Poetry gets made, lips mumble, & the talk about poetry floats around the perimeter.

Literary thought-about-it blends with philosophy, politics, sociology... people proclaim their preferences, allegiances, enthusiasms...

but is there a particular social purpose, role, telos for poetry as poetry? Can this be looked at, without the effort being immediately branded as aesthetical detachment, diffidence, quietism, art-for-art, etc.?

Are you only interested in art as a vehicle for working out your ambitions & frustrations (personal or political)? Or your ideals, even?

The natural pull of what is beautiful tends to send these things (frustrations, ambitions, ideals, ideas) through a sort of shift-changer, a distortion-pedal...

What is beautiful, in relation to what is right? old debate....

A poem has a form (beginning to end). & the form contains a variable degree of moral weight or impact.

But getting back to the question of a unique social role for poetry as poetry... it seems pretty obvious that there is no single or homogenized purpose here. There are different & shifting degrees of social or cultural engagement. The same can be said for the other arts. They are put to differing applications, based on various motives & aims.

What I would emphasize (as often before) is that poetry is a unique verbal mode - one which combines art (aesthetic values), performance (embodiment), & personal presence. As such it is akin to drama. But more intensively than drama, poetry displays (in dramatic form) a fusion of consciousness-personality-language. With drama - as with prose discourse generally - there is an aspect of alienation or distancing, when the text or the composition intrudes between the one who speaks and the one who listens. A poem is a form of soliloquy, of recitation, and a poetic text is the transcription of same.

So what are the consequences of this special verbal form for the form's social role?

If we look at this phenomenon through a kind of amateur or informal philosophical lens, we might see some implications - some implied arguments, which this special form of verbal address makes, about the nature of reality & experience. I guess Heidegger & many another not-so-amateur philosopher (back to Plato) have had much to say about all this.

What strikes me is how the special filter or form through which poetry sends language offers a sort of challenge/critique to prose discourse. Language is embedded firmly in the circle of human presence and consciousness. Even its famous "impersonality" is the effect of an artistic (& personal) ascesis, for the sake of an achieved form which itself will be imprinted with creative consciousness.

This was an element of the stand taken by the Romantic poets, in response to Enlightenment rationalism and the rise of science. If knowledge is related to Becoming (the mind seeking to know, the hand seeking to control), then perhaps art is related to Being (the intuition of wholeness or completion, despite present imperfections - Keats's "negative capability", essentially). And I suppose the conjunction of Romanticism and medievalism is no accident, since the medieval outlook was based on a confidence in an ultimate (sacred) equilibrium, between knowledge & experience, Becoming & Being (a worldview whose static - or perhaps I should say a-historical, mythical - aspect, the new sciences came forward to challenge).

Victorian, modern & postmodern (western) science & philosophy have, for the most part anyway, served to corrode the ground beneath the Romantic vision (which was difficult & shaky terrain to begin with). Yet the actual pragmatics of poetic making can't simply be identified with a philosophical attitude or cultural zeitgeist (Romantic, Modern, Postmodern...). Poetry's fusion of art, consciousness, personhood & performance has in it something older, something archaic and uncanny. It is, in itself (like all art, going back to the cave painters) an argument for, a statement of, Being. The philosophers & theorists who deny the reality of Being, must also (& do) deny the order, the equilibrium, of art; and poetry is the art of language.

In a sense Keats' notion of "negative capability" has never carried more intellectual weight than it does right now, in this era - since now the ontological status of everything except that "unknowing" equilibrium, which he ascribed to poets, is called into question. Hence poetry has had many 20th-cent. false friends among the philosophers, from Heidegger to Derrida; notions of poetry's unique status in a cosmos of irreality always end up condescending to it in the end (since language, too, is irreal).

So poetry, then, continues to present language in its ancient musical-dramatic mode, by way of its own play-realm of art, beauty, equilibrium, wholeness. As such it offers a challenge not only to postmodern philosophy, but to philosophy in general - to prose discourse of every kind. The intense presence, the actuality, of the poetic performance belies depersonalized abstractions of every persuasion. Plato recognized the challenge, & acted accordingly (exiling poets from his ideal state).

And if poets want to explore the peculiarities, the special characteristics, of the social role of their vocation, I would think they would do well to ponder these peculiar, pragmatic characteristics of the mode itself - how, through art, Being is represented - and defined, delimited - by way of living (& expressively-performing) persons. Here is where poetry is itself : not politics, not philosophy, not any other kind of talk.

ol' goofy Fontegaia...

25

 
A thin Calabrian hermit twines concentric Celtic rings,
rough plunkets of inverted eagle-dives, for his own
2nd-time Olympiad (calibrated to a lonesome
kingship, coming on).  A grey dove, practicing

 
an oboe (flighty tremolo) - paired with another
prophet, somewhere (San Franfrisco?).  Ramirez-
vagrant - tunneling crayon horses, chugging trains
around a rainbow-merry (can-can) Mother

 
(God).  They're waiting for the advent of the spectrum-
sun (like Lorenzetti with his Lorelei, in the Palazzo
Pubblico) - waiting for Captain ground-round Zero -
summa of the summer, light, lightly incarnate.  Hum

 
we with them, strum we zither, cithera - for ascents
of lilac inebriations, Byzantine zones of honey'd joy.
O taste and see.  Your body, one with every body -
brother to other, sister to sun (unusual cerements)...

 
In the gray matter, everything merges into one.
Only tremulous radiance of those triplet rings
(9-pin necklace for the Paraclete) brings
peace.  An odd disease (to plumb your own 

 
version, lambkin).  O may one hungry eagle-eye
excise the frills, he cries - O may the pluperfect
descend upon us all - the Providence (displaced,
immense, commensurate).  On the 4th of July

 
a grand mere milked that hippo train to Jubilee.
Eight limping belles danced limberly, a tender
trot around Big Edicule (ridiculous bender -
ridda-waltz).  And we were there (in lilac-scree).

I puts the word "meerschaum" in previous poem, out of nowhere. Unexpectedly. Then this morning, on coffee break, I'm finishing novel by C. McCarthy, Suttree. 1st page I come to : there's "meerschaum" again. Describing ancient sort of voodoo soothsayer Suttree's consulting (for the blues).

zig-zag Fontegaia.

24

 
The sparse dogwood in the evening gloom out back
glows like phosphorus.  Robins yodeling like mad.
Cars stirring dust at the corner.  And he said,
ever-returning spring.  Like an old Micmac,

 
paddling himself upstream always - an argument
by neverendingness, against the tidy closure
of each lead-lined lid of epicurean and sad
composure (meerschaum despair).  Saint

 
George in his own element, an L-shaped move
among the troubadour-cicadas.  Militant
amor in armor, silvered whorl of a brow all-
cognizant (disseminated now, concentric wave

 
on wave).  Whose motion is homeward, always.
Like the tale of the sailor hidden in lamb-
limbs - Noman was his name, or Everyman -
one long-delayed and drawn-out share of Paradise

 
his scarred rebound.  What seemed elliptical
and sly was angled right - all zeroed in
toward a squared-up breathing contest (90
degrees in the humid shade - a silhouette of L

 
whirled in a J-spiral).  Where life resides
in shifting clay zig-zags; where the potter
spins her delta silt (rote rotation - water's
utter source wrung round again).  He says,

 
ever-returning spring.  And the voice shudders
like flung pigeon fleets - shucks into air,
plummeting, fading.  As if no one were there then
between 33rd and Chamber (or just a ghost-rider).

Fontegaia hoboes on.

23

 
The rushes at the river's edge, in the shadow
of a tensile span, make a cloudy rustling.
Give voice (below that rusty trestling)
to an urgent source, in shuttling undertow.

 
Where an ancient vagrant trails his fingers.
Grazing, whiling away a wasted hour, there
beneath steel talons of an eagle's aerie.
Lapsed into memory of bolder wings.

 
But let it go, let it go...
Crusaders strain toward Mizpah or Montjoie,
the paramount anointing mound, their Calvary
for thundering cavalry, a glaring chariot-show...

 
his donkey's keyed to a different, a diffident drum.
It's here, in a nondescript burbling of delta salt.
Something tumbling down from Victorian vault -
lake-drawn dawn silver skipping over the ho-hum

 
mud-stream.  Ah, he confirms, even Solomon slept.
Slept like Nebuchadnezzar on his hands and knees
until that immured wraith (among willow trees)
floated into view... deigned to descend, yclept

 
his very name : the silken spouse, the river-
nymph, a morning diorama, light as a dream is
light.  She was with him as some Io or Isis was
and is - as Magdalen slumbers in the dawn-clover;

 
distaff sceptre, volute volunteer - a Sheba, she.
As Lucy rose apace, pacing into the laggard road
of history... so her streambed (O motherlode
of all desire) repeals that rust-corona'd mystery.

Hectic here these days, but meanwhile trying to read through this long essay by James Keery in Jacket #24 (which I discovered thanks to funny article on British poetry by Kent Johnson in recent Chicago Review).

This essay is incredibly keen & erudite... have to go back to the originals (JH Prynne) to follow along... this thing about apophrades (Harold Bloom term for a sort of pre-echo or reverse allusion or foreshadowing of a poet in earlier poets) is fascinating... & the way Keery interprets the Bible so poetically (they were all nazirim, "Nazarenes", holy-fool singers).

I have had various obscure encounters with this apophratic phenomenon over my years in poet-land... signally around "Henry" & John Berryman... relates to what I sometimes have had to say about "incarnational poetics"....

