My baby pint-sized books will slowly filter into consciousness now, impinging on American culture... sort of a lit-model resurrection of "Henry" from out the sub-sub-librarian grave... (that's the dream-song plan anyway...)

I'm what they call a Person of the Book, I guess. Not only have I been a bookworm forever, & worked in a library for almost a quarter of a century : my own ponderings & writings are all caught up with metaphysics & religion & scripture. My life took a sharp & fateful turn when I read the Bible at age 19. I was baptized Episcopalian from infancy; at age 50 (old sinner by then) I started finally going back to church.

This is all prelude to saying that there can be people in the world like me who are not part of the global pious-moralist-fundamentalist-superstitious cultural pressure of our era.

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." What is faith? As I understand it, faith is an inner conviction (despite the lack of complete knowledge or information) that something is true. It's a prudent, considered hunch, a choice between possibilities rather than firm facts.

One's view of the substance of experience in its entirety can be focused by such faith-judgements - even if they are understood to be provisional, subject to change.

So my personal poetics or metaphysics or understanding of history or anthropology are all colored by these hunch-beliefs. There is no getting away from it. My artistic development has been shaped by the prior shaping of my worldview.

NONETHELESS. ALL THAT BEING SAID... the fact remains that I am an adopted Rhode Islander (there are two Gould Islands in Narragansett Bay) and a partisan of Roger Williams.

Williams had a concept he called "soul liberty". Which, as I understand it, refers to the free activity of the individual mind in search of grounds for those inner convictions understood as "faith". Williams, simply put, devoted his entire life to the defense of soul liberty. He understood that the inner union between a person and the divine had to be one of true conviction and free choice. Any manifestation of what he (& others) called "enforced religion" was a grotesque 3-pronged insult : an insult to the authentic substance of faith; an insult to intellectual freedom; and an insult to the peace of a (self-governed) community, made up of people holding to diverse beliefs.

This particular conviction of Williams was the historical origin of the separation of church and state as we know it; of the concept of religious tolerance as we know it; and of the oldest surviving secular state in the Western world - Rhode Island.

One of the key elements of Williams' philosophy was an idea related to the medieval concept of natural law (as a young man, Williams was a student-assistant to Edward Coke, the great English barrister, famed for his defense of Parliament and "ancient right" against the encroachments of the Crown). The idea is that humankind, as made in the image of God, displays the God-given, natural capacity to know right from wrong and to achieve self-governance in lawful, peaceful commonwealths. Williams, the friend of Narragansett chiefs, loved to harp on the idea that non-Christian nations (such as the Narragansetts) could be wiser, kinder, gentler, more civilized, more peaceful than many so-called "Christian" nations. (Of course, according to RW, such refined virtuous gentle & civilized pagans would sadly miss out on the Kingdom of God and eternal life, but that was an utterly separate issue.)

This history is part of the "epic theme" I dealt with in my sort of Olsonesque poem In RI. Written back in the early 90s.



(this post was inspired in part by Frederick Wiseman's documentary, shown on PBS last night, about the ordinary workings of the Idaho state legislature... a fine film! Reminded me of my time (back in the early 80s) as a VISTA volunteer, when I worked for community groups as a "legislative analyst" at the RI state house.)

I think of Wallace Stevens as pondering along some such path as this...

The mind is creative, the imagination is primordial, originary - since experience is unavoidably subjective : the world we know is the world as we see and experience it.

Thus the vivid, bracing, inventive, concrete perception of poetry offers reality made new - re-shaped anew (or, reality in a new light). Thus the "supreme fiction" displaces the worn-out myths which have congealed into doctrinal belief.

Poetry in this sense is representative of art & artist generally. Which are, in turn, representative of free creative conscious perception generally.

This is very basically the "standard model" of the Artist, since Emerson, the Romantics, etc. And I accept it, I agree with it, for what it's worth : a working credo for the nourishing of creative talents & aims. But it ain't the whole story.

Interesting juxtaposed reading these days : Pope Benedict on St. Bonaventure (Theology of History of St. Bonaventure) on the one hand; a critical study of Finnegans Wake on the other (Joyce, Dante and the poetics of literary relations, by Lucia Boldrini).

I have the feeling Bonaventure would have found FW out of court (even though Joyce is so deeply fascinated with both Christianity and the notion of creative world-making).

Joyce is awfully deep & subtle, but he seems to shape the book in a sort of circular, "Buddhist" (or Hindu) framework : life circles around & around like a river forever & ever. For Bonaventure, the assertion of "the eternity of the world" was one of the primal marks of Aristotle's pagan error. For Bonaventure, the world is a creation, and history has a singular plot (even if B's version of that history has a certain circular quality about it : history is the story of the world being sent forth from God, pivoting on Christ, and returning to God).

I've got my own inklings about this, which I won't go into now...

But getting back to the "Stevens" bit above... I feel more & more on kind of a Nicholas of Cusa/Byzantine tack, with the central notion of the human/divine imago... that is, there are human creators (with maximum freedom) & yet there is also Creation - these 2 perplexibly & unaccountably meshed (like 2 circles) together... & there is the Event at the center...

Christianity : revelation (the event) trumps reason.

Poetry : the actual (drama) trumps abstraction (discourse).

There's a kind of parallel or analogy there... (worked out in History...)

"Competence" : I'd agree with J. on this one. Just hearing that word makes you want to run screaming from Poetry Room. It's like somebody in ill-fitting polyester suit walking in on ballet practice looking for IRS paperwork from 1974. Excuse me, could I speak with Col. Competent? Oh, he's over at Competence Hall, rm 666, CREATIVE WRITING. The competents will get their comeuppance.

J. Latta, as always... Lights are on, somebody's home. He has a fine-grained way of reading... I think I stand back more & look at the picture from a slight distance. Take his Crane "Cape Hatteras" comments of today. Faulkner's telling a tale, with his droning southern rambling drawl-whisper. Crane, on the other hand, is painting a mural. His individual sections of The Bridge are like odes, or (in this case) Charles Sheeler machine-landscapes. An ode has a big frame : kind of unfair to nip & tuck at individual lines or stanzas, without taking a look at the whole thing. Thus "Hatteras" should be looked at as part of a wheel (or ring of suspension guy-wires, or rainbow) - one of the tones in a huge tone-poem. Look at "Hatteras" through the other panes : ie., the opening invocation to Columbus, or the closing rhapsody, or the ode to 19th-century clipper ships. Each ode should first be taken in & measured in terms of its scope as a whole song among a series of songs, before (over)-reacting to in-grained mannerisms...

Another way to think about the quoted stanza, too, is as parody. "Power's script" shifts the substance of true poetic-visionary power - "The Bridge" as comprehending a new perception of civilization on earth - shifts it to the machinery of power itself, and thus its "script" is diluted or corrupted. So the stanza includes gimcrack takes on Rimbaud's lines from "Illuminations".

Eliot did something similar, it's said, with the 3rd of the 4 Quartets. The whole thing is a self-parody.

I guess this is all special pleading, but anyway.

It seems John Latta, in his Hart Crane post of today, is providing an illustration for the concepts I've been pondering here lately : the poet/seer & Beauty's dislocation...

