swiss chocolate, Big Bang).

 
The cosmos whispered in a willow branch.
It was the timbre of your crooning voice,
compagnevole Jonah-tree – sweetness
in the creaking of a rusted latch.

 
As every wheel reiterates itself
so I rekindle your itinerant ellipse.
Vagrant heart... feminine apocalypse...
your potter's clay my zed, aleph.

There is more time experienced in an individual life than in the whole span of history. Un paradoxe, n'est-ce pas? Proust had an inkling of this, which is why his novel runs to 8 volumes. It could have been so much longer.

Despite the severe practical problems and existential suffering I experience as a low-level unionized library worker in an Ivy League University on the Eastern Coastline of the United States of America (just kidding), I continue my heroic (kidding) effort to produce new episodes of my epic (kid) poem Autumn Door. Thus :

8

 
That which is infinitely far is also infinitely
near.  Beguile me, then, with your
singular aspect, Gypsy songster - for
two is only one in the mirror, so.

 
Across the remoteness of a frigid lake
two skaters, gliding, arm in arm
who leave their breath behind, still warm
in crystal form (with streaks of icy wake).

                              
                 *

Yet more debate today about Ron Silliman's critical terminology.

Branding/pigeonholing is truly an inversion of literary criticism. A poem is something new constructed out of shared materials. Criticism relies on catholic taste, common sense, careful discernment. These are requirements for any fair judgement of poems, bodies of work, stylistic trends. On such basis, the critic evaluates the new thing that the poet has made out of shared materials.

The aim of the polemicist and pigeonholer, on the other hand, is to fit individual works into a pattern, an abstraction. The poem is not a new thing, but merely an "example" of a "trend" in a predetermined (and determinist) literary cosmology. The work is thus belittled in the very act of being "named" (though "to brand" - that marketing practice derived from cattle-herding - should not be confused with the dignified verb "to name").

We all generalize - we all draw general conclusions based on particulars; but if our evidence has no grounding in honest criticism, or if it merely serves as fodder for some kind of polemical agenda, of what real value is it for appreciating the qualities of individual works? It's nothing more than a pretentious form of name-calling.

MAXIMS OF COOL QUIETUDE


That poem you love is an excerpt from the poem of Reality.

*

You thought of form as shape or design; now think of form as (informing) principle.

*

Twilight world.

*

nice poem today by Mairead Byrne, straight from little olde Providence

... but it's not about me & my story, ultimately. Poetry has to do with expressing truth - through feeling, sensibility. All the poems in the world are just scraps of paper, little piles of litter, old signs, that accumulate and drift around the psyche-life and its memories, its thoughts, that deep round well.

A new essay over here : My Quietude.

Yes, today I feel ready to curl up in dream-song land, negative capability land, give up the "irritable reaching after fact and reason"...

If I come across these days as some kind of Preacher McDunderhead, it has partly to do with the fact that lately I have been on a very local campaign to help the struggling little church across the street from me, and my mind is preoccupied with these questions - how to talk about faith to people on a mental fence...

& of course partly to do with the fact that I am a Preacher McDunderhead...

I like this review of Richard Dawkins's anti-religion screed, by Terry Eagleton, which Mark Scroggins pointed me toward. Eagleton's defense argues for the reasonableness of faith, against the carping of rationalism and (pseudo-)scientific positivism. This review is actually an example of ordinary, good old Western humanist thinking - though I would quibble with the somewhat simplistic re-presentation of the Jesus vs. "legalism" story, the Jesus the political radical, etc. Theologian Amy-Jill Levine's new book, The Misunderstood Jew, might be an antidote for some of that.

But this is not a religion blog. I promise to get back to poetry one of these days. I'm starting to miss it myself.

I guess this remains the Manifesto of Quietude.

MAXIMS OF COOL QUIETUDE


Invention is the mother of necessity.

*

Poets are painters and should be treated as such (rubbing alcohol).

*

Critics ought to approach poetry the way Teddy Roosevelt approached the River of Doubt.

*

People generally believe poetry is made of words. Nothing could be further from the truth.

*

A poem is a ziggurat.

*

A poet is a rat.

*

The best poetry is always in translation. One discovers this after the native tongue has turned to gibberish.

*

Poets are deaf-mutes surrounded by packs of gossip hounds.

*

Poems are made out of pure lead.

*

American poetry - an oxymoron. Some have lived and died (simultaneously) for an oxymoron.

*

Changed the blog header a little bit. Got tired of looking at myself. That's Henry Thunder Winnebago, recording songs in a grove.

