Addressed to Emily (from July) :

 And if nine muses in July slipped
 downstream toward a swollen, stolen
 summa... it were a felix loss
 for Caesar's breastplate - broken jewel,

  
 cool dove, stone sister - moosed-over
 mossy garnet in a woodland of
 autumnal jasper.  Duels
 of August - golden - over now -

  
 are nevermore.  Veteran stone,
 an Inca sacrifice - a frozen child,
 limed over, liminal (ditched
 first-born son, whose knot

  
 entwines the ceremonial sword
 like twine around a strong man's
 house - holds it for a host
 of Jacobean thieves) turned

  
 gypsy roost now, camel-humped,
 bull-dragged and wobbly, a
 knife-line violin, the last bow
 of your father's father's ho-hum 

         
 poem...  finished.  Built.  Where  
 the river flows both ways around
 your coracle's felt node (or
 upside-dome).  So row

  
 some more, toward summer -
 toward hurtling chords of warmer
 wind.  For the grasslands of your
 mini-Rome are no more rusted

  
 than busted us (trust me on this).
 Understand, we stand in good here
 for the minor coppers who dug
 her out of the lincoln logs - Scythians

  
 with charlie horses carved into their
 knobby, needy, bowlegged errors -
 still, they hit the bell's aye - rose.  And
 this is a drawing-out of thundering wraiths.


      
                             11.13.99

(full excerpt here)

Emily Dickinson's 1850 valentine, which scholars presume was addressed to (George) Henry Gould, opens like this :

"Magnum bonum, 'harum scarum', zounds et zounds, et war alarum, man reformam, life perfectum, mundum changum, all things flarum?
Sir, I desire an interview; meet me at sunrise, or sunset, or the new moon - the place is immaterial..."

& so it goes, a goofy take-off on high-flown oratory ("This is strong language sir, but none the less true. So hurrah for North Carolina, since we are on this point.") With a sidelong panegyric for her dog, Carlo... & ending :

"But the world is sleeping in ignorance and error, sir, and we must be crowing cocks, and singing larks, and a rising sun to awake her; or else we'll pull society up by the roots, and plant it in a different place. We'll build Alms-houses, and transcendental State prisons, and scaffolds - we will blow out the sun, and the moon, and encourage invention. Alpha shall kiss Omega - we will ride upon the hill of glory - Hallelujah, all hail!

Yours, truly -"

Come to think of it, I am going to delete some posts from yesterday.

Endemic problem here at HG Poetics : posting disorganized and flaky meanderings about complicated things. Some topics need more deliberation, consideration, care.

Nevertheless, I'm going to leave up the "feminism" post, despite its awkwardness.

(Because if you actually read my poetry, & especially of late, you'll note how so much of it is a weird spin on the sacred-uncanny-androgynous-feminine... an oblique take on (tautological-Narcissy) cosmic oneness, Virgin Birth, Incarnation, Poetry, saintly San Fran hoboishness, scapegoating, etc. etc....)

Tempted to delete all my blatherings of yesterday. But not this time.

In prep for upcoming reading, Tom Epstein gave me a copy of 1999 issue of Essays in Poetics : Journal of the British Neo-Formalist School, which has some translations of Alexander Skadin's poetry, along with a great little essay by Elena Shvarts, about Nabokov's art of hide-&-seek. How he conceals what is most important & meaningful to himself under layers of false trails. Explores the false-bottom box of Invitation to a Beheading - its buried (& profound) inscription of Pushkin's debt to, & elegy for, Andre Chenier, poet executed in the (French) Revolution...

& speaking of valentines & all that, it might be very good for me to write, for myself at least, some kind of account or analysis of the themes, aspects in my poetry, relating to love, gender, sexuality, & such like complexities.

So much of my poetry is "love poetry", more or less - I mean it is prompted (& structured) by some real or imagined feminine person or presence or quality. "Gendered." (the Beatrice Effect)

& I'm sure it would be possible to analyze all this as very, very, confused. Even the analysis would get confused.

If one tends to believe, as I do, that the (poetic) imagination is involved in creative cosmogony or theogony - I mean a sort of (relatively) ex nihilo world-shaping, starting everything over - one gets involved in challenging or revising traditional (often patriarchal or authoritarian) symbols or mythologies of such cosmogenesis.

& if this ambivalent impulse - I mean simultaneously to maintain & to challenge certain conceptualizations of reality & belief - gets fused with a romantic or emotional alignment of poetry & love - then feminism & cosmology & poetry (the "muse") become sort of indistinguishable...

& if, moreover, these impulses are aligned also with certain subconscious or psychological motivations (ie. childhood, Mom, the equilibrium & bouyancy of the body/ship in the womb) - a sort of Bachelardian emphasis - these trajectories are amplified even more.

The trouble with all this, I think - & with the neo-mythologizing of personal psychology (Jung, & Freud too) - is that it leaves both poetry and philosophy at a certain state of formation which, while very important - & maybe essential (especially for poets like me) - still leaves huge dimensions of discourse out of the picture.

What I'm referring to, I guess, is what you could call the "gender neutral" or universal aspects of social experience, morality, & justice. This gets complicated, because it seems to require holding two sometimes contrary aspects in balance at the same time. First of all, society as we know it, to varying degrees around the world, is certainly warped by gender inequalities and the oppression of women. But there are other, equally pervasive facets of global violence, injustice & disorder. & it seems that the path to sane and happy social life on earth involves pragmatic, common sense action - political, scientific, social - where gender equality is both insisted upon and taken for granted (so that the focus can be on the specific practical problem at hand). (This is not to suggest that gender equality and gender identity - or indistinguishability - are the same thing... although that, too, is part of the equation... All poets, I suppose, are androgynous in some way or another.)

I'm guess my cogitations are quite primitive & simplistic. But I'm thinking specifically about the sphere in which social issues become material for poetry. & what I'm thinking is that the cosmogonic-mythologic "feminism" represented in a lot of poetry - and a lot of my own poetry - can sometimes (not always) hobble its capacity to address public, civic issues & social phenomena in a certain ordinary, objective way. It's like being trapped in some Jungian, personal psychodrama; like some character in the Divina Commedia, unable to climb above a certain level & see things more clearly, & address them more impersonally.

What I'm trying to say, I think, is that there are vast regions of human activity and social action - and many dimensions of ethics and justice - wherein men & women can, and do, work (& play) together, without gender coming into it at all (except perhaps in fun). & poetry likewise should be capable of addressing these conditions & occasions in a witty, direct, impersonal & gender-neutral (or simply "gender-comic"!) manner.

All that being said, I'm sure I will continue to follow the very obscure, oblique & mysterious (& mysteriously feminine) impulses from which my poetry emerges. What would life be without sex? Vive la differance, & all that...

& I do think that the utopian or apocalyptic drive underlying religion & human history is powerfully, substantially "feminine" in ways we tend to elide or misunderstand. This is partly what aligned my own direction toward Crane & Joyce as opposed (at least on the surface) to Eliot's & Pound's seemingly more patriarchal attitudes. The happy dreams of Noah's Ark, or the spacy moon-ship of Jubilee, really are impelled, in some obscure subconscious way, by the affective womb-life & infancy of mother-&-child. Humanity - in taming & "civilizing" (& also endangering & ruining) the earth - is motivated by these profound & early impulses - the buoyancy effect, an infant equilibrium.

...I wrote this (belated) valentine to her also, a few years ago :

LETTER TO EMILY D.

 
You would have liked it here.  The sun flares colors
clear as the sea-floor.  The Navajo
make tracks circled in clay so sharp, so
clean - bladework of feathers, aloes, arrows...
 
And then, the Grand Canyon resembles you -
the Colorado scribbling a planet down
through dry spectral layers to the wet
blood-red and prehistoric marrow.
 
For Scripture precedes history - your insight
precedes Scripture - April's alpha and omega
purl playfully from your soul-saga.
Who finds you meets a palm-tree full of light.
      
                          Phoenix, AZ
                              4.12.04

Found at this site :

"In those years Dickinson experienced a painful and obscure personal crisis, partly of a romantic nature. The abject and pleading drafts of her second and third letters to the unidentified person she called "Master" are probably related to her many poems about a loved but distant person, usually male. There has been much speculation about the identity of this individual. One of the first candidates was George Henry Gould, the recipient in 1850 of a prose Valentine from Dickinson. Some have contended that Master was a woman, possibly Kate Scott Anthon or Susan Dickinson. Richard Sewall's 1974 biography makes the case for Samuel Bowles. All such claims have rested on a partial examination of surviving documents and collateral evidence. Since it is now believed that the earliest draft to Master predates her friendship with Bowles, he cannot have been the person. On balance, Charles Wadsworth and possibly Gould remain the most likely candidates."

Hmm. I sense the approach of Valentine's Day. From now on, I would like to be referred to as "the Poet formerly known as George".

Fine time at the Tazza reading last night. Mairead Byrne has a gift for comic, satiric poetry - a good M.C., too. This old buzzard enjawed hisself, along with all them decorous lamb-like collegiate young RISD bohos. & I got to accompany (con harmonica) MB on her heartfelt classic Irish lyric entitled "Oatmeal".

(A late evening downtown. While I was doing my hijinks, Sarah noted there were several real bohos - the solitary homeless ones, consigned to neglect - walking by the club windows. On a (rare) mild winter night.)

... then I'll be reading with Russian poet Alexander Skidan on Feb 11th, at the Brown U. Slavic Dept. Ochin interesne. Bolshoi spasiba, Tom Epstein.