Keery's theme (apocalypse, Bk of Revelations) resonates for me right now, as there's an undercurrent going on in Fontegaia having to do with Joachim of Fiore, Sts. Francis & Bonaventure, & their interpretations of that text.... (see Joseph Ratzinger's book on Bonaventure's theology of history)...

Fontegaia limps forward.

22

 
When light seeps from the old albumen prints
time lingers there, like someone waiting for you
on the seashore, or the river's edge.  Small
whirlpool eddying, full of hints and glints

 
beckoning you to step through the sepia scene.
This was the feeling in the high Siena room
where frescos (radiant in evening gloom)
stood waiting quietly for you to enter in -

 
where the maidens turn their eternal ridda-
ring, and Justice (regal, adamant, serene)
holds sway (merciful minister) and
Pax, insouciant, leans on a useless shield.

 
What was it, exactly, you wanted me to find?
It must have been a twirling riddle-game -
a Gorgon-knot, enigma of the Ever-Same
(its figures veiled your whisper, undefined).

 
And like thin silver rain through the mercury
the farewell trumpet taps against a screen
of 5th-month memory - all that has-been
derelict can summon up again, a requiem

 
of history (his own).  And as a wheel
of moss-green circuitry creaks once
more (around, around), an octave-sense
lifts fifty stars toward flagging Jubilee -

 
the milk of sadness trembles in the midnight sky
again, the everlasting evening star gleams out,
still there - a folded promissory note (lone heart's
defense) sets sail, its sea-worn prow an eagle-eye.

What is poetry "tradition"? Got into a little thread about that over here.

One thing that got me interested in the Cantos (20 yrs ago) was its blend of "wild & crazy Amurrican" with ancient/classical/Europe/epic. It's so extreme - including its ambition to re-do Dante.

Part of the extremity due to the poet's exalted valuation of the cultural specific gravity of poetry.

Thinking of J. Latta's post today about Whitman & printing books. Poetry as measure - language set to musical measure - measured by letters, alphabetical characters. WC Williams' interest in the capacity of poetry to reflect every level of social experience by means of just this (measurement). Yeats' emphasis on same ("in measurement began our might", or something like that - speaking of art in general).

Nicholas Cusanus' (very Renaissance) dwelling on the notion that to see - & to comprehend - is to measure.

Bible (psalms) - God creates all through "number, weight and measure". (Notice it took 6 + 1 days - thus fitting cosmos neatly within solar year - a sort of mirroring or inset/framing of scriptural logos with nature & time). Augustine's focus on the shared properties of poetry and music. Poetry is essentially measured speech.

Poetry unites music (measure) and rhetoric.

Kirsch (whose book I want to read) seems to scourge both moderns & contemporaries for neglect of poetic tradition (the knowledge of both music & rhetoric). To which I counterposed Whitman's remark (somewhere) that American poetry of the future would be "indirect" (in contrast, I assume, to the "direct" transmission of ancient forms & modes of European poetry).

What might Walt be getting at? The notion I have at the moment is that he was thinking of the global tradition of poetry as dual or bivalent. Because the poet has already mastered, in his or her bones, the ancient forms & motives of poetry (going back to prehistoric times), the new poetry will be indirect, by way of insisting on playing variations on these ancient modes. The tradition will always be implicit - because tradition itself is something more than imitation.

I guess this is all pretty obvious.

But this morning I'm thinking about Pound's (& Yeats', & Eliot's, & Whitman's) extremely exalted conception of poetry & the poet's cultural role. & adding to this the idea that measure, or music, is a reflection of nature itself. Something that the poet doesn't invent, but taps into (cf. the whole notion of inspiration, the Muse). & adding to this the consequence that perhaps despite all the roiling turbidity of artistic ambition & creative & imitative literary ferment, maybe on some level, societies - & poets themselves - do not choose their poetry. I'm thinking of the great "benchmark" works of art as having the character of historical events or forces of nature or acts of God.

Mandelstam's (& Akhmatova's, & Tsvetaeva's) writings about poetry greatly influenced my perspective on this. The Russians have a fateful sense of art (along with just about everything else).

Objectivity of critical judgement based on the notion that artifice is rooted in nature.

This actually is the sort of half-formed hunch or belief upon which I've based quite a bit of my seemingly irrational vocational choices over the years. & I still don't know if my gamble was correct. The one thing in poetry we cannot measure.

O Fontegaia...

21

 
As the morning egret rises from a river
of regrets, the word insinuates itself
into a flow of weakling years.  Glyph
of gesturing brave guests - kernel-sliver

 
with a sail.  So your mother whispered
"go!" in every syllable of Frisbee's tale -
you, the hero, donning a chain-mail
letter-sheath, making the glinting sun

 
your sword.  It was a geste for a ghost
of honor (George, a red crossroad at night;
Al-Khidr, kidding around with simple light).
Just a return of something poured out, lost...

 
delta of streaming confluence, its source.
Eric the Red, Robin Hood - whoever it was
who sang in the crooked, fibrillating bras-
embrace (gong's dislocated endlessness).

 
It's like the shadow of a profile pent
around a mountain or a tree.  Faded,
blent... reticulate inconstancy of jaded
leaves.  Fan of limb-design (serpentine,

 
elephantine).  Dauphin in the mind
of Joan, the J in the imagination
of a springtime jig.  Someone
waiting at the end of the line -

 
Hobo or Oblomov, a maypole Juliet.
Beside the muttering ark above the sea,
the chest of secondary ribs - a perihelion
of sunken pain - golden suspense-duet.

Attended reading at Tazza last night. Hosted by Mairead Byrne. Keith Waldrop, Michael Gizzi & a bunch of young students, some of them OK. Especially one young Chinese woman, whose name I didn't get, who read a short poem that shifted quickly between English & Chinese, within individual lines. Really beautiful. Chenglish.

Keith Waldrop looked like an old ethereal trapper from Arkansas. Read, very expertly, short sequence in his usual spooky, terse, whimsical-philosophical manner... but I heard some echoes of Whitman there.

Handsome Michael Gizzi did his wry beat Bogart to good effect, except he hurried off too soon.

Hopalong Fontegaia.

20

 
Green grow the rushes, oh
where everything begins again.
A circle of fifths, in the empyrean
hot stuff (original Large Boomerang-o).

 
Countdown to take-off.  Launch
the launch, Lance - step onstage.
Disseminate dandelion leaflets,
green the page.  Cowwamaunch,

 
Canonicus (Egyptian phononaut) -
I love you (ringed in Narragansett,
Roger).  A-okey-doke.  Over and out from
one evasive (pre-enthroned) clay moat.

 
Into quiet of the photograph.
The retina's retentive curve.
Unspoken spoke.  A concave
almanac (a summer cenotaph).

 
Here lies the clay of the land.
By Circe of sheepish kingdom,
sleepy orb, sunlit shalom, shalom.
South of the mouth, by a mile, of Nile,

 
understand?  Where buffalo roam.
Outside Rome, inside the dome.
Not far from home.  Salome,
Solomon, Sheba (green centrosome).

 
Infinity's the trail - path P (for poetry).
Some pieces of eight.  Double one 32-ft
(mosquito-size) bard equals a lady egret -
white mane eddying abaft the parquetry.

Some photos from Anny Ballardini's visit & readings at RWU and Brown.

Had a good presentation on Wednesday at the ol' John Hay Library (bust of Dante at the front door). Peter Thompson read his translation of a very interesting West African poet (Veronique Tadjo, Red Earth), as well as his own series of "bar scene" poems. Anny read a Ronald-Johnsonesque take-down of the Book of Revelations ("Apocalypse"). I read a couple poems, & talked too much (& too disjointedly) about Roger Williams, Milton, epic, & translation, etc. Then Anny & I read together from the bilingual In RI. This event was videotaped too, so maybe we'll relay it to the public somehow.

Yesterday walked with Anny around RW's old stumbling-block, Boston town, on a sunny day. Italian North End, Beacon Hill. Stumbled upon a lot of bookstores & coffee stops. Quaint historical plaques, flowering trees. Talked about all the friendships & connections Anny has made through the poetry internet. Pretty impressive. She brings some Italian warmth & Alpine intensity to her endeavors. One dedicated hard workin' hungry scriptor-sparrow, that is for sure. Reminds me slightly anyway of Elena Shvarts (cigarette smoke, airy leanness). Annie Oakley types, sharpshooters.

At the RWU event, along with listening to Anny Ballardini's italian, & reading the In RI english, I talked a little about Roger Williams & the epic poem. & how it interested me that RW, epic hero, was a friend of John Milton, last poet of ancient epic. & how the Gould genealogical elements helped me displace the Romantic/Modern obsession with the poet (the poet's consciousness) as the hero of the poem. That is, unlike Whitman's ongoing song of himself, or Pound's cumulative/accumulative "rag-bag", or WC Williams' self-conscious poet-experimentalist (in Paterson), the "Gould ancestors" in Salem & RI fit both more seamlessly & more peripherally into the narrative history of the founding of the RI "counter-state". In RI is not an open-ended series or personal epic, but a rough-hewn story - with beginning, middle & end - focused on RW's basic mission. So I used some techniques of these other long poems, but turned them in a different direction.

& lots of other stuff.

All went well with Roger Williams epic (In RI) at Roger Williams University yesterday. Good turnout, fine acoustics, interesting questions from audience, even sold a book. They made a video - maybe we will air some of it somehow. Peter S. Thompson, RWU faculty, translator of francophone North African poetry, and home beekeeper, hosted reading. Afterward, resorted to local italian restaurant, where they accidentally gave us a $99. bottle of wine, & didn't charge us for mistake.