Happy new year, friends. HG Poetics is 4 yrs old. I've been busy lately with un-literary things. Setting up a lecture series at my church, etc. Hope to get back to poetry & all one of these days. Toodles.

... & so the mysterious Xmas guest Gabriel Gudding heads back (in his little blue car) into the flat deep skyland of the midwest. It was great to see him, compagnevolo of him to come calling. Usually we seem to agree to disagree. I too adore Simone Weil - but not for her rejections...

Here, then, for Christmas, is the philosophical groundwork for the School of Cool Quietude - the school which basically surpasses and replaces the Language School, the Post-Avant School, the New York School, the Black Mountain School, Nathan Bishop Middle School, Harley Hopkins Elementary School, and all the other contemporary schools. Aristotle laid out the understanding by which we recognize that state that Charles Olson so avidly pursued in his mumbo-jumbo way (& ironically dismissed the Greeks for missing) : that reality is inherently intelligible : there is no Cartesian-modern duality of mind and matter : Intellect is the identity, the coincidence of the knower and the known. C. Moev again :

"...the heritage that is Plato reworked by Aristotle reworked by Plotinus, all reworked again by Aristotle redivivus in the thirteenth century, and all sharpened in the light of Christian meditation. From our discussion of Aristotle, we may distill that understanding into three fundamental principles, which were to become the foundation of the medieval understanding of reality.

1. God, as pure being or actuality or form, is the reflexivity of pure awareness (intellect itself), which is nothing (not a thing), but the active power to be everything and nothing. [viz. Nicolas Cusanus's name for God : the Possest, the "Is-Power"]

2. Each thing that exists, exists only as a qualification of or participation in Intellect-Being. As determinations or limitations of being, things are radically other than the principle of Being itself (Aquinas would say they participate only in 'common' or 'created' being), yet if they were not in, of, through or from God, they would not be. In an absolute sense, only God is; all else shares. [note the prefigurement here of the Romantic poets' synthetic awareness - contemplation of the All in all things, in quietude]

3. Human awareness (the rational soul) is a special case, a special sharing in or affinity with the ultimate ontological principle. Hence its (at least potential) immortality, freedom in and from space and time, immunity to the power of any created thing (freedom of the will), and potential for what was variously called contemplative rapture (alienatio mentis, ek-stasis), deification (deificatio), or divine union (unio mystica). [ie., quietude]

"Our particular concern is the third principle, because it in fact subsumes the first two, and because it is the principle that underlies the pilgrim Dante's journey, his claims to have visited the Empyrean..." [Moev, p. 58]

Found the book I was looking for for Gabriel
(though my edition has a different cover). (see previous post)

ten years ago

Another special spiel over at Latta-day today. I do have a copy of Feathers to Iron; will have to go have a look at it again.

The homerish-homelessness of the poet, sneaking past the ziggurats of abstract systems, yet searching, puzzling along...

Aristotle & Dante, of course, is all system... here's Moev (The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy, pp. 54-55): "Here we see that various aspects of Aristotle's philosophy fit together, as they are wont to do. Aristotle's stress on the fact that the rational soul "comes from outside", is divine, in some respect immortal, and that it presupposes no organ or body, is all to say that it is not subject to generation, corruption, or any natural process. The intellective soul does not rely on body or the world because it is ontologically prior to it, which is to say that it is related to the ultimate reality (pure form or actuality) iin which all things consist. The Christians were to express the same point by saying that the rational soul depends on (is produced by) only God, and is thus immortal. Moreover, it no longer seems arbitrary for Aristotle to claim that the Unmoved Mover moves all things as final cause, as their goal or object of desire and love; or that all things have "something divine in them"... that consciously or unconsciously moves them toward happiness or fulfillment, an impulse that grounds the human notion of the good, and whose ultimate goal is the Unmoved Mover... The Prime Mover is pure form, the principle of intelligence-intelligibility-being through which every being is; it is the principle that becomes manifest, and conscious of itself, as form becomes immaterial. To aspire upward in the hierarchy of being is to aspire to a greater range of existence, and ultimately to be unbound by any particular mode of existence : to be the power to be anything. It is, ultimately, for things to aspire to be what gives them being : form itself, which is nous. This is the ultimate consequence of Aristotle's rejection of Platonic Forms and dualism : intelligence-intelligibility-being must then be intrinsic to things, the being of their being, which is why the world is knowable."