Will be reading poetry tonight (briefly) at Tazza bar, in downtown Providence, with Mairead Byrne, Lisa Samuels & some RISD students. 10 pm. (Yes, I do emerge from den of hibernation now & then.) Also might be playing harmonica with guitarist Mark Milloff.

Fontegaia, on we go...

6

 
Mangered by Siena's seven hills,
intuitively the Palio braves rip round
their Campo.  Mad steeds pummel down
stable-strewn bricks - an annual memorial

 
to virginal triumph (1260 Montaperti).
She who climbs over the things we do
on earth - august ascent up to
conceptual hyperspace (see Dante) -

 
becomes minatory martial emblem.  Great-
Eyed Virgin to grey-eyed Athena.  Aerial
spear of light.  Spine-tingling peal
above that rabid, rancorous cartwheel.

 
Yet beneath incense-fog and icon-shimmer
yet-more-evasive dream-reflections
stream.  Strange backflow, that shuns
the rampant street (immured murmurmur).

 
The lion must roar, and prophets prophesy...
Grim silhouette of spiritual fright, weird lemur-
glare of recompense - O feline moon of fire
(eroded copper coin, dangling above sky-

 
bearded Amazon, piranha-sheathed) -
under your rigid radiance, an undercurrent
of impending leaps (obverse impediment;
sidewinder; vernal meteor).  Bequeathed

 
now, homing dovecote-aerie, carrier-
plied past rims of warring warnings;
do-si-do-eyed whirl of cherishing
dear Wisdom, aflame in civic mirror.

more wacky wonders...

5

 
Solomon the rainbow trout navigates
upstream, humming his hymn of hums;
he ponders (as he strokes his gills) Time
(timing the moonrise over Stephen's Gate).

 
Upstream, at the source, where crusted
snow-gargoyles begin to crack and melt.
Where a trickle slips out of a vault
of instinctual springs - a rusty

 
statue's melancholy beard of copper mold.
He ponders the mercurial curve of waves;
how the odd angle of a horse's neck heaves
mighty Troy-town tumbling down - such low

 
ambivalent ululations in that wooden fold!
The rainbow ringlets on his spine channel
a flickering repetition.  Some concealed
mass of green mountain, perhaps - retold

 
in parabolic slopes, shapes of mirage...
Or only a pert montagnard, maybe -
very uphillery (will she ever rest?).  She
is cherishing, the thought of her - a mint

 
montage, magnetic magma-load - the node,
the gnomon of Siena's flyting, flights.
She is that more-than-tidal measure, night's
chalk mate - mere swimming down the road

 
will never glom this morose mare (she climbs
limbs of Time's rim).  Solomon astrologer
caught her milking the NW Passage (near
Orion, Saskatchewan) - but only in his rhymes.

- & heading back to the jungle?

4

 
The Giantess lay on her side in Mayan shade,
beside the Moon River, that flowed and flowed,
immense and sensual, across the road
one evening.  Inconceivably begot, not made.

 
There my taut and waterloggy coracle
turns back upon itself (a-bob like putty
on a potter's carousel).  Her knotty
Egyptian-acacia ribs were barn-like,

 
barnacled with wayward fables; her bow
a figurehead rigged like a palanquin
to the nether shore, with a green
spring bough.  There were no vowels

 
stored in bulkhead, hold or hull - it was
a primitive scene (lumped in my granary).
And on the Last Day, so it will be,
each orbiting heart: tinder and resinous.

 
And drawing to a close is drawing near.
Spun round a faery mizzen, seesawed
sea-salts paddling acorn-caps raveled
a crowing cupola, on Homer's shore -

 
frost-veterans of bardic doom saw lightfall
filter through that complex tent, a whisper
lapping slow against each tender pier (their
uniondom pealed like a Russian bell).

 
These iris blades on spokes will find
your own heart also, giant sleeper.
Out of your own tiered granary, dear
Guadalupe (Teotihuacan host-figurine).

Fontegaia rollin' on...

3

 
To catch the dark meaning of the shuttling threads
woven out of old, old, senex Yule (a snowman
in July, Henry) - the unraveling plan
of surrender to yon alien love-craft... Medusa

 
heads upstream (Moon River, wider than a mile).
One plangent string drawn taut, one note
drawn out so, sostenuto... little mote-a-float,
small purple coracle (a circular bark, congealed

 
of thread, compiled from bark) sails through
the mottled shift of memories, the flaking
Madonna imagery (that photo taken by
the pool - those charcoal eyes, collecting you)

 
until the war-cries of a mortal struggle
(Battle of Lost Mountain) interweave
as overtones - the town conceives
itself as free at last - living model

 
of a byzantine mosaic curvature (Prince
Charming tenders her the toy Troy-town
surrounded by fleet morris-dancers, bound
in labyrinthine knots of amaranth footprints).

 
With sun and moon beneath her feet, haloed
by the Milky Way - so the hungry painter
(out of his ribcage-shell) depicted her:
fluttering Jonah, sister-sailor, swallowed

 
up in submarine design (breathing
Leviathan) - a levitation, inevitable
leavetaking - straddling her sable (midnight)
bridled Pegasus.  The Queen of Everything.

continuing Fontegaia chapter 3...

2

 
Over the panorama of Good Government
a brooding glow of midnight blue - so dark
against that airy chamber's Tuscan glare
(nocturnal cadence under Judgement seat).

 
In a corner of the couch, her head sloped
on her hand, in diaphanous soft silver smock,
sweet Pax, detached from civic rolling stock,
moons into the distance (a painted antelope

 
toward real mountains).  Shielded
by gentle heart, wise temperament
and nothing more.  Feminine bent
posture, leaning there; unfolded

 
field of meadow flowers, arcadian ark;
figure of the will, transfigured in a well
of all things well.  Not sundered from the skirl
of shrill desire, no - lightened by the footwork

 
of a deeper bass.  That ring of nubile girls
dancing in the street, demure, careless...
that Appalachian moonshine, effortless 
play (ukelele-dobro-mandolin)... whirls

 
you (collage of giggling collisions, jig
of visions) shaken to the roots
of every angling pine.  Somehow in cahoots
with an aerial arc-welder in T formation (Zig?

 
Little Brown Jug).  His banner under me
was sealed (toward Paradise); the plow
left off, her feathered steed sails Now (her
Soo Line siren - high horn silvery - Away).

Bright gibbous moon in the sky tonight. Started Fontegaia, part 3.

1

 
A pool of cold forest water.  Dark
and clear.  Remote slight muttering.
A rocking of breeze-waves (sinking,
rising).  Underneath an arc

 
of pines.  Beneath your eyelids.
Where images flicker, a fluttering
surf-susurrus (still moon-mooring).
A resin-resonance of prickly caryatids;

 
a pining.  Moon of admonition
for rusted memories.  Disfigured shield
harrowed by rain.  Here testaments repeal
as shed leaves, unbound, tossed adrift -

 
when your absence sets a stream in motion
(veinous pressure bent against the bow).
This is where Siena circles now -
moat-silvered cloister, cryptic ocean,

 
subterranean corona (Diana's brow).
So, in the water, one's reflected frown
turns inside out.  Hoofbeat, wing-flown,
up, down.  Slow tidal undertow.

 
Perceive, Phoebe, how it branches free
(your tributary once, now sole initiative).
Follow down (dawn-star, inceptive
dreamer) time's wide-opening seraph

 
when she sets off in her flighty car
(a nation at heart) - a Frisbee
Sorcerer, or Hula-Loop - her teetery
peripeteia, perilous - your Mayan mare.

Bachelard, the charming psychologist of daydreams & poetry. An advocate for states of mind that, in their wishful vagueness & wayward useless dislocations, are not highly valued in vigilant hard-working caffeinated America. But he's great at evoking the nexus of reverie/imagination/creativity... eloquent (in spite of the fact that he quotes, as examples, some pretty 2nd-rate & saccharine bits of poems).

Most of Forth of July was written in a kind of productive trance. Sometimes I talk about it in the poem (this part from early in Stubborn Grew)...

Home again from London, I lay near Lucky;
a man on the sofa, nearly lucky, I lay.
A man of clay, eyes open, looking out at the sky.
As though the blurred porch window held the key.

 
Blue arch of sky, a flurry of pussy willows. 
Out of the man of clay the heart goes out 
through the eyes – a circular route, 
elliptical, eccentric. Whatever nobody knows

 
sounds, unspeakable.  Toward the willows; 
toward the bent branches shading a long river, 
somewhere (ingrained in the interior).
A dream of the clay man, motionless, comatose.

 
An image in the glass, or ghostly hum 
draws breath from lakes of immobile eyes. 
A statue, stirring Provençal sighs
from old books (Francesca's boredom), or

 
immobile blue-brown blur captured in a porch 
windowpane.  A supine, motionless man of clay. 
And something quivers in his chest – today,
eternity – a key, scrambling in the latch

 
or Bluejay, whistling, rehearsing in the tree... 
icon filling the frame for a troubled moment 
like lost summer wind, crossing cement
with deep soil... infant memoir of infinity.

 
Closed eyes and speechlessness.
A clipper, sailing over seas of grain. 
Bluejay's fiery Chippewater – a milk train 
way.  Eyes closed, and speechless.

The child doesn't want to be left out in the cold, dismissed. One wants to join the round of ordinary goodness & warmth. One wants to be part of the family of happy endings, the comedy in which everybody pretty much gracefully "muddles through" somehow... Tolstoy's opening sentence in Anna Karenina - "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - ie. one wants to find oneself in the unwritten circle of the first group, the world of foolish-wise & bumbling grown children...