JL is sharp to point out how Crane muddles & roughens up his own acute (prose) notations as he turns them into poetry...

but I have a different take on this, and I think "The Idiot" is a better poem than John suggests (Crane's complaints aside). The juxtaposition of the prose and the poem serve to point up the difference between prose and poems; and it's not just a stylistic difference. The essential difference illustrated here is between prose, as anecdote or reportage, and a poem as both song and symbolic representation.

I read this poem as a kind of parable : the poet-speaker actually identifies with the idiot boy, who scans the heavens through his tin can and sings his wacky Dio gracias tune. The "song" of the poem essentially seals this identification, asserting a kind of harmonic relation or hidden unity among things or events (subjective, objective) which are (on the surface) jarring, absurd or pathetic. "The Idiot" is an artifact of Crane's laborious effort to "sing his own song" : ie., Crane forges an initial anecdote into the pattern of his typical style/tone/voice/theme, the unified substance of his work as a whole. Look at how that "late" (for Crane) poem mirrors this earlier one :

CHAPLINESQUE

We will make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Note how, in "The Idiot", Crane has "faced [or re-faced] the dull squint" with the idiot's "squint lanterns". He has echoed the moonlight/ashcan with the tin can/telescope. The humorous/perilous social role outlined for the poet in "Chaplinesque" still holds in "The Idiot".

JL laments the loss of Crane's initial clear reportage in the process of composition; but (unlike most 20th-cent. poets) he's not writing prose. Not only is he not writing prose; he's making a peculiar song which asserts the fundamental difference between the poet and everything "prosaic". The distinction is epitomized in an old Ojibwa term : dream song.

I wrote here a few days ago about Beauty and Purpose and other capital-letter topics. The idea (taken from Christine Perkell's study of Virgil) that the poet has a particular social role, as mediator between the Iron & the Golden Age - that is, between necessity and freedom, history and paradise...

Chaucer was doing something like this in the Canterbury Tales & other writings. Poetry here has a social-ethical aspect, interpreting and judging the mores of society.

There has been great resistance, since the end of the Victorian period at least, to the notion of didacticism in poetry. Poetry is either too detached (Symbolism) or revolutionary (Futurism) or autotelic (Modernism) to serve as a medium for ethical counsel or social critique.

It's not hard to think of many exceptions to this rule, of course. 20th-cent. poets from Yeats to our contemporaries have addressed social-political issues. But there is an understandable hesitation, on the poets' part anyway, to assign any ulterior purpose to art. Beauty exists for its own sake; the forms of art are self-generated and self-sustaining, growing out of the inherent dynamism of beauty and invention.

Here's how I resolve this dilemma (this morning, anyway) : the harmonious character of beauty (expressed in art) is indeed self-sustaining & self-contained, like a gyroscope floating on a string - and this is precisely what is "revolutionary" (disturbing to the world's business-as-usual) about it.

The poet as social interpreter, counselor & critic is simply the poet who has become conscious of the exile/dislocation/estrangement which is already rooted and inherent in the relation between beauty and the world's turmoil : and who takes responsibility for the consequences.

*

Addendum : of course, Virgil & the other ancient writers didn't leave it at that. That is, the relation between Beauty and the world's trouble (say, History) is not static and a-historical. The key, again as Perkell points out, is this dual notion of beauty (Aristotle), one part of which takes into account the object's purpose or telos. Because humankind also has a telos - a spiritual goal, adumbrated (very basically) by the perennial reality (under many guises) of Beauty/Truth/Goodness - the manifestation of Beauty in art somehow serves that spiritual telos. Suddenly we no longer have a static reality, but a world-in-development, as an expression of essential human aims (philosophers & theologians can argue about the divine vs. human vs. natural origins of those aims).

This gets me, anyway, back to Joachim of Fiore. According to the theologian formerly known as Ratzinger, 13th-cent. Joachim (revised & corrected by Bonaventure) played a pivotal role in a shift in Christian theology - away from Augustine's more static vision of the Two Cities (Earthly & Heavenly, temporal and eternal), toward a kind of quasi-prophetic perspective, which looks to the historical future for a concrete expression of spiritual harmony on earth (call it Peace, or the Kingdom of God, or the Jubilee, etc.).

*

The poet, then, stands midway between Iron and Gold - "representing" (making representations of) Beauty - in Mandelstam's figure, playing the flute, or the fife... showing signs of things to come... "quickening" (Eliot's term) at the sound...

*

An illustration (from the King James Bible, Gospel of Luke, ch. 7):

"24 And when the messengers of John were departed, he began to speak unto the people concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A reed shaken with the wind?

25 But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they which are gorgeously apparelled, and live delicately, are in kings' courts.

26 But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and much more than a prophet.

27 This is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.

28 For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.

29 And all the people that heard him, and the publicans, justified God, being baptized with the baptism of John.

30 But the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God against themselves, being not baptized of him.

31 And the Lord said, Whereunto then shall I liken the men of this generation? and to what are they like?

32 They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.

33 For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil.

34 The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!

35 But wisdom is justified of all her children."

*

- of the "fife", that is :

32 They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.

Allen Bramhall, fellow seasoned veteran of the American Muse Stakes (pronounced "mistakes"), says some kind words about me, & leaves his brand new book on my grave. (Hope he doesn't mind me swiping his photo...)

Reading The Malefactors, by Caroline Gordon (a very very good writer). Written in the 40s-50s. Includes fictional portraits of her sometime husband Allen Tate (they married & divorced twice), Hart Crane, Dorothy Day, others.

Ratzinger writes about Bonaventure's concept of "revelation".

"Revelation" is the result of an inspired capability to recognize the truth beneath the "veil" of the scriptural "letter". Thus an inspired hermeneutics (the ability to interpret aright) = revelatory vision.

Counterpointed by humility - exemplified by St. Francis, whose approach was to live out the Sermon on the Mount "sine glossa" (without "glosses" or special interpretations) - ie., simply, literally, taking Christ's commandments at face value.

Since Joachim & Bonaventure (in very different ways) expected the working-out of salvation history as the increasing influence of the Holy Spirit in the world, by way of "spiritual" (contemplative)

Have been reading a book by the current Pope Benedict (formerly Joseph Ratzinger) : Theology of History of St. Bonaventure. Recent delving into Joachim of Fiore led to it. Bonaventure appears to have been influenced (to a degree) by Joachim's writings.

Drawn to this complicated area while working on Fontegaia poems (some posted here recently). Siena, palio, all that. The palio race as metaphor for various other things (the "racing" of the poets, the eschatology of the human race...)

Maybe I've blundered into a spot where it gets more difficult to say anything, without sounding facile, glib, "profane"... doesn't feel like writer's block (I know very well what that is).

Joachim, Bonaventure, Virgil's "audacious" poet (see post below) - all of them looking into the future...

My books are in pretty good shape now. They're all a handy, lovable pocket-size, except for the complete 1-vol. Forth of July.

The big, all-in-one Forth of July, with new cover and illustrations.

New, slightly tweaked & improved, Island Road.

Medievals : "beauty is truth is goodness"

Keats's urn (Romantics) : "beauty is truth, truth beauty"

Moderns : "beauty is beauty, truth is truth, goodness is goodness..."

Poetry : speech made beautiful.

But then, how do you define "beauty"?

Umberto Eco on Joyce on Aquinas on Aristotle...