The charming Anny Ballardini has arrived. We're planning for tonight's reading at Roger Williams University. Planning sessions held at Prospect Terrace, near RW's old burial place.

As per, John Latta's got me wanting to read some more... in this case, Dos Passos. Latta can make this ol' Ivy library mole squirm sometimes. Discomfort is bad for you. Bad for you is good for you.

Pondering (in the shower, on way to work, etc.) next week's events with A. Ballardini.

We'll be reading in libraries (RWU, John Hay). Yesterday visiting British poet John Cayley orchestrated a performance piece in my library, via linked computers, called "Impositions" - involved chanting, singing alphabetical algorithms - very unusual ambience for "the Rock"...

the poet in the ancient matrix of texts...

reminded me of the also-ancient, generative duel between the poet and writing, texts. (I've tried to deal with this before.) Poetry's roots in oral performance and personal presence set up a kind of rivalry with the more-distinct separation of speech & text represented by prose. cf. Whitman on/in Leaves of Grass : "this is no book... but a man". There must be a rhetorical term for this kind of exaggeration - certainly a paradox, anyway. Of course, it is, in fact, a book you are holding in your hand... but Whitman's statement - his persuasive, beguiling poem generally - plants a doubt in the reader's mind.

So I was thinking about this, and then about Pound's Cantos. Pound set himself as the heir to Whitman. With the "beak of his ego", as Olson put it, he attempted to bring old documents, old texts to life - by setting them in vivid, poetic juxtaposition. The poet setting the "beak" of his person within the dry nothingness & vast wastes of history & historiography - & in so doing, identifying himself with the lifegiving Osiris or Orpheus - bringing the millennial vision of springtime renewal into earthly history. This is how Pound set out to "re-do" the epic task of the epic poet, in the path of Homer & Dante.

& he saw his approach as specifically marshalling the special rhetorical powers of poetry, in order to challenge the displacement of the epic role in literature, from poetry to prose fiction & other forms of prose discourse.

So I was thinking about some of this this morning, in relation to the talks & readings I'll be giving with A. Ballardini. Back in the early 80s, I started to glom onto these special long history-documentary poems - Pound, Williams, Olson, David Jones, & others. They had an immediate appeal to someone like me, who has been avidly reading history since early childhood (I remember that big terrific Random House series for young people - the "We Were There" books, the history of science books - which I devoured when I was about ten or so).

& I started walking in that path, of the long history-epic poem. & now, due to Anny's translation/interpretation of In RI, I'm starting to think of these things in the context of translation. If poetry, in its rivalry with prose, is manifested under the sign of embodiment - of personal presence - how does this relate to translation, & specifically to In RI?

Just as there is more than one way of considering translation, there is more than one way of considering presence or embodiment. A. Ballardini provides an example of 2 types of translation, as I've noted previously - linguistic (English into Italian), and conceptual (text into interpretation - ie., her essay on the poem).

The Bible, correspondingly, offers at least two kinds of presence - both of them hovering near the sign of translation. In the King James version, Elijah, when he rides his burning chariot into the sky, is "translated" into heaven. Secondly, in the New Testament, there is the paradigmatic event of Pentecost, or Whitsuntide. Here, the ghostly presence of the Third Person of the Trinity is manifested by an explosion of translation - the famous "speaking in tongues", when the disciples from many nations saw flames flickering over each other's heads, and, though speaking in many languages, immediately understood each other. (This is a representation of the dual aspect of translation - linguistic & conceptual - fused together.)

We could say that this narrative of personal (or Personal, or supra-personal) presence - ordering and translating language into a new efficacy - is analogous to the role of poetry, in which personal presence manifests, vivifies and celebrates linguistic meaning.

So I was thinking of these things this morning, and of how A. Ballardini's attention and understanding of the text of my poem to some extent brings it to life; just as a poetry reading brings text to (celebratory) life.

In the context of In RI, we are talking about the epic tale of a "hero" (Roger Williams) who was, in many ways, both the product and the agent of translation. The new "counter-state" of Rhode Island, for which founding he was most responsible, was in a sense the outcome of a clash between the medieval & renaissance culture of autocratic state and enforced civil religion, on the one hand, and the radical, anarchic power of the newly-vernacularized Scripture on the other. When ordinary people could read the texts for themselves, forces of liberation were set in motion : forces which Williams, perhaps more effectively than anyone else, marshalled on behalf of the actualization of real political liberty. (p.s. some scholars have suggested that the term Williams used to identify RI as a "sanctuary state" - defining it as a "refuge" - might have been borrowed from an old report, in Italian - the first European description, by explorer Giovanni da Verrazano - of Narragansett Bay as a pleasant "refugio".)

So I was thinking about these things... and also about the title of the poem, In RI - which has a sort of double meaning. You see it in many medieval & renaissance paintings, as an inscription printed by the Romans over the crucified Jesus. Here is a counter-symbol, the polar opposite of that of Pentecost : an authoritative text inscribed over a dead body. At end end of her essay, A. Ballardini quotes an email I sent her in this regard :

"[The poem] is political. About founding a "counter-state", based on rights and popular sovereignty, which themselves in turn depend upon human empathy, fairness, openness, solidarity. Thus the title "In RI" sort of telescopes two things: an abuse of judicial language, and a special place (RI). By the abuse I mean the inscription 'IN RI' written by the Romans over Jesus' crucifixion. They had a procedure of writing the crimes of the condemned in this way, on the very instrument of execution. 'In RI' stood for 'king of the Jews', thus accusing Jesus of rebellion vs. the Roman state (actually a sort of stand-in for Barabbas). The political foundation of that "special place" (Rhode Island), through the agency of Williams, effects a sort of reversal (in world history) of the type of injustice represented by the inscription "In RI" (a mirror-image of the founding of Rome in Virgil's Aeneid...)."

So... anyway, I've been thinking about the role of poetry & the poet, in the context of a centuries-old literary predominance of prose. & how these varied elements of presence & translation - embodiment & ghostly transposition - are somehow activated by poetic performance...

I re-read Anny's essay on In RI. She has really done me a great honor. Actually she is "translating" on different levels - first, linguistically, into Italian; second, conceptually, through her critical interpretation. It becomes a kind of collaboration. Maybe all big heavy poems need something like this! I'm very lucky.

Nicholas Manning, over here, asks Anny Ballardini : "how Gould's poetics of historiographies contrasts with the heritage of Olson, or even Pound?"

I probably shouldn't barge in... but here it is anyway, from the horse's mouth.

In relation to the "long history grab-bag poems" of the 20th century, In RI was a latecomer (1994-5). It's closer to Williams' Paterson than to either Pound's Cantos or Olson's Maximus Poems. By that I mean the style is for the most part more discursive & prosy - less elliptical/discontinuous (Pound) or vatic/obscure (Olson) - though the 2nd Book (of the two) starts to take off in that direction, to a limited degree.

The most obvious contrast, I think, between my poem and these others, is that In RI is not an open-ended, improvisational "life poem" (which approach Pound & the others took primarily, I think, from Leaves of Grass). Underneath the seeming divagations of the first part of In RI lies the simple bone-structure of an epic narrative : Roger Williams' exile to Rhode Island, his friendship with the Narragansetts, his founding of a new kind of political entity designed intentionally as a "refuge" from state & religious persecution.

The "subplots" of the first part - the Pequot War, the witch trials, the story of Anne Hutchinson, the Gould genealogies - serve as a contextualizing backdrop, the "ground" of Williams' "figural" epic deeds. In a way, the subplots present the dead-ends, the dangers, the obstacles, the tasks which the hero has to confront.

I could have approached the material with a different kind of style - and in fact I considered doing so. There were other models, such as Crane's Bridge, and, even closer to home, Brotherly Love - Daniel Hoffman's historical sequence on William Penn and the history of the Quakers in Pennsylvania. But In RI was a sort of intentional side-trip. I had already been writing long poems in a kind of overwrought imitation-Crane style (a series called Spring Quartet), and a felt a certain revulsion for that stuff. I needed to do something different. And, for a long time, I'd been reading & thinking about those long poems in the more Poundian mode. (My first effort in this vein, called Memorial Day, was written around 1988. I "published" it back then as a very homemade chapbook. I still like that poem, though I don't think I'll publish it again. Buffalo & Brown libraries have copies.)

More later, maybe.

It's a minor personal miracle, that - after years of blathering about my own poetry - someone else, with her own viewpoint, has actually given it some careful consideration. Anny Ballardini found valuable sources about Roger Williams et al. which I never consulted. Her paper is a good introduction - emphasizing some important things, putting them in a clear light. I'm very grateful to her.

Nicholas Manning, in her comment section, also asks an interesting question, which I will think about...

& so on.

19

 
Some prehistoric microlevel of the dome's
mosaic law.  Beneath the fixity of royal
crosshairs (where PT-109's red-purple
wake left the Pacific for a martial

 
martyrdom).  Under the stippled panoply
of curved Gargantua-gazing eyes.  Past
crystalline strata set in mordant paste
down to the furtive ricocheting clay.

 
Where the life resides.  Persists.  Kenosis
(unwritten law of shrouded self-
displacement).  Love's non-com - Sergeant
Elf (oldest service in the universe).

 
A gap in the fabric's polyhydral harm
(world-histrionic tragedy, a comedy
of air).  Somebody sleeping in the eye
of the sty.  Cyclone of prophet-phlegm.