- old poem from Way Stations -

The wind for France
blusters and laughs.
Green hills, gathered
and chaste, gleam
over the humped sediment.

 
And bowmen will carry the day.
Silence an awkward garment
among the clear circles,
at the lighted feast
of modesty and honor.

 
Only, in the mild air,
to say goodby.  Or there,
in grandmother's book,
Rapunzel, glancing down
from her strange tower.

 
Or stars over the sea.
Or tongues of fire.
A hearth-blaze.  Fold
my hands, light the
four corners of the bed.

Gaston Bachelard (Poetics of Reverie) : "From poetic reverie, inspired by some great spectacle of the world, to childhood reverie, there is a commerce of grandeur. And that is why childhood is at the origin of the greatest landscapes. Our childhood solitudes have given us the primitive immensities."

(Something of this in the vast & rivery-bulbous dream-bridgedom of Forth of July).

The Bachelardian child (hidden unchanging solitary cosmic dreamer) is analogous to the perennial "order" of Melchizedek (mysterious King of Salem, who comes out to greet Abraham with bread & wine as he enters the Promised Land) in the Epistle to the Hebrews. ("For unless ye turn & become as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.")

The order of milk & honey (mel). (see Melville's Moby Dick for a whole arcane & ribald symbology along these lines)

Fontegaia. A fountain in Siena. Poetry, a sort of welling-up, a swelling. In Mandelstam's term (from biology?) a "salience". You have to provide a little space (of silence) around that salience in order to hear it properly. Poetry is the nipple on the breast of the mother-tongue (got that?). The Milky Way.

Latta, right, I just realized. Milk-Man. (see photo at the end of today's post there)

MLK Day coming (or Melchizedek)

Reading Malcolm Woodland, Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode. Reminded once again how closely Stevens listened to other poets (from Isaiah to Whitman to...), re-fashioning their terms & phrasing to meet the pressure of his own time & his own concerns & idiom (see especially comments on relation between Stevens' "Martial Cadenza" and Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"). Every case is different, every situation is particular.

This, it seems to me, is the real thing, the real work & tradition of poetry, in every era...

I keep deleting boring entries from previous day. The fact is I'm kind of burnt out right now, distracted.

Maybe when I get some energy & focus back (I hope) I can think & write more about these things that have preoccupied me for years...

such as the theory of poetry as a kind of message that rounds on itself, complete in itself (a form of beauty) : and as such, a representation of one way of understanding nature as a whole - reality, experience, the cosmos... life itself considered (envisioned) under the sign of the beautiful. This rhyme or identity (or tautology) joining the image (the work of art) and the thing itself (reality).

& that the epic mode in poetry aims actually to include (somehow) all of time, history, & social experience within this category of the beautiful (a severe beauty, perhaps) - erasing the (Heideggerian) distinction between "earth" and "world" noted in previous post.

& that my "quatrain" experiment (Forth of July) & other poems tend to circle around this natural-historical "ring-structure" in a thematic way... the shamanic spinning sufi-ghost-dance gyroscope of time & reality celebrated in Grassblade Light & other places... trying to see into the "brow of reality" where everything spins around & begins again...

(here's an example of what I mean, from Fontegaia...)

John Latta's remark, yesterday, on Nature according to Nabokov - sly, shy, complex, suffused with intelligibility and intelligence - so as to underscore humanity's tragicomic bumbling -

here's a picture of things which seems, at first glance anyway, quite different from Heideggerian-poetic "earth" (according to Kirsch). In Nabokov, the poetic word, in itself, is not endowed with world-shaping magic, mana; rather, Nature as a whole is unspeakably marvelous, and the poet observes and follows after (like Dante, the self-professed "scribe" of Love).

Similar, & different, I guess. In both, there's an alliance with things of the earth, & a humility & self-limitation involved in rendering them; but it seems in Nabokov there is no necessity to sign up with the army of philosophical poet-mystagogues, or treat the Word as some kind of substitute religion or science.

Re-reading Adam Kirsch's essay : it seems too neat, too simplified, to speak of "poets of world" and "poets of earth", though the temptation is strong to seek these kinds of resolutions. Van Gogh's peasant shoes, in the context of Heidegger, make me think not so much of humble, a-historical simplicity, but of the discarded mountains of shoes etc. - remnants of the Holocaust (& then of Philip Guston's forlorn & comic footwear). History and nature are mingled together. Heaney, Simic, & other poets like them may make the effort to distance themselves from grand historical/imperial narratives - very understandable after the 20th century, as Kirsch explains - but doesn't this come at the cost of reducing poetry to a minor art? According to Kirsch, Heidegger sets the terms for the metaphysical/spiritual poetry of our time; but Heidegger's mysticism seems to require the building of a wall between metaphysics and history. All philosophy, I suppose, tries to transume the chaotic flow of history within its ordering categories (even if these are post-structural anti-categories); but I think there are forms of both secular-pragmatic philosophy, and types of religious faith (ie. both Judaism & Christianity), which would not admit to a separation between time, history and metaphysics.

Stevens' (& perhaps Guston's) "noble rider" - the "nobility" of the imagination - doesn't renounce or seek to avoid the violent reality of history; it pushes back against it.

(Meanwhile, I've put in a library request for the Heidegger piece, so I can see the original.)

Thoughtful - & pleasingly brief - essay in current Poetry magazine by Adam Kirsch. Attempts to characterize distinctive aspect of contemporary poetry by way of an essay by Heidegger ("The Origin of the Work of Art").

Have to think about this for a while. Kirsch suggests that contemporary (or postmodern) poetry has distanced itself from modernist totalizing (& sometimes totalitarian) social ambition, & focused instead on a more humble (& passive) rendering of the things of the earth itself.

If true, then perhaps contemporary poetry has (temporarily?) renounced the "epic" layer of poetry altogether.

See Mairead Byrne's post of Jan. 3rd, & click on the Artaud line, for a funny video of her trials & tribulations in my place of work (the Rockefeller Library).

What is it with these people? What is it with me? Que pasa? Gabriel writes epic poem while in his car driving to see his daughter, here, in Rhode Island. Mairead makes videos of herself & daughter breaking into my library. I write poem inspired by graffiti on sidewalk near my home, drawn (unbeknownst to me) by their daughter - & send it (all unknowing) to Gabriel...

What's going on, Clio? Is Poetry trying to prison-break the Library???

I guess I could put that state seal on the cover of The Grassblade Light. The middle volume of Forth of July (& actually the poem as a whole) is suffused with many images, stories & gestures of the poet-plowman persona turning to listen to the Native American "ghost-dancer".

& the formal, numerical center of Grassblade Light (as I've noted before) is the following line :

Love is our North Star high up above

HG Poetics turned 5 years old last Wednesday. He's learned to read the Dick & Jane books all by himself! What a good boy am he.

*

Turned a corner last night; back on track with Fontegaia poem. Maybe I was aligned somehow with the fresh air coming out of Iowa (where my maternal grandmother grew up, in West Branch).

When I start making obscure design calculations based on parts & line-counts etc., I know something is crystallizing.

Fontegaia is really the culmination of all my quatrain-hoboing of the last 10 yrs. Nobody knows about it yet. Look out, Poetryland!

*

Some constructive metaphors are also rambling into place. I don't want to explain too much at this point, though...

(The seal of the State of Minnesota shows a farmer at his plow watching a Sioux warrior riding by on his horse. I'm finding a way to think about the georgic plow of poetry and the Odyssean Trojan Pegasus of the muses and the ship of state and the Palio of Siena and the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse and Mandelstam's "Egyptian bark of the dead" and the ribs of the lungs around the heart.)



(I see MN will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of its statehood this year. "The Star of the North.")

*

The georgic plow of verses has something to do with the georgic labor, in an Iron Age, of serving the common good, the commonwealth : since rising (by way of Aristotelian "virtue") beyond pure selfishness and egotism, toward the equity and fairness of justice - justice, which is an absolute necessity for global survival - requires labor and sacrifice. Perhaps even more, it requires tolerance and mercy (always difficult for the doctrinaire and self-righteous) - since we all come up short when it comes to loving our neighbor as ourself (the foundation of equity).

Rather tumultuous (weddings, passings) holiday season over now. Reading some books on Wallace Stevens' poetry (The Wallace Stevens Case, by Thos. Grey - on Stevens & the law; and another study of Stevens and "apocalypse" - can't think of author at the moment). Curious about apocalypses, after finishing section of Fontegaia (& the horsemen) not too long ago. Apocalypse means "unveiling". Trying to get myself together toward writing again, not always easy. Also distracted by potboilers (funny old spy novel by Len Deighton my brother-in-law recommended. Remember The Ipcress File, with Michael Caine? It's not that one. Enjoy Deighton's sense of humor.) Boredom & annoyance with just about every snippet of poetry or poetry-reviewing or po-biz reporting I come across : not a good sign. Deep boredom; maybe accidia itself. Or just irritability. This is one reason I need to find a way to write again, that works, somehow. Trying to get my mind around it, in lackadaisical fashion. Good thing nobody's paying me to do this.

Hpypa Wne EraY !

My resolution : to try some new things in writing. That's why I went & bought an old manual typewriter.

*

A poem or an artwork "disintegrates" (Whitman's term for a precipitate) from the stream of time, interest, discourse, chores, etc. It falls, it drops from the sky... because it's complete, it's finished. It has wholeness, roundedness.

