Received first copies of new pocket-size version of some of my books. This is how I want them to be! Small, handy, inexpensive, easy to put in pocket etc.

Now I'd like to roam the country like Walt or Vachel, spread them around.

*

(Tinkered a little with Way Stations, added photo on back.)



(Also tidied up Dove Street. Now they are really just right.)



(And tweaked Chapel Hill, added photo. Done.)

Fontegaia burbles on. I wonder who understands this.

9

 
Proud Guidoriccio (upon his stallion
clad in rich honey-gold and black) still rides
over the blank space of an absent mappamondo.
Year after year, mesmerized horsemen

 
replay the triumph of their city-state.
Res publica del popolo - an April quattrocento
renascence - young lovely Sienese (memento
mori) twirling the ridda hand-in-hand, sweet

 
and sedate... (O Primavera).  Plague
brought down the curtain on them all.
Only a somber scolding wraith (dismal
Baptist with bare talon-toes) raged

 
through the chastened aftermath.
The merchants (in their wills) heaped
ashes on their brows.  The Reaper reaped.
Wheedling warlords waded in (bloodbath).

 
Yet... neither libertine nor puritan, bells
drone on.  Sound like an iron whisper
flows in waves across the sleepy air.
An equilibrium (Diana, Dionysius).

 
Like the slowest horse in the race - Ramirez
hobo-caballero, con crayon - swaying
King Bumblebee, atop dawdling (braying)
donkey (or sleepy waiter Biff - sez

 
the magic circus-word is : hippopotamus)
riding an iron horse through his peculiar
tunnel of love (Chet's trumpet, silver).
And the iron rose through disaster (us)

 
and the rust of river-water - through
august Augustus, Augustine's hip hippo, all
wolverine Rome, cavernous Constantinople -
til it roosted in a glinting horseshoe

 
buried in speechless soil (black earth
of curious Rus).  Like the copper penny
of a saturnine pilgrim - unearthed now,
uncanny.  So the Campenone berthed.

The history poem In RI is now available in pocket-size edition.

(Latter part of poem #8 below : sort of a comment on remarks about poetry & "fluency" posted a few days ago.)

8

 
And every race is a memento of the last
and the race itself is in memoriam
for the republic - its equilibrium
a dream of self-determination (still steadfast).

 
It seems a dream-work of oppressive habit
round and round the celebrated shell.
And the echoing shouts, curses - rivals'
obscene chicanery - twilight orbit

 
of the mob - all mingle there in the valley
of three hills (fuse and fade out into
children's games).  And the chariot
of the elders, clasping their hoary tally-

 
books, stamped with the black-white oval
of Siena... an absent river (Dante's gibe)
streams invisibly beneath it all.  The tribe
of poets crosses there - perpetual

 
hum (mellifluous).  You search for its source
in the double-almond of those eyes beyond
memory - like an icon from Trebizond
or the sound of a nervous horse

 
in love with the whole race (spread
over the sloping breast of earth-
buried bricks).  Woman of the South,
Sheba from Nile head-

 
waters, angel next door.  Evening
monotone (universal groan).  Cosmic
longing springs from the tropic
Amazon - her hair tendrils an unseen

 
planet; there the contemplative
urchin sets his paper vessel free
to echo in the stream of memory.
Horses, muses, stream, give, give.

...meanwhile, the horserace (or turtle race) continues...

7

 
On the prehistoric spine of Providence
spring trees branch white
with tiny flowerets.  Intricate
clouds come down to earth.  Once

 
each April, all the young trees
are almond-shaped.  The almond
blooms in winter snow (the round
year interrupted so) and so precedes

 
the Palio.  And so the Palio proceeds -
one horse (the last) sets a race in motion.
Pegasus, molding the Hippocrene fountain,
is pattern for these hill-town cavalcades.

 
Anxious against the rope the jockeys
plunge their steed-necks; hair's-breadth
will determine (after all the breath-
less muttered dickering) who hoists Mary's

 
flickering image in the Campo once again.
Meanwhile trees whisper a different course
(I remember small purple-white magnolias
in the courtyard beside the Franciscan

 
chapel, at the edge of a cliff-like wall).
They hold their places, swaying in the wind.
Sap rises slowly, tuned to long sorrow, blind
adoration.  Slowly, lowly... (like a turtle's call).

Wrote this simple poem after listening (for the first time) to Mstislav Rostropovich playing Bach for solo cello. Good music for a cruel April.

My kind, friendly neighbor across the street, whose nephew died at V. Tech the week before, passed away suddenly in his sleep on Thursday night. A loss to my neighborhood (not to mention another severe blow to this family).

