The odd thing about the latest blab movement, which they're calling Conceptual Poetics, is that it seems to be made by poets who have no ideas. There are no themes, no topics, & no artistic concepts about how to shape & present same. The only idea in play seems to be the same one that underwrites the making of processed cheese (although processed cheese is more substantial). Take a prior artefact and run it through a processor, or homogenizer. This will get a laugh & win you a place in the Conceptual Poetry Movement (or Process). It's sort of like Flarf with a straight(er) face, a more determined (prosaic) pose. I don't know why I'm bothering to talk about it. I guess it's part of my Friday-at-work process.

"Knowledge is Power". & there is a kind of will-to-power on display in the foregrounding of conceptualization for its own sake. It's the fascination with finding the magic algorithm, the inner overlap structure, the handle-grip of the machine, the key. Like starting a lawn mower : sudden burst of control over all that grass. Then to pretend that it's not about power, that it's simply (un)artistic (unvalued, unoriginal, uncreative) free play : classic move of every intellectual game & ideology.

John Latta's post today, on the other hand, is classic Latta. Here the self-consciousness of the writer - the knowledge-overlap, reflexivity - becomes a useful gauge of limits, a rebuke to hubris & self-delusion. Humility as realism - the still-human comedy.

15

 
Blue-grey flame   beneath a crown of golden straw
and the horsehair   held in Lippo's fingers leaps
the traces   racing after her   who is   resting
so still   in her eyelash-curved   wave (folded

 
over itself)   closed lid of myrrh-box   purr
of the murmur   whirr of well-oiled wheel
hum of milk train   passing the jeweled
field   at dawn   (sound of river R)

 
and the lift of the wave (from Diana-moon)
like the green crest   of a fiddlehead,   or
an arc of spray   from Fontegaia
copper spring uncoiling   (moss-green

 
coin)   a silvered nine (or silver mine)
a rain of pennies   in the children's books
(uttering the sun)   where the willows   shake
their shade   over the stream   of early time

 
O my agate   gate   where I creak   transfixed
in the wind   out of ----   &   (lipped by the curl
of your magnet smile)   Where now is the whorl
of original spring?   In the wood   of my myrrh-

 
box   the streaming grain   of the stream
comes   itinerant   steeled in the hold   &
buoyant   floats   the acacia   toward the delta
doubling round the final bend, your   salty palm   fans

 
open         to trace   an almond there
(ancient flotation sign)   Mississippi Miss. ms.
Papyrus   unrolling   from further south
toward the mouth   lifted   into gypsy (stolen) air

[note : 1st stanza refers to a small painting of Mary Magdalen (attributed to Lippo Memmi) in the RISD Museum, Providence.]

So Fontegaia is drawing to a close, along with (I think) maybe this whole long-poem jag I've been on for - if you count all these long poems - 20 years.

I hate to come across as intentionally arcane, obscure, obfuscatory in Fontegaia. That's not my aim; I'm a very simple fellow. If it's obscure in the end, it's a failure. But then, often my previous self-explications de texte have left me with a bad aftertaste.

Nevertheless, I feel like expatiating briefly... - so what is "Siena" in this poem?

1. the home of the little Fontegaia fountain
2. a nexus of medieval & Renaissance visual art
3. a sort of little sister to Dante's Florence
4. an early example of a "free city", with a republican government & proto-democracy
5. a government of elected officials (for a few decades, 13th-14th cent.) known as "the Nine"
6. the town with the most-famous & ancient "Palio" horse race
7. a center of Franciscan Christianity (St. Catherine of Siena, St. Bernardino)
8. a kind of outpost or offshoot of Byzantine art & culture
9. a place that was specifically pointed out to me...

Taking all this into account, then, Siena serves as a kind of sounding-board, or catalyst, where these elements (& others) interact to form new things.

Right now (in this final chapter) you see a lot of imagery around numbers - esp. "nine". I don't want to get too explicit (since I'm still in progress!). But I'm trying to suggest some relations between poetry & knowledge, poetry & civil society (political philosophy), poetry & religion.

Dante famously wrote that "Beatrice is a Nine". No one's ever been quite sure what he meant - but the prevailing notion is that he's referring to some representation of the Trinity (3 being a factor of 9).

Maybe I'm working out something similar. "J" - the mysterious muse or instigator (in many guises) of all my quatrain efforts, since Stubborn Grew through Fontegaia - can be understood as a kind of mark or hieroglyph : a curling spiral, or inverted nine, or...

The "Palio" horserace - focus of chapt. 2 of Fontegaia - is a sort of extended riff on poetry-as-Pegasus. Now Pegasus, & Medusa, & Perseus, & Cassiopeia, & Ethiopia, & the 9 Muses, are all intertwined in the original Greek myths.

The Muses were actually a mythical figuration of the Apollonian (rational) spirit in poetry : they each represented a different facet of the ancient organization of knowledge & the arts (history, comedy, tragedy, lyric, astronomy, dance, etc.). Orpheus, the Greek ur-poet, was a representative or missionary of Apollo (thus his fate - torn apart by the maenads of Dionysius, the devotees of irrational passion, fury).

In Fontegaia, I'm developing (sketching out, let's say) a dual transformation : first, shifting between Hellenic & Hebraic elements (or muses); second, shifting between Apollonian & Dionysian aspects.

The underlying argument is that poetry figures reality holistically : as measure : dance. The dance is actually underwritten by the fusion of nature, good will, and knowledge. The agent (& also consequence) of this fusion is what is called "grace" and "wisdom". The innate or potential actuality of human good will is represented (in social experience) as conscience and natural law - that is, the global/universal awareness of good & evil (irrespective of race, ethnicity, cultural traditions, local conditions, etc).

Law & government are essentially the formalization of this innate natural law or (potential) good will - actualized on behalf of the whole, of the common good. When knowledge of the good unites with good will, the outcome is wisdom, expressed as grace. Without good will, law & government fail, are futile.

In the poem, "Siena" is both governed by "the Nine" and expressed by "the nine (muses)". The "ring-dance" of the Sienese maidens in the civic fresco by Lorenzetti is meant to be an image of the synthesis of art & political actuality, of poetry & history, of Apollo (knowledge, light) & Dionysius (passion, rhythm)... in measure.