 
A dream.  Old Neapolitan, melting
in rings of irrational national colors
(three, three, three...).  Nature abhors
a rotund vacuum - let him keep painting

 
descending eagles and other things, until
his bright, monkish, contemplative eye
wells up with figures so continuous (pie
squares) only the river of ages will

 
fulfill their overflowing way.  Even now
I hear those waves cascade over Victoria.
And the sun-dog suspended there, an aria
shading the area... a rosy-fingered plow.

Fontegaia rambles on.

18

 
Something curls in pale fiddleheads,
filtering green cobras out of a dank
spring swamp.  L-shaped mountebank
in bat-cape, with cure-all meds -

 
green knight, al-Khidr, bold St. George
whose penetrating transverse blade
pierces the charade of winter
murk.  The hero's urgent

 
fatal geste... Effort of the mind 
to grasp the nettle of the crux of things
finds its analogy in his blind quest.  Wings
meander just behind eyelids... unwind

 
the shroud.  Outline, profile, silhouette -
winding-cloth of one slow-wheeling planet.
Through elliptical sun-paths, a chariot
of fiery thought - viridian alphabet

 
whose chrome transmutes the metronome
- monotony to optic choreography,
mantic morphology; lips tippling topology
until they topple from their Babel-dome into

 
Mare Magdaleneum (or magma-mare).
Shadow of the curving earth
(circle of a single mother's
brow) her precinct, everywhere -

 
the potter's fluid handiwork, the mind's
unknowing amplitude, the emperor's
surrender of a miniature hill-crown
town.  To her (evasive leaping hind).

The amazing AB has now posted an essay she wrote about the poem she translated. This is the first critical attention the poem has received since it was written almost 15 years ago.

You can PREVIEW some of Anny's Rhode Island reading, here.

(& here you can find her text...)

Comments are back. Previously I was using an external service for this, & unfortunately, I was having problems with it. The new set-up is internal to Blogger.

I regret losing the old comments. I hope those who wrote in will accept my apology to them. I'm grateful for all non-spam, non-flame comments here, criticism included.

Starting to prepare for Anny Ballardini visit & readings. (We'll also be reading at Brown, in the John Hay Library, on April 23rd, 3-5 pm).

Looking over In RI, which lengthy chronicle she translated, the whole thing. This visit has a lot of work & history behind it.

In RI is sort of an anomaly among my other poems. A prose-poetry amalgam. Something like WC Williams's Paterson (or the Bible). (A piece of it appeared in Apex of the M #4, way back when.)

The last epic poem which fulfilled the ancient generic expectations was Milton's Paradise Lost. Since then, prose fiction happened. Epics became "personal" (Wordsworth's Prelude). Pound set the template for the modernist experimental epic (The Cantos).

In RI is modelled on Pound, Williams, Olson, for the most part. However, in some ways it's more like a straightforward "epic chronicle". The state of Rhode Island is, curiously, a kind of city-state - founded by a bona fide "epic hero". Roger Williams was a city-founder in the Virgilian mode - courageous, magnanimous, visionary. His story of exile, struggle with authorities, relations with the Narragansetts & other tribes, travels, war, and state-founding radiates ancient epic values. In RI sort of balances aspects of epic, chronicle, and personal reminiscence & anecdote (the poet "sinking" or dissolving into local history & personal history together).

It's a palimpsest, a mish-mash. The story of Anny's translation of In RI into Italian (a language Milton introduced to his friend Williams, while RW was in London - in exchange for Williams teaching Milton a little Narragansett) combines the pre- and post-Gutenberg situation; that is, on the one hand, In RI reminds me of those old texts & compilations - rag-bags, incunabula - you find in early printed books; while on the other hand, this translation-collaboration was made possible by the internet.

Fontegaia meanders along.

17

 
Billions of years from now, melted down
in the furnace of Milkomeda (black hole
of calculations)... death without parole.
Everything changed.  Planets unknown.

 
Here Maddy became her meditation.
In a place of desolate vines.
By a barren cave.  Mind's
(dislocated) irrational

 
sixth sense took over.  33
years ('tween cryptic epiphany,
spooky return).  Old prophecies,
lightwit beehive wheels... wheee...

 
PT-109 nine times around Mt. Helicon!
A trim, grayish cicada boat, immersed
in mist... O breadbasket of Melchizedek!
Weird Circe's chalice! Almond-eyelid-sun!

 
Only 32, mon eleve.  Not much time
to figure out universe as continuum.
Arms' bending willow branches form
primordial, frigid arch... a sturdy rim

 
of rhyme, a hula-hoop, a hand-sprung
loop-de-loop.  Poco al poco (haunt us).
For the hand that wheels the wheels
within wheels whizzes unseen, unsung...

 
lifting the weight of serpentine copper
across green moss of Moses-magma,
charted long ago through fiery tetra-
grammatone to faery stream-stopper.

p.s. "Lucy" in previous... refers to name given by archaeologists to the famous skeletal remains of one of the earliest humans, discovered in Ethiopia....

she showed up in a few of the earlier sections of this chapt.

Gosh, this chapt. 4...!!! I been writing at the very top of my game, as far's I can see.

Hey world, get a clue. Here's how it is : there's the currency of USA poetry today, & then there's my quartetto-train, circlin' like a big grey eagle-bird way high overhead. That's how it is. No brag, jes' fact.

...that was certainly one of the more baroque entries in the Fontegaia show... I must be channeling Spenser or something.

Fontegaia keeps on walkin'...

16

 
Since earliest Lucy walked upright
there remains one city, one abiding law.
Steadfast, victorious, from misty Ethiopia
she journeyed toward it, keeping it in sight.

 
12 precious gems adorn its pinnacles;
dodecagonic gates unveil each side;
there Moon wed Sun (while her bride-
groom decanted dew-lit canticles).

 
Within the midmost confines of that place
a temple dome glows like a honeycomb.
All radiant within - where waves of foam
(in silken folds) enframe an enigmatic face...

 
Wizard of Oz?  Or someone of that ilk...
hiding away in order to be found.  Like
Ptah (primordial ground, Indian mound
- the master of her manor-catafalque).

 
Here Lucy stood.  Her marriage-rite
a riddle-trial, where sparkling Circe
meets serpentine Odysseus.  Morse-
coded hero's hieroglyph - knight's-

 
move inquest - a Sheba-test for Solomon.
Their easeful teasing sparring bowls
all through the night, til Robin solos
(pretre naturel) - sums up the dawn.

 
That vine-fed honey-mead they shared
appeared merely to clear and cheer 
their thoughts... O union near!  A dear
rain-arch above deceptive falls (sun-flared).

Yesterday was a very good day for Fontegaia-poem. Reached a sort of turning-point in the design. (I knew it was coming, but I didn't know how it would go.)

You never know how such things will turn out, but in a way it feels oddly predetermined. Embryonic, & then born. Some of it you plan; some of it just appears, like magic. I feel grateful for the symmetries & synchronicity.

Here's an example : I think of this poem as a kind of companion or coda to the long poem Forth of July (7/4). I reached its pivot or turning-point yesterday (4/7).

Here's another : I planned the pairing of "1-3-2" and "1132 pm" in the framing poems (#13 & 15). But I didn't even notice the pairing of composers (Beethoven - Quartet 132; Mozart - Requiem) until this morning.

My poetry, anyway, is a kind of give-&-take, an interaction. The section just finished struck me as an example of how the compositional process can liberate the writer from his/her own preconceptions about it. Now possibly I can move forward in a slightly different vein. I have a rough idea of where it's going.

I'm simply operating an alternative poetry making/dissemination process. It's outside the usual channels, parallel. I know the poems are not easy reading on the web. But anybody who's really interested in looking at them more closely (& who has a computer) can download them pretty cheaply from here, or buy the book. The current chapter (#4) is not in there yet, but if all goes well it will be fairly soon.

So... Fontegaia takes the Big Bend.

14

 
A saturnine Pharaoh, by an empty goldfish pond
counted up his losses, mourned the absconded
myth (his darling pride and joy).  Wounded
in his nether hoof, he dreamed of Trebizond.

 
His glances lingered in the pond's recess.
A memory of black, disturbing eyes
that drew him, stumbling (so unwise) to
far perimeters of his domain.  A single kiss

 
from her, his only aim (sweet target
summoning his whole desire).  He gazed
into the pool.  He seemed to see those eyes
again.  He realized : they mocked him yet.

 
They gleamed there, twinkling, above her smile.
And then, as out of overhanging willow leaves,
a whisper came.  Have you forgotten, peevish
prince?  Never understood at all?  The trial

 
of love I bid you run - and did you fail?
You loved my image and yourself, not me.
Think how I turned your eyes away - toward
the frescoes of Siena.  Ponder that.  Farewell.

        
                  *

 
In a far well of years, in a quiet chamber
high above the rooftops of the town,
those frescoes dwell.  Through grinding
poverty and strife and plague, earthquakes

 
and bickering, still they remain - a single
figure full of figures, gesturing toward civic
hope.  Swept along (like some light bark
across time's stream) in Sienese

 
unperished hearts.  What cargo do they bear?
What whispers fidget under spectral
flourishes?  It is an image of regal
equality - pluperfect rain.  Justice wears

 
the crown.  For in just hearts, each neighbor is
sharecropper of all goodness - goodness
bubbling up like Fontegaia, from a fond recess
where buoyant, sunny Pax sheds every care.  