Robert Archambeau writes a chipper report on Brit Poetry Wars in the Chicago Review. But the debate between Wilkinson & Riley over poetry/politics - Riley's critique of what seems to be a bent toward Language-purism and hands-off politics, stemming from a failure to distinguish between the two (poetry & politics) - well, this sounds like an echo of old debates on the Buffalo Poetics List of 10 years ago. Can't we get beyond these parameters somehow? Of course, British authors have a knack for saying whatever they say very authoritatively ("ne'er so well express'd")...

It seems like a continual re-statement of basics (though I pretty much agree with Riley's position). No, aesthetics is not politics, nor vice versa. No, poetry is not only a purification rite for a particular stream of left-religion (though it may be for some people). No, poetry in general, or particular "schools" of same, will not save us from capitalism, global warming, war, etc. (though particular poems might help).

Most poetry expresses shared values & trends of the moment; thus the "poetry wars" on various continents reflect ideological fractures in the cultural/intellectual spheres of the time. I think the aim of the poet (or dramatist or novelist), however, is to dig deeper : without surrendering fundamental principles, to find shared (if unacknowledged) ground, and to provide models of reconciliation.

I'm on jury duty this week, so blogging will be minimal. Here's another scribble for Fontegaia chapt. 2 :

6

 
The swelling crowd fills the Campo-conch
like the roar of the sea - contrada banners
swoop and flutter, sailing - glory to Siena!
Horses, horsemen jostle in the cinch

 
of the lead-rope - twilight inches forward
from the bell-tower - the tenth horse
starts his run... the race is on (hoarse
cries of rival jockeys, lashes of calf-pud).

 
Peacock rivalry, testosterone.
O vain people!  Chasing a bloody rag
around the haybales (for a brag).
This is about the poets (non-Verona).

 
You hold the key to the highway, cowboy
(sucking your pacifier).  It's cold
in the mountains (iron manifold) -
where snow locks up the almond eye

 
in a hexagon of exempla - where the race
wheels around a cast-off labyrinth
and the frothing beast (ninth
horse of the Apocalypse) reflects your face.

Interesting lecture by Kenneth Miller, biology professor at Brown. In the tradition of the Scopes trial (remember Inherit the Wind?)

3 chords for Virginia

HG Poetics has received a great number of visitors in the last 24 hours, thanks to Mandelstam (and the McKanes). This archival post to his poem "To Natasha Shtempel", translated by Richard and Elizabeth McKane (Bloodaxe Books, 1996) was the link. A member of a Classics discussion list had posted the poem in the original Russian, in memory of the victims at Virginia Tech; then someone found the link to the McKanes' translation.

This poem, like certain pieces of music, always brings me close to tears. It's fitting for this season, and for last week. Mandelstam often connected poetry with medicine and healing.

The poem was Mandelstam's last published work, written in exile in Voronezh, in May 1937, a few months before his death in a labor camp in Vladivistok. As the McKanes note : "When Mandelstam gave this poem to Natasha Shtempel, he said: 'I wrote this poem yesterday. It is the best that I have written. When I die, bequeath it to Pushkin House.'"

Yesterday I took some soup Sarah had made to our neighbors across the street. Their nephew was one of the victims at Virginia Tech.

Believe it or not, I represent continuity with that old high road. An American version. Not the pretentious post-avants, not the harlequin New York School, not the prosy Olsonites, not the slick magazine poets, not the cautious academics (charming and dazzling and fine as they all can be). Not them - just little ol' me. Henry. It's all there in them pocket-size paperbacks, the long & short of it.

Here's the new pocket-size, illustrated, & less expensive Dove Street.

& cf. JL today for a different angle on "abstraction".

The painter's abstractions are "concrete conceptions" of color, line, shape. If we go back to Mandelstam's idea of poetry's double thread - the impulse and the medium - we can think of the formative impulse as abstract (logical, constructive), and of the medium as concrete (a fluent song, a dramatic design).

In poetry's case the medium is so different from that of painting (or music, for that matter). It is the word. In Mandelstam's sense, the (poetic) word is a "plow, turning up the deep layers of time". How so? Because, for one thing, the word is the intimate expression of human consciousness - and it is lasting. Thus it forms a bond between human beings of different places and epochs. "I don't want Ovid in translation; I want the living, breathing Ovid." (Mandelstam again)

This archaic, perennial aspect of the poetic medium is part of what I meant by tradition as an objective reality (the bees' hum, the ongoing conversation). Thus poetry displays two kinds of fluency : sonic and "chronic".