"9" as a visual icon - the spiral, "J", the fountain - presents a kind of symbolic "square root" of this number. But this is so complicated I'd rather not get into it here, right now.

[p.s. I realize my presentation of "grace" here leaves out the whole theological dimension. In a theological sense, this is the other side of the coin : grace itself is the agent of the fusion of knowledge and good will - since without divine grace, the human will is too corrupt to receive (to understand) truth or knowledge.]

I was never much of a runner (though I was captain of the soccer team, & was on the track squad for a while, & was indeed one of Al Franken's wrestling partners!). But something in me (call it "Pegasus") starts racing toward the finish line of these long poems. It happened with Stubborn Grew, with Grassblade Light, with July... & though I was not thinking or planning or expecting it all, it happened again with #8 of this final section of Fontegaia. & it's a wonderful feeling, when something leaps into place - as if it were there all the time, just waiting for you. Rivers play a big role in these poems - & it feels exactly like - suddenly a new tributary of fast, fresh water slams into my regular, slow, meandering, ruminatin' river... I suppose a mundane psychological explanation is that I'm anticipating the end of all this inching laborious composition... maybe so, I don't know. But I did indeed want Fontegaia to run clear - & fast - at the end. & I had no clue as to how that was going to happen, until one evening a few days ago, sitting in the back yard after work, #8 just started tearing along.

Fontegaia, at a gallop now...

14

 
The aged sheepdog sometimes loses the scent
of his old flame   but then steps back 4 steps
and picks it up again   waltzing from the steppes
to the Andes   down the incremental ink-track   went

 
trailing a single dark hair   curled in a Guadalupe
loop   & round & down   into a quipu knot   like
Juliet in Cuzco  sunspot in the shade   of Manco Capac
so   love's mazement makes a labyrinth of   rosy lips

 
& so   the blindness of the heart's black hole
(cunning J-dem conundrum) might become
a spinning jenny demonstration   thrown some-
where   by modal centrifugue   toward Clio

 
& Calliope   or Cassiopeia   luminous suspended W
above the primal falls   where the well begins
the fountain springs   where Frisbee spins
in stillness, hovering - Noah's rainbow -

 
out of the still center   of the potter's royal palm
near the Middle Sea   of an infinite (88-fold) stringed
mappamondo   out of the hole in the Blind King
shade   out of Poe's fable   & Whitman's dream

 
the light   light fingers leave   across chippy water
old jib wassail, old Bluejay way   & the scent
of a goodness deepening through distance   what
she meant   by leafing me   through the dark matter

 
of Siena ennead   Nile-milk   by leafing me alone
& all   disintegrated from her heart   a separation
of the eyes   from sun   old chaos-causing Cuz
undone   by djinn   a spirit-whorl's   O-zone

                           
                    *

 
then   thence   to begin again
as unfurled flag   or fiddlehead
since   Lucy's lightened way   led
Will   unburdened now   as if reborn

 
& as each petal   of the famished heart
made bold to turn again   beheld   as from the pool
rose   rose   lake standing sheer   a school of
golden fish   translucent   there   in evening light

 
there   at the Itasca source   of all my   labile
laboring here   in ordinary   Providence
toward you   because   love's endless 
sentience is spun   from a blind sapience   wild

 
tamarind tree   of very rooted nature   kind
& true   through fair & foul   equable   steadfast
& firm   lasting forever   like a droning mast
through the last tempest   until you find

 
streaming   good will   in a delicate arc of spray
from a limestone font   sweet susurrus underneath
the stumbling speech   of a beckoning mosaic   wraith
of inward memory   you always knew   & could not say

 
O harbinger of restoration   little messenger
on tender feet   my carrier pigeon
out of Jonah's wail   take this portion
to her Mystery   like the town in the cupola, or

 
the rose in the chest   Jose   Martin   Jasper
& Hart   it flowers so   and flows toward where
up where it came   the stream in the mirror
the rose in Notre Dame   so follow now   now   soar

      
                                        6.4.08

(p.s. some notes : this is the centerpiece of the final (5th) chapter of the poem. "j-dem" - term from contemporary physics having to do with theory of dark energy. "Manco Capac" - mysterious Inca savior-god (see Melville's Confidence Man). "Middle Sea" - ancient term for Mediterranean (middle C - center of 88-key piano). "Blind King" - The Blind King was the name of an old storefront windowshade store on Atwells Ave., in Federal Hill, the Italian section of Providence.)

Fontegaia keeps on keepin' on...

13

 
Out the library window   beyond the Courthouse
at the end of the park   under the shady maples
& ringed with vines   lies an old well (RW's
early spring)   from whence   the plumbline goes

 
straight up into the sky.   & just as a stone
draws perfect whorls in the stream   just as it
drops beneath the surface   disappears
I would draw a set of radii   from this point   on

 
into the town   & let it pulsate, rotate
a rippling impression of   an ancient face
a Personage   as if   breathing through the ice
of frozen circumstance   warm air, wind   aslant

 
into cold soil   where the seeds are   And
this, my sketch   for an image of the Truth
- a living, breathing   parsonage   at azimuth
of plumbline-crown (its vertex   in your heart)

 
& that which is everywhere the same   inexorable
necessity   the gravity of the grave   & the
blinding roar of the sun   & the restless sea in
motion   under the moon   become slowly   amenable

 
(amen, amen) to the georgic   human hand
trembling over its seedling-keys for   the prevailing,
guiding melody   the providential path   the Way
and suddenly   over the verdant, waiting plowland

 
a harmony of   9 courting spheres   in a dance
memorious pavane   slow Sophie-seraph lightfoot
sarabande   for Roger's will-to-truth (soul liberty)
See   they whirl   in a stereopticon (Siena trance)

Onward she goes...