"Negative capability" has something to do with the poet's self-transference or absorption into the poem's complete little universe. Unwilled, unforced - a sort of love-manifest. Wholeness and inimitability - the poem radiates the intensity of this total self-transference. (Nobody mistakes Shakespeare for Jonson, or Herbert for Donne, for (obvious) example, or Marianne Moore for anybody else, & so on.)

Look for the density, the specific gravity, of the poet's entire emotional-intellectual participation in the birth of the poem.

This transfer - this back-&-forth - an image of the wholehearted self-giving (non-self-seeking) exchange which is love or charity. Reality as gift.

& this is it. In a nutshell. Maybe.

...so in this vein, some Rest Note reminders...

Reading Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie. What everybody read back in the 60s or so. Fine Gallic stouthearted defense of poetry's useful dreamy uselessness. Seems rather French, how he says he spent decades trying to reconcile conceptual reason and imagination, until he finally realized they were irreconcilable, dialectical contraries, etc. The English would rather meander in an undecisive manner between the two.

That "poetry" dream I had recently - seems so oddly familiar, almost like a cliche or pantomime... was it more like a "waking dream"? The impression was strong, the feeling extraordinary. (Was I thinking about my daughter, who got married that very day in Bangladesh?)

I am pondering my usual conundrums today (quiet at work, nobody here).

Artists & poets in the borderland between reason & dream. So that when I had that "Shakespeare/Bible" crisis back in 1973, my mind was a vulnerable. (There's some psychological term for the breakdown of reason & fall into a more primitive, regressive state - mise en abime? I forget.)

Experience like a 2-sided mirror. I mean there's a subjective/psychological explanation, & then there are other ways of interpreting the same things...

I have faith now : but I don't want to find myself trapped in a regressive-mythological frame of mind. So I try to understand these mysteries.

Americans perhaps have to choose between Eliot & Emerson. Between doctrinal allegiance and Romantic spiritual individuality. & being Episcopalian is akin to androgeny : you're Protestant-Catholic.

Charles Peirce somewhere writes about how God must be the always-new, the continually-creating. That's close to Emerson, and the dignity of the Romantic poet's office : the creative Lux Fiat of the imagination.

The dignity of the poet's office : the Russians, the Petersburg Russians, seem to have a special understanding of this. The regal Akhmatova, the tigress Tsvetaeva, the kingly Mandelstam, the princely Brodsky. (They got it from Pushkin, mainly.) The lordly regalia of the creative Imagination (Coleridge's great "I AM.")

As a Protestant, I think of the Biblical-Hebraic tradition as essentially iconoclastic and writerly. Yahweh the revolutionary, the universalist, the unknowable - the One who challenges every merely human myth and cultural idol and local tradition, on behalf of a more stringent ethos. A disenchantment on behalf of the truth.

As a Catholic, I think the truth is actually mysterious, elliptical, and feminine : I think the truth is love-beautiful in its incarnate and particular splendor.
Truth is not abstract : the Word is Psyche. Life is pathos, and charity means self-sacrifice.

As somebody who takes an interest in Nicolas Cusanus and Giambattista Vico, I have this sense of history and anthropology as "conjectural" (in Cusanus' sense). That is, all our human doings are imaginative projections; we impose the very orders we live by. We enslave ourselves to traditions and habits of our own making. It's both frightening & liberating to recognize that we make the world we inhabit. It is a recognition at the root of the world-historical struggle for political freedom.

But there is another, more curious, conjecture I maintain, until proven otherwise. I distinguish somewhat between all these human imaginative constructs, and the founding event(s) memorialized & chronicled in the Bible. I actually believe that, beneath the murky & ambiguous testimonies of scripture, there lurks some kind of intervention from "outside". (I am not saying I'm a Biblical literalist, however - not at all. I think the Bible is endlessly-interpretable in all kinds of allegorical & psychological ways.) This intrusion of the Word - from its origins in Mosaic exodus to its conclusion in Christ - marks out a differential reality or space : an iconoclastic, anachronistic break-through. The plumbline of justice depends from a space above the human : the space of "the Father", of the One of whom every human being is a partial image and replica. I say "iconoclastic" because the Biblical event uprooted every myth and dependency outside the purely human relation with this "plumbline". As the New Testament puts it (roughly from memory), all power & authority have been delivered into the hands of the Son, and no one knows the Father except through the Son. One way to intepret this is as I just have done : ie. the Incarnation ratifies and authorizes the complete humanization of reality, but strictly in terms of a primary relationship with the original source of this order. And from whence did the (providential) plan for this manifestation of order proceed? My guess is that it came, somehow, from our own future : the intervention of the Word involves some sort of feedback loop, which we don't yet comprehend.

Someday perhaps the traditional & patriarchal concepts of scriptural authority will give way to a new understanding of human imagination, writing, and truth. As Isaiah puts it somewhere, "they will all know Me in their own hearts". This is where the feminine imagination of reality (poetry), and that iconoclastic, elusive & hidden Will (represented in scripture), might meet (in some ultimate Song of Songs).

John Berryman, dancing his antic (Hamlet-like) St. Vitus' dance on the edge of all these things.

"Nature is a prairie for outlaws." (Thoreau, via Latta-meander)

*

Hear, hear. Sends me back to Rest Note :

16

 
Far-off rehearsals of a whippoorwill
send Oblomov into the summer deep.
Yearning's sister is eternity.  The steppe
is brother to the sky.  So still

 
the planet's perihelion : so beaten round
the concave of the heart.  Its cup
so plenished with pleroma-envelope
(reverberant bell-boom of circum-sound).

 
I am but a poor herdsman, a dresser
of sycamore trees, bespeaks Hobo.  The priest
(amazed) beseeches him, leave off, desist!
His plumbline oscillates from nothingness.

 
Its long suspension seals the summer rain;
the swingset's rusty interrogative
repeals its requiem (equable ruth).
A whippoorwill replies.  They will remain.

 
Across the rolling distances, a prairie
butterfly makes delicate, indifferent way.
Zigzagging here and there.  A monarch, say,
or viceroy : his plangent rule a mockery

 
of rule, his slip of flight a sweet retort
to blind and dutiful raison d'état.
He's gentle evanescence, only that -
an evanescent elegance, the earth's éclat. 

 
The sound of the whippoorwill penetrates
the humid summer afternoon.  Late summer,
later afternoon.  Oblomov twists an ear
of wheat between his fingertips.  He waits.

Had one of those unusual "in dreams begin responsibilities" dreams last night. One of those out-of-left-field dreams, that has you lying there thinking at 3 AM.

Was encountering, and reading poems by, a poet, say in her late 30s or 40s, who was living with her young daughter in a cheap, discount basement apt., someplace up north, like Canada. She was charming, winsome, reddish blonde... the daughter was like a little sprite, an Ariel - kind of moody - she had a special flying car or sled which she would lodge in a hollow tree trunk, her hideout... it had a great name (the sled) which of course I can't remember... (not Rosebud, anyway...)

It was clear that the poet was bohemian, poor, living only for her poetry, a dreamer... her poetry was about her daily life with poetry... sort of a Mandelshtamian "blessed poverty", allowing her to live in & for her imagination alone... the daughter a kind of quintessence of that life... I was reading some of the poems, but can't remember much about them (except that she used the occasional ampersand (&)).

What struck me was the clarity and force of this impression of impractical dedication, the brave "negative capability" she was manifesting, and the vibrant, verdant, vernal feeling of joy - I have a clear image of her smiling sideways glance, and the forest greenery around her daughter's sled hideout - which seemed to emanate from the dream as a whole, & stayed with me after I woke up...

Bachelard or Jung would call this some kind of "anima" dream, I reckon. It was a poetry dream, a dream from poetry.

Allen Bramhall has started a new blog for his poetry reviews, with an apropos name : The River's View.

Interesting article in the New Yorker this week, about the decline of reading. Refers to new book on science of reading, Proust and the Squid (Maryanne Wolf). Origin of writing in visual hieroglyphs; powerful historical impact of different alphabets; Chinese script stimulates different parts of brain; etc. Effects of decline of literacy & obsession with viz-technology on US culture & politics.

Got me thinking again about ekphrasis, synaesthesia, poetry as "fluent images", blend of sound/vision. Melville's "hieroglyphic" symbolism (see Viola Sachs book)...
all the paintings in my poems... original fascination with Mandelstam by way of his imagery...

speaking of which... yesterday was St. Lucy's Day.

"Study me then, you who shall lovers be..."

Quiet in the library today.

Snowstorm yesterday, now sunlight on the trees, old colonial rooftops. Snow-radiance, winter brightness.

Sort of a northern light, Bruegel-light, Thomas More-light... imaginary sense of medieval gemutlichkeit comes to me now & then, like something out of collective memory (fantasy, I should say). It's in a lot of my poetry.

"Lit with the cold and clear Minnesota light" ("Grain Elevator")

Thinking of Stevens' "idea of the sun". & the tale of the Biblical "burning bush" that drew Moses out into eventual Exodus, and a scriptural Code, a social Covenant, & the history of the West.

The spark is like a mathematical equation :
Universal God + Mankind-Imago = Human Dignity/Equality = Justice

ie. if each & all bear this divine image (like M's "gold coin of humanism") then the irrevocable consequence is : dignity & respect & equality for each & all. (cf. the "greatest commandment", from which depends "all the Law & the Prophets" : Love God; Love your neighbor as yourself)

A further thought : these verbal articulations of social design (justice) are themselves epiphenomena of the unspoken Actual - the common intuited relations of love & respect that relatively free & sane persons offer naturally (at their best, anyway) to one another.