It is precisely the modern-postmodern emphasis on breakage, dissonance and iconoclasm - & the banal-commercial-industrial iterations of same - which make this special fluency of the poetic medium difficult to recognize or value.

To think of the verbal-poetic medium as a river. Whitman's "hum of your valved voice".

To contrast a notion of art as emerging from conceptual abstraction, a sort of Platonic ether, with the idea of the "vernacular" (whether in language or architecture). Poetry emerging from this sort of perennial sound (Edwin Honig wrote somewhere about poetry as something like bees humming, present always and everywhere.) (Honig's name, in German : "honey")

Drab, dehumanized modernist building projects. Poetic productions stemming from abstract notions of language, form & ideology. Or kraftwerk poetry based on a do-it-yourself model - a-historical, detached from the flow of culture and civilizations, re-inventing primitive wheels again and again.

As opposed to an "Acmeist" model of poetry as a distinct, perennial something - an ongoing "conversation" (Pasternak's term) - rooted in shared culture and history, memory (a Dantean vernacular, the volgare illustre). Or Mandelstam's (& Akhmatova's, & Yeats's) sense of it as a gift, stemming from states of exaltation - inspired yet built on labor (Mandelstam proceeding from Pushkin & the Russian tradition).

What I'm trying to describe is close to Eliot's much-maligned concept of tradition - an already-underway, ongoing conversation, which one can join (and even revise) if one is willing to recognize it, and put in the necessary work of absorbing it.

My understanding is that these emphases are normative for European and world poetry : and somewhat distinct from the American (& Futurist) emphasis on flash, immediacy, (post)-modernist abstraction, constructivism, industrial kraft-production.

The "hum of the valved voice" - aiming for clarity and engagement, an intellectual agility for grasping connections. Wallace Stevens, a great technician, tended, in his critical comments, to downplay 20th-century emphases on technique : in favor of this "river-sense" of fluency which I'm trying to get at.

The poetic medium : perennial fluency.


Mississippi River, near Franklin Ave. Bridge,
Minneapolis (photo by Phoebe G.)

Would like to clear out the cobwebs, the lumber here. (Often feel mildly rebuked by John Latta : ie. today's "the temptations of earnestness".)

*

"Critical faculty". Fair judgement. I'm not referring to people (individuals), but to an aspect of how we play at art & poetry.

We take a liking to a poem or an artwork. Then we recognize weaknesses, limitations - but we still like it. It's that initial response which forms the basis for mutuality & camaraderie among artists : we like the same things. & there's a (limited) objectivity about the process.

The point is that this is a critical activity, not a "creative" one. "Being poets together" is not a good enough reason to be together. But liking (some of) the same things - even if we disagree about some other things - this is a firm basis, at least in the art sphere.

*

The tumult of the years since 1907. The gale-force winds : modernization, technology, ideology, politics, war. & we've had so many explainers & culture-critics since then that we sometimes forget that art & poetry offer a continual opportunity to re-evaluate, re-organize, rethink everything.

This is the creative process itself, the source of originality. We forget how personal it is : it's a matter of the artist picking & choosing what's important - whether in subject-matter or style. The explainers love to identify trends & social determinations, while downplaying this essential matter of aesthetic choice.

*

There are the experimental conceptualists. For them poetry is a kind of discourse, a means of social role-playing or commentary. Then there are the poetry-krafftwerkers, the pedagogical creative writing technicians. For them poetry is a literary craft - a product one can learn to produce.

The former lean too far toward abstraction and concept; the latter lean too far toward the minutiae of literary-rhetorical technique.

Both concept & technique are obviously major elements of poetry, but to over-emphasize them is to smother the thing itself.

Let's say : poetry is an imaginative medium, a channel for particular forms of beauty-&-truth. It's a medium : an activity with archaic affiliations to both music and painting. Think of it as an ongoing stream, with certain qualities and aspects which have not changed since 500 BC or earlier.

I emphasize medium in order to try to differentiate my way of seeing things from both the kraftwerkers & the aesthetic ideologists. A complex artistic medium is not the same thing as the postmoderns' version of language as materialist silly putty. Nor is it the bread & butter of the industrial kraftwerkers : it is, rather, personal : suffused through & through with the artist's deeply conceptual allegiances and choices. This creative - pre-compositional - process of formulating such choices and allegiances is what gives birth to art which actually means something to us, moves us. An inner necessity.

(Osip Mandelstam, in his "Conversation about Dante", referred to this primordial process as the "poetic impulse". In fact Mandelstam asserted that the poetic process was a matter of entwining two different strands : the impulse and the verbal medium. This sounds simplistic only if one forgets Mandelstam's exalted, intuitive, philological sensitivity to the verbal-poetic medium - for him, a perennial, archaic, complex, autonomous activity/reality, suffused with cultural mana.)