12

 
Down stately Prospect Street I go, on my way
to work   in the morning   in Providence
dawdling along   slow brain-matter   dense
trouble in mind   trying to figure out that Day

 
of Jubilee   how   out of these slowly corroding iron
wrecks   this wracking violence   just how
it comes  (as the blarneyman says) dropping slow
Pax, that is   Peace   not just my private lawn

 
but Peace in general   over the broad rolling earth
to the steel-drum splash   of sword into plow
(delving, planting)   How will it be?  Just how?
It seems impossible to frame   the Falstaffian girth

 
of such an expansive, expensive ship of state
Impossible   so to direct the human will
into such channels of a civil grace   so naturally
supernatural   a dream (full-timbred   first estate)

 
Until   we reckon in   that primary, original good will
the deep dark cosmic J-dem hole   the well
of doing-well   prompting an echo in the soul
of every child   the fountain of the W (Blue Nile

 
falls, hovering   beneath a well-wrung constellation,
Lucy)   there   in the balance of its equilibrium
a dance   of Will   with Sophie (merged in the hum
of some mellifluous & royal honey-hive)   turning one

 
turn, then another   1-3-2   and so revolving
in a far-flung highway   O   that milk train way
from the deep breast    of the dark matter   hey-ey
O   the sustenance   for every steadfast vessel (love)

I've put a link to the video of the reading with Anny Ballardini & Peter Thompson over in the sidebar. (Requires Quicktime player, which is available as free download here.)

Busy today in Fontegaia-land...

11

 
Strange mourning dove   hidden somewhere behind me
this evening   fluting her clay ocarina   inconsolable
blue-grey counterpart   to all the cheery warblers
and chatterers   a low woodwind   in minor key

 
lonely   What do you want, heavy-hearted little bird?
You have your mate somewhere, I'm sure
you have the bird-feeder   and the June weather
Time, time... you're moaning   Time   hoarded

 
kept close   within your somewhat tubby frame
keeping time   & this minor key, this mournful note
must have another counterpart,   your saturnine
urn   its jovial mead-cup   true end and aim

 
of such drawn-out, repetitive, lengthy, endless complaint
O ever-despised, lonesome, no-count heart (slate
tablet's plum-robed sentinel) of yearning earth!
My brooder, there in the shade - muttering, faint!

 
You chant your dirge   just as you do   in the window
of the town hall   in Siena   and this evening
your meaning came clear through   to me   (wings
of seraphim bear similar sign)   it is   to know

 
is to love   to love is to know (beckoning
mote in the eye of Magdalen) there is no more
than this   this is the source   of that obscure
slow semaphore   absent moon-fountain (morning,

 
Diana)   elusive water   too clear to see
only rightly seen   in simplicity
foundation sure   of every
spectral fresco   of   good governance   & free

10

 
& then he played a brief encore   a haunted
(Chopin?) gypsy melody   an elegy
quiet, mysterious & sad   maybe
for his own people   (from Lvov)   (Beethoven

 
counterpoint)   and   somewhere
there is an axle of the rolling earth
in the heartlands   in the heartlands of
your soul   I hear that wasp intoning there

 
magnified    from the well of deep rose evening
a drone (a B-flat miner) zeroing in   on a target
of concentric colored rings   his whisper-chariot
uniting with a deeper bass   like a maestro's fledgling

 
son   down deep there   in the well   of milk and honey
where the milky Word reigns   raining upward
from Eternity   and shore to shore   a pillared
arc   arching back   high   over the makings of a day

 
I want to go there now   into the heartlands
where the wasp sings   at the axle of the earth
and wheels   like a master of the clay   an eagle-
wraith   diving toward   the dove   where she stands

 
hesitant spouse   bereft widow   (amid neglected
purple irises   beneath bent lilac wands)
transfixed   at the sepulchre   (her hands
against a rim   of cold, solid granite)

 
& hears that other, deeper voice   from the spring
through the full piano-panoply   (drift of May
silver & gold)   as a matrix of concentric waves
(streaming river-water)   melding   into a ring

keepin' on Fontegaia...

9       
                          for Phoebe

 
In the rattle of the restless uncertain business
down the street, up the street   questions
the soul, then : chance, or Providence?
I was lucky last Saturday   a willing witness

 
ushered into my (free) place (father of the usher)
4th row, Lincoln Center   Emanuel Ax, playing
Beethoven's 5th Concerto   with playful bearing
of a rollicking bear   who's found the honeycomb

 
there   and when 10 fingers lift from pounding octaves
and tremolo of tender  haunting trills   he turns
rolling on his bench   hearkening   smiles   breathes
in the violins   sweet   master of intricate delight

 
So   glancing at the Times this morning   noted
photo of distant galaxy   in the shape of a nippled
breast   and thought of the Milky Way   the principle
of designation   human signs   for the remote

 
ongoing mutter   of dark matter   but I think this
dancing bear   has found the honeycomb indeed
in the dome-nest   of the turtle-home   the secret Law
of setting-free   (between gloomy ax   and the kiss

 
of Pax   the pact   in the mosaic   in the fresco
in the sign   of Siena)   yes   this old geezer
(Old Faithful)   this old hobo too   insouciant
slouch-hat rambler   found his Lincoln icon (imago)

 
where the stereopticon of the spiritual war
between time and Providence   is resolved   as when
a magnifying glass   pours sunlit fire   into a thin
green blade of grass   as from a deep well-jar

Surprise, surprise (to me!)... sometimes it just melts like frost on a Frisco stove (Crisco)... this reminds me of a certain type of yodel that was published in The Hat and Fulcrum (& Dove Street)... - & lots of other things, back in the Qua-train (let the Midnight Special... shine a light on me). Must be because yesterday was my birthday (& JFK's!) - & tomorrow's WW's birthday...

8

 
Harmonics of the octave tend toward unison
on the 8th day   when Raven sheds his feathers
and descends   out of the primitive Fathers'
fresco   out of Voronezh   Calabria   an icon

 
of Diving Eagle (trailing a shadow in grey
watercolor)   mosquito weather   109 degrees
in the shade   of the petrified well   of Sheba's
garden (Shulamith)   (surely a myth)   hey-ey-

 
eye   of sunstroked horsehair   afloat   riding the
air  like a Scythian soothsayer   toward a wedding
without fail   furnace of B-flat cosmic soldering
fearing not   heat o'th' sun   by day   nor the

 
moon by night  since he carries the sceptre   and
wears the crown   seated in the Pushkinian
catbird seat   of   ink-wound path
and meteorite   and the myrrh-box of a Magdalen

 
opens for him   hidden   under a cloud   of royal
Ethiopian milk   where the ark   (like funereal 
bridal train or   PT-hovercraft   hymeneal
barge of the Law   Melchizedek-amygdala

 
- lucid Sophie, from way back when)   shines
in the sunlight   your spiral-jetting J or
Golden Gate   your Fontegaia   your
Itasca-source   victorious amid   green summit pines

 
so the harmonica   steeled in the Iron Age
breathes forth and sounds   a trump-card chord
and the seraphim's   8-winged triplets (all aboard!)
transpose (B-fl to C) this waltz   for disguised page

Fontegaia, the poem, is winding down... I'm in the last chapter (#5); the grand finale was actually in #4; thinking of Whitman's slow leavetaking in Leaves. Who knows, maybe there'll be a final bit of fireworks.