In other words, part of the overall gift of life is a certain unspoken normative justice, an equilibrium of happiness & peace.

Then the Biblical revelation (or divine intervention) is not so much a motor of history, on the order of cause-&-effect - but rather a manifestation (a "glory") of the truth as it already is, & always was.

Everything pivots on a sense of the unique Person as enfolded in, or unfolding, an image of the universal & divine Personhood. Everything pivots on consciousness & the Person. "I am that I am."

These things have been known for thousands of years.

Imaginary scholars (my imaginary friends) might be able to find some connections between Paul Fry's notion of the "ostensive" character of lyric poetry, and Rest Note.

A "rest note" in music is silent : a timed pause, the absence of a note. With regard to my poems, the title implies a sort of culmination - the conclusion of my seemingly endless stream of quatrains (!) since beginning with Stubborn Grew...

Stubborn opens beside a river in Providence... Forth of July moves on to the Mississippi... Rest Note goes from the Amazon to a mythical underground river in Siena (Diana), and the fountain in the Campo square (Fontegaia).

But aside from that, the "rest" implies a hoped-for future... the rest on the 7th day, the peace on earth, the Jubilee, Redemption, the Golden Age. The rest and equilibrium radiating from a finished beautiful thing. And the analogy between these two (art & history, or art & theology). Thus the Palio "4 horsemen" on the cover. The references to St. Francis, Joachim of Fiore, etc.

I made a few slight tweaks to Rest Note. Also removed the read-along notes to the title poem, which I had printed in the back. Too much self-explanatory overkill.

Looks very nice now.

I suppose the epitaphic sensibility of Paul Fry et al., and Mandelstam's Acmeist notion of "domestic hellenism", could be seen as contrasting counterparts. Where Fry regards literature as an emanation from our non-human roots, Mandelstam understands poetry as an active labor of humanization. I suppose they're two faces of the same coin (see M's "Pindaric Fragment").

Christ's Promethean "I have come to cast fire upon the earth" gets domesticated beside the primordial Greek-Russian rustic hearth (the kitchen stove, a sacred object in those latitudes). The poet's breath breathes on culture and humanizes it, acknowledging with gratitude the (Acmeist) earthly "mansion" - thereby perhaps helping establish the terms of ethical life, or civilization. Brodsky : "Mankind was put on Earth for one purpose : to make civilization"(rough quote from memory). "In Him was light, and the light was the light of men." Nature and the round of life on earth - framed by wisdom to the seasonal, psychic dimensions of human experience & destiny.

Paul Fry's Defense of Poetry really is a defense of poetry, mainly (for me) for its sensitive readings of Wordsworth, Keats & other Romantics. (& he's got me going back to Bachelard, & Wordsworth, & looking for Allen Grossman.) Fry's argument can be understood as an elaboration of Keats's "negative capability" : poetry provides a rest from the "irritable reaching after fact & reason". He quotes Blanchot, who writes that he reads literature to find rest in actuality, the thingness of ordinary things - beyond meaning, beyond reference, beyond interpretation.

His argument is also, it seems, rooted in a disenchanted naturalism. The basic ground of reality is the nonhuman, the inanimate - King Death being the much-evaded terminus, the inanimate to which all dust returns. For Fry the Romantics, especially Wordsworth, are naturalists avant la lettre, or in spite of themselves.

At one point though, in a sort of aside, Fry mentions Blake, as something of an exception to the rule. & I find myself closer to Blake's supernaturalism than anyone else's naturalism.

Naturalism, as a literary atmosphere, succeeded Romanticism, under the pressure of 19th-cent. science, politics, and war. (Symbolism and modernism succeeded naturalism, but only within the restricted sphere of their aesthetic self-enclosure.) Simply put, poetry's role was sidelined and trivialized - penned up in the realm of "culture" and "feeling".

Basically, Science took the place of Religion, and everything else lined up appropriately.

But let's look over at Pope Benedict's essay (see link below). Faith, according to Paul, is the substance of hope, the evidence of things unseen. In Benedict's reading, then, faith is a spiritual something from outside, which we internalize (or already possess) - and such possession makes possible a kind of intuition of a greater goodness or joy which we cannot see yet, but which we hope for. Because faith is a "substance" we actually possess, it is also the evidence which grounds our hope.

As I see it, this spiritual intuition is still active in the world, and provides a way of seeing &/or understanding reality, which has not been displaced by science. And there's a kind of analogy here with the intuitions, the aesthetic discoveries, which guide artists and poets. (& that's the key to my Byzantium)

For Fry, literature & poetry intuit and represent an austere ground of being, in the non-human, the inanimate, the extreme limit of death. For me, I guess, the labyrinth of the human mind and spirit is yet more subtle. At some unspoken level, we recognize and intuit the formations of life & death together (this is actually close to Fry's reading of Wordsworth) : but death doesn't necessarily have the last word.

(I realize my notes might strike some people as a very aggressive and unpalatable confusion of categories... I'm sorry for that. This is how I organize certain categories of understanding, for myself : but my main interest lies in the actual ("shamanic") praxis of the visionary, synthetic imagination...

- & what the heck : I graduated from Blake School, in Hopkins (MN) !)

Vision and synthesis. Again, the notion of poetry as a kind of speaking painting. (Verbal synaesthesia being a hypertrophied symptom of something larger.) Imagination and dream. The project of the poet - to challenge more discursive, abstract, mechanical forms of mimesis - to absorb both dream & reason into singing. The old shamanic/oracular activity, except it loses its utilitarian motives (archaic, magical) in the process of painting the vast image for its own sake. A free-standing model of reality.

So maybe Fontegaia is a love poem of sorts... Trying to show love cohering in synthesis, a "synthetic" vision. How reality itself is rooted in love. (Mostly a ponderous jumble, maybe!)

The driving meditative thought-whisper of Stephen Ellis.

I suppose Mankind per se is that unruly rabelaisan Infant, loving & devouring, with joyful greedy gusto, the world designed for such, making him/herself the measure of all things... endowed with such freedom & power by the Maker's own express & gracious will... & that such futuristic freedom & power might be difficult for popes & philosophers & kings & generals to grasp... so that the Parable of the Prodigal Son is the greatest parable, and Jesus perhaps took the stage name "Son of Man" in a somewhat literal (futuristic) sense...

- & the same prodigality of freedom & power leading miserable Mankind into all the terrible hellholes of both "progress" & the lack thereof... requiring the difficult climbing ascesis of saints, who love the Source and the Whole - the whole Truth - the suffering Shepherd - more than they love any particular thing (including themselves)... [& then, following along, they go on the difficult downward ascesis, loving each most abject suffering unimportant thing as a portion of the Whole...]

- & speaking of Infants, I was reminded of a particular thread on the Poetry site (a posting by A.E. Stallings), about "poetry & prophecy", where I commented that I sometimes felt my poems had prophesied some of my own later poems... & was reminded of this very early poem, & how it seemed to foreshadow the whole Forth of July adventure...

The Pope's reflections on "Hope" : deeply-considered, sometimes very moving. (disclaimer - I'm not Catholic.) (note to intellectuals : he seems to like Adorno, cites repeatedly). The passage on how we might understand the concept of "eternal life" is especially rewarding & clear.

Two tentative criticisms come to mind. The first is that sometimes, despite his generally brilliant and subtle thinking, Benedict falls into a sort of sacerdotal "religion-speak" (understandable, coming from a Pope). Nothing wrong with this in itself : but it might be relatively inaccessible to non-believers, skeptics - anyone suspicious about, or simply incapable of, conceptualizing a theistic reality. (Maybe it's a job for philosophical poets - like Stevens, for example - to imagine, conceptualize, and picture basic cosmic/human realities in a graspable way.)

The second is more specific. In the course of contrasting humanistic or atheistic social utopias or conceptions of history with a Christian perspective - a critique of notions of "progress" - Benedict emphasizes that, because of the gift of human freedom of the will, we must expect that every generation will have to struggle against evil. Thus incremental human progress toward an earthly paradise is represented as a form of determinism or social engineering, incompatible with freedom, and with the moral imperatives facing individuals and individual generations.

I guess as an American (predictably) I have a problem with this. And I'm groping for a sort of theological ground for a different view. It seems to me that if Benedict's position is the case, then social idealism (whether in Dante or the Social Gospel) is, to a degree, in vain.

I think one could imagine a future Earth where social relations and moral education have changed for the better - so much so, that when new generations of children and young people come into the world, they can - without renouncing freedom of the will - for the most part distinguish between good and evil, and choose, for the most part, the good.

This seems hard to imagine... but there is some Biblical authority for it (I think!!). There are passages in Isaiah and the prophets, about "they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and learn war no more". There are verses where God announces that he will replace "hearts of stone" with "hearts of flesh", and that all people will come to know God, in their own hearts. Thee are passages in the New Testament about "saving the world", "a new heaven and a new earth", etc.

How these things relate to eschatology, the 2nd Coming, the Last Judgement - that's another set of issues, and beyond me at the moment...

Reading Pope Benedict's encyclical on "Hope" (which happens to be the state motto of Rhode Island).

Welcome to 21st-century po-biz, just like the earlier version. Check out Ron Silliman's weekend news clips. Ange Mlinko's rathery gushy Ashbery review (in The Nation) gets labeled "great". Troy Jollimore's measured Ashbery review (in SF Chronicle) gets labeled "quietist".