OK. "To aspire upward in the hierarchy of being..." Now think of all those loping obscure tricky illegible prickly-proud expansive derelict long life-poems, which Latta is talking about... those searching-wandering poems, trying to absorb and be everything, Olson, Jack Clarke, Pound, WCW, Zukofsky, & all... those material-local-historical jumble-bags...

Here's the fundamental axiom which might be the key to their "form" : the way upward is the way down. In order to aspire to the Empyrean the poet must descend compassionately to the most material, the most particular, the most obscure, local, abject, ignored... down among the abandoned ones, down into the rag-&-bone shop, down Desolation Row... in order to become everything the poet must become nothing...

(cf. Joseph Brodsky's moving poem "Nature Morte")

... thus I might want to argue that the locus classicus, the perfect exemplar of this modern poetic form-effort, is none other than David Jones's Anathemata and his other works... because, 1st of all, he united the most particular, the most abject, the most historical flotsam & jetsam with an intelligible aesthetic form : the old notion that the pagan myths and ancient histories were all types and prefigurings of the historical kenosis-descent-crucifixion of Christ is what gives shape to his mythos & his narratives. No one has so thoroughly rendered the actuality, the local feel & color of an excruciating place : whether it's the trenches of WW I or the battlements of an outpost of the Roman empire, he was there...

In this way history and the poem, in parallel, reflect the compassionate kenosis - the descent, the self-humbling - of the divine. In this way the history of the modern long poem reflects, unknowingly, the acts of the sacrificial lamb.

This is just one way of looking at it.

see Daniel Green's comments on literary formalism, in his posts of Dec. 12 and 13.

The aesthetic sense : free intellectual capability to absorb information (facts, ideas, arguments, opinions, sensations), and then to encompass same within a sense of form, order, beauty. A formal (and holistic) response to beauty in works of art.

I might have more to say about "form" after I finish this interesting book on Dante by Christian Moev. He describes the subtleties of Aristotle's central concepts - ie. the relation between form (as the substantial reality of things in the hierarchy of nature or "chain of being") and the intellect (the free power of the soul to apprehend real things).

(This sounds awfully vague, I know.)

When you know the form of something, you grasp its identity. Matter, strictly speaking, doesn't exist : it's the potentiality of form. & form fulfills potentiality in acts of creative intellect (the Prime Mover for Nature; the human intellect for art).

But what is it to say that something has (primarily) an aesthetic form? Maybe Aristotle would say something like this : an aesthetic form is an object structured in such a way as to reflect the sense of beauty which resides in the (complementary) inner form of the soul.

THE POETRY of earth is never dead:  
  When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,  
  And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run  
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;  
That is the Grasshopper’s — he takes the lead          
  In summer luxury, — he has never done  
  With his delights; for when tired out with fun  
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.  
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:  
  On a lone winter evening, when the frost         
    Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills  
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,  
  And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,  
    The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.


 
                              December 30, 1816. 

Gabriel, who is in town for a few days, told me last night he was working on a poem in praise of the sun. I remembered a poem by Greek poet Odysseas Elytes; went upstairs to look for it on my shelves & couldn't find it. Today I searched the library stacks; when I get home I'll dig around some more for that yellow paperback (I think it was called "The Sovereign Sun"...).

Now I realize I'm doing this on the shortest day of the year.

OK, enough whinin' & moanin' & groanin'. I just go over here & get a 2nd wind. (though I ain't so enthused about what I've seen of Mr. Thomas IQ Pynchon. Seems like a Joyce wannabee, over-ambitious, splenetic fussbudget. Like me.)

A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day,
Being the shortest day

 
TIS the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes, 
Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes, 
The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks 
Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes; 
The worlds whole sap is sunke: 
The generall balme th'hydroptique earth hath drunk, 
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke, 
Dead and enterr'd; yet all these seeme to laugh, 
Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph. 

 
Study me then, you who shall lovers bee 
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring: 
For I am every dead thing, 
In whom love wrought new Alchimie. 
For his art did expresse 
A quintessence even from nothingnesse, 
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse: 
He ruin'd mee, and I am re-begot 
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not. 

 
All others, from all things, draw all that's good, 
Life, soule, forme, spirit, whence they beeing have; 
I, by loves limbecke, am the grave 
Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood 
Have wee two wept, and so 
Drownd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow 
To be two Chaosses, when we did show 
Care to ought else; and often absences 
Withdrew our soules, and made us carcasses. 