Eco sheds clear light on an oscillation between Symbolism/Modernism, Symbolism/Acmeism, Plato/Aristotle, idealism/materialism... the halves of these binaries overlap.

More later, hopefully. Must get coffee.

*

J. Latta quoting Kundera today. Want to read that book, too. Though Kundera seems to have developed a fiction vs. poetry polemic. He condescends to the poets. A worthy antagonist, I guess.

*

My post of yesterday, on the duplex perplexity of it all (verbal toy or compelling vision?) is what got me asking myself about Beauty.

Joyce (see Eco link, above) follows the general materialist trend of the 20th century, when he tweaks Aquinas' 3rd of the three aspects of Beauty (integritas, consonantia (proportion), claritas) - claritas - toward the radiant actuality of the thing-in-itself. The artist's "epiphany" is a recognition of this unique and particular radiance - the essence of the thing itself - its quiddity.

Joyce's attitude paralleled the Russian Acmeist revolt against Symbolism (at the same period - around 1910 - roughly, birth of Modernism). The Acmeists aimed to praise and celebrate this world (not the cloudy otherworld of the Symbolists) - mirrored in the autotelic craftsmanship of the Modernist art-work.

I think if we took Aquinas' triform definition as a starting-point today, we might bend it slightly differently.

Poetry : speech made beautiful.

Beautiful : and beauty is a kind of end-in-itself. The existence of a work of art is justified by its beauty.

But what is beauty? Joyce's equation relating to the 3rd aspect (clarity = radiance = object's quiddity) - perhaps, for us, falls slightly short.

Today we might relate claritas to intelligibility.

Radiance is not merely self-contained in the object, autotelic, self-generated. Claritas (as well as integritas or wholeness and consonantia or proportion) interpenetrates, transcends its own borders, surpasses itself. The harmony of these aspects is both 1) reflected in the perceiving mind, and 2) echoed & magnified in general experience or reality as a whole. Thus the object is radiant with its own quiddity, but only in the context of universal wholeness or integrity.

This is a shift I guess slightly away from Aristotelian analytics toward Platonic synthesis. But both Aristotle and Aquinas can show a continuum or relation (which Modernism downplayed) between the object's quiddity and universality. Eco's comments (see link above) point the way.

In Aristotle, art understood as craft shows a duplex beauty. An axe can be both 1) beautiful to look at, and 2) beautiful or fitting in fulfilling its purpose, its end (telos). The axe is designed so as to chop wood beautifully. The ship is beautiful in fulfillment of its practical purpose - it sails well.

As Eco notes, for the ancients and the medievals, humankind's existence was understood as having a spiritual purpose or telos. Inasmuch as art serves that end, it is beautiful in Aristotle's second sense. Beauty, Goodness and Truth coalesce in that spiritual telos. Here is where Plato unites with Aristotle.

The radiance of intelligibility is a measure of an art work's integration with universal human purposes. Truth, vision, wisdom... this is the range toward which art can rise, by way of claritas-intelligibility.

Can you see where I'm tending with this?

I'm going back to the issues raised yesterday, with reference to Virgil and the mystery of the poet. The "audacity" of the poet is a spiritual audacity : the willingness to stand at the border between "Iron Age" and "Golden Age". Between humanity's universal purposes, and more short-term (seemingly practical) aims and desires.

In this sense the poet is only a more acute representation of the writer in general or the artist in general, just as the writer or artist is only a "signifier" for Everyman and Everywoman, for humanity in general. That is, the contradictions at the heart of human experience - between now and forever, earth and heaven, self and other, universal and particular - are signified - emblematized - by the artist.

It's this inward contradiction which accounts for the "outsiderness" of the artist - again, perhaps most acutely represented by the poet. In the context of practical America, consider the unique (& very personal, very idiosyncratic) estrangements at the core of the lives of Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Poe, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Bishop... etc. et al.

Because the oscillation between Iron and Gold, earth and heaven, body and soul has both psychological and political - personal and social - ramifications.

"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

*

p.s. of course the 20th-cent. Moderns illustrated their own forms of "spirituality". There's a spiritual-scientific aspect to the artist's personal renunciation in pursuit of the "objective correlative" or the Joycean epiphany. Yeats's "profane perfection of Mankind".

Noticed that labels I created in the index using a slash (ie. form/structure, church/state) were not searchable. I've renamed them, using dashes, etc.

I'm quite pickled & packed now, what with my Index of labels & pocket-size books. (Basically have been avoiding difficult patch in poem I'm working on.)

My blog is a self-enclosed discourse-world, fully self-sufficient, quite disconnected from the established Organs of Poesie. What does it all mean?

My obsessive interests, my speculations & hortatory p'lemics, my vast ambitious compile-ations...

My unease with the duplex nature of versifyin' in the world (toy, serene pastime, abject tomfoolery, useless hobby, voice of revolt, vehicle of civilization, wisdom & learning, visionary prophecy...)

My non-place in all the places of Poe-Land...

Got me thinking about a book I read many years ago, by Christine Perkell - The Poet's Truth. About Virgil's Georgics. Couldn't find it in the library, but I see it's online.

Wherein the poet's role (& its "audacity") is contrasted (Orpheus vs. Aristaeus) with that of the practical farmer. The poet channels "Golden Age" values (pity, peace, non-violence) against the present "Iron Age" (of war, necessity, competition, violence).

Maybe more on this later.

OK, this is it for the tinkering for a while. I've re-done the book of early poems, Way Stations, with a new cover (actually an old design from a chapbook of 18 yrs ago).

OK, I've pocket-sized the 3rd (concluding) volume of Forth of July - titled July. (I've also done a serious bit of editing : the previous brief 4th volume - Blackstone's Day-Book - has been merged into July. So the poem is now complete in 3 volumes.)

You can preview it there.

The Grassblade Light, 2nd volume in long poem Forth of July (& a sequel to Stubborn), is also now available in pocket-size edition. I'm getting a little better at photo-editing. This book includes images from the original chapbooks (which now make up the poem's 7 chapters).

I suppose all these kaleidoscopic editions are rather bewildering. But I'm pleased with the changes. The books are handier, better-looking, & more individualized (not to mention less expensive). Look out, Penguins !

Stubborn Grew now joins the pocket-size editions. Includes the original collages (& some new illustrations). You can preview it there.

The subject labels posted today gather up some of the main themes of HG Poetics. It's a very informal catalog... much has been left out.

Hopefully a few intrepid explorers will enjoy finding their own way through the labyrinth.

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : history (label : subject/history).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)


There are many others...

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : painting (label : subject/painting).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)


There are many others...

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : consciousness (label : subject/consciousness).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)


Related topics (there are many others): icon, Peirce, subjectivity, "J"...

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : HG poems (label : subject/HG poems).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : Henry (label : subject/Henry).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Related topics (there are others) : breakdown, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry's books, Shakespeare...

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : long poems (label : subject/long poems).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Related topics (there are many others):

American poetry, Dante, narrative, numerology, Stubborn Grew...

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : polemics (label : subject/polemics).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Related topics (there are many others) : carpitude, cheese poetics, community, ideology, satire, social role...