5

 
Siena-town wheels inward on itself,
inseminate with signs.  Flutter of flag-
sisters in a ring (around the phallic
Mangia, swelling Campo, Fontegaia).

 
What's the source of all this muttering
and thundering?  They hunt the lost Diana
River, rippling somewhere beneath the brouhaha.
They reach for the silk concealing her tippling

 
utterance.  The Virgin saved them, once
(at Montaperti, in 1260).  Now (nine times
90 years after) they burble the same
nursery rhymes - the world a microcosmos

 
in a horserace, history a folksong
of parochial abuse (carols and catcalls,
bridle deals).  There are many protocols
flickering under Fortune's ping-pong

 
table (prong, sarong) - you'll learn them all
in order to become a man.  Only that dusty
widow-nun, shuffling so pigeon-footed (steely-
rimmed) mimes awkward exception to the rule.

 
Or the half-wit in the corner, self-conscious
beneath his crumpled horn - he'll take the fall
gently, for everyone, for a laugh (perpetual
motion winding down).  All part of the sensuous

 
wave goodby, children.  Sweet nothings
we've forgotten, baubles and toy
soldiers, the vagrant sweep and sway
of oak tree limbs.  The sigh in the grass.    

For very detailed background on the Palio, see this book from the 70s : La Tierra in Piazza, by Alan Dundes and Alessandro Falassi (Univ. of California Press, 1975). Lots of good photos. Last chapter a sort of anthropological-psychological interpretation, fascinating.

Recently, Allen Bramhall & Gabriel Gudding both discuss (& condemn) agonism & rivalry in American poetryland. Meanwhile I'm using this horserace as a metaphor for it.

Dundes & Falassi analyze the palio as (in part) a male puberty rite, colored by the machismo of Mediterranean culture. Curious & ambiguous symbolisms in the city of the Virgin and the she-wolf (for example, the winning jockey & his clan drink wine and suck on pacifiers after the race). That's just one aspect of it.

I understand & to some extent agree with Allen & Gabriel. Poetry, obviously, is many things at once : an art form, a game, a vocation, a means, an end. Poetry can be (profoundly) a release from egoism and violence and stress and Keats's "irritable reaching after fact & reason".

Sweet music of speech; delightful play & laughter; intellectual bread & wine; wisdom, encouragement, equanimity; etc. etc.

But an artwork also brings into play the faculties of taste & critical judgement. (John Latta quotes Coleridge's description of his reading method as "sieve and winnow" - and shows how it's done.)

Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is all about coming to terms with contrary forces of ego and ambition, on the one hand, and the objectivity of the art itself on the other. "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

Critical judgement acts (or should act) as the umpire - fair, disinterested, objective, above the fray. And every authentic poet is also such a judge - both of his or her own work and that of others. In fact this critical activity - as part of the whole creative process - is what makes for companionship, camaraderie & cooperation among fellow artists. It's not just that they are poets together - they are critics together.

When you have a fair referee - then you can have a horserace.

& no one can judge rightly without true love.

Back from visit to Minneapolis.

Removed section #4 posted previously (needs work).

OK, this is it for little paperbacks. A new run of Rest Note, pocket-sized. Includes 3 related sequences : Rest Note, Autumn Door, and Fontegaia (part 1).

Now I feel like hitting the road, giving some readings... (p.s. I'll be away for the next few days, in the Twin Cities, for an 80th-birthday party for a couple of twins.)

I know, I know, the poem-section posted yesterday is mighty obscure. But not as obscure as the bird-talk of the mysterious Pihana people of the Amazon. (see New Yorker article)

New issue of Chapel Hill, also in pocket size.

I've always wanted to put out a book in that old 60s paperback size (roughly 4"x6"). Well, I'm getting around to it. Here's the sonnet-sequence Island Road in a new pocket edition, complete with photo on the back and frontispiece. & it's cheaper!



I've also added a back cover and frontispiece photo to the new Forth of July.)