 
But I am by her death, (which word wrongs her) 
Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown; 
Were I a man, that I were one, 
I needs must know; I should preferre, 
If I were any beast, 
Some ends, some means; Yea plants, yea stones detest, 
And love; All, all some properties invest; 
If I an ordinary nothing were, 
As shadow, a light, and body must be here. 

 
But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew. 
You lovers, for whose sake, the lesser Sunne 
At this time to the Goat is runne 
To fetch new lust, and give it you, 
Enjoy your summer all; 
Since shee enjoyes her long nights festivall, 
Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call 
This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this 
Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.

- John Donne

I wonder if there are still places where people approach poems together - comfortable spaces - where people approach poems as verbal-emotive-intellectual objects, having different dimensions -

sort of informal philological symposia (in Mandelstam's sense) -

places where whole poems are apprehended, experienced, evaluated - in an atmosphere of collegial craftsmanship & shared insights -

not as part of any poet's or critic's personal ambition or agenda, but focusing together on the artistic object itself -

far away from personality promotions and demotions - a place of intellectual and aesthetic objectivity -

the dream of the Petersburg Acmeists -

Still in early chapters of Moev book on Dante mentioned previously. Also reading Russian novel by Vasily Grossman, Life & Fate. In english.

Moev's book hinges on the argument that Dante's (& medieval) conception of reality differs fundamentally from modern, & we need to try to grasp that conception if we want to make sense of Divina Commedia. His description of the Platonic-Aristotelian-Dantean world-picture reminded me of George Berkeley's writings. Matter is not a "thing". It is substantial, but not in our materialist sense of a solid substratum. Matter is not any where or what : it is an expression of a (dramatic?) concept. The substance of reality originates in the creative act of the divine mind.

We do find this world-view extremely remote, hard to comprehend. Yet some would argue it's closer to the quantum-relativity cosmos of contemporary science, as opposed to traditional-modern materialist notions.

In the chapter of Stubborn Grew called "Once in Paradise", I tried to ground that narrative in something similar, by playing with the story of George Berkeley's 3-yr residence in the "Paradise" section of Newport, Rhode Island, in the early 18th century.

Here are a couple relevant passages :

*

Irish iconoclast, waiting for the money to come through 
under his cardboard loans, waving his good arm 
toward Bermuda; heeling to leeward on charm 
only – the world can understand.  Sand fills his shoe.

 
English, French, European, utilitarian, 
rationing out creation, one coffeespoon, one puff 
of philosophical smoke – and it's enough
for the Modern Diner – these eggs are vegetarian!

 
Queue up for the doubledecker sandwich island,
individuals!  Invisible hands prepare your steaks –
Chicago machine-made diesel-chuckle-X shakes! 
Lock the white sex bullpen – key's in your hand...

 
etc.
Berkeley was a chip off the old wayward block. 
Yahwehward – subject to Johnsonian hard knock. 
Yet stone synecdoche the builders reject

 
becomes a wander in RI.
Chip, chip, chip away... yet chippewater will 
return – a continuous whippoorwill
in marginal field. Aye.

 
16

 
Aloft there on shale shelf, in cave mouth, 
Berkeley's eyes drifted out to sea.
A pair of dicey gypsy barks
gambling on the shepherding waves.

 
You have your materialist peasants 
nattering pedantically along with your 
libertine idle blank-eyed statuettes O 
London – and this jovial pleasant

 
noncholeric collared Irish bookish Dean 
waves the Vico key in your face.  And waits. 
Waits for your double crosscheck, mates –
your doubloon that never comes – keening,

 
why have you forsaken me?  In RI?  Heaven's 
not some dull neuteronian mechanical.
It's providential – and recreational!
A dream, again! – again! – Bermudian!

Am busy these days trying to set up a lecture series for church on some of these basic issues of "worldview". Going to invite various scholars & religious people & atheists etc. "God for Beginners" "Intro to God 101". something like that. & don't worry : there will be a section on civil liberties, freedom of conscience, separation of church & state, etc. This is Rhode Island, after all. If I can figure out how to podcast the lectures, I will.

(that's me on harp at a concert on Redeemer lawn last summer)

Back from Mpls comes Henry. Him daughter is all graduated (hip hoo-ray) & on her way to distant deserts with her Mom, to visit Peace Corps pal. Him blogland bud Gabe Gudd coming manana to crash on couch (while in Prov to visit him daughter). Him wife ask him to ask him Gabe not to talk about it on him blog. Him agree. Henry has no poesie to speak of, he im pow'rful down blooey & bored with all sundry & self him, he.