O Ashbery. The Mlinko review is indeed wide-ranging and intelligent; but the Jollimore one is good too.

A. Mlinko writes : "The Ashbery poem isn't grounded in reportage or fact. And that is at least one of his great discoveries, if not his greatest: the ideal poetry for the Information Age is a poetry of no information." This is very close to Paul Fry's theory of the "ostensive" ground of lyric poetry : it exists outside of, or before, reference and meaning.

Actually, I don't feel that the ideal poetry for the Information Age is a poetry of no information. Just personal taste, I guess. For me Ashbery represents one of the larger sacred buffaloes in the vast constellation of American confusion.

Here's a website where you can improve your vocabulary & donate rice simultaneously.

A revised, expanded Rest Note : includes new chapter of thingo-in-progress, Fontegaia.

Last puzzle-piece for Fontegaia, chapt. 2 :

28 (coda)

 
So the Tuscan tinkers' toy Troy-town
on the hilltop (miniature Hippo
in the August sun) is ensign now
of end-signs (Jonah diving underground).

 
As eighteen tender feet translate to nine
spheres circling the sunlight glimmering
in streambeds brimful from the swelling
horse's hoof (gold-beaten shoe-iron)

 
one distempered Hobo (smoking pot
on mossy bank) dips his toes
in winking night, 'mid rows
of rock-doves in a railroad lot.

               
              *

 
They raced beneath the tower there
for the joy of racing, just as
a pride of lions circles a carcass.
Fabulous exfoliation, flair

 
of summer flares, embodiment
of equilibrium of men and horses,
laughter and money, knives,
smiles... the ancient, famous

 
tournament.  Stiff-neck mastery
of recreation.  A gimp-legged
padre (or his younger brother)
pegs last place (stigmata-victory).

               
              * 

 
Early in the morning, only a trickle
in the fountain.  For the boy's
best friend (a brittle wooden horse)
it is sufficient unto the day.  O fickle

 
people! - a child shall lead you then.
Alongside the last-place colt
of goofy Bernardino (grinning dolt
of God) a merry band or procession

 
of beggar-lads... the fool's parade
circles the Campo, heads to Cathedral
where they'll toast the empty saddle
once again - O dim charade, slow oracle!

          
                          11.27.07

I wonder if there's not something overly passive in Paul Fry's concept of the "ostensive" moment as the defining characteristic of lyric poetry. I'm not done with the book yet, & I know he has a chapter specifically addressing "negative theology" and quietism in relation to his concept - so I'm probably jumping the gun.) It's as if the political/controversial stakes have become so intense and byzantine in theoretical-historicist literary crit, that eventually some such notion had to be found just to let off the pressure (without becoming, heaven forbid, "a-political"!).

Guess I would tend to think of humankind as naturally, genetically, political - in the sense of creating adaptive orders of social life on earth; and that the a-human or pre-human ("ostensive") reality of non-referential stasis, or "mere being", will always be subject to human adaptation (even if its source, its paradoxical/cthonic power, is non-human).

In my view, the charming stasis or equilibrium of lyric poetry stems from the same root as pastoral - a "peaceable kingdom" hidden within the present & representing a (future) better state of things on earth. It may indeed be a mingling of the human and the non-human, or the human and "nature"; but I wouldn't equate such a state with non-meaning, or some transcendence of, or vacation from, meaning itself. This is too reductive. This state ("quietude?"), along with everything else, will not evade interpretation. Everything is interpretable.

I think one of Fry's main points is that lyric poetry humbles the pride of intellect (interpretation) - restores the balance of actuality and our names for it. I would agree with this (though he might not agree with my spin on his position...). But one can imagine a humbled intellect still active, still interpreting,, still "figuring out" that ultimate global Day of rest.

(& actually, Fry's passage on Virgil's bees (in the Georgics) presents such an image of "active rest". Maybe there's more on this in the chapters I haven't got to yet.)

Winding down 2nd chapter of Fontegaia poem. Finally found some time to work on it.

27

 
Herds of autumn leaves like red-
gold seahorse-centaurs race now
(ceremonially) toward the ground.
The pennants of each neighborhood

 
of every hilltop Tuscan town strive
to outdo themselves.  Cocky rivalry
of pennate foliage - circadian chivalry
of bagpipes, droning in a restive hive.

 
Numb roots of the trees still thirst
toward snow.  In the centaur's heart
(a horse chestnut at the center
of the swirling hubbub's hum) a wasted

 
wasp, forsaken, crawls toward the border
of bridled boudoir, fainting, slow...
Ajax burdened with an axle-wheel,
a naked mule dragging a suitor's quarrel.

 
Omphalos moat, dawn water
for the dying.  The river's fluting
now.  Last leg of labyrinthine fling.
A drone flotilla (shrivelled to mutter)

 
accompanies her fluent aria
with muted paddling of tender feet
round aureole-knoll called Complete
(knot drawn tight; flight's last cry).

 
The mingled alloys of the leaves say
near, near.  Profile of a referee
at apex of the cobweb-tracery
of Palio and round-dance (planetary) -

 
sliver-shadow of the solar One,
lanternglow of pulsing jockey-Jacques;
a morsel of the moon in parallax,
a ripple in the stream (yon Hobo's hon).

Reading along in Paul Fry's Defense of Poetry. I haven't even gotten to the chapter in which he zeroes in on theology (contrasting the "mere being" of his "insignificant" ground, with traditional via negativa theology). But I get to thinking as I read along that he reminds of John Locke & the other 18th-cent. materialists with whom Berkeley did battle.

Fry dismisses questions of first causes ("why does anything exist? how did it start?") as of interest only to theologians, not to philosophers, scientists, critics etc., since we can have no comprehension of anything which precedes comprehension itself (reflection, mind, intellect, language, understanding, awareness, knowledge, etc.), and, moreover, it's perfectly possible to imagine this unimaginable cosmic substrate has having no beginning whatsoever. And it seems true that all our conceptions (Nicholas of Cusa's "conjectures") are strictly human constructs, and we live in a kind of human-constructed conjectural reality. But if this unsignifiable substrate (Fry has many names for it) is strictly beyond - because other than - human intellect, then the conjectures of theologians (and philosophers) are just as valid as those of Fry's persuasion. Berkeley described Locke's "matter" as an abstraction, a heuristic convenience, a non-entity : for Berkeley, everything begins and ends in Mind. Berkeley perhaps lacked Cusanus' dialectical sense of a limit; he made up for it with paradoxical faith ("the evidence of things unseen").

This bit (from July), written on Thanksgiving 8 yrs ago, seems to be dwelling on yesterday's notion of "sounding" (the ping in the depths, the weight-balance)...

What I wrote yesterday about the architecture of human/natural cosmos...

this weight-balance of relations...

maybe what I mean is "specific gravity". Maybe poets sense the cosmic harmony or design intuitively, by the sound of weight, or the weight of sound.

1132 : mysterious number in the works of James Joyce (& also Henry). Rate of falling bodies (32 ft/sec? something like that)

You might be able to read Olson, Dorn & some of the other like poets, using Fry binoculars (tweaked). That is, the "documentary" in history is also a kind of indication (ostensive).

Simple pointing toward facts (it is what it is) is also tautological, though for the purposes of interpretation & ideology, such indication becomes the primary tool in argument, persuasion (& thus loses its force or gets blurred in verbiage & comparisons).

But perhaps in a "documentary" poem, the facts can get taken in a different direction - aligned or fused with Fry's notion of the submerged prima materia of literature and lyric poetry : the tautological is-what-it-is of "precognitive", "somatic", pre- or non-human "being". A form of irrational or anti-thematic rhyme.

This Paul Fry book is amazing, actually. Very original, very deep.

(Though I have the feeling (see yesterday's post) that I might give different names to, and draw different conclusions about, the phenomena he describes so acutely.)

Paul Fry, Defense of Poetry, p. 52 :

"We might willingly enough agree, with many of our colleagues, simply to give up formalist, traditional Marxist, and rearguard humanist efforts to define literature and settle instead for the neo-pragmatist argument that whatever you want it to be is what it is; but that argument leaves an interesting question unanswered, the question why you do invariably want it to be something, and why so many have always wanted to write or speak that something, whatever it is, not just until formal, representational, or vocational aims have been fulfilled but incessantly, with obsessive repetitiveness. From this curious fact it is almost enough to infer... that literature is coextensive with human being in defining human being, over against all other forms of sentience, as that which can never say what it wants to say."

- which reminded me of this post -

I tried to dig down into things this way (which JL thinks about so intriguingly) in the poem In RI. Anny Ballardini (who translated it into Italian) will be making an expedition to Rhode Island next spring : hope to give some readings.

If you read Paul Fry, poetry (according to him) is not so much anti-fiction, pro-history. It's sort of pre-fiction, pre-history. Pre-cognitive, so to speak. Unplaceable.

For these theorists, humanism = anthropomorphism, essentialism. False consciousness. Blinkered by species-solipsism & historical conditioning. An interesting idea, has a lot of appeal for our presently human-battered, overheated planet.

I'm too ignorant of their whole mentality to argue with them (yet). Provisionally however I harbor a couple caveats:

1) if you're going to accept the notion of universal sentience, pan-consciousness (thinking rocks, etc.) then you have to consider the possibility of super-consciousness, a higher sentience.