I'm already thinking of what to do next. This poem, as I've noted before, feels like the coda or caboose to the very long quatrain-train that began with Stubborn Grew, over 10 yrs ago. Taking a deep breath, trying to see how to proceed.

Hope to find ways of writing in a more direct & clear way. Going back to shorter poems, maybe. Try to break into a more public conversation. I've been writing for a long time, changed many times, tried many things already... maybe I'm just getting started. We'll see.

As far as style goes... I don't believe in programmatic method & technique, I think the artistic revolutions & programs are over-rated... often they simply amount to poets without either style or subject-matter trying to create a program ex nihilo... trying too hard. There are group styles & period styles... but they seem to happen spontaneously, a sort of coalescence of mutual interest, friendship & shared enthusiasms.

In my view, poetry itself is a kind of living ongoing organic entity or phenomenon. Just because you can write doesn't mean you can write poetry; it doesn't start from scratch, from nowhere, as if discourse & language were a-historical.

Of course, the aim to fold as much not-poetry as possible into poetry is a basic project...

Literary style per se (grammar, rhetoric); subject-matter, topoi, the ancient occasions for certain kinds of poems; the personality and existential situation (the particular historical or social dilemmas) of the poet; literary models & mentors.... all these things coalesce for the poet who has discovered a way into that living entity or gestalt. Thus it's an extremely complex interaction, a personal & individual encounter between a singular talent and a very subtle game (or calling). This doesn't mean the poems themselves have to be turgidly difficult - far from it.

A video of the April 23rd reading at Brown, with Anny Ballardini & Peter S. Thompson, is now on the web. You can view it here.

It's about 90 min. long. I open with a Shakespeare sonnet, in honor of his birthday (and because "Let me not to the meeting of true minds" made me think of the art of translation).

(& I know, I need to work on my delivery...)

Fontegaia 5 reaches the quarter-post...

7

 
Horse chestnuts lift their festive candelabras
all over the breezy spine of Providence, today.
The Blackstone (placid, parallel) fans toward the sea,
hidden, cryptic (behind massed Swan Point cypresses).

 
And when civilization takes the impress (gives
the impression) of a system of cemeteries...
then, when wind blows through the trees
and gets them droning, you'll know where Raven

 
goes, lives... into his own song (measuring
the distance from his former spring).  
The bird-man sketches a landscape for
escape - papyrus silhouette (plane, crumbling).

 
Only a matrix of whispers, out of a shack (or
hovel), hovering grey beneath titanic arc or span
astride the Bay.  As if a piano (infinite Man)
flew 9-1 centuries back - 1132, to be exact...

 
So the old hobo (former farmer) mutters his
reversals.  To his imaginary friend (yours,
mine).  The implacable one - the one the birds
chirp for (in California, in the Hitchcock frizz) -

 
call them the Fates, or Nature, or Genetics -
call her the Bride, the Spouse - Sheba (pal
of solitary Poe-types, mages-mineurs) - Ligeia, Sal...
what you will.  She's listening, you, you... geriatrics!

 
List.  Only wind (in a craggy chestnut, on the cliff).
Bent limbs (eighty).  The seal of the living God -
consciousness, my friend.  Mind, conjecturing
athwart one questing, jesting heart.  Cleft.

(note : William Blackstone, the early RI settler for whom the river was named, was buried on his property in Cumberland on this day in 1675.)

What I made (homemade) in a B & B in New Hampshire. Not realizing I was 2 blocks down the road from Robert Frost's house.

6

 
The last of the sunset, a pink slip of violet fire
cradled in a vertex of these ancient feminine hills.
Here laborious Farmer George buried his skill
for burial.  Terse kingdom of New England ire

 
(think, Hesiod).  Elliptical.  Stubborn stub,
stump.  Great-Grandpa saw his opportunity
and lit out West (pretty gals, plenty money)
leaving behind old Yankee (post-Civil War)

 
memoirs.  That time he fell onto the thresher,
kept it to himself.  Somehow the story got out
- but whence this diffidence, meek Cincinnatus?
Fumbled for the key to the machinery... there

 
entangled (grimacing a bit, in pain).  The last
of the nine (Melpomene) leans down (goldfinch,
turtle-dove)... eight bells, sounding.  Winces...
wings to silence.  Copper profile, soldered to mast.

 
There was, once, a very brave racehorse
(in Kentuck).  Like Catherine upon her wheel
she took to the Derby, a Frisbee-Elohim... fell.
Limps now from the grave (a horse is a horse,

 
Mr. Eddy Puss) - come back again... somebody's
Magdalen (out of a charnel-house of universal
freeze).  And she pulls that hearse of hers
with her shoulders (home to her mother's house,

 
handsome).  The octave swells, then
(from the old 33) : his pastured accompaniment
to her deep well-voice, on the radio (gradual bent
through sky).  Clay pipestem lips mime violin.

      
                                      Franconia, N.H.
                                          5.24.08

Old poem from Way Stations. (note : "pass the torch to those who follow" - line from my high school's official song. Same high school poet Allen Grossman attended 20 yrs earlier - another poet obsessed with poet's "vocation", poetry's social authority or sanction. (cf. his remarkable essay in latest Chicago Review.))