        
                 *

 
You pointed toward my darkness,
dear one.  Where words fail,
perish; where old private travail
merges (pangs of tenderness)

 
with a round earth's rolling drone.
It's forlorn Hobo's simple moan.

 
Look toward the southern sky.
Disconsolate Centaur frames a W
where hopeful eyes turned once (to 
you).  Papa's gonna be home, by n' by.

 
Out of a glittering, dreaming ocean.
Out of an Indian expanse... the sun.

 
Where a Frisco angel floats, mid-air
over an emerald catenary span -
a double rainbow-catamaran.
Frisbee's paper hat, still spinning, there.

        
                *

 
Driftwood lingered in the fragrant night
beneath cascades of tiny mountain bells
(in laurel leaves).  Looked into the wells
of sky, where every river takes its light

 
spring into gravity.  The Milky Way
(a kind of Whitman-suntide) tenderly
revolved - he saw the martyrs (soldierly
Venusians) - saw the Old Man of Clay

 
with the key to the highway (one
green helicopter-penny) - and then
he saw the mirror of his own
heart, flowering.  A moonshine

 
ring (suspended, circling) where
light melds everything - bends
gently, sturdily - to bear the ends,
& all begins.  Sweet bells, ring, ring.

        
                *

 
I dreamed I was a prince, once, in Siena.
The damsels flocked to me as damsel flies
to their bright day; through dense mosquito-
swarms, I led an expedition to Moon River

 
(er, Diana).  Almost immediately, all went wrong.
I lost my cosmic robe of gem-bedizened silk;
my proud equine quartet (so incomparably
caparisoned) shrank to one equable donkey

 
(stubborn old stump; still, serviceable).
My brilliant companions disappeared.
I wandered nowhere, seemingly - weird
circulation! - Paradise a bramble-stumble

 
now.  I leaned against a concrete wall
and looked across an unfamiliar plain -
a stranger to my native town,
it seemed!  And then a melody (in laurel

 
leaves) rippled, lowly, in reply :
You searched for me where I cannot
be found.  I'm not in Rome, nor Camelot;
not in Jerusalem, nor under any tree.

 
I'm in your heart.  You are the spring
releasing me; I am your fountain,
you are mine; not nigh nor high, neither 
lointain, my friend, but everywhere - wing

 
of sad weight lent flight experience.
And you will gather up all glancing strokes
in one great wheel of everlasting spokes -
one lofty arc.  I woke, and it was Providence.


 
 
15

 
Gesthemane.  The coptic sentries by the sepulchre
plinked somnolent piano keys.  It was 11:32 pm.
We slept.  A pity.  10, 9... Mozart.  Requiem.
Midnight.  The ghost is knocking at the door.

                                  
                                 4.7.08

Fontegaia reaches watershed.

13

 
Light pattering of lakewater along the rocks.
Cool air; strange sighing in the tamaracks.
Lead sky.  Ineffable figures fingers make,
tripling across piano keys.  Heartbreak.

 
Beneath immaculate octave-dance
implacable forces held in check.
Harsh steel's taut harp-neck,
yoked by calm endurance.

 
As tiniest calibrations of a brown recluse
enfold a pattern coiled in an attic room
for centuries... so ponderous doom
plights equilibrium (4 sides of Opus 1-3-2).

I liked the essay by Taylor Branch in NY Times today, on Martin Luther King. (You may have to sign up for online edition in order to open this.)

Fontegaia's been on quite a streak lately.

12

 
It was early in the leaping-water-season,
one grey morning.  Lonesome Drifter,
like a chip of wood, squared
with his name under a see-saw sun

 
in an empty square, in San Francisco.
Played peek-a-boo with gray-tinged light
across chill blocks.  A cube of salt
from Nile-fed sea, like silt he'll flow

 
where the whispers go.  A puttering
mourning dove pecks at his feet.
On her gray throat glints rainbow light;
a band plays ring-structures (cueing

 
for flight) behind, below her feathered
fold of wing.  Music for Four Winds
dies down.  Silence penetrates the sound.
Plaque for plague victims.  Fresco, tethered

 
with a hopeful pact - sealed 
with mordant of a raptor's art.
Hobo halts there, listening (wrapt
in ragged clods).  The pigeon wheels.

 
Pivots.  10, 9... his fingers counted
down a line of graceful lineaments,
their linen governments... all present
now.  As when a morning word fountains

 
into overwhelming wave, his overtaken
heart (adoring) wondered at its source.
And then the sun rose like a moon-horse -
Ocean glittered, surging, under Golden Gate.

More wild Fontegaia-nonsense...

11

 
The old primordial spine of Providence.
Beneath colonial clapboard, college
collage, the tenements.  A prehistoric ridge.
To think of lightfoot Narragansetts here, once...

 
April sunlight.  Everything
nascent.  Expectant.  Recalling
Ptah, the mn before the 9 - thrumming
helicopter wing (with copper spring)

 
whose hipster lifts a manuscript
from Rome (for slim white buildings
by a riverbank).  Memphis.  Seedling
Parousia.  Windblown remnant.  Coptic

 
gypsy... O that old Mississippi garbage-
barge, still chugging upstream (in 4/4 time)
loaded with everything rifled from home.
March into April.  May be just mirage,

 
Junie - but let's let 19th-century Nature
take its course.  The ineluctable Lucy
will arise from Ethiopia, and walk home
free - once-jejune Logos - now mature,

 
secure.  Andromeda equality.  O Lamp,
Democracy!  It was for you the limber
Negus climbed from his light-trembling
mosquito boat, golden - assumed the lamb-

 
skin - felt his blind way (upstream
from Memphis).  Meanwhile a dram
of equilateral mood-poetry illuminates
unspoken trail (sweet Sheba freedom train).

K.S. Mohammad pointed out this interesting review of collected poems of Philip Whalen, by Jordan Davis.

40 years, today. 4/4. 44 is ancient Chinese number for "death".

Wrote here recently that "Life is drama." One thematic trend of recent Fontegaia alignment... I'm trying to evoke the notion that history, time & reality have already been sacramentalized, made sacred (through love, devotion, sacrifice). History = sacred theater. This is the kind of public feeling which emanates from "memorial days" like today.

(Mandelstam wrote about this, in his essay "Pushkin & Scriabin". Western art set utterly free, paradoxically, by a prior sacrifice.)

*

Writing these days feels like fresco-painting. I use a Neo - a simple keyboard designed for schoolchildren. Looks like a Stealth bomber.

Fontegaia goes da guerre...

10

 
The lunar light of old daguerrotypes.
Here Brady's trenches have become mass graves.
An evening star, suspended, distantly (pellucid
wave of tender blue)... Death grown ripe

 
to bursting (life to death, death into life).
Feral eyes in hard gray photos plead
for final recompense - and ferried over
yonder, trade one copper for the sum of strife.

 
A far-off shunting in the railroad yard
reverberates against a wall (of falling weights).
Some counter-measure lifted all that stone
to height of cloud, at windswept Chartres -

 
the wide mandala-labyrinth laid underfoot
patterns its path down to a 10-9-1.
Stony Franciscan target zone, a sermon
sine glossa... Time, unburdened, follows suit,

 
steps into light.  And ink sinks into paper
twilight, too.  Steeped in bitter chemicals,
its phantom, inching... achingly coalesces,
fixed - a Bruegel waltz, a dirge, a pauper-

 
twirl.  Meanwhile a graybeard hobo, unknown
soldier, camouflaged beneath gray skies,
reached out both hands, to stanch the rising
wound.  Adhesive love.  Unconscious bandage-man.

 
The earth proceeds in mourning black and white,
an image stayed in billowing relief; her canvas
sails toward afterlife - some stubborn Jonah's
spectrograph (green almond in midwinter night).

Religion & spirituality are fine things, but literature & poetry have to stand on their own two feet.

We take an interest in art as art, not as politics or philosophy.

If poetry doesn't please us in its own right, then it will never edify us either.

*

That being said, I am not simply a poet. I do not worship at the Temple of Art.

My life suggests (as I see it, anyway) a comic (or pathetic) melodrama, full of stumbles & slippage between artistic & religious interests & enthusiasms.

Every writer brings their own preoccupations & subject-matter to Poetry per se.

Maybe in a case like mine the private preoccupations have overwhelmed the common idiom, the shared life, ordinary speech.

Well, everybody's different. I'm working out my views on what's what. & as I see it, Life is Drama.

It would be good, as a reader of poetry, to find a special quiet space where all the middling discourse, the "talk-about", the peripheral chatter & observations, have no place at all. The ideal poet would be consistently closed-mouthed about the poems. They would simply be sent out into the world, to take their place with the other serious business out there which employs human language.

More dashed-off Palio obliquities...

9

 
Fern-like wing of pterodactyl memory
flickers across my still piano keys.
A tight-wound, sprightly voice (for skating
stories) glides aslant late winter atmosphere.

 
Today's bright leafless April air.
What roguish Osric sun enforced
the tale's evasive metamorphoses?
Nile Indian-mound harbors a meteor.

 
Some sweet-sad circus waltz, limping
toward lair of Boris - and Natasha's
eyebrow-temple's early-bird nostalgia's
blue-gray mini-Yenisei lone-wolf lope.

 
Shuttlings, crisscrossing strings -
knots, hefting a milkweed countryman
suspended from bronze-copper perihelion.
Mean angle, hour unacceptable.  She hangs

 
about, her gaze freezing the frieze,
arms flung high like everlasting piers.
Not to move.  Gray dove (in tears).
A quit-coin, masted, bridged, in breeze.

