In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam repeatedly evokes something she calls "humanism", or "traditional humanism", by which (I think) she means the basic ordinary values underlying normative civil society and social life, basic human kindliness and sense of mutual responsibility, sanity, "piety" in the old sense, natural law, the golden rule, simple good nature, the "love your neighbor" ethic... - which she records being systematically wiped out under Stalin, and which she found in paradoxical places (not so much among the intelligentsia, as among the humblest & poorest workers & displaced peasants, who helped the Mandelstams on their hard road).

It seems to me that - with respect to this sense of "humanism" - M.'s notion of the cultural meaning of Redemption - as sketched in the unfinished essay "Pushkin & Scriabin" - is enormously rich in implications & possibilities.

As I noted before here, his idea that the once-&-for-all Redemption sets culture & art free, for spiritual play - "hide & seek with the Father", as he puts it - could be aligned with a sort of classicism. This is so because any concept of Redemption is underwritten by a certain certainty about the divine purpose : the Redemption is a showing-forth of divine providential wisdom & plan. Such belief in divine plan is not solely Christian, but structures most ancient religious thought & culture. One can see it in the Stoic's acceptance of destiny, the amor fati. One can see it in all kinds of fatalistic determinism, religious & philosophical. One of the hallmarks of "classicism" in art is its expressive awareness & representation of "the way things are", the way things cannot otherwise be.

(Simone Weil wrote some penetrating essays on this topic, which offer an interesting parallel to Mandelstam's orientation. She focused on ancient Greek concepts of beauty, necessity, and mediation - and their analogues in Christian concepts of nature and grace.)

But there is something else going on with Mandelstam & his neo-classical Acmeism, something which actually opposes fatalism & any kind of indifference. M. likened the poet or artist to the "grateful guest" in the beautiful & tremendous "palace" of the earth, nature, Creation. This is one expression of the specifically Christian grounding of the idea of Providence in the love-relationship between creature & Creator. The artist - & the human being generally - fulfills his or her nature most completely, by embracing this playful relationship of love & trust between the human and the divine. Life here is given complete meaning within the circle defined by the radius of relation between creature & Creator. This is indeed a specifically religious (as well as philosophical) way or means of understanding the nature of the cosmos & our experience of life. (If our ultimate understanding of experience is shaped by a loving relation between creature and Creator - well, there are implications here not only about fate & destiny & plan, but also about (playful) freedom - the spiritual freedom of the children of God, in the Pauline sense.)

My own interest, for a while now, has been to explore how such a worldview can be synthesized with the specific powers & qualities of making my poems, & with poetry in general (how, in this context, the manner & discourse of poetry relates/contrasts to other forms of human expression). Along with recognizing the human (and personal) limitations on any such verbal formulae or "explanations" of experience : since there is always a deeper level, oftentimes shunted aside or avoided - a more acute angle of perception, a blindspot...

new stuff at Lanthanum.

...please friends, forgive the bravado. Indulge my quirks. No, don't indulge them. Just buy my books! Ha!

Found this NY Times science article on blindsight very interesting (you may need to sign up to read this).

Poetry (in my case, anyway) seems to depend on a sort of unconscious instinct or imaginative conception... I often feel like I'm "feeling my way", stumbling along with my fingers extended (on the piano...). It's always been like this. I started writing when I was 4 yrs old (see sidebar for example). Music & poetry have gone together.

You start writing when there's a balance between the conception in your mind, and a few words & lines (for me it's usually an opening line). This preliminary balance gives you the confidence to go forward... & sometimes there are clusters or offshoots from a theme or word or idea (Mandelstam often worked thus).

Now I keep going back to these long strung-out modes (cf. Lanthanum). There's a cost involved (or maybe many costs!) - ie. a certain indirectness... I don't