3

 
Siena's perennial quarrel with itself -
who can plumb this curious errancy?
Before the tumultuous horseplay
in the Campo, bells of Sunto, Martinella

 
(foghorn, swallow).  A solemn parade
of captains, guilds, contrade, humbler
towns, ecstatic kids, to the Spedale -
where they mime a Palio-masquerade

 
for those too old or ill to see the race.
The little carroccio (triumphal car)
bears the four elders of the Biccherna,
the trumpets, and the object of the chase -

 
the palio.  A silken banner, painted 
with a figure of the Virgin.  The drone
of the Sunto echoes her Ascension to
the Throne of Heaven, beside her anointed

 
Son; the iron in the Mangia tower reaches
through city walls, through thunderclouds
of August overhead.  To whistling crowds
of contemptuous kinfolk she beseeches,

 
Peace.  A whole more that its fractious
parts.  Hobo Francesco hears it rustle
in frittering almond leaves, the tussle
of gutter sparrows.  A racehorse

 
dumps in the cathedral; the Sienese
take it for good luck.  Poets bicker
over the body of the Word (a wicker
basket in the Amazon - a breeze).

...decided (finally) to put out Forth of July in one volume, after I picked up Mary Douglas's book Thinking in Circles (about ring-structures in the Bible, Homer, Tristram Shandy, etc). Started looking again at the symmetries in my own poem. & seeing it (the poem) in a somewhat different light.

As I've written elsewhere, there's a great deal of ring-structure or mirror-symmetry in this poem, beginning with the "ABBA" rhyme of each quatrain, all the way up to the macro-structure. And there are a number of rings-within-rings. The technique was a lot like weaving : I would write parallel quatrains, or sections, or books on either side of a central pivot.

But Mary Douglas describes "classic" or ancient ring-structure as a means of (1) establishing firm meaning (by such parallels) and (2) creating a clear narrative structure (leading to a central turning-point and closing with a kind of resolution paired with the beginning).

In Forth of July, often enough, the narrator/protagonist is unaware of his real destination (Bluejay, his "guide", explicitly tells him this, repeatedly). The introductory poems of the prologue foreshadow the major concerns of the pivotal center - and then the poem veers off in a new direction, a deeper level. Yet "Bluejay" warns "Henry" of this from the beginning.

Furthermore, behind the narrator/protagonist stands a more shadowy - yet also pivotal - character, the meditative William Blackstone.

Not without reason the central chapter of the poem is titled "Ghost Dance". The poem represents ghoulish, garrulous Henry surrounded by ghosts (Bluejay, Blackstone, Juliet... & the mysterious "J").

The long poem Forth of July (previously published separately as Stubborn Grew, The Grassblade Light, July and The Rose, etc.), now available in one volume.

The Great American Caterwaul !!!

re: post of yesterday -

effortless play, hobo bohemianism, the locus of art-making as ephemeral, contingent, unofficial, supremely natural, tossed around by more rigid social powers & forces...

chimes somewhat with Montale's notions of "superior dilettantism" & the "2nd life of art".

This (spring-feverish) trend of thought, if I took it seriously, might spur some changes in the way I interact with other poets, the (so-called) "scene"...

(what I want : a fusion of this bohemian sense of things with artistic dedication - scrupulous, upright, disciplined... sort of a Pushkinian-Petersburg-Acmeist spirit of collaboration. sounds appropriately ridiculous.)

Last night I was reminded that Eugenio Montale has a poem titled "Palio" in his 2nd book, Le Occasioni.

There's a translation of a much later poem ("After Palio") here.

"Palio" shows faint parallel to previous effort posted here (the contrast between "Bernardino" & Siena racing enthusiasm resembles the substance of the speaker's address to "you" - the spiritual "Clizia" - in Montale's poem). (see translation by William Arrowsmith in his great English edition of Le Occasioni.)

One self-analysis post per day is more than enough.

Thought for the day : what a dreamy, ephemeral sphere poets & poetry inhabit in the world at large. That's part of its history. Part of its beauty, actually.

We take ourselves too seriously (me, especially). It becomes a career, an industry, a politics, etc. etc. And that ruins it sometimes. I probably would have stayed in the NY School orbit (30 yrs ago) if I hadn't started taking everything (including myself) so seriously.

Even the greatest achievements in art have tinges of the useless frill. The beauty of the world itself has tinges of the useless frill. It's a holiday, not everyday. A rarity. (Wallace Stevens gave this a lot of thought.)

This probably doesn't mean (unfortunately) that I'm going to stop taking myself seriously, or stop harping (as I tend to do) on arcane architectonic aspects and difficulties, deep philosophic themes, etc.

But today I want to get in touch with a younger, less socially-responsible, less ambitious self... the ineffectual bookworm nontennis-bum aesthete of yesteryear, the minor writer, the layabout. Why?

Maybe because I think poetry comes from a mysterious, almost-inaccessible region of effortless play. & also because (though I'm hesitant to acknowledge it) my own methods involve a lot of lateral thinking, serendipity, escapism.