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : poetics (label : subject/poetics).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Related topics (there are many, many others) :

allusion, beauty, commentary, complexity, incarnational poetics, literary absolute, mathematics, musicality, negative capability, paraphrase, reader, recapitulation, time...

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : Russia (label : subject/Russia).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Some related topics (there are many others) :

byt, Futurism, Glazov-Corrigan, Potebnia, Russian Ark, Russian art, Tom Epstein, translations, Tsvetaeva...

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : criticism (label : subject/criticism).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Some related topics (there are many others) :

Acmeism, academy, affinities, American culture, American poetry, Aristotle, classic, classicism, Coleridge, commentary, disinterestedness, holism, investigative poetics, Modernism, postmodernism, Russian poetry, style, wholeness...

I'm going to try adding some homemade subject labels to the Index. The aim is to facilitate searching. These labels will be links to a small cluster of labels on a general topic. I'm sure I'll miss some... also, the number of labels I can add to each post is severely limited. So I'll include a list of related (unlinked) labels in the body of the post.

All the subject labels will be in this form : subject: (ie. subject:criticism).

In order to do this I'll have to post a separate blog entry for each subject. I'm not going to include each separate label in a numbered series (ie. criticism, criticism2, criticism3...) - only the first one (ie. criticism).

Please bear with me... this is an experiment.

Something to read... (see Index)

http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/search/label/Byzantium

or this one...

http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/search/label/language poetry

(often I favor the earlier entries...)

There, I've indexed the entire HG Poetics archive. Whew!

As it happens, the last post I labeled was this one.

"Poetry remains an undiscovered moon."

What's a classic, then?

A classic is a work that remains interesting - necessary - on many levels and in various dimensions of society. That is, valuable to both young lovers & old scholars.

Classic (the adjective) does not by any means equate to famous, successful, traditional, formal, classical, classy, etc.

It does, however, have connotations of original or ground-breaking. Because a classic is - somehow - both inimitable and foundational. It sets the pattern or template for something new which becomes perennial. A true invention.

Almost done with this Big Dig labeling project. Looking forward to getting back to Fontegaia.

I suppose the ponderous pigeonholing somewhat goes against the grain of blog ethos. But HG Poetics has always been a hybrid : Henry's serious American yowl over the rooftops.

Labeling the archives still... almost done...

I thought this one from Dec. 2004 was a pretty good starter-document for would-be critics...

Sort of chimed with a fleeting thought I had yesterday : that the deeper intent of the "serious poet" is - not to become famous, but to become a classic.

Still adding labels... about 2/3rds of the way through. When I'm finished, HG Poetics will be a sort of electronic book. Then it can grow some new leaves, hopefully. I'm enjoying reading old entries, trying to figure out the main points (if any). Sauntering down some esoteric trails...

Now my Index is in pretty good shape, I hope. But I'm only about a third of the way through the archives, so will keep at it.

The fact that I circle around a few obsessive hobby-horses over & over might be an advantage. Adds a diachronic dimension. The topics mesh, occasionally - so the reader can sort of wander through the labyrinth. No doubt much of it is eminently skippable - but the skips aren't long, entries are short.

Labels add coherence to my incoherence, make HG Poetics more reader-friendly (maybe). It's like a catalog. No accident I work in a library. A new kind of book, I guess.

This is also an opportunity for self-examination... maybe more on that later.

Index to HG Poetics

Below is a list of all current labels for HG Poetics topics. I don't know yet how to create direct links from this index, but you can Do It Yourself : just copy this url : http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/search/label/... - and after the final slash, add on whichever individual topic (from the list below) you want to investigate.

Example : http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/search/label/Joachim of Fiore

There are also a few "subject" labels. These links provide clusters of related topics - for example, "subject:criticism" collects some of the labels covered by this general subject.

(I've added a link to this post at INDEX on the sidebar, & will update it as it grows.)

Note : there is a neo-medieval glitch in my scriptorium. Because I am loth to choose an updated Blogger template (I love ye old HG Poetics), these labels currently show a maximum of 20 posts only. I don't know how to tweak the html to fix this. So for topics with over 20 entries, I've used the identical label, and numbered them (ie. Mandelstam, Mandelstam2; or Rest Note, Rest Note2, Rest Note3...). To read all the entries on these topics, you have to search each numbered label separately.

(It's easy, actually. Just enter the url - for example, http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/search/label/Rest Note. Then, to see the other entries for this label, just add a number (2, 3, 4...) at the end of the url, and go there - ie., http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/search/label/Rest Note2 )