 
As if the catenary lift (elliptical)
of all those wheeling premonitions,
prohibitions, circled your Samson-
shoulder's own shy shadow (typical

 
eclipse).  The fresco registered each one.
Your date is waiting in the wings, forlorn
like some unlucky Frieda for her balder
Abe - an April skid-schedule for Phaethon.

About yesterday's post : I don't want to give the impression of simply tying poetry to religion. I've always viewed the market/racket in artistic "spirituality" with distaste & suspicion. The various cults of transcendental thinking, the hi-jinks, occult mumbo-jumbo of poetic mages & popularizers - the whiff of pseudo-religion puts me off Robert Bly, Robert Duncan, some of Olson, many more. But maybe to others I come across the same way...

That's not my intention. Poetry's purview is everything under the sun, every subject, ever level of tone & style - omnivorous - lightweight & heavy, secular & "catholic".

However - by the same permission - there's room in poetry for special projects like my own (the saga of Henry). Dante thought so, anyway.

Fontegaia, Fontegaia...

8

 
The light slows in the evening, thickens
like dark honey, grows more dense.
In the high room - in the quiet confluence
of silent frescos, frozen civic scenes.

 
Here time slows gradually toward stillness, too.
The moon glints through an eastern window,
sunset radiates the western view - tomorrow's
just a Washington slept here, nestled in futurity.

 
Below that tower, on a sunken stream
(imaginary Di) somebody's plucky packet 
boat makes for the source.  He plunks
half a piano, for a double-deck of dreamers -

 
weaklings, cards - dressed to the nines
(someone elected them almost at least...)
- he played the fastest 44 out East, they
said.  Curved ivory whispers in the pines.

 
Music revolves around and round
until it finishes where it began -
a double wreath of birth and death,
the milk and honey of Melchizedek.

 
A tom-tom of the doom (eternity).
Such were words he muttered quietly
while tinkling the pilot's keys, while
angling that penny-swap mosquito boat.

 
Such be the b-flat of finality.
It drones for you, for me,
it is the adamant of history...
the high room's bright hilarity.

Can I say anything more about this poem, Fontegaia, without spoiling the fun (if there is any)?

Have been at my idiosyncratic process for so long it's sort of hard to take a step back.

Is it all so dark, abstruse, obscure? Maybe. Maybe requires a lot of scaffolding, instruction manuals...

I follow certain ways of seeing things & thinking about things. I share much of this, I believe (I hope), with other like-minded people. But as a poet, I don't enjoy cliches and shopworn generalizations about deep & mysterious facets of experience. I want to see (& say) things as they are, or as they were "on the 1st day of creation". This is an aspect of the intellectual game of my poems. The serial-continuous-repetitive forms are, I guess, in part anyway, a mode of expressive contemplation or meditation. I want to express the "brow of reality", in my own way.

As you can probably tell, I've come increasingly to see things through some kind of spiritual-theological lens. (Of course, this loses a lot of people, scares them off.) There are a few mental foundations I return to, whenever I try to do one of these self-summaries.

Such as the notion that reality is "personal" in some ultimate sense. That the universe is suspended in some fairly indescribable creative consciousness.

& the idea that human history is subsumed within a (very) dramatic narrative of salvation history, which involves, on its most basic level, a promise or covenant between the Eternal and the mortal, the human; and which promise is fulfilled in the most distinct and "incarnational" fashion, in actual human history.

& the counterbalancing notion that this "salvation drama" has been, from the beginning, in some sense a symbolic intervention - a representative action : the full, mysterious, intricate, various & particular truth(s) of which cannot be concretized in language. Language - even "sacred" language - only acts as sign : pointing, directing us to look & see & understand. Truth itself (going back to the notion of the "personal", subjective quality of creative consciousness) can only be embodied. (Walt Whitman descants on this point over & over again, in great phrases : "The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything." & etc. etc.)

These two counterbalancing notions (actual - yet representative - salvation drama) find their crux, for me anyway, in the Good Friday & Easter events. A representative (unjust) death; a representative resurrection. As the death on the Cross is a figure for the death of Everyman & -woman - for our own particular mortality; and the resurrection is the same, ie., has representative meaning for each of us, personally, subjectively.

(Someone like me might also argue (& in so doing enter perhaps confusing & dangerous theological waters) that the clear recognition of both the actual & representative elements of this drama, is the sign itself of Joachim's & Bonaventure's coming of the "new age" : which was, for them, to be a change & renovation of the world, under the reign of contemplation.)

In my poems these events are encapsulated in the various "plays" I make on the letter "J", the word "Jay"... in one important example, "J" stands for "Jonah", which means "dove" in Hebrew. In this word are meshed both (1)the (comic) story of the runaway prophet in the bowels of the whale (a symbol, for me, of the existential blind travails of Everyman), and (2) the story of Pentecost, of the simultaneous and omnipresent manifestation of the post-resurrection-spirit - the "ghost-dance" presence of God (as dove) in the heart of Everyman. So in "Jonah" you have the melding of both crucifixion (the whale) and resurrection (the dove).

Poetry, in my view & practice anyway, offers a means of expressing visions of "how things are", which contrast with the methods & results of standard discursive prose, philosophical reflection, scientific analysis, etc. Poetry, as an art of "embodied" language, offers fundamentally dramatic models of reality; by "performing" language as self-sufficient play and exploration, these models suggest a universe which (somehow) underwrites & shares these same qualities - by rendering it suffused with personality & consciousness (as Whitman, again, pioneered so powerfully). In my understanding, a recognition & growing trust in these aspects of reality might help open the door to the full flowering of the love and confidence which is already hidden (in potentiality, in seed-form) in every person.

Fontegaia, I guess, is a kind of river-trip exploration of these & other realities. Along with previous extended poems (in Forth of July etc.) I try to dramatize & recapitulate these realities in the present, in the lingo of today.... and in so doing, to offer evidence for the idea that Time itself, as we know it anyway, manifests some kind of arcane ring structure - both ever-Now and (historically-chronologically-actually) symbolic - the mystery of which is in a process of continuous unfolding....

John Latta, today, conveys a discerning comment by Denise Levertov, on the Beats & "experience". More useful background on Our Past Poetickal.

Fontegaia Space Odyssey.

7

 
A still-bare delta of branching limbs
in light March rain.  Tributaries
flecked with tiny green flotillas.
Something pulsing through those stems

 
redeems the worn-out winter grass,
trash-dotted ground.  Old unshaven
hung-over hobo season!  Even pavement
sprouts your weedy wanderlust (en-masse).

 
A momentary pirhouette.  10, 9, 8...
two billion years from now, the galaxies
Andromeda and Milky Way (say stargazers)
will marry, merge.  Black-hole checkmate.

 
The End.  So let Hobo unfold his hand.
A pocket-size apocalypse (poco al poco,
loco pard).  He'll only marry Mocha
Midge, his loony star - her wedding band

 
but a wavelength long (blood orange to
dark honey milk).  Twin doubtful wraith
those two will plait - a ghostly path
across Lethe - wrung out of range

 
of deepest light (one copper penny
pays the fare).  And we were there,
fair witnesses.  It's in the air,
maroon, marine - in Magdalen's keen

 
cleaving to your fate.  A way of seeing
April blindly home; a copper wight's green
calibration, tightening a Pvt. No One's
skull.  You paid in full, O Revenant (beaming).

Where is this Fontegaia, the poem, a-goin'?

Who cares? Not Poetryland. Their loss.

It's not work, for me. It's play, though it takes some effort.

I'm trying to blend some things, some figures & ideas. I'm drawing toward a design & thematic crux of this long poem. (There is a numerical & sort of structural design, but I won't go into that.)

What's it all about? Well, I'm trying to establish some affinities - very tentative, very gradual, very indirect.

1) there's the link between, on the one hand, Siena, as a sort of aesthetic model of the "free city", with its art and natural surroundings (the hidden river Diana) - and, on the other hand, some of the spiritual roots which have a presence as part of that history : the cult of the Virgin as Patron of Siena; the background presence of St. Francis and the Franciscan ethos (poverty, brotherhood, love of nature), and the mystical-historical thinking of Joachim of Fiore & St. Bonaventure. The notion of the millennial "city coming down from heaven", the New World. The little model city which the Emperor offers to the Virgin, in the Byzantine mosaics.

2) & there's the affinity between those things & the ecstatic-visionary spirit of Walt Whitman - very "San Franciscan" - filtered partially through Hart Crane (the Bridge, the River, the hobos, the "key").

3) & there's the "river"/fountain motif... the mingling of Amazon-Nile-Mississippi-Jordan... the interest in the Ethiopian version of the "ark of the covenant".

4) & there's the mingling of several painters & their images - Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Martin Ramirez, Jasper Johns, et al. & their connections with Crane, with all these other themes, with Joachim's drawings - his (& Dante's) spiritual "geometry".

5) & there are personal & autobiographical impulses & references.

So slowly, partially, obscurely, indirectly, I'm concocting a sort of American elixir... drawing connections with old things & old poets, toward ideas and commitments which are still important for poetry & history & social life today.

(p.s. & who's this "Frisbee"? Well, Frisbee is the name my mother gave to an adventurous little Tom-Thumb character about whom she told stories, back in the 1950s - such as the one about Frisbee sailing his paper boat down the spring rainwater brooks in the dirt road called Arthur Street, where we lived. A few years later, "Frisbee" reappeared in my family history, as the name of the whirling disk produced by the Whammo company - the copyright for which my father, a lawyer, had something to do. I remember flying Frisbee prototypes around the yard with my brothers. I suppose I've already written about this, here.)