2) an architect fastens onto the weight-balance of relations. Ecology is a kind of natural architecture. So also human being seems to have a certain symbolic/practical "stature" in the ecology of life on earth - an architectonic. Yes, our notions of that place & stature in relation to other creatures is changing : but I'm not quite ready to accept the idea of NO structure. Even if the human self-concept has to change - from "lords of creation" to servants & stewards of creation (gardeners) - that still leaves us with a certain concrete role in a structured ecology (history, the house in Michigan) of reality/life.

3) and what if history is not the indescribable chaos of scripted fictions/errors of the Yale boys? What if history is an enactment of a growth-process, a manifestation-process, a flowering?

4) a Byzantine, iconic-triadic architecture (Urs von Balthasar's history as "glory") : Mankind as body, mind, and union of the two. Personhood inherently relational (parent & child, self and divine otherness).



(p.s. my little brother Bill is such an ecologist.)

Reading Paul Fry, A Defense of Poetry (1995). Out of or after the Yale School of literary Theory. Kind of fascinating - like trying to decipher foreign language.

Out of Geoffrey Hartman, Derrida, De Man, etc. - but on his own track. He seems to have invented a new interpretive tool or explanation for poetry called the "ostensive" - I'll have to check the etymology of that. The idea in a nutshell - as far as I can see blurredly for the moment - is that Criticism (Theory + Historicism) has deconstructed any "essential" reality of or function for literature - that is, it's all a kind of epiphenomena, really indistinguishable from other epiphenomena, predetermined by socio-historical forces at large. But Fry complicates this (it is a "defense" of poetry) with a new idea : that poetry - lyric poetry in particular - is actually a release from meaning, reference of any kind. It's a sort of tautological non-human substrate (sentient or non-sentient, I'm not sure yet - just started reading the book) - it is what it is, so to speak, and in so doing lets reality "be" what it is, whatever that is... He leans a lot on Wordsworth, Keats & other Romantics ("a slumber did my spirit steal..."; "music of no tone"; etc).

Much of this intellectual milieu - the arcane & ponderous philosophical assumptions & assertions about writing, history, reality etc. - I find pretty doubtful & unappealing. Have made a lot of fun of "Theory" over the years. But Fry's idea ("ostension") sparks my interest... that is I recognize certain affinities with, or new ways of reading, my own poetry themes & adventures.

I guess I'm behind the times, as usual - the book was published 12 yrs ago...

It's always love/hate for the non-poet explainers of poetry. The better they are at it, as in the case of John MacKay - unveiling aesthetico-historical motives & mechanics in all their conceptual nakedness - the stronger the ambivalence.

(Though I wouldn't be surprised if he's a poet, too...)

Pretty much under the cartwheel of Labor lately, not thinking very much. Ambivalent response to John MacKay's fine book. The prospect & orienting markers of the historico-philosophical Left, so subtle, so fine-woven, so refined now. The flavor of the word "capital". A kind of superstructure or brahmin sense. Predicated on the assumption that the People cannot or will not correct (or ameliorate) economic injustices through the channels of law, democracy & civil society; that the idea of Revolution is a forceful idea precisely because it is an Idea fused with Force; and that such Forceful notions (ideology) are justified in a sense by a kind of historical Revenge Ethic : because of the brutal Force of Capital, the countervailing Force of Revolution is justified. But in refined brahmin academic Leftism, such Force is assigned to a kind of theoretical Utopia (where it won't really hurt anybody). (Slavoj Zizek, on the other hand, seems to be doin' the good ol' Big Man (Chavez) kow-tow, which worked so well for the 20th century.)

My 70s ancient history among the community organizers emphasized a more "hands-on" approach to social consciousness and public service. Less intellectually ambitious, perhaps, but more practical. (& public service, you might notice (if you read your local paper), often transgresses supposed ideological differences.)

Meanwhile, we live in a Red-Blue atmosphere, where political thinking per se is suffused by a religious-symbolic vocabulary (on the right) and frustrated ressentiment (on the left).

I, personally, have a lot of trouble holding historical, religious, aesthetic and political ideas in balance in a single conceptual process. Maybe others have similar problems. It helps me to think of Roger Williams' attitude toward relations between cultures, religions, and politics. He had a sort of Greek sense of the universality of civic and political goods (the common good); he somehow was able to hold absolute religious convictions without feeling the need to impose them on others or on the world at large - mainly by way of a sharp distinction between spiritual/heavenly/personal reality and earthly/historical/social reality. Maybe these are signs of a kind of "providential" political prudence. Very different from the various strains of apocalypticism, millennialism.

MacKay also notes "remarkable" affinities between Mandelstam & Hart Crane (sumpin I been sayin for years !)

Want to get back to poetry... lots of commitments & distractions lately.

Thin scattered thoughts on politics & religion etc. are not enough, irritating.

I know I'm out on a limb - that is, far from the current acceptable climate of opinion among the literary intelligentsia.

Reading interesting book by John MacKay - Inscription and Modernity. Wordsworth, Clare, Baudelaire, & a bunch of Russians (Khlebnikov, Kluiev, Mandelstam especially). From an historicizing left-materialist-Marxist perspective (Barrett Watten is one among many names in the acknowledgements). Interesting to see Mandelstam's Acmeism and "domestic hellenism" taken seriously from this perspective.

I know that in my occasional informal attempts to align or echo Acmeism/Futurism with "me"/post-avant-langpo, I have oversimplified Mandelstam. Also, much of the OM criticism over the decades has emphasized his victimhood, as part of an anti-Soviet polemic. MacKay, on the other hand, looks at Acmeism as not at all nostalgic/reactionary, but as a secularizing, materialist-humanist vision; and MacKay's interpretation of M's deep interest in language and "the Word as such" takes on an almost proto-"language poetry" cast. It would be interesting to contrast this viewpoint with that of Elena Corrigan (Mandelshtam's Poetics). M's critical writing is rich and complex, & can sustain opposing perspectives; there are passages which contradict MacKay's general position ("the Word is Psyche"; the "double strand" of the "verbal material" and the "poetic impulse"; etc.)

In general, MacKay's close readings seem to me both politically tendentious (based on several familiar socio-historical assumptions of left "critique") and very sensitive & discerning. His analysis of Mandelstam's concept of the perpetual renewal and invigoration of ancient poetic language is probing and evocative : inspiring, actually.

These came to me (as I was trying to get back to sleep) at 2:30 this morning...


JUDGEMENT PARABLES

1.

A man died and came before the Judge. "Judge," he said, "I renounced strong drink in order to pursue the active life in my community. I imposed strict ordinances outlawing alcohol, with severe penalties for the smallest infraction." The Judge said to him : "I perceive you are a man of strong will and self-denial. After a thousand years in the Hell of Tyrants and Oppressors, I will transfer you to the Hell of Drunkards, where you may remain sober for eternity."

2.

A man died and came before the Judge. "Judge," he said, "I learned, through careful perusal of the fine print of your Holy Book, that you abhor homosexuality. Thereafter I spent my life preserving your people from the slightest taint of such practices." The Judge said to him : "I see that you are an observant, conscientious and meticulous man." He handed him a copy of the Holy Book, in the form of a large roll of toilet paper, and ordered him to clean, forever, the anal cavities of his brethren in Hell.

3.

A man died and came before the Judge. "Judge," he said, "I know that the word of your Holy Book is the literal truth. I have devoted my whole life to the recreation of an exact replica of the original Holy Nation, as described there in detail." The Judge said to him : "I see that you greatly revere the literal truth of the Sacred Writings." Then he seated him, naked, upon a large anthill, in the Hell of the Literalists, and commanded him to read the Holy Book aloud, unceasingly, to a large colony of fire ants.

Another stirring & verifiable report from John Latta today. I don't see eye-to-eye with him on the politics - I don't have the same faith in the anarchist's righteous thunderous "No" - but I appreciate his discerning literary ear.

So where do I stand now on the War (Kent Johnson wants to know)? I accepted the "WMD" argument & aligned it with 1) Saddam tyranny; 2) egregious failure of Iraq "sanctions" regime; 3) Saddam's unwillingness to negotiate before the war. I was offended by what seemed to me the knee-jerk, partisan and doctrinaire mentality on the anti-war (& poetry-world) left. I was tempted (as I often am) into gratuitous contrarianism.

What it comes down to, however, is that I assented to another round of war and military violence in history; moreover an "unnecessary" war (in that it was not provoked in defense against a real & immediate threat). This puts me in a rather demoralized and discouraged state of mind. (I suppose if the follow-up to the war had been more successful, I would not be having these twinges of conscience; I would have accepted the justification for violently pulling down the tyrant Saddam; it's easier to be complacent if you're among the victors.) On the other hand, I also believe the situation in Iraq is not amenable to simple armchair abstractions; good & bad are emerging together out of the great spectrum of intentions and actors on that vast stage. I think many (if not all) Americans there are working hard to make the best of it, to steer toward a better future. If history is any guide, that future will not justify the pronunciamentos of doctrinaire politicos & prigs on either side of the debate. I would be not at all surprised if John McCain's strategic view of the situation in Iraq proves (surprisingly) correct in the long run.

I'm not (obviously) a strict pacifist, but I do hope for a global, historical evolution beyond war, aggression, violence, oppression, and exploitation. This will not happen in some deterministic fashion, but depends on the decisions and actions of the human race. The arrogance and vanity of nation-states is maintained by the complacency and brutality of nations themselves. "Why do the nations rage, and the peoples imagine vain things?"