"A" "Henry" "J" "J"2 "M" "W" 1001 Nights 11 1132 132 20th century 20th-century poetry 29 5.28 5.29 9.11 Aaron Beck abject Abolone Abraham academy Acmeism Acmeism2 Acmeism3 acorns action Adagia Adam Kirsch Admiralty adolescence Adorno aesthetics aesthetics2 affinities affirmation Africa Agamben AIDS AIEE Poetry Aizenberg Akhmatova Al Franken Al-Khidr Alan Shaw Alastair Fowler Albright Alcalay alchemy Aleksandr Wat Aleppo Alexander Deriev Alexandrov Alfred Schwaid algorithms Alice Notley alienation Allan Bloom allegory Allen Bramhall Allen Grossman Allen Tate allusion almond Altieri Amazon ambition Ambler America American culture American poetry American poetry2 American poetry3 American Renaissance American speech Americana Amsterdam analogy Anastasios Kozaitis Ancient Light Ancients Andrei Rublev Andrew Ford Andrey Gritsman Ange Mlinko Angel angels Anne Hutchinson Anne Lauterbach Anne Winters Anny Ballardini Anny Ballardini2 Anselm Berrigan antennae Antheil anthologies anthology Anthony Hecht Anthony Lane anti-intellectualism anti-poetry anti-war poems Antichrist Apex of the M apocalypse Appalachia Aquinas architecture Arendt argument Ariadne Ariosto Aristotle Arizona Ark Arnason ars est celare artem Ars Interpres art Arthur Miller artifact artifice Ashbery Asian poetry assassination Athens/Jerusalem Atlantean Atlantis atonement Auden audio recitation Auerbach Austin Farrer authority autonomy Autumn Door Autumn Leaves avant-garde babble Bachelard Bacigalupo Bacon Bahr ballades baptism Barbara Guest Basilique Sainte-Madeleine Baudelaire Baxter Hathaway Beatrice beats beauty beauty2 Beckett Bede bees Beethoven Behrle belief Bellow bells Ben Jonson Benchley Benedict XVI Beowulf Bergson Berkeley Berryman Berryman2 Berryman3 Bhagavad Gita Bible Bible2 Biehrl Billington binaries bird-clock birds birthdays Black Madonna blackface Blackmur Blackstone Blackstone2 Blake Blanchot blogs Bloomsday Blue Guitar Bluejay Bluejay2 blues bluntness Bly boats Bob Dylan Boethius bohemian Bonaventure book bookworm Borges botany Bourdieu Bowling for Columbine breakdown breeze Brent Cunningham Brian Corman Brian Henry Brian Phillips Bridge Broch Brodsky Brodsky2 Brooks brothers Brown Univ. Bruegel Buck Downs Budick Buffalo Poetics List Burning Deck butterflies byt Byzantium cabala Cain-Abel calendar calendar2 calendar3 calendar4 Calvin Coolidge camouflage Campion Campo Candice Millard Cantor Cantos capitalism Captain Gago Cara Gould Carol Christ Caroline Gordon carpitude Cassiopoeia Cassirer Castel del Monte cat catabasis catachresis catenary Catherine Daly Catherine Drinker Bowen cattywompus Cavafy cavaliers CD Wright Celan Ceravolo Chagall Champollion Chan's chapbook Chapel Chapel Hill Chaplinesque chariot charismatic charity Charles Bernstein Charles Olson Charles Olson2 Charles Simic Charles Williams Charles Wright Chaucer cheese poetics Chet Baker Chicago Chicago School Chicago School2 Chicago School3 childhood children's fiction Chinese painting Chopin Chretien de Troyes Chris Kraemer Chris Lott Chris Murray Christian Bok Christianity Christopher Middleton church church-state Cianci cicadas Cid Corman ciphers circumference cities civil society civilization Clarence Brown clarity Clark Coolidge classic classicism Claudia Rankine Cleanth Brooks Clement of Alexandria Clio Clive James Cloisters close readings clown coda coincidentia oppositorum Coleridge Colette Fournier collage color comic commandments commentary commentary2 common good communication community community organizing complexity composition composition2 composition3 Conceptual Poetics conchology conducting Confessional poets Confidence Man confusion conjectures Conrad Aiken consciousness contemplation contests Coppo di Marcovaldo coracle cosmology Costaguana coterie counterfeiting covenants cowboys creation creative writing Creeley crickets criticism criticism2 criticism3 criticism4 criticism5 criticism6 Crusades culture Cusanus Cusanus2 Cushman D'Annunzio Dale Smith Dana Gioia dance dancing Daniel Green Daniel Pritchard Dante Dante2 Dante3 Dark Lady dark matter Darwin David Cashman David Hess David Jones David Kellogg David Kennedy David Orr daydreams decadents decorum deeds deep image Degas Delmore Schwartz Delos Sackett delusions democracy Dennett Denny Moers depth Derek Walcott desire detachment dialogue Diane Gilliam Fisher Dickinson diction difficulty digital emunction dilettantism Dirk Bogarde discourse disinterestedness disjunction dissonance divine Providence DM Thomas documents Dogtown Dolphy domestic hellenism Don Share Donald Justice Donne Dorn Dorr doubleness doubloon Douglas Bush Dove Street Dove Street2 Dove Street3 doves drama dream songs dream-vision dreams Drew Gardner ducats Duccio Duemer duende Dugan Duluth dynamic symmetry early poems early poems2 early poems3 Easter Ecclesiastes Eco economic justice Ed Dorn Edgar Wind Edmund Burke Edmund Wilson education Edward Coke Edward Taylor Edwin Honig ee cummings Ehrenpreis Eileen Tabios Einstein ekphrasis Elder Olson Eleanor Cook elegy Elena Shvarts Elena Shvarts2 Elijah Elio Eliot Eliot Weinberger Eliot2 Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Robinson Elizabeth Willis Emanuel Ax embodiment Emerson emotion empathy Empson England English poetry enigma epic epicurean epilepsy Epiphany epistemology epistles equality equanimity equilibrium Eric Selinger Erica Dorf error Erwin Schrodinger espionage essays essays2 eternal return eternity ethics Ethiopia Everyman evil exile expatriates experience experimentalism Fagles failure fair faith Falstaff fame family family crest famine Famous Reporter fate father Faust Fawcett Fellini Felstiner feminine feminism Ferrini fibonacci Ficino film finish Finnegans Wake fire first idea fitness flarf Flaubert fluency folk poetry Fontegaia Fontegaia2 Fontegaia3 Fontegaia4 Fontegaia5 Fontegaia6 Fontegaia7 Fontegaia8 form-content form-structure form-structure2 form-structure3 form-structure4 formalism Forrest Gander Forth of July Forth of July2 Forth of July3 Forth of July4 Forth of July5 Forth of July6 fortress Foust Fox Point Fragment from Purg. frames France Frank Samperi Franz Wright Frayn Frederick II free verse freedom fresco Frisbee Fulcrum fullness fundamentalism Futurism Gabriel Gudding Gabriel Gudding2 Galvin Galway Kinnell Gandhi Gardner Gary Sullivan Gateway Arch gender generals Genesis genius genre Geoffrey Hill geometry George Henry Gould George Kline Gerrit Lansing Gertrude Stein gesture ghazals Ghelderode ghost dance Giants in the Earth Gill Gillian Rose Giotto Glass of Green Tea Glazov-Corrigan Glenn Gould glose glut GM Hopkins Go Little Sparrow God Godel Golden Gate goldfinch Goncharov good will Gospels Gould ancestors Gould Island Goulds government grace Grace Ravlin Grain Elevator Grand Fenwick Grassblade Light Grassblade Light2 Grassblade Light3 Greeks Green Constellation Green Tea Greenblatt Greene Grenier grey grid Grunewald Guatemala Guggenheim Guillaume Barre Guillem de Gellone Gumilev Gunslinger Guy Davenport gyroscope H.D. H.L. Humes hacks Halliday Halloween halos Hamlet Hamlet's Mill harmony Harold Bloom Harold Kaplan Harriet blog Harry Howe Harry Mulisch Hart Crane Hart Crane2 Hart Crane3 Hart Crane4 Harvey Shapiro Hat Hawkwood heaven Hebraism Hecht Heckenberger Hedy Lamarr Heidegger Hejinian Helen Gardner Helen Vendler Helen Whitman Hellenism Hen biography Hendrix Heninger Henry bio3 Henry bio4 Henry bio5 Henry bio6 Henry bio7 Henry Adams Henry bio Henry bio2 Henry bio7 Henry IV Henry James Henry music Henry music2 Henry music3 Henry redivivus Henry Thunder Winnebago Henry V Henry VII Henry's books Heraclitus hermeneutics hermetic heroic poetry heroism Hersh Herzog Hess Hessler hesychasm heteronyms HG in print HG Poetics HG Poetics2 HG timeline hg video Hiawatha hidden hieroglyphics hieros gamos history history2 Hitchens Hobo/hobos Hobo/hobos2 Hoboken hokum Holbein Holderlin holism Holocaust homelessness hoopoe hope Horace horses horseshoe Houlihan House Organ Human Manifesto human nature Human Poetics humanism Humboldt's Gift hummingbird humor IA Richards IB Singer Icarus icon idealism identification identity ideology idiom Ignatius Donnelly Ignatow ignorance illness image image2 imagination Imagism imago Dei improvisation impulse In RI In RI2 incarnation incarnational poetics independence index India Point Indian pipes indie-crit individualism infinity influences injustice insufficiency integrity intellect intelligent design intention interlocutor interviews intuition inventions investigative poetics involuntary memory Iran Iraq Iraq2 Irma Brandeis iron irony Irwin Is Islam Island Road Island Road2 Island Road3 isomorphism Israel Italy Izenberg J. Lesselbaum Jack Birss Jack Kimball Jack Spandrift Jacket magazine Jackson Pollock James D. Bloom James F. Cotter James Gould James Madison James Merrill James Ravlin James Wood James Wright Jasper Johns jazz Jeff Clark Jeff Greenspoon Jeffery Bahr Jeffrey Walker Jennifer Moxley Jeremiah Jerusalem Jerusalem Chamber Jessica Stern Jesus jewelry Jews JF Powers JFK Jim Chapin Jim Harrison Joachim of Fiore Joan Houlihan Joan Retallack Joe Gould John Barr John Irwin John Keats John Latta John Latta2 John Latta3 John Latta4 John McKay John Michell Jonathan Ivry Jordan Davis Jordan Davis2 Joseph Conrad Joseph Cornell Joseph Mitchell Joseph Rock Joseph Roth Josh Corey Josh Corey2 Joshua Clover journalism Joyce Jubilee Judaism judgement jug bands Julie Christie Juliet Julietta 484 Julius July July2 jungle just war justice K-2 poetry Kafka Kalevala Kant Kantorowicz Karen Donovan Karl Young Kasey Mohammad Kasey Mohammad2 Katrina Kay Ryan Keith Waldrop Keith Ward Kenneth Cox Kenneth Warren Kent Johnson Kent Johnson2 Kent Johnson3 Keppel-Jones Kermit