It may be that I come across as a hopeless seeker-of-attention, with my massive blogging and endless serial poems etc... & perhaps that is the way it is. But it's also that I have simply evolved a way of writing which is not a matter of discrete individual poems; it's more diaristic & progressive. This is not so conducive to getting published (yes, I still get my steady supply of rejection slips from major poetry magazines - edited by people 20 years younger than me, and filled with work that I don't think, honestly, is as good as mine...)

I'm actually in a race against all the other American poets - my own competitive Sienese Palio - from a lazy, supine position, typing into my "Neo" (a very simple portable keyboard used in elementary school classrooms).

2

 
The high-strung Tuscans with their mimic battles...
elmora, battaglia di sassi, fist fights.
They make a game of it - Mary, local saints
watch from the bleachers.  The contest settles

 
everything.  600 years of symbolic
clan warfare - ghost dance, sacred epilepsy,
scandal summoned to the pitch of travesty.
O these infinite recurrent mirror-wars

 
of rival caballeros!  They make a pageant play
feud pay to winnow dry resentment and contempt
blooded with animal names.  Trumpets,
drums, neighborhood flags!  Oh say

 
can you see - the heart writhes
with parochial devotions - paces
its cage.  An eagle plummets - laces
the sky with lilies, oak-leaves - scythes

 
earth from heaven.  At that borderline
a frozen San Francesco stands in the sun
(collateral for all the vanity of Mammon).
He sheds his clothes... a simple sign.

                            
                 *

 
The star of poetry rides with the bedouins
out of somewhere east of Somalia, near
Sheba's Eden - pursues the chanticleer
Etruscans (smiling from sand dunes

 
of Rome, from their tombs in the hills)
to vortex of contrada-nonsense -
meticulous hubbub of impious Sienese.
A candle burns the purple from their quills.

Book on writers & typewriters (Iron Whim, by D. Wershler-Henry), reviewed here in New Yorker. Relates how authors felt they were just the medium - that the typewriter was doing the writing.

(Chimes somewhat with post below, about role of the "muse".)

... and so another round begins in Henry's (con geetar) famous horserace with himself (and all the other poets).

1
                     Mandarla al palio

 
Only God created the horse.
Among totemic animals of
(dragon, turtle, leopard, eagle...)
proud Siena neighborhoods

 
there is no horse.  Only the race itself
belongs to the horse.  Nowhere else
is a racehorse led to be blessed
inside the basilica-barn itself.

 
Virile, snorting, arrogant stallion.
Beast, clomping his iron hoof
beneath the cathedral's holy roof.
Bravo's elemental advent (of the Virgin).

 
Ninety seconds in the Campo ring.
A year drawn tight into a knot.
Banners, shuddering.  Local Camelot
rages for Arthur's fabled coming

 
back... Guidoriccio - nobleman
in yellow-black, atop thundering steed
above Mappamondo (absent, indeed).
Crown of nobile contrade; king of kin.

 
Meanwhile wily Bernardino grins from his curving
alcove.  The one who loses the race - the one
who surrenders (hobo, loser, slave... no one).
The shadow of a stolen colt flits (furtive,

 
cornered) - a shrouded patch of brown
or coroner's cigar thrown down (Corona).
Who will wear the crown?  The arena
overflows - a boasting hubbub-hippodrome.

A very rich passage I used for an epigraph for July :

I had come to hear that great things might be true. This I was told on the Christopher Street ferry. Marvelous gestures had to be made and Humboldt made them. He told me that poets ought to figure out how to get around pragmatic America. He poured it on for me that day. And there I was, having raptures, gotten up as a Fuller Brush salesman in a smothering wool suit, a hand-me down from Julius. The pants were big in the waist and the shirt ballooned out, for my brother Julius had a fat chest. I wiped my sweat with a handkerchief stitched with a J.

- Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

- Humboldt, Bellow's fictional version of Delmore Schwartz (& paradigmatic American poet), tells Citrine (the narrator) "that poets ought to figure out how to get around pragmatic America". Isn't this - hasn't it always been - the crux of the American poet's ridiculous situation? And isn't it - at some level - a spiritual problem? Not just a problem for the poet - but a problem which poets in particular represent and act out? The poet as unworldly St.Francis/Hobo figure, who dramatizes the conflict between spirit and flesh, worldliness and spiritual poverty (although Francis - unlike earlier ascetics - has always also represented the integration of humanity and nature - beauty, creation, love).