6

 
It must have been a time like this,
in the beginning of evening.  Between
naptime & dinner, supper & night-night.
In Mendelssohn (the music of what is).

 
A circuit of happenings, a plot - a splendor
played out in murmurs, mirthful surf.
Backwater pools; tributaries
trickled over turf.  You begged for more.

 
Like a supple dancer following a tune
her story swims into your heart's delight.
Nine muses, seven days... his tiny chariot
spins faster.  Frisbee matches sun and moon.

 
Then weeks of years... weak years
of broken twine... you counted swine
while waiting.  Waiting for the tail-end
of the tale, at last (printemps appears).

 
Now sunset touches dappled walls
in the lofty room, where time came
to an end.  Twelve candles frame
a moody, shaded ricochet - signals

 
from beach to ball, from all to each -
as if an omnipresent rainbow reigned
muttering warm colors.  And remained
(uttering itself just out of reach).

 
It was in the family from the beginning,
then.  (The Negus branch - remember Lucy,
when she'd just begun to skip?)  & so will be
- see the young dancer step the ancient ring.

Fontegaia zeroes in.

5

 
Saturday afternoon.  A lambent flickering
through old porch glass.  Slight rainbow
effect against yellow-green (stealing
toward brown) wood frame.  A ring

 
of midwestern Mnemosyne (faint memory
of summer cabins?) lingers on the mental
doorstep.  This is how they call,
the seraphim (hardly there, really).

 
A pair of prophets in a sunset fresco,
silent (in the weekend city hall).
They stand beside a doorway.  Still.
Wrapt irises converge on San Francisco.

 
We hardly knew you're there.
Like mutters of a hobo sketch artist,
horsing around in solitary.  O most petite
one o'nine muses, grace his gray,

 
his patriotic zero stare!  For good.
His flag's his flagging repertoire -
a simple tune of freedom (by a shore
of IKB and salty waters, streaking red).

 
Under the darkening colors, beneath
the gray, a midnight milk-&-honey train
hoots (like wayward whale) across the plain.
Upstream, along the riverbank (its wraith

 
of steam trailing the other way).  Zigzag
retreat toward monkish habitat (gray-
green palm fronds, some Sheba-almond joy).
Sheds everything, grows light (high milky jag).

I start working on these things during breaks at work. Then, if I have time & energy, I write them later.

4

 
Providence.  Rain-soaked street.
Hesitant March weather (cool, 
gray).  Low clouds, parallel
to the granite, concrete.

 
Where fountains of ocean sky
come pouring, showering... a gray
mosquito boat floats - hovering
between the streams (evasive, shy).

 
This concrete husk of solitary walks.
Maze of temporary paths.
Revolving labyrinth,
crepuscular (within gray rocks).

 
Along descending granite steps
a wake of wayward pelerine -
maybe some muttering Madeleine,
grey-eyed Ondine (of unknown depth)

 
- within an Escher etching, inside out.
We know how Jonah must have felt
beneath Leviathan's gray pelt.  That
submersible arc light, sans spout -

 
grave of abortive prophecies,
gray cul-de-sac - sacral skull
(chambered) sounding burial
at sea.  Within a sea-worm

 
(see?).  Then a swift gray seedling-
bark of buoyant pity - one o'nine 
amazing coattails, trailing five fine
contrails - thar she blows now, peeling...

C'mon down & meet Anny & me.

The segment of Fontegaia posted yesterday (#3) - seems like one of the best of the bunch. Underneath the kidding around, it emerged from some pondering about the nature of language, especially religious language.

Ever since Yeats ("go in fear of abstraction"), Pound, & the Imagists - if not long before - poetic language is contrasted with various kinds of abstract discourse. But it's possible to think of a poetry (Stevens, for example) which goes over into "enemy" territory - tries to grapple with the nature of linguistic abstraction.

In the background of my poem here, I'm thinking about the universal application of Biblical principles - say the 10 commandments, the Proverbs, the Sermon on the Mount. Or even about more seemingly general notions, like "God".

If you imagine this language as a set of general laws or principles, which only make sense within the "local" context of particular persons & situations; and then if you add this concept to another concept - that of the idea of Man as "imago dei" - the image of the creator-God on earth; then the outcome is, I think, that you can begin to conceive of religion in a subjective, inward, personal & individual way. In other words, the language of religious doctrines or religious knowledge only makes sense as you apply it yourself, in your own mind, in your own actions. It's like a tool kit rather than a positive description or ontology. It's universally-applicable, but meaningless unless you make it mean something. (Is this pragmatism?) (cf. Stevens : "Two Illustrations That the World Is What You Make of It")

& this rhymes with Roger Williams' notion of "soul liberty" - the primary, irreducible (& irreducibly free) relationship between the individual person and God's divine love. One can also "read" Christ's statements about his own work as leading in this same direction : the "Son of Man" (ie. Everyman, Man in the abstract) is the locus & benchmark of all meaning; God is not "outside", but is manifested by the "Son of Man"; the Word of the Gospel is universally applicable and everlasting; and "my word shall be your judge on the Last Day" (ie. the abstract "laws" of divine Love are reflected - inexorably - in the existential results of each person's attitude and actions toward same). (p.s. I know my interpretation of the term "Son of Man" - as Everyman - is probably not the usual or ordinary one.)

This seems like a very arguable & very American (Emersonian) set of ideas... which I am still trying to figure out for myself... no final attitude yet.

Fontegaia. To be continued...

2

 
I was lonely in the Fatso Tower.
Mangia, mangia! implored the Hungarian
waitress (my nemesis, my fate).  Someone
barged through an archaic swinging door -

 
was it you?  Or my Assemblyman?  Fair
deal, m'friend, he was shouting into his cell.
It's only a dream, he yelled.  Swell.
I tipped my left and got out of there (fast).
 

We have got roubles, methinks - right here 
in River City.  With a capital R and that
stands for Jail.  Lots of collars of a lariat
in a gray corral, Mister Fog - sheer

 
Poe-croquet, Froggy.  Malaise.  Oui.
The chirp of a pigeon on the Chom Ping
Lazy-A will never hazard me bowling
that egg scroll down me throat, Bobby.

 
Ideogram this, my Chinese characters!
Brain-drone croon-droogies - beyond pals!
The signals drip, pivot - halyards
slap, swivel - the whale-rim teeters

 
on its own spoke - Everylubber applies
his waddling gat against the shoulder, 
shirking... only, the sea is colder, colder.
Only the Transylvanian masseuse - the wise,

 
the amazing Miss Nile mid-USA (mass
Mattress of the Universe) - only she can spin
even this potted flashpunt toward one Parisian
plumb-bob.  Weave, Magdalenian - windlass!

 
3

 
Imagine, friend, a husky infant seedling
everywhere the same.  A sort of emerald
revolution, furled in jasper bronze.  Old,
yet still alive.  A kind of everyseed.

 
Coconut palm, perhaps - a milky sphere
lapped by dark and rugged threads.
Royal drink for an eagle Negus; mead
for a Queen Bea, victorious.  Sacred beer.

 
You searched for that pithy shell
like an under-Stanley for his living
Stone - paddling up, down - striving
through crystallized honey, pell-mell...

 
- but it can't be commanded, no,
nor imposed upon - only planted,
grown.  Meaning only (in the future)
what you find it locally, my loco friend -

 
the way the 2nd Coming keeps not-coming
except in your knotty heart, Pinetop.
A funny kind of phonautograph (post-op
encryption - ghost puffball thing-a-ming)...

 
She sings for Solomon's soul liberty
out of a sheepish seedling caravan -
make of it what you will, O lover-man.
It's like the storied storehouse, see,

 
of a maid on a maiden camel-trip -
like a man in the hold of a mosquito-
ship, a triple-whammy for a two-step
shamble, Sheba.  Break a leg.  Skip.

- there, got that off my chest, said the egomaniac.

We don't want to imitate the vain blind selfish applause-seeking hypocrites chastised in the Gospel.

Then again, we'd like to take part in the Grand Parade (down Highway 61).

Feel like I'm in between things... an early spring, March state... incipient &/or depressed... preoccupied with various distractions...

Feels like my poetry CAREER has been a matter of painting myself into a corner... frustrating (maybe I'm just impatient)... choices I've made which are perhaps somewhat self-defensive, compensatory...

- the yakky blogging & commenting
- the long, long (endless) poems
- the self-publishing
- the non-involvement with scenes (beyond online gabbing) & magazines

Where have I been published?
Copper Beech Press did a book, 1979
William Slaughter's online MUDLARK did the "Island Road" sequence in 1997
Tod Thilleman's Spuyten Duyvil did a book in 2000

- scattered appearances in Witz, Apex of the M, Fulcrum, Jacket, Lit, The Hat, alea, a few others...

I'm not complaining!!! Maybe it's all for the best.

Where/how do I situate myself as a poet? I started out back in the 60s, with an interest in the New York School anthologies. In the broader scheme, the NY poets might be considered informal formalists. That is, they rejected both the new prosy narrative-lyrical free-verse styles which emerged after (or with) the Confessionals, as well as the conservative formalism of the 50s (Hecht, Wilbur, Merrill, et al.). They practiced poetry as self-consciously formally-informal, and self-consciously minor (at least on the surface). Humor & light verse played a big role; irony, parody.