  
  
 MEMORIAL DAY

  
 It is no longer in my power
 To pass the torch to those who follow.
 Long ago I fell away from the steel
 Fiber holding up the school gymnasium,
 And years have obscured the clear
 Path I walked, a serious child,
 By the dreamy lawns, the sheltering
 Oak trees of the suburbs.  Shame
 Weighs on me, tugs at my pride:
 My tongue grows awkward, inarticulate,
 Unable to confess in clever numbers
 All the grotesqueries this antic mind
 Would indulge - my soul, snagged
 In a filmy web, in the seamy afterlife
 Of manifest destiny, that central pomp
 Of high-riding families, magnified
 On the national screen.  An irony
 Hovered with dark wings over the slow
 River of my growing, marking a sign
 On the brow of the elder son.

      
     Thus
 We plant our feet on the boards,
 And pretend a scene.  But every word
 Tingles with guile; the simple form
 Of the body recites from memory
 A better tale - more harsh, more
 Innocent, exemplary.  To be born -
 To be thrown off-center - the rest
 Is only lust, or circumcision -
 And perhaps a morning breeze, echo
 And reconciliation.

        
                  Enter Hamlet, reading.

    
            Pray God, your voice, like a piece
            of uncurrent gold, be not cracked
            within the ring.

  
 The envious ghost burns for his
 Possessions - rattling armor there
 On the far side of the battlements,
 In the outer dark.  Gertrude?
 Ophelia?  I remember Memorial Day,
 Gathering families in the clear
 Green stillness of the huge park -
 And my brothers scampering, acting up,
 Waving their tiny stars and stripes.
 As in a grainy home movie, I can see
 My meek father hovering over the grill;
 Granddad motionless, his hearing aid
 Turned off; and Grandma and my mother,
 Laughing, bustling around, two bird voices
 Diving into the water, where a bronze
 Hiawatha carries Minnehaha carefully
 Across the muttering stream...

      
                        5.30.86

Heading out for a few days, back Monday evening.

Old quatrain-train in his hero-dotage.

5

 
In far-off Scythia, little horse-bells tinkle
in the wind, among the effigies, circling
the terror-mounds.  Effeminate soothsayers
(Enarees) plait, unplait their strips of linden-bark.

 
Air flows clear across vast prairie.
Saskatchewan, maybe.  Rattling my old snake-
rattle now, one arm swerving the daylight-radius,
muttering around the square perimeter, hey-ey.

 
Behind the skeins of Henry pilots Enaree.
Under the eyelids, dreams, wind.  Clear light.
And the woman veering away as you pivot
yourself... back into mist... who be?

 
Shoulder hunched, brow intent, eyes
scouring earth... Amazon on foot?
River-nymph on shore?  After chariot-
wheel?  Lost where my flood rose...

 
I can't bring back one who never left.
So song goes blind, just air over grassland.
Word-rods, tempered - beholding, as they bend
cities to their will, how the frail grass-waves lift

 
in the wind.  Not to speak of the broken sun-
spoke, its expectant fling across that steep
last curve.  Servants glean what remains, sweep
up the dust, murmur, croon (... will be done)...

 
How the air-flood sweeps away my crumbling
babble - what's left of ribcage holds no sail.
Only oscillating, in a hangar, wired to a nail...
icon of garden-angelus (blue eyes trembling).

Reading Allen Grossman's terrific essay on Hart Crane in recent Chicago Review. Also Kent Johnson's funny spoof on JH Prynne in same issue.

So be it...

4

 
Magnetics of a blue-green gaze, out of
resplendent horsehair.  Through colored
oil.  Across lacquered wood.  Light poured.
Blonde, with casket of brune acacia (wheels

 
within Kiev-wheels, Irina).  Gift of myrrh
sent through a frame.  So she handed me
the stereopticon (old Providence in Tuscany).
Her mother, dove in local ground (my father's

 
birthday).  Strange elevator, dropping scales
(Justitia and Pax, either end of Byzantine
couch).  Mary Magdalen (Siena version) -
sea-blue, veiled glance (frankincense?) - all's

 
figures.  And eyes well with tears.  All's well.
When the local scene takes hold of its vitreous
reality, suddenly compact with very specific (US)
gravity.  Down the hill from the art gallery - we'll

 
go find Willy's original spring, won't we?  Still
there, beneath granite, iron.  Like Delphic
tripod-oracle - perennial glimmer through thick
3-D shades.  Primary crayon civilization, ex nihil.

 
Only light!  A cyclo-paean (absolute devotion).
Because I love, because I love, because I love
Frisbee traveled from fire, through mauve
dusk, back to evening star (run, run...)

 
and in the well of years harbors (like tree
from a tiny light).  Shed milk of regal
Negus-kenosis.  Hunch of equality (Lincoln-
simplicity).  Double-thing, W-ing from eternity.

Methinks somebody could write something about connections between JH Prynne & Vallejo. When I read Prynne's scientistic jargon-jags it reminds me of late Vallejo.

I said it ALL better 10 yrs ago, talking to Kent Johnson in a Jacket.

Reckon my insistence on the otherness of poetic language (see post of yesterday) takes me to the edge (or over) of lunacy, for some readers of this blog.

Certainly poets & poetry are also engaged with, and in complex processes of exchange with, the prose of life & what I was calling "ordinary" language, as well as with everything to which such language is addressed... (see, again, J. Latta's comments today on CD Wright's Poundian poetics of reportage...)

Yet when I tried to think about this briefly (on coffee break this morning) the image of a spiral came to mind... what was this? Double helix of poetry or something? (Now I suppose this really sounds wacko...)

No, I was seeing the spiral, I think, as an image of the root motivation or process of poetry-making... which in my view has its basis in song or harmony... & not in a self-enclosed or autotelic sense (cf. New Critics, Langpo...), but a sort of mystical sense, I guess. That is I think art reaches up to, or drills down to, some locus amoenus, some fundamental rightness, some Paradise, Jubilee - what Stevens meant when he wrote that "poetry is the sanction of life"... & for me anyway this deep harmonics actually shifts the nature of poetic language in the direction of its own telos, pleroma, end, fulfillment.

& I'm attracted to the Romantic notion (see Schlegel, Vico, et many al.) of poetry-making as a recapitulation of original human language-making; that language-creation was/is fundamentally a poetic process; & I am very intrigued by this corollary, that poetry-making actually turns or curls language-creation back on itself - the primal reflexive art-recursion - so as to repeal the structural alienation or distance established by the act of "pointing" or indication or measurement which underlies the making of the first human words. Maybe this is the spiral I was thinking of...

Fontegaia rolls on.

3

 
That other one, with the beard, the slouch hat
of tramps, the pathetic pipe - that needy old man,
wearing out his welcome among blessed suburbanites -
where he gone?  Southwest with the Soo Line, I bet.

 
Down to the turquoise desert, maybe - watching sunrise
light the razory edge of ye planet.  Doing the ghost
dance bit with the birdcage whistle of a limberlost
vacationer in these parts (passin' through, guys).

 
A pattern in the sand, like a sidewinder mandala.
No cameras, please.  An excuse for a man,
dug up somewhere (straight from the can,
I reckon).  Better move on, fella.

 
Whistle on through, like a Hiawatha
with fins - like a Frisbee hovercraft
over a couple of stereo kids (daft
in love, falls like Minnehaha).

 
Everybody's shadow lights out somewhere, Huck.
The spin doctors the wound but won't heal
the mortal - since it was a formidable
yearn to begin with (out of a garden walk).

 
So's the story, anyhow.  Hope to see her someday,
quoth King Solomon (speaking the dark cause
of him condition).  She'm the reason I chose
to chase them varmints over the hill, agreed Will A. 

 
Who your buddy, Poe?  Lasso-Man?  (Can't we all
get a lung?)  She'll be roping up your neck
as we speak, pard - Legal Aid, I mean - heck,
she's law, f'cryin' aloud.  Sheba's Blackstone, pal.

It's not unusual to think of poetry as the speech-expression of pure pleasure principle (see John Latta's fine detective work today, re: Joan Retallack's playful writing).

But I can't help thinking of metaphysical or ontological implications. Though I know many poets & artists are opposed to metaphysics on principle. Anti-metaphysics can be a principled stance.

[An aside : but often it strikes me rather as a kind of complacent flatland of self-pleasing epicureans & blind egos (I'm not referring to either Latta or Retallack here, for heaven's sakes!). The self subsists always in relation to something or someone else...]

What I mean to say is that over the last few days I've been pondering along a parallel track to Retallack's comment, quoted at the end of Latta's post today. But maybe I'm thinking of it more abstractly or something. Poetry is distinct from other kinds of writing & language use in that it foregrounds & dramatizes (in & out of "performance") a living breathing speaker - even when there seems no rational reason to do so; in this way it (poetry) seems often to stumble over its own "feet", while ordinary language goes about its functional & impersonal business of declaring useful & necessary things.

& what exactly is happening here, in a linguistic sense? It seems to me that the pleasure of poetry pushes back against language's inherent alienation from that which it indicates. Poetry tries to close the ring of the space separating "horse" from actual horse. Paradoxically, it can only do this through a sort of playful embrace of solipsism and tautology. By focusing not so much on the real horse, but rather on its own imaginary song-horse, the poem, counter-intuitively, gives the horse itself a vivid sort of virtual reality. Thus poetry goes along singing its contrasting counter-melody, against all normal denotative indicative descriptive functional language-use.

The tendency in postmodern poetry has been to celebrate and revel in this contrast between poetic & ordinary speech. I think where I am leaning is toward the idea that all poetry - plain or obscure - whether the poets are conscious of it or not - all poetry is radically different from ordinary usage. This distinction gives evidence of poetry's link with archaic modes of intuition, prophecy and soothsaying, as well as ancient forms of praise & celebration.

It is possible, actually, to conceive of poetry's tautological ring-around-the-rosy as manifesting a form of knowledge-by-analogy, as in visual art - not by analysis or definition, but by modelling and implication...

(the end point being, perhaps, dramatic poetry : where theater & reality, play & history, come into intense engagement...)

Improv Fontegaia, winding down.

2

 
I keep returning to the same old memory -
you, pointing to those evening panoramas.
Icons of what pleased you, always. 
Remembering the Emperor, his toy city

 
offered to those almond eyes... trim reciprocity.
Song circles thus, thirstily, around its own joy.
A taut tautology, twirled tight, suspended...
(highway for hovering Frisbee dit-da-ditty-

 
datta data-hum).  Only a neurotic project?
Overshot bridge to nowhere?  Sunburst
heart like expunged orangutan, immersed
in his analysis (decomposing rancid intellect)...

 
and will it always be so?  Furtive raven
scrapes surface of the road, Poe
weaves zig-zag after... pines solo
tremolo for Whitman... weeps later on

 
for Poe... I don't think so.  Raven slices air
southwest, like a blind spot in the sun belt
of Orion, southwest... where fire felt around
wings of a Phoenix proscenium - the choir

 
belted out Messiah.  In the continuum
song circuits around its immeasurable flame
as gull-be-dove, wheeling high... terrific frame
of golden lyre, Apollo-harbinger (incalculable sum) -

 
old hobo-love burns there, over the stream.
It never ends.  It is longing-equilibrium's long
home's Big Rock Candy Mountain... simple strum
of a suspended 7th (33 light-yrs from yr sunbeam).

Beginning final chapter of Fontegaia.

1

 
The heavy-laden lilac leans and sways
toward the light blue-yellow wall.  The May day
glories in its brilliance; old Hobo will have his say.
These words like sand that slips between my fingers

 
... those first words formed, those infant sounds
measuring the distance between lips and breast...
the welling O... orotund as gentle eyes that rest
on me, grant my whole body rest... so time rounds

 
home, rounds out of mind.  So the muttering
of Everyman circles its secret sun - the word
like a primitive hunter, blinded by its own weird
mirroring (til General Davy sets Gem in a sling).

 
Homesick Eddy wanders empty Providence.  Then
a green light stops him in his tracks.  Some ghost
of springs long-gone (a-spiralling)... he hears a host
in sandy Frisco (bit by his own heart's shady evidence).

 
Beyond earthquake and fire, the approaching clip-clop
of apocalypse - the unspeakable plague of his tabloid
taboo has turned him (pearl-lined, clammy) inside-
out (twin magnetized Ligeia-orbs, under eclipse).

 
And hobo-poet stumbles, blind, his mother-wit
now branded on his brow.  It wells from swollen
veins beneath the crust - cheap sour wine
gone vinegar, an infinite discomfort

 
roiling, rustling across his tongue - the fatal crown.
Touch of hot iron sears the whole mouth now.
So near, that solar flare - where a lone crow
(raving, pivoting southwest) tastes his renown.

You can do these google searches on HG Poetics & come up with some strings of ideas... but I don't think they go back through the entire blog... or maybe they're limited by number of entries.

Anyway, looking these posts over I recognize my combination of garrulity & vagueness. Must try to communicate more deliberately with my compeers, somehow... write some essays & reviews... I spend most of my time chasing my strange muse, composing...

The emphasis in these particular posts on gesture and embodiment... on the difference between poetry & prose... does this align me with Olson & the Projectivists?

Not really. For a couple reasons, I think. On the conceptual level : I see Olson's attitude as (to a degree) akin to Pound's, & with certain strains of primitivism or romanticism - in that he idealizes pre- or ir-rational Nature at the expense of discursive reasoning - & thus sets up poetry in radical opposition to the utlitarian-technological rationality of Control, which is the great bogeyman of 20th-cent. modernism & postmodernism.

Superficially, this actually sounds like a lot of things I've said myself over the years (say, in interview with Kent Johnson at Jacket, & on this blog) - ie. when I promote poetry as a special kind of visionary discourse, providing uncanny "answers" (while science & philosophy ask questions) etc. etc.

But I would want to differentiate my attitude from this Olsonian (& maybe Prynnean?) point of view. I see no historical-epistemological "break", as Olson does, with the advent of Platonic rationality. Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility", a somewhat similar concept, is not as extreme, but there is the same promotion of perception and feeling at the expense of abstract reasoning, which of course you also find in Pound's imagism & parataxis. Or, perhaps it's more correct to say, Eliot's ideal for poetry is a poetry in which feeling is infused with wit & reason - but the end point is primarily a sensible artifact (an aesthetic object), not a new kind of understanding.

I would rather align myself with the spirit of Nicolas of Cusa. The intellect is inventive, constructive, creative and playful in itself. Artistic making is as much a form of intellectual exploration (logos) as it is sensitive expression (pathos).

In fact I would suggest there is a specific pathos of the intellect. The artists of the Siena frescos were depicting an ideal city as a practical matter - the frescoes floated above the meeting rooms of the city hall, didactic reminders of the state's foundational values. And this intellectual-constructive effort - to contain and mirror actual, historical & political existence - this practice of modelling - is an act of measurement which is impossible without a certain degree of alienation. The maker must stand aside from both the world and the work itself in order to create something adequately objective & true. This "standing-aside" puts the maker (or the intellectual generally) in a potentially marginal & abject position - the outsider. ("The prophet is not without honor - except in his own country, & among his own people," says Jesus in the Gospels.)

The maker is the uncanny double, the other self, the blind spot in the mirror. The art work is, possibly, a true representation of an objective world - but it is also the trace of the maker's silhouette or fingerprint.

Olson - & much 20th-cent. art & poetry - idealizes the vital energy of the world outside, beneath the human, the rational. My own desire would be to show how creative intellect sits crowned at the center of reality - as the core of civilization. Despite all the fearsome, destructive, world-threatening perversions it undergoes for the sake of greed, arrogance, ignorance & war. I would identify true intellect with the humility of the estranged outsider or servant, the victim of brutality & persecution.

The second way I would differentiate myself from Projectivism & much postmodern poetry is on the level of style & form. I've written about poetry as personal, embodied, performative, theatrical - as achieving its complete form only in performance, in the response-context of its cultural milieu. But unlike the Projectivists - & the Language Poets - I don't see the expressive form of contemporary poetry as situated in an agonistic rivalry with "traditional" poetry. Rather, I believe we have never left the precincts of archaic rhythm. Poetry now & always presents a kind of holistic song-mirror - the aesthetic work as musical-imaginative re-casting of experience - on behalf, I repeat, of a constructive concept or intelligibility. The aesthetic form, the formal finish, of the achieved poem, makes a statement about Being as fulness & completion. The poet's vocation is thus a kind of voyaging toward the return of the Same. If too many short-cuts are taken, the work will not move us - it will seem facile, superficial, cold (since we are still all of us struggling on the way). But the postmodern rejection of order & purpose, in toto, simply surrenders too much - misses (rejects) the intelligible order, the substance of reality.

By these comments however I would not want to be simply lumped with the anti-moderns & formal traditionalists. As I've tried to argue previously in various places, my notion of form is not really focused on the surface elements of style, but rather on poetry's underlying dramatic plot.

Have started paying a little more attention to the terrific British criticism in Jacket, by the likes of James Keery, Andrew Duncan, Steve Clark et al. My thundering ignorance. & the feeling that I'm stepping into a nest of quite poisonous serpent-varmints. Sense in these writers an almost-incurable English angst, with compensatory vehemence... or is it just that they don't share my odious American (or just plain Henry) complacency?

Strange things can happen in libraries. I was thinking on my lunchbreak about the Hitchcock film "Vertigo", which seems to surface now & then in my writing. I come back from lunch, & someone has left some very expensive library items on my desk - old onionskin typewritten screenplays from the 1940s, for "Notorious" and "Spellbound", by "Angus McPhail" (a Hitchcock nom-de-plume). Makes me feel a little dizzy.

Now available, a new version of Rest Note (includes latest chapter, #4).

What is a saint? A saint is a hobo, grabbed by the scruff & assigned a spiritual job to do. What is a poet? Part of the scribbler cadre of this bunch.

Hart Crane on hobos (in The Bridge) : "humpty-dumpty clods"... "they touch something like a key, perhaps". Aside from the probable homosexual joke there, he's also talking about the hobos' nostalgia or connectedness with Mother Earth.

Herodotus recounts the blunt advice of an advisor to Persian king Cyrus, about how to subdue a certain tribe - tell the fathers to become shopkeepers, & the sons to learn the flute & the harp, rather than war - you will make them all effeminate & easy to control. So aggression is gendered down through the centuries.

But poet & saint cannot be subjugated so easily... they have a connection with the original Gardener (Adam), by way of guilt-ridden Cain (the farmer) & guileless Abel (the shepherd). Farmer, gardener... their quiet productive labor in the earth, far from the hot winds of vain cities... the peacemaker, the good shepherd... Milton's muse...

The hobo-poet-saint is not exactly an epicurean Bohemian, a Beat... but there is some affinity in their common desire to negate the harsh & violent labors of the Iron Age... they share the same alienation, but the hobo-saint turns that diffidence into a motivated spiritual labor of another kind... like that of the gardener...

The hobo-poet-saint feels a certain distaste for the profession of letters, since there all the Iron Age labor & vanity enters in again, by the back door... his Arcadia is an evening (after work) of literary "amateurs", slouched in some cafe... nobody pays them for their perfect freedom...

but the hobo-poet-saint must pursue those games with a fiery devotion... blind Miltons all, Chaucers, Shakespeares, chanting the Garden of Eden coming back... the Jubilee... & how to get there... an isolato-farmer's wisdom...

A Nation gets the poets it deserves... some nations turn it all dutifully into trade & busy-ness...

& so concludes Fontegaia pt. 4. (p.s. today is the anniversary of the founding of Constantinople)

27

 
Grandma went down to St. Croix on your birthday,
Phoebe, to visit a nest of potters along the river.
Spry Frisbee-soothsayer keeps on revolving forever,
almost - like a venerable Pythia-barge (109 light-years

 
away, it seems).  Your Little Boy Bohu-Pa (some
China clay?) peers out again (through his mosquito-
net) toward a winking, twinkling Ocean shore -
the river-of-riverbanks, a moving firmament

 
(tesseract dome or drinking bowl).  Where
elk-sized almond eyes (through arctic space)
lock into mutual recognition - natural grace
domesticating something else.  Grain of sand (or

 
key of clay) from nowhere.  Something immeasurable
nestled in the river-rings - purled mote of fire
in parallax.  Becomes an equal sign (9 = gyre)
whose Magdalenian eyes dove into mine.  Voluble

 
pebble on ramble up Nile - light-bauble, hidden
in humdrum clam - Jonah's wail, phonautographed
by Byzantine toy elephant... some corn-fed seraph
Ruth found (a-slumber) on her way to Rachel's barn.

 
Earth just tuning up, the way an infinite keyboard
found a home in Mendelssohn.  Five-finger exercises.
We count the cost together, local guys n' gals
figuring out Saskatchewan - but look upstream, toward

 
rainy spring (where river-whales play hippopotami
arpeggios).  Look there, look there.  Cassiopeia
and her Milky King - your mother-stream's calliope -
a muted requiem.  The universe.  Sings come with me.

     
                      5.11.08 (Pentecost/Mother's Day)

Fontegaia chapt. 4, unraveling down to finish line.

26

 
Those fibrillating frescos in an old Italian town...
she handed them to me, like 3-D shades, like some
Calliope-kaleidoscope.  Good Government their theme,
a peaceful Providence their angular reunion -

 
in the L-shaped room, where the hero circles back
to square one.  Back through green rushes, O...
back up the Nile again, unto oh-so-mysterioso
Ethiopia.  Where a triple rainbow on a tripod neck

 
taught sleepy Sheba how to riddle Solomon
with double consonance (pithy adagia).
A kind of Minnehaha joke on Hiawatha.
Odd misuse (tree-planting in a railroad cabin).

 
Homeward bound, through the scarred terrain
of hi-ho yesteryear.  All those nations, kings...
- it makes you wonder about things,
said Miz Pa to her Uncle Sam (caboosed again).

 
Em thought so too.  A hermit election... old America
wound up on a chessboard toward the end of November
- was they what the people want?  Or just an ember
on the lips of a clod?  Humpty-Dumpty?  Caw-caw

 
crowed the triplets in a cypress tree - we seed
what ye sow.  A kind of raven-milk for boho
Elijah - seal of Melchizedek on his hillbilly brow.
A raft of Lincoln-logs on the stream of minstrelsy,

 
I gather - since you brought me here, jailbird -
to the echo chamber (33 Chamber St).  Shades
of transfusion on the telepathy-phone... reeds
drooping in a semaphore across the prison yard.

I suppose my comments about poetry & Being sound rather anachronistic or simplistic, compared with something like Paul Fry's theory of poetry's "ostensive" substance (see his Defense of Poetry). But Fry's theory could be seen as a contrasting counterpart to my position, since the "ostensive" also presents a kind of equilibrium or order, which gives poetry a unique and anomalous position in the larger realm of discourse. I posted more about Paul Fry etc. here.

I'm a partisan of the old idea that Being is present to us most clearly in the fact of personhood and consciousness; that individual persons also reflect or stand in for some deeper more mysterious reality of personhood and consciousness; & that this fact of subjective consciousness does not rule out an additional mystery, that all things & beings in the universe also share with us in that representation; that everything takes part, through the slow rolling of time, in some manifold musical embodiment, unfolding or event... & the more I think about this, the more I'm drawn to a sort of franciscan attitude toward nature & experience...

Keats' "negative capability" formulation reminds me that too often we look at the poets of past eras through abstract lenses we learned in school ("the Romantics", "the Victorians"). We forget that poets of every era share more, as poets, than what divides them by way of historical distinctions & differences. Thus Keats here is speaking as a craftsperson, of his experience with making - the experience of living with uncertainties & unknowingness, for the sake of the distinct & anomalous shaping-work of the poem. This is the poet's experience in every era.

What I'm getting back to, I think, is what seems to me an undergirding set of principles, of you will, which distinguishes the poet's motive & purpose in the world from that of any other "worker-in-discourse" : the principle, basically, that in poetry, language, consciousness and personhood are fused together and alive - the poet stands for a humanized world, a civilization, resting in a kind of Bergsonian elan vital, rather than in some kind of cold amoral solitude, a dead universe...

Moreover, the fundamental law of civilization itself rests on this consciousness (ie. our personal attitude toward this "conscious reality", and consequently toward those who share it with us)...

Is this just old Romanticism? OK. It's Franciscanism too, maybe - something even older.

Speaking of performance... in the next week or so I hope to be able to link to video webcast of the reading on April 23rd with Anny Ballardini & Peter Thompson.

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...