... exploring curiosities around Joachim de Fiore, in various books by Marjorie Reeves. She speculates that Dante (who put Joachim himself in Paradiso XII) was influenced by his imaginative prophecy-drawings - in the sky-written "M-eagle" of Justice, and in the image of the Trinity as a set of interlinked rainbow-circles (toward the close of Paradiso) (see diagram image in previous post). Joachim has repeatedly (over the centuries) served as point-of-reference/avatar for millennarian-revolutionary-visionary hopes & dreams, showing up here & there in 19th-20th cent. poets & novelists (George Sand, George Eliot, Yeats & Joyce included).



(See my note from this enormous blog 4 yrs ago (post for 4/8/03) :

" "Mammon Lujius", in FW: MMLJ, Matthew Mark Luke John. "Lujius" an inversion (as is rhyme-scheme in Forth of July i.e. Stubborn Grew / The Rose book 3, July) - an inversion of "Julius". July begins on 7/15 - St. Henry's Day or St. Swithins' - the date on which in 1099 the crusaders entered the Holy Sepulchre. 33 years later (age of Christ): 1132, Joyce's motif date in FW : birthdate of Joachim of Fiore, theorist of the Age of the Holy Spirit. Christ-Finnegan wakes from the sepulchre (time-age reversal) after 33 years (1132). July plays verbally & thematically with inversion of Caesar & Caesarism throughout - going from July 15 toward Ides of March & April 15 (death of CESAR Vallejo & Abraham Lincoln on Good Friday). Julius to Jewel-eye...")

Why poetry-making cannot be taught.

Because the fulcrum of art is imagination. "Imagination" is a name for the synthetic-inventive capability of the artist - the mind in concert with the eye, the hand, the feet, the heart. And because this fulcrum pivots on a desire to represent reality holistically (mimesis, imitation, mimicry). And because this desire to replicate or re-present reality in a new key, in a new medium, is incapable of fulfillment - the medium can never grasp the changing totality.

So what the artist does is surrender to what used to be called the "Muse" - stepping blindly into a trance-like state of creative glossolalia - in order to surrender to reality (since this is the only way to even approach mimesis).

Of course it is possible to teach and learn some of the skills which are necessary preliminaries of this creative furor (these preliminaries used to be called "versifying"). But the furor itself - what used to be called "inspiration" - can't be taught or learned in school. It can only be suffered. No one wants to undergo this, who hasn't already had a premonition about it long before.

The concept of "holistic representation" - the sense of immediacy, actuality and truth-to-life, which is communicated sometimes by the faintest and most abstract artistic means - and is the most difficult thing to achieve, and is the measure of an artwork's integrity (wholeness mirroring wholeness) - should perhaps be the real benchmark of aesthetic judgement (that of both critics and artists).

This concludes what seems to be the 1st chapter of ongoing poem (Fontegaia).

28

 
A fine spring rain.  Settles like silver
mist upon the street-lit pavement.
Your native town, beyond argument -
actual as the gravestones by the river.

 
But you're not here.  And it was you
(like Ariadne, like a brown recluse)
played out the luminous painter-clue
that riddled me into this trobar clus.

 
Which one of us is missing, then?
Where mast meets shallop
at the center of cerebral hilltop
lamps of the frescos shine, shine -

 
the way your lashes flicker (here
and gone) across my absent-minded
minaret-dome.  So branches bend
inward... homely signs cohere

 
only for the vagabond.  Scripture
tags like a faithful Fido after vision
and the dogma of the politician
barks at its own reflection (pure

 
and blind) as hobo-capitan sets off again
toward the burgeoning rose in his sea-
chest (buried somewhere in deserted
San Francisco).  Toward your return.

Investigating the curious Joachim of Fiore, following up on a note (in book on age of Giotto by Hayden Maginnis) which relates him to St. Francis & Fransciscans. There are connections with Joyce & Vico. (Joachim & I share name-day/birthday - May 29).) Discovered the ring-designs I'd been obsessively drawing in notebook (as part of attempt to "plot" Fontegaia poem) are like one of Joachim's (he was a very inventive geometer & numerologist-interpreter of obscure Trinitarian theology)...

27

 
I play the same chords over and over,
a trio of suspended 7th (A - infinity).
A simple bridge by Bernardino - he
of catenary smile (in arch-alcove) :

 
the one who battles, overcomes himself
makes peace, becomes a fruitful vine.
For the ben comun, for the Florentine
florescence, for the Sienese seraph

 
hovering above her vernal vineyard-hill.
Yon hobo Mexican in mental ward
sketched an analogy for every word.
His caballero tombed in prison-cell,

 
embalmed in crayon-honey, pistol
high - his freight-train ouroboros
(endless, serpentine, circuitous
regression - repetitive ur-tunnel) - and

 
an open-handed, blooming Guadalupe.
This Mary (of Coatlicue-echoes
and eyes of Constantinople) billows
up toward pencil-heaven, smiling, loopy...