Much is being made on the Poetry Foundation blog (Harriet) over issues of sexism, fairness, marginalization etc. within both mainstream and "avant-garde" sectors of Poetry World. Lots of articulate braininess and high-octane critical thinking on full display.

As somebody writing on the extreme margins of the Marginal, I am sceptical, perhaps cynical about all this right & righteous thinking. I recognize that cynicism/curmudgeonliness is a self-defeating vicious circle (see Edmund Wilson's essay on Ben Jonson's "anal" personality, for a classic diagnosis of this feature of po-biz).

Nevertheless I can't help thinking that this is one of those areas where the path of good intentions leads straight to, etc. Everything gets over-complicated (like most of our popular technology these days) when sociological analysis or a demand for justice tries to take people's snobbery & pecking-orders and scheming ambitions & self-interest - as a whole - to the cleaners.

I guess my feeling is that these crummy behaviors will always be with us. And it's part of the miracle & glory of the aesthetic experience itself to trump them all, without all the well-meant tinkering and interventions. Aesthetic response relies solely on personal and public taste. The art that pleases, informs and enlightens is the art that wins out in the end - because it's what people are looking for.

This is just another way of saying that I have a great deal of naive faith in aesthetic detachment; the ordinary reader; the unknown interlocutor. Without that primary relationship between artist, art and audience - why bother with all those other games, all that social engineering? We have to have a baseline of trust that editors and publishers also have some dim sense of the basic aesthetic experience and encounter - and know how to capitalize on it, for better & worse.

The number of known works by artist Martin Ramirez has just expanded by about a third (over 140 new drawings).

There's a funny article about how they were preserved and discovered, in Tuesday's NY Times (read it here if you're signed up).

(cf. also various sections of Fontegaia...)

When someone comes from generations of taciturn New England farmers turned self-effacing midwesterners, there's a resistance to writing poetry. But composition is like a gravitational force. He senses the poem approaching like a mandatory summons, like Cincinnatus at his plow hearing the far-off bugle.


(my father & the Taj Mahal)

Gabriel Gudding's Big Book is a-comin' round the bend...

an old poem for Halloween.

(p.s. the title is not "Myself included." That's just a comment on a previous post... the poem is untitled.)

Not thinking very clearly about it, but I seem to be dwelling today on the distance between the actuality of poems, and the area of discussion & criticism about same.

I'm one of the very guilty ones, responsible for sending up great eye-wincing drafts of smoke & bother.

The distance between the state of creative receptivity and inspiration, on the one hand, and everyday cognition & discourse (& non-cognition, and non-discourse) on the other.

Thinking about Wallace Stevens' (seemingly) vague notions about "poetry" (per se) and the "poetry of life", and their relations.

The feeling, in my own experience of writing poems (when it seems genuine), that something has been born. Not just words, but an event - a concrete experience in several dimensions. As if every poem is an occasion, an occasional poem.

As if there is this sort of angelic or seraphic world of beauty & pathos, of which we are mostly ignorant, unaware. (Yeats's or James Merrill's business with the automatic writing representing this reality in a sort of parodic/satanic mirror.) And the perfect poems stem from and inhabit their world of perfection. Or perhaps I should say living poems, in a world of life.

And the rest is utter (moral, psychological, aesthetic) futility - ink, smoke, scribbles.

I actually like this poem by Robert Bly, though the philosophy doesn't quite (barely) cut it. Shows what might still be done with blank verse; skillful.

Wilson seems like an apt critic for the Symbolists & Moderns because he's not really like them. He's a humane journalist-scholar. That is, he reads poetry & fiction as a generalist, through a wide lens of general human problems. He approaches art in terms of character & psychology, but he's not a psychologist; in terms of history and politics, but he's not a historian or an ideologue. He's synthetic, not programmatic or theoretical. As somebody noted somewhere, he's a subtle literary portraitist; we begin to see literary moves & choices as shaded, in part, by the personality of the artist, & in part by the economic & political climate of the times - underneath the more explicit or tendentious philosophical-aesthetic debates.

(- plus he wrote a pretty good essay about Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, so he can do no wrong.)

Reading Edmund Wilson's study of Symbolism and some of its modern avatars (Yeats, Valery, Joyce, Stein, Proust, Eliot) - Axel's Castle. One of those classics we were supposed to read back in college & which I avoided.

Wilson has a sensible capacious humorous humane sceptical critical approach - plants the writing, the writer's choices, in history, character & psychology...

Could possibly shake me up, get me (re)thinking the first principles of all this folderol I've been engaged in for so long...

While I'm thinking of something to say,
here's a toucan from Kuala Lumpur.

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Blithewold Dendron, an American poet with whom you may or probably may not be familiar, occupied the peculiar position known in rugby circles as "fore-back", which is to say, he was both ahead and behind his own times. Ahead, in the sense that his nation and generation had yet to discover his unparalleled works; and in the same sense, behind. Tall, lanky, with a bronze forehead and a somewhat brassy left arm (his writing arm), Dendron was more likely to be taken for a youthful Midwestern gas station attendant than a major American poet (and not only because his main source of income was his full-time employment as a gas station attendant at North Plummet Shell, in North Plummet, North Dakota; the fact is, he simply looked like what a gas station attendant would look like). His voice was dry and clear, if halting - like the sound of a small table saw doing diagonals through cedar knotholes. One shoulder slumped slightly lower than the other, the result of an early collision with an oncoming older sister (Sandra Grumbach, nee Dendron). His reading style was mixed; but that's neither here nor there.

Why do we look, paradoxically, to Dendron, today? Vast and diverse have been the critical speculations on this question. Some scholars have emphasized Dendron's "enigmatic ear" : he could calculate the tempo of a nuthatch in flight at a distance of 400 yards. Others have remarked upon his tendency to present literary themes with uncanny foresight, as in his poem "Treetops", which predicted global warming (in pantoum form) as early as 1962. But Dendron himself explained what he called his "invisible fame" in a very different way. In a short essay titled "Shell Man" (1997), he writes :

"I never wanted to be a poet. All my poems are about something else. They are the traces of a constant effort to escape poetry. All I wanted to do was turn poetry inside out. Not into anti-poetry - I'm not an anti-poet : just something else. What I write about is a huge secret. It is literally, exactly, completely, utterly inexplicable. That's why trying to write it down is self-defeating, and why I'm constantly trying to escape my fate. This is why my fame is invisible, and why the world at large dismisses me, ignores my work. Because, unlike all the famous and successful poets, I'm trying to run away from poetry in the very act of writing it. The sight of a poem, a poem which fulfills all the conventions of a pleasing and successful artifact in contemporary style, is, for me, frightening, abhorrent : it's as if I'm looking at a looming jail cell built specifically for me. Whereas my heart - deep at some occluded level, beyond my reach - is seeking something else, or someone else; not the poem, not poetry, not even the shadow of poetry, but something outside them. I suffer from a kind of literary claustrophobia, a subconscious fear of capture. That's the explanation for my continual disappearance."

Jacqueline Semblanche, the Harvard critic, has written this of Dendron : "he out-formalized the Formalists; he out-experimented the Experimentalists; he out-sang the Lyricists; he out-did the Didactics. His miniature lyrics, his enormous epic sequences, float within a dimension exponentially distinct from all his contemporaries. He surpasses them to a degree such that he cannot be heard at all, like a sound vibration pitched beyond human hearing. And how did he achieve this? By writing about something else; by transcending poetry itself."

Today, in semi-retirement from the gas station, the folksy Dendron can be found on the front porch of his modest 1-person bungalow in North Plummet. Like a war vet, he doesn't like to talk much about his experiences in literature; but he does enjoy telling jocular just-so stories of local doings in Plummet and environs - which, to the acute listener, might be interpreted as parables of poetry. And someday, far in the future and/or past, the world will start to listen.

Randomly across my desk, The Children's Museum, a pamphlet by Ange Mlinko (Prefontaine Press, 2007). Wow. Sparkles. Nervous elegance. She plays tennis with the prose (to steal one of her puns).

I like this poem by Franz Wright, in the New Yorker. American hobo-sound. The boy can play the dobro. (Queer amid the full-page luxury ads.)

Franz Wright cuts an old-fashioned figure, out of Greek tragedy or Old Testament. Shuffles around in mourning rags, hefting the stigmata of his father's blessing/curse. Adds a memorious, para-literary dimension to the febrile atmosphere. A keynote, or a gateway - between the popular and the true, the distinctive and the en-masse. (a bit like "Henry" out of Berryman. huh?)

Back from visiting darling daughter & her fiance, living in Far East. Feeling strangely revived, no jet lag. Ready to explore mysterious Poetry Land.

The cicadas of Kuala Lumpur - less buzz, more flute-like. Omnipresent in the forest parks (like this one).

Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm......

I'm in Blade Runner, er, I mean a cyber-cafe in Kuala Lumpur. My daughter's teaching English here, I thought I'd better meet her boyfriend. Finished Portrait of a Lady on the 26-hr plane flight. Surprisingly, no jet lag (must have been those Jamesian subordinate clauses). Now reading Anthony Burgess Malaysian trilogy, bk 1 (The Long Day Wanes). Joseph Conrad in suitcase. Someday I'll read something contemporary - perhaps something by one of you younger chaps/lasses!

I like the heat, actually. I am beginning to understand fascination of Mysterious East. Will explain US poetry scene upon my return.

Cheers!

Busy lately with neighborhood tree planting. That's me kneeling down by the English oak. On Thursday I go to southeast Asia for 12 days, where my daughter is teaching English - probably won't be blogging much for a while.