How you start is important. These early influences maybe inoculated me against an American "faux-naif" approach to poetic self-presentation - in the mainstream journals - which consists in a sort of earnest, prosaic, ingratiating, transparent, socially-thematic (ie. "my poem on animals"; "my poem about my mother"; "my poem on 9/11"), anecdotal stance (I know, this is a very inadequate & unfair abstraction...). Part of me just feels like that's a mode of discourse, a contest I don't want to enter. I'd rather play hockey or chess or knit shawls or something.

The other side of the coin : my failure to break into mainstream print tended to disallow any sort of relaxed, easy congress with the "ordinary" reader - any confident "public" or normative mode of call-&-response. There's no response. You get inured & adapt to being marginal & marginalized.

Anyway... after a long strange trip-hiatus in the 70s, I started back into poetry... even more distantly unconnected with contemporary goings-on. Did a lot of reading... Whitman & Dickinson, Poe & Melville... Pound, Joyce, Crane, Eliot, Stevens, Yeats... & the poets they referred to... Renaissance, Dante, Homer... Olson & Williams... some Russians (Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova)... I know, it sounds like mostly men, & it was... that's one of my limitations...

Read lots of monographs & dissertations... essays & criticism...

Got very focused on how Pound & Williams & Olson brought history & prose particulars into their poems... but believe I am basically a musical/evocative rather than visual/descriptive poet, so the influence of Stevens & Crane was just as strong...

- wanted to incorporate in poetry my own view of world history, as a counter-weight to Pound/Williams/Olson's epic arguments...

- & so went off on long, long private voyages through verseland... got myself entrained into the quatrain train... a personal idiom or compositional process...

& there is no response... in the vast multiplicity of (more-)talented voices I am a pigeon blending in with the sidewalk...

(p.s. : I'm being completely unfair (in my fussy egotistical way) to those intrepid readers who do visit here, & read my scribbles... & those dear people who have responded, helped me along over the eons...)

Still hopeful & doubtful at the same time... I've constructed an odd "Henry" persona-presentation, sort of a Rhode Island embodiment of loco-locality (on top of the dome of the RI State House is a golden statue called "the Independent Man"). (Note : RI Statehood Day & my birthday are the same : 5/29.)

My long poems & sonnet sequence & short poems... I want them to be seen as a recapitulation of modern/contemporary American poetry history, with my own personal "Henry" stamp - In RI does the Olson/Williams train, Forth of July does the Crane/Stevens train, Island Road does the Berryman/Berrigan sonnet strain - that's the idea... I'm here...

Sweetly Now


 
Walking home,
head full of gloom
(my own woes muddled
with those of the world) -

 
noticed (on the sidewalk)
cheerful letters in pink chalk
(rounded, girlish - cursive script,
broken off - author skipped?) -

 
PEACE
               LOVE
(signed, in a heart-shape) CLIO

 
the Muse of History : as if to say
I'm starting over - here, today.

Reading: a history of Ethiopia; Pope Benedict's study of theology of history of St. Bonaventure; exhibit catalog of current (fabulous) Jasper Johns show at Met ("Jasper Johns : Gray").

& so begins part 4 of Fontegaia. 10 yrs after Stubborn Grew.

1

 
Good Friday moon came round somehow
on the first day of spring this year.
My little swirvy Frisbee-sailor
navigates toward deeper waters now.

 
Like that babe in Nile-reeds
in a curved mosaic.  A very slow
circle eddies in the stream... she'll row
(backstroke) whence her spring proceeds.

 
And there's a courier pigeon (camouflaged
in gray cloud) with a scroll copper-wired
around one leg - some napping friar's
hieroglyph - threefold dreambird montage.

 
Her dream a melted timepiece, burning coal.
The vision of exhausted Jonah, cornered
in Leviathan.  Your end is mine (last word
in submarine? - aground).  He's calling

 
Elijah.  Yet, there - (glinting
so faintly over collar
of coroner) - a dove, a dove!  Far
across curve of everywave... ting,

 
ting... sea-bells ring... heard everywhere
at once.  As the moon lifts ocean water
toward the source of all Victorias (the
waterfall, the reign of reigns) our cruiser-

 
nut carries each wight upon his keel
(Joe Nobody, a milkman in the morning
tinkling across the sky).  Hear the milk train
moan - a miniscule echo revolve (its creed).

     
                  3.21.08 (Good Friday)

On Good Friday 10 years ago, I finished the first book of my long quatrain freight train (Stubborn Grew). I'm still at it...

how stubborn grew the rose!  How
  stub born grew the rose stub
  born grew the rose stub born
  grew the rose stub born grew
  the rose stub  born grew the
             rose.

The latest version of Rest Note, which includes the new chapter of Fontegaia, is available here.



A*D*V*E*R*T*I*S*E*M*E*N*T

...& all my books are available here. You can look at the previews for each book, sample the poems, evaluate the print quality, etc. It's all my own work. The print is rather small, but on the other hand these are genuine "pocket books" - they will fit in your pocket. Or you can download an electronic version, for the price of a large cup of coffee.

I don't carry any imprimature but my own. There are no blurbs, recommendations, curriculum vitae, awards, medals, or insignia to be found on the covers. You'll just have to take your chances.

I have nothing against regular publishers. I've had a few, & I hope to have a few more someday. But in the meantime I've written too much to keep it all at home - my poems run to book-length sequences. I learned typesetting & editing through publishing other people. For now, this is the simplest way I can make my work available to my contemporaries.

Conclusion of Fontegaia, part 3.

28

 
It seems a squareful solid world,
a daylit world, when a gray evening
moon slopes through a curtain
of grey cloud (light frigid, furled).

 
Its face bent toward pining (yearning
service, servitude).  Its pallor speaks
some excess, overflow... weeks
of years of tidal turning... purling,

 
pearling... weighted toward their end.
When the curving edge of the earth
closes that melancholy eye (a wreath,
red-rimmed, marks its encirclement).

 
So sorrow hides itself away
like love that looks not to itself -
by a relentless law of gravitation
offering up its life (O gentle ray).

 
On the slimmest branch
of the narrowest tree,
the smallest acorn - see
it break off, launching

 
free.  To drift downstream,
almost invisible.  A pigeon
in a marble niche, a bairn
in a barn.  Light beam,

 
okay?  In the bull's-eye of a rainbow
sings a solitary pine, from the taiga.
In reunion with a dome, Diane (Siena
lifted toward you on its bending bough).

Fontegaia, winding up...

27

 
Lakewater used to lap the shore
where a lonely scholar turned her back
on the glaring blare.  Awake, awake,
the water whispered.  Try once more.

 
To penetrate to the smiling target
through a knot of jungle vines (concentric
rings of shimmery spectra - pastel Olmec
mimosa crest of feathery waves - a coronet

 
of birds of Paradise)... and begin to hear
the granite roar of a Lake Victoria, falling
from the sky.  Where all the rivers are
recoiling foam, seething, moist - cleft, sheer...

 
as if the sigh of some Red River
of the North, encircled, echoed
upon an equatorial green.  Golden
ordinance, bell-governance - Love's

 
Admiral of the Ocean Sky, looped down
and knotted to a limping sailor.  Neptune-
child - inept, familiar shadow's Chaplin-
quest - your errant, midnight son...

 
a wandering hobo-star, a Francis-mule,
a river-freebooter (plain flaw, a-flow).
Touch the keyboard, star, she whispered.  So.
Out of a hole in the rainbow donut, foolish

 
one, it flows (beyond the garish ceremonies
of the day).  O sleepy wake of Everymoon...
you are my Ocean, streaming light, a crooning
dog-star Orient; the only sweetness of the seas.

This last section of Fontegaia chapt. 3 (#26, below) is a wee bit murky, even for me. May have to work on that...

Chapt. 3 is the (planned, anyway) middle part of a 5-part poem. Fontegaia is an attempt to explore certain historical, geographical, religious, political, & poetic phenomena through the lens of Siena (civic murals & artworks, the Palio horserace, local saints & other historical figures, & so on).

Elements of the city sort of shift around - like a lens focusing on different facets - in order to represent lots of other things (beyond Siena itself). If I write about the semi-mythical river "Diana" (which the medieval Sienese, always in need of a better water-supply, went searching for beneath their hilltops) - at the same time I may be writing about the moon (Diana was a moon-goddess), about other rivers (Mississippi, Jordan, Amazon, Nile), about searching for "the source" of things, about baptism (in the "font" or the spring), about masculine/feminine (& psychological) aspects of religious iconography ... - etc. etc.

Chapt. 3 (as you can see if you've been following along) focuses in particular on Diana/moon/river-sources. (As chapt. 2 focused on the Palio, and the 1st chapter on the Lorenzetti murals & other art.)

As I finish new chapters, they've been added to the Fontegaia work-in-progress, in the book titled Rest Note. Chapt. 3 will be added soon, I hope.

*

Also, I think, if you want to understand what I'm trying to do here, you'd want to see Fontegaia as the culmination of a longer "quatrain" train (as I've mentioned before). Stubborn Grew - the 1st book of Forth of July - opens with the poet-speaker looking down from Prospect Park at the "local Rhine" (the Providence River). The Providence, the Blackstone, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Nile, the Jordan, the little spring rainwater streams that run down Arthur St. in Mendelssohn (Hopkins, MN), & various Russian rivers, all play a very big symbolic role in Forth of July & some of the quatrain-sequences which followed it (like Rest Note).

I could be wrong, but I do feel I am drawing toward the close of this particular long streak of writing. So it's culminating around this little fountain (the Fontegaia) in the main town plaza of Siena (the Campo), over the supposed location of the underground tunnels & channels of the mythical Diana River.