Don't mind me. I like some poetry I read in magazines and books. Really. & they have meant much to me at various points in time & space. I even edited a little magazine myself for a while.

It seems I'm a chap who probably needs to make some changes.

Now I'm off to the Great Mid-West, for my daughter's college graduation. Back in Providence on Monday. This blog will be 4 years old in about 3 weeks. I will be turning 4,000 this year. Maybe it's time.

Sorry, just ruminatin'. Have a good week.

....then again, why even try? This blog is perpetually winding down. I don't have a vested interest in writing scholarly briefs. Blog-posting poems is a dead-end disguised as a short-cut. But then again, who wants to read poetry magazines? or poems in magazines? New Spleen Today, issue #414.

Reading about the nature of Dante's Primo Mobile (in Moev book mentioned previously). The fastest of the heavenly circles, it is basically potentiality and motion. Lives "right next" to God's Mind. Spin.

This coincided with article in NY Times Sunday magazine about new design for surveillance aircraft : basically it's all wing, sort of a perpetual-motion boomerang which spins so fast that the whole thing (not just the rotor, as on a helicopter) is invisible.

Helen Vendler profile in NYTBR last Sunday as well. Her dislike for fashionable emphasis on drafts, posthumous disjecta literaria. Discrimination, "classics".

I can sort of appreciate that. But my way of writing poetry now involves a perpetual spin-motion (quatrain toy train) which causes itself to disappear from everyone's literary horizon. See ya.

My prof & proto-prof blog friends are almost done grading papers, & now they have time to tell us about the ethics of poetic pleasure, and the pleasure of poetic ethics, and so on etc... I'd like to agree with Eric Selinger's clear distinction between morality and aesthetics - it clears away so much sophistry - & yet I have doubts about an epistemology(?) which makes of "pleasure" a distinct and separate entity, something we can analyze for ever & ever with complaisance & delight...

walk in fear of abstractions...

Poetry is a (pleasant) conjunction of contradictions. A fulfillment of a particular poet's very personal, subconscious need (perhaps very specific, private); yet also a dispassionate, disinterested, aesthetically-resolved end in itself. I guess in that self-determining end lies its power of fulfillment. It's that unique, autonomous aesthetic quality (um, let's call it "beauty") which makes poetry so desirable as a means to other ends (ethical, intellectual, ideological, political, utilitarian, etc...).

Dante considered the Divina Commedia a didactic poem with a moral lesson. But we recognize that its power as lesson depends on its integrity as art work. On the other hand, perhaps this recognition reveals the limits of our worldview. As long as we keep searching for Ethics in Aesthetics, we remain merely aesthetes. (Ethy ain't here, people. She lef Athy bout 6 yr ago f'nother fella, move to DEtroit.)

From an ethical standpoint, art is merely a means to an end (the good life, the justified life, the right action at the right time, the heroic exemplars of truth & virtue... the edification of humanity).

From an aesthetic standpoint, ethics (in the abstract) is merely an occasion for comedy (and tragedy) : since the power of experience - the mimesis of particulars - gives art an overwhelming advantage over any other form of discourse.

Deal with it...

(... that's "Pax", reclining there, from Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "Good Government" fresco in Siena.)

Texts that have made life difficult for me over the years :

The Bible
"Cowboy Bob" series from Hopkins Public Library (that dates me)
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Catch-22
60s NY School anthology (red cover)
Vlad Nabokov books
Most of the paperback novels of the 60s

... in fact whut has been seriously discussed in various litwawy salons as the "mainstreaming" of "difficult" "avant-garde" "texts" in our "poetic culture" is really just the manifestation - the bulbous exposure - of the "professional" "serious" and "influential-successful" communing & commingling together of one or more of the mutual heads of Hackdom. It was there in the genes from Day One.

Let's face it : 99% of all writers are hacks, and the other 1 percent are also hacky 99% of the time. You have your commercial (generic) hacks, your arty-farty (academic) hacks, your vaunted-garde high-nosed (revoleptic) hacks... all three of 'em close kithin-kin brethren, a-slurpin' o' the turbid inkwell.

Behold them three conjoined heads, a-yammerin' down the track o' the Hackbeast Trifecta ! Now there's some writin' for yaz !