Roosevelt Kerouac KGB Bar Khlebnikov kickshaws Kim Lyons kingfisher kingship Kinsella kinship Kirsch knowledge Koeneke Kooser Kristin Prevallet Kruchenyk Kublai Khan Kundera Kwinter La Paz labor labyrinth Laforgue landscape Langdon Hammer language language poetry language poetry2 language poets Lanthanum Lanthanum Road Lanthanum2 lanthanum3 Lanthanum4 Lanthanum5 lanthanum6 Larkin Last Supper lastingness Laura Carter law law of identity Lawrence Lazarus Lee Smolin Leggett Len Deighton Leo Steinberg Leo Strauss Leonardo Leopardi Lermontov Leslie Caron letters (alphabet) letters (alphabet)2 Lev Rubinstein Levenson library life light limericks Lincoln line Lippo Memmi Lippo Vanni Lisa Jarnot literacy literalism literary absolute literary democracy literary friendship literary ghosts literary models literary time literary values little tree logic logos London long poems long poems2 long poems3 Longfellow longing Lorenzetti Lorine Niedecker Louis Menand lousanna Louth love love poetry love2 Lovecraft Low Lowell Lucky lyric Mackie Magdalen magi mainstream Mairead Byrne Malcolm Lowry male chauvinism malice Mallarme Malte mandala Mandelstam Mandelstam2 Mandelstam3 Mandelstam4 Mandelstam5 Mandelstam6 Mandelstam7 manifesto mappamondo marginality Marian Anderson Marianne Moore Mark Scroggins Marlow Marlowe Marsden Hartley Martin Luther King Martin Ramirez Marvell Mary Douglas Mary Karr mask mathematics matrix Matthew Arnold Matthias Mauron maxims maxims2 maxims3 Maximus Maximus the Confessor Maxine Moore May 29 Mayakovsky Mayans Mayhew Mayhew2 Mayhew3 maze Mazzotta McCaffery McClatchy McKane meaning Medusa Mel Gibson melancholy Melchior Melchizedek Melville Melville2 memoir Memorial Day memory memory2 Mendelssohn neighborhood Merrill Gilfillan Merwin messiah metaform metaphor metaphysics metapoetry meteorite metrics Michael Andre Bernstein Michael Eskin Michael Gizzi Michael Gould Michael Harper Michael Moore Michael Theune microcosm Middle Ages middle voice Midwest Midwest Elegies Mike Magee Mike Snider militarism Milman Parry Milosz Milton mimesis Minneapolis Minnesota Minnesota2 Mississippi MLK Moby Dick modernism modernism2 modernity Moevs monasticism monotheism Montaigne Montale moon moralism morality Moschos mosquitos mother Mount David movies Mudlark Mukarovsky mundus Muriel Spark muse muse2 music music2 musicality Musil My Byzantium mystery mystery plays myth Nabokov Nabokov2 Nada Gordon Nadezhda Mandelstam Nancy Kendrick Nancy Pollak narcissism Narragansetts narrative Nathanael West National Poetry Foundation national security Native American Nativity natural law naturalist nature Naumov Nazarene Neanderthals necessity Nedge nef negative capability Negus Nemirovsky neo-classicism neo-medieval Netherlandish art New Americans New Criticism New England New Orleans New Orleans2 New Yorker New Zealand Newman Newport Nicholas Laughlin nightingale Nikolaev Nile nine Noam Chomsky nocturne nominalism nonviolence normative Northrop Frye nostalgia Nostromo notes Notes Toward and so on novels novels2 Novus Ordo Seclorum nowness numerology numerology2 Nuttall NY School NYC O'Donovan O'Hara Oak Tree Day OBERIU obfuscation obituary objective correlative Objectivists objectivity Oblomov obscurity ocarina Ocean State octets Octopus magazine Odysseas Elytes Ohmann oikos Ojibwa old poets olive Omry Ronen Onegin Oppen oppositionalism oppositionalism2 oracles oral poetry order Orhan Pamuk origami originality orotund Orpheus Orpheus2 Orthodoxy Oscar Williams osier otfe otherworldliness Ovid Packer painting painting2 Pale Fire Palio Pankey parable Paraclete paradise Paradise Lost paradox Paragraph paraphrase pariah Paris Pascal Pasternak pastoral Paterson path P pathos Paul Fry Paul Lake Paul Mariani Paula Tatarunis Pavese Pawtucket Peanuts pearls Peirce pencils Penelope penny pentameter perfect Perloff permanence Perry Miller persiflage Pessoa Peter Marquez Peter Murphy Peter O'Leary Peter Riley Peter S. Thompson Petrie Petroski phaser Philip Guston Philip K. Dick Philippe Claudel philosophy phlogiston photos photos2 photos3 photos4 photos5 physics piano Picardy 3rd Pico Piers Plowman Pindar pines Pinsky pivot Plato play pleasure Pleiades plot Plumbline poetry po-biz po-biz2 po-biz3 po-biz4 po-biz5 Poe poems poet vs. State poetic schools poetic schools2 poetic schools3 poetic schools4 poetic word poetic word2 poetic word3 poetics poetics2 poetics3 poetics4 poetics5 poetry Poetry Magazine Poetry Mission poetry-prose poetry-prose2 poetry2 poets poiesis point polemics polemics2 polemics3 polemics4 polis politics politics2 politics3 Pope popularity populism possible post-avant postmodernism postmodernism2 Potebnia pottery Pound Pound2 poverty power pragmatics praise President prestige Prickett Prof. Hinkel professionalization projectivism prophecy prosody Prospect Park Prospect Terrace protest Proust proverb Providence Providence Journal Providence Review Providence2 Prynne Przybylski psalms psyche psyche2 Puerto Rico puns Purgatory Pushkin Pushkin2 Pushkinism Pynchon Quartermain quatrain Queen of Spades quickening quietude quietude2 quietude3 quipu Qutb R.A. York R.S. Crane R.S. Crane2 race Rachel Blau du Plessis Rachel Wetzsteon radio railroad Rakosi Ralph Maud Ralph Wessman Randall Jarrell Rasula rationalism Ravelstein Ravlin read-along reader readings readings2 realism reality reality2 reason recapitulation recitation redemption Regina Derieva Reginald Shepherd regional rejected poems rejected poems2 religion religion2 religious persecution Renaissance Rene Girard renewal repose resonance Rest Note Rest Note2 Rest Note3 Rest Note4 Rest Note5 Restoration era resurrection revelation reverie reviews rhetoric Rhode Island Rhode Island2 Rhodian Manifesto rhodora rhyme Richard Dawkins Richard II Richard McKeon Richard Swinburne ridda riddle Riffaterre righteousness rightness Rilke Rimbaud ring-structure Rite of Spring rivers rivers2 Robert Alter Robert Archambeau Robert Archambeau2 Robert Bly Robert Duncan Robert Frost Robert Vincent Robinson Roger Williams Roger Williams2 Rogier van der Weyden Roland Rolling Stones Romanticism Rome Ron Silliman Ron Silliman2 Ron Silliman3 Ron Silliman4 Ronen Rosmarie Waldrop Ross McDonald Rostropovich Rothko roundheads Rousseau Royal Palm royal seal Rumsfeld Runciman Russell Russia Russia2 Russian Ark Russian art Russian Formalism Russian poetry Russian poetry2 Rykwert Saarinen sabbath sadness Saenz salience Sam Hamill Samizdat magazine Samuel Greenberg Sanford Budick Sanford Schwartz Sappho Sasquatch Sassetta satire Saturn Saul Bellow scapegoat Schell schtick Schwerner science scripture sculpture secularism Seine self-parody self-publishing self-reflexive sensibility seraph seriousness service sestina sexism sexuality Shakespeare Shakespeare's Head Shakespeare2 Shanna Compton shape poems Shattuck Sheba Sherry Brennan Sherwood Anderson ships Shirley Jackson Shklovsky Sibelius Siena Siena2 silence Simon Dedeo Simone Martini Simone Weil Simonides simplicity sincerity Sir Thomas Browne Siskind Skidan Skunk Hour slang slimy rime Snider social role social role2 social role3 social role4 sociology soil solipsism Somatic Mirror song song2 sonnets Sophie sophism Sophocles soul soul freedom sound speech speed Spinoza spirituality spleen sports Spring Quartet St. Francis St. George St. Louis St. Luke St. Patrick St. Paul St. Petersburg St. Petersburg2 Staiger Stalin Stanley Moss star statues Steele Stefans Stepanchev Stephanie Young Stephen Burt Stephen Ellis Steve Evans Stevens Stevens2 Stevens3 Stoicheff Stone stones string theory structure4 Stuart Blazer Stubborn Grew Stubborn Grew2 Stubborn Grew3 Stubborn Grew4 study style subject:consciousness subject:criticism subject:Henry subject:HG poems subject:history subject:long poems subject:painting subject:poetics subject:polemics subject:Russia subjectivity sublime submarines suicide Suite Francaise Sukenick summer Superman Supreme Fiction surpassing surprise Susan Brown Susan Howe Susan Stewart swing Sylvia Moubayed Sylvia Petrie symbol Symbolism synthesis Tagliabue Talisman talk Tarkovsky Tartt taste Tate tautology technique Ted Berrigan teleology telos Temple Emanu-el temple-cleansing Tennyson terrorism Terry Eagleton text Thanksgiving The Hat the person the person2 The Return theism theme Theocritus theology theology2 theory Theune Thilleman Thoreau Tim Yu Timaeus time Time Flowers time travel time-space time2 Timothy Hyman Tiscione To Natasha Shtempel Tocqueville Toledo tolerance Tom Chandler Tom Clark Tom Davis Tom Epstein Tom Fleming Tom Raworth Tomlinson Tony Tost torque torture toys TR tradition tradition2 tradition3 transcendentalist Transit of Venus translations transumption Treadwell trees trickster Trinity triptych trobar clus tropics trumpets trusty truth Tsvetaeva tunnels Turing turtles Tutu Twins typewriter typology Unconquerable World Underground City understanding understatement United States unity universalism Updike Urs von Balthasar ut pictura poiesis utopia vagueness Valentine's Day Valery Valis Vallejo Vancouver Vasily Grossman venants Vendler Venus Vertigo vesica Vico Victorians Vienna Viereck Viola Sachs violence Virgil Virgin vision vision2 Voronezh Vvedensky W Wachtel Waitts Wanda Landowska war War and Peace war2 Washington Watermelon Pickle waves Way Stations Way Stations2 Way Stations3 WC Williams weather Weinberger Weinstein weirdness Weldon Kees well wellness wheel of Virgil Whitman Whitman2 wholeness wholeness2 Wilbur Willa Cather William Dalrymple William Gould William Logan William Safire Williams Winesburg Ohio Winters wisdom wit Witz Wolfram wonder work worldview writer's block WW Brown WW I Wyatt Wyoming Yeats Yourcenar YouTube Yvor Winters Zaccheus Gould zeitgeist Zolli Zukofsky