 
I play the same chords, over and over.
Lodes of a mosaic Justinian
forever offering his mini-dominion
(pink-walled Providence) to Jaybird-lover.

The language poets and affiliates thought they could jettison the myth of the lyric self & romantic subjectivity & so on by objectifying "language" as a "material" phenomenon. In doing so they had to narrow down the theory of poetry, exclude all those epiphenomena we ascribe to accurate description, definition, feeling, evocation, symbolism, plot, meaning, etc., and just leave poetry a sort of stripped-down protest against the supposed domination of the signified. Some of the langpos aimed for pure versions of this procedure; their postmodern affiliates used those methods to "torque" (their term) their "language" in eye-catching contemporary fashion.

In my view the "language poetry" concept should be clearly rejected, as a cramping limitation on what poetry actually is and can be. I've tried to do just this, over the years... The essays over here around the Chicago Critics try to present a broader concept, which is formalist in a quasi-Aristotelian sense : the poem is an achieved intellectual-affective form, which is not restricted to its verbal texture - because texture is not the sum or limit of what poetic language does. Instead, language is a transitive element - a form of transportation - which may lead to both referential meanings and to aesthetic (intransitive) equilibrium.

Moreover, poetry is ineluctably personal. (I would go so far as to say that reality itself is ineluctably personal, but that's a somewhat different debate.) We will never return to those archaic times when art was the anonymous social expression of collective myth. But art is not only personal : rather it represents a synthesis of subjective and objective, personal and social. The modes, forms & genres of poetry are past signs (& not always relevant to the present) of the complex struggle to discover or create such syntheses.

The locus of interest in poetry is that very tightrope between these poles : it is precisely this wavering dialectic which opens the line of connection between poet and reader.

I suppose I'm behind the times, being anachronistic, by harping on the langpos and the postmods at this late date. Younger poets have "moved beyond" that bygone era of language poetry's flourishing. But how have they moved beyond? In the direction of new dialects or mannerisms, new sub-schools and urban collectives, new identity-affiliations? I'm suggesting they could move in the direction of a more capacious theoretical understanding of the art's possibilities.

Of course, theory generally (as John Latta's recent quotes from Larkin & O'Hara testify) can be considered inimical to poets and what they do. It is usually irrelevant to the working-out of a poet's life and gift. All I would suggest is that a theory which emphasizes personality, feeling, concreteness, accurate description, formal integrity, and at least the possibility of substantial, verifiable meaning - such a theory would be congruent with the actual practice of those two poets, and perhaps future poets too.

...removed #24. Seemed hopelessly saccharine this morning.

Fontegaia keeps spouting off...

26

 
Every poem is a small apocalypse.
Justly the great ponderous world
turns lightly on the nonchalance
of Pax - twirling an upright slip

 
of green, where she lolls at ease
(in comfortable slip) across the corner
of the couch, in Lorenzetti's fresco
of Good Government.  Just so a breeze

 
of evanescence bears elusive scent
of something inexplicable - world, life
set right - 7th (sustained) after grief
and toil - a restoration (plangent... 

 
prescient).  Over Palazzo Pubblico
the spry agave-spine (Torre del Mangia)
leaps into space; time pauses where
your singing icons drone (calm echo).

 
Insignia of Sabaoth, harmonious iron
of time fulfilled.  Every person is an end
in Pax's slow-revolving laurel crown (when
she comes into her own, the labyrinthine one).

(I like the way she looks like she's listening...)

25

 
Quiet agave in the desert lifts
a solitary mast (for listening).  Rush
of wind, ache of rue.  Sift of ash
from old volcano.  Local glyphs

 
of weather and millennia - cuneiform
sparrow-tracks, flute-prints... you
dear dry green spine, curlicue
clay (my snail-scale home).

                     
             *

 
Tiny town of Massa Maritima
(Siena's miniature hill-neighbor)
houses festal phantasmagoria
(Lorenzetti, Maesta) -

 
rapt saints, apostles zone that gloze
('mid gilded violas, crowns, bouquets,
rhapsodic Faith-Hope-Charity displays)
on one small kiss (melodic honey-maze).

Interesting article in today's NY Times arts section (by Edward Rothstein) - new book by anthropologist Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles, on role of ring-structure in ancient literature (Bible, Homer).

Not a new discovery. Alastair Fowler devoted several books (decades ago) to ring-structure and other numerical-geometrical patterns in poetry. But it looks like Mary Douglas has expanded the field.

(Fowler had a big impact on my own writing - ring-design became basic aspect of composition, after I read his work about 15 years ago.)

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.