Trying to follow & enjoying the conversation on varieties of pleasurable reading experience, started by Josh Corey & et al. Nota :

There's probably something like "inherent difficulty", which gets around Robt. Archambeau's relativizing the notion. Understanding a difficult text has to involve more than just learning the lingo - no matter how arcane (socially, pedagogically) the lingo may be. Difficulty is not just an aspect of verbal encryption - a puzzle to be worked out - nor is it, on the other hand, just an aspect of textual ambiguity, undecideability.

I'd say "inherent difficulty" is present in any literary work which tries to represent/interpret the unknown, the mysterious, and the real - all of these together. What we think of as cheap thrills, escapist novels, easy reading - the pleasure we take in them - and the reason we think of them this way - is that they have little or no originality. There is no apprehension of anything really new - no exploration. They are "generic" - they fulfill generic expectations - there is no break in the seamless machinery of entertainment, because the author is not confronting anything mysterious. There is no "mystery" in these mysteries.

Silliman & many others would like to analyze this difference in goals by way of differences on the level of diction, syntax, etc. But the use of different styles and literary idioms doesn't guarantee the "inherent difficulty" I'm getting at. In fact we are familiar with the phenomenon of supposedly "difficult" texts which simply mimic and parrot the received or prestigious exempla for "difficulty". In fact we see so much of this, that many of us have to turn to cheap thrills fiction just to escape the hypocrisy of it all.

Where do writers like Jane Austen, Malcolm Lowry, Shakespeare, Nabokov, fit here? Nabokov is someone who tried to bridge the popular read and the extreme-cryptic-arcane. Lowry's Under the Volcano is layered like an onion. (is there pleasure by way of onions?)

Deleted some posts from yesterday. My apologies (sincere) to those who commented on them. I'm just too old for these games. Will probably have to delete this post too eventually.

J. Latta, everlasting Gracehoper. (I think I'm more of a left-handed Ondt.) Today's post transmits both downsides & upsides of "hobo-ing", by way of Pynchon. (& vicarious same.) Have a generation of poets been systematically "kicked to the curb", viz. Amiri Baraka? Seems more like the poets just reflect the trends at large. Settling into your computer cubicle & checking your investments. But he & John L. keep pointing to something outside ("old weird America").

(I'm a-goin' to write a comic novel in ol-wild-America fashion, about a salesman traveling through Harper's Ferry who gets taken hostage by a big fat Civil War re-enactor, in order so that the latter can publicize his belief that Abe Lincoln, as a crypto-Native American, deliberately selected the world's worst generals for the Federal side, so as to carry out a spiritual command to wreak Divine Judgement, fully, on both sides in the Civil War. It's a theory. hereby copyrighted @ Henry H. Gould.)

... another little putt at Nicky de Cusa's Mini-Golf (ie. Autumn Door) :

7

 
A sparkling of snow, the air grown featherweight.
This is the earth, we may see no other.
A ball bobbled in a children's game, somewhere
suspended... pendant, over-under the infinite...

 
An anxious bluejay squawks contingent plans
for now.  But we will revolve, you and I,
on this trim pivot that upholds our sky -
drawn as we were out of the bookish plains

 
toward one transparent parapet, a ziggurat
of smiles.  Its coil retracts to vertiginous heights;
its labyrinth of particolored slates
a nowhere-palimpsest (at zero climate)

 
and with such pitch the crusted compost-mound
disintegrates in layers... flaked limestone
streaked with articulate foam, Shoshone
medicine bones, plate tectonics ground

 
up and moving in infant array - earth's
loyal dust-mote children - early, early, eagerly 
engaged in morning, honoring seared ugliness
beguilingly, half-grasping each pennyworth

 
incalculate and prodigal - innocent idolators
plunging tenacious fingers into frangible soil.
A scarab rolls its microcosm toward the Nile
(fragrant little lifeboat buried in funeral barges)

 
as the thought of you rotates beside the kiln
where the sun growls and the stars gesticulate
and the thought gestates, a guest of state...
(eyes bent toward snow along a windowsill).

The previous poem is not meant to be simply a melancholy reflection, an elegy for someone far away. The idea that "the autumn door leads nowhere" has another side to it also. Relates to this concept of "the empyrean", which I'm getting from the book about Dante noted earlier here (by Moev). It is not "anywhere"; it is an intellectual, non-physical space - the beginning, the origin of space. The "uncreated".

Slow to glob (I mean blog), slow to write these days. I love my new little poem, hope it keeps going... but everything like this takes a big mental effort on my part. There are many distractions as well as obligations on my time.

I have to get into a state of mind. Poetry for me is very different from talk or prose. I know that doesn't hold for everyone, obviously. That's OK.