... so take Path P into labyrinth HG P.

Allen Bramhall is reading my book in Starbucks, says kind word. New England, May (2007). This is old country. Poets in moss & old manses. Makes me happy.

I've been (ant-like) labeling the 4 years and 2600 posts of HG Poetics; soon, hopefully, there will be an actual Index of HG Obsessions & Hobby-Horses. But now it's time to go back to Fontegaia, chapt. 2...

10

 
Spring wheels around once more.  Air
grows temperate.  Providence in flower
swells and sighs, exhales its myrrh
(lilac, viburnum, mountain laurel).

 
Slow contrail traces a white thread
across evening sky.  Paints one
straight line (evanescent
fresco).  Distant chord

 
of freight-train horn.  Plangent
sundown.  Next door, kids toss
horseshoes (last trace of race-
horse).  Clang (iron fundament).

 
Amazon remains the same (zone
of absent plenitude).  Bugs drone
in unison (to Judgement Day).  Bone
rots (waits); iron = rust; only word

 
is adamant (alpha to omega, end
to end).  And water shapes it
(preternatural stream) like tropic
parakeet - like warbling Reverend

 
in Nev-Neverland (a rainbow
collar over morning gray).
Light filters the prism, day
trembles (hand in sky)... so

 
evening to morning wheels toward
Everytown.  Providence (primordial
prototype) is in the droning bell
now - is everlasting word.

photo by Richard Benjamin

Finished Suite Francaise. Moving, beautiful, heart-rending. Tremendous. Goes into "metafiction", as at the end you read her journal entries, in which she plans new sections of the novel (fascinating entry into compositional process), & comments with searing clarity, insight, irony, on the situation in France and her own impending doom (she was murdered, as was her husband, in Auschwitz). Astonishing story of this book's survival.

(Interesting to read this after having read H.L. Hymes' Underground City.)

Reading Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky. Here's NY Times review.

Listened to fascinating interview on NPR with Christopher Hitchens, about his recent book God is Not Great. He is a very witty guy. Valuable sacred cow-punching.

Yet for me there are these 2 basic possibilities : either there is "higher consciousness" or not. I go with the former. Even without such things as the "argument for design" etc. You don't need to be a philosopher to recognize the beauty of the universe and the poignancy of life.

It's a profound intellectual (or spiritual) step, to accept the notion of the (granted, mysterious) "personal" quality of the universe : that life is ordered - somehow - around consciousness.

I call it the Byzantium waltz. (An icon represents the divine, and the divine imago, as one.)

This is at the root of my own (somewhat eccentric, I suppose) concept of the normative, the classic, the Acmeist, the Pushkinian, the human, the Hellenic-Hebraic, the Joycean, the Mandelshtam-Celanian, the Dantean-Montalean...

& at the root of my particular distinction between the synthetic song-imagination of poetry, and every other kind of discourse.

All this HG Poetics annotating makes me feel like a certain character in Pale Fire.

... speaking of daughters, today is my daughter Phoebe's birthday.

On this day Constantinople was founded as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. I was born on the day it fell (May 29, in 1453).

I sent poet Gabriel Gudding a poem written a few years ago. I thought he might like it because he has a Providence connection, & because it involves a mysterious someone named "Clio" - which is his daughter's name too.

Lo & behold - it turns out these two Clios were most likely one and the same !

I'm amazed... it's as if three writers were playing a game of secret messages...

(re-affirms my faith in a "special providence" of poets - a belief (superstition?) instilled years ago as I read Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir, Hope Against Hope...)

I'm gradually going back and indexing posts with these labels. This is a very useful feature for a gab-o-rama like HG Poetics. Try clicking on one!

Reading more about Joachim of Fiore these days. I think I'm sort of preparing for next phase of Fontegaia chapter - from the Siena Palio horserace to the 4 horses of Joachim's Apocalypse.

Joseph Ratzinger (currently Pope) wrote a book about St. Bonaventura's theology of history which touches on Joachim. I'm going to look it up.

There's kind of a thread which ties together (in my mind, anyway) Joachim - the Franciscans - San Francesco - Giotto & other painters - hobo America - my Siena poem. (There's also a thread linking Joachim - Vico - Joyce - & me.)

Tying together all these threads about time & history & horseraces & world-renewal. The article on the Antikythera mechanism (basically a very elegant cosmic clock) is in there too somehow.



What is the cornerstone of the wholeness of the poem? Why, the Moon, of course (says the loony poet)! The 7-day week and the lunar cycle... solar reflection (consciousness)... Forth of July (7/4, or "28")...

Love this New Yorker article on the Antikythera Mechanism.

Mandelstam : "an arch appears in my muttering".

For me, this is one of the most concise & precise characterizations of the poetic process.

Artists testify to the creative experience as a moment which begins when the art-work coalesces, forms an integral whole. Sometimes the poet intuits this process in advance. It's an act of imagination and synthesis. This is the point : the art work is some kind of organic-conceptual whole.

The poem fits together : its sound, its imagery, its plot, its meaning(s). A new invention, a little world unto itself.

Paintings fit together, novels fit together, musical compositions fit together... & poems - rhythmic incantations - also fit together.

This fitness & integrity of the unique art-work - within its very particular and specific mode - prose narrative, drama, music, visual art, poetry - this wholeness - is its ruling characteristic, without which the work does not really exist.

Of course there will be crossings and shadings between verse and prose, narrative and lyric, lyric and dramatic. Novels & plays will be written in verse, prose will intrude into poems, etc. But this does not negate the primary requirement of aesthetic wholeness, whatever the specific genre or rhetorical mode.

If you start with wholeness, and then look at the particulars of diction and style, you might be able to distinguish more precisely the difference between the achieved poem and the merely textual discourse, scribble, speech, imitation, or harangue.

What a cussed vexed bone of contention is this eternal debate over tradition & innovation, Moderns & Antients... in these matters, I come across often enough as a ponderous prig, which is not what I want...

Where do I stand, then?

As I see it, the world itself is "poetry", in Wallace Stevens' general sense - and there are many kinds of expressions or reflections of same offered by all kinds of artists, visual, musical, performance, comic, prosaic, dramatic, etc. & etc... - all kinds of unique inventive amalgams of various arts...

- but as for me, I want to keep playing up an (optional) distinction between prose & poetry, because I have something "thematic" or topical invested in the notion of "the poetic Word" as a very high kind of exalted song-vision... - & exalted doesn't have to mean ponderous or serious or prim, just inspired & ecstatic...

- such things can never be programmatic - because when they do become so, they lose their inner rightness, become sentimental or exclusionary... & life's poetry is not programmable, it is not an acquisition of any kind....

Where the "experimentalists" get it wrong : they forget that calculation = prose.

Poetry is the surge of music pressing against every form of utilitarian, merely functional speech. The poet shapes reality through song : we forget how different this behavior is, how different it sounds.

& I'm not talking (in obscurantist, pseudo-romantic, sub-intellectual, "mystical" fashion) about poetry vs. reason. Ultimately these opposites meet : that's what song celebrates.

re previous post : of course, red flags pop up at the mention of "natural development". As well they should. In art, everything is conceptual.

Everything except the medium itself. By "song" in poetry I refer back to previous posts about the idea of poetry as perennial fluency, or a sort of omnipresent bee-hum.

This sounds sub-intellectual, sentimental, merely visceral - until you consider the possibility that the medium is a vehicle for forms of intelligible-conceptual invention, communication, aesthetic-conceptual syntheses : complexes inexpressible by any other means.

Thus what I suggest as "natural development" is not so much a WC Williamsish, Emersonian, Whitmanic or Poundian version of American origination, as a movement of American (literary) civilization toward fusion/assimilation with world history and culture as a whole : the echo of (global) perennial fluency in an American dialect.

The postmodern/"New American" emphasis on informality, slang, minor modes - this was a healthy reaction to many strange literary-historical-Modernist pomposities & perversities... yet we need to recognize its limitations, its "period style" aspects. Just as we need to understand that the prosaic materialism of the Language School closed the door on most of the normative distinctions between poetry and prose, and thus on the distinct qualities and resources of poetry.

dicey dichotomies

Robert Archambeau's recent remarks on the "Battle of Chicago" (Brit Poetry Wars) echo the various histories of stylistic division on these shores (SoQ/Post-Avant, New Americans/New Critics, Experimentals/New Formalists, Raw/Cooked, Moderns/Victorians, etc. etc.).

Have been wondering (in a vague way) this week whether these dichotomies are not symptoms of something deeper, more elusive - something involved with the nature of poets & poetry generally...

If to make a poem is to take a particular step into the social, public arena, perhaps there's a basic binary there - the step is either joining or defying (or escaping, or avoiding). Either yes or no.

The trouble is, every poet is a jumble of yes and no - mixed together in a unique, unrepeatable way. Often the efforts to align or group poets (mainstream or oppositional, for example) involve eliding the uncomfortable fact that group defiance is just the obverse of group joining.

It seems best to focus on the aims and motives of a particular work, rather than aligning poets with groups or styles. Because the most accomplished writing often involves a process of distinguishing or differentiating - which is the method by which the work says something clear, determined and new.

As for me, I'm a chaos of mixed motives & feelings. Discouragement over (non)recognition - combined with fear of entrapment in what seems like self-enclosed, ingrown aestheticism (part of me doesn't like being a poet). & on another level, the difficulty involved in balancing poetry with other kinds of thought (religion, philosophy...). Poetry & thought don't always work together. They're like two headstrong horses on a chariot...

Yes, this is a wave from the Pushkinian-Petersburgian future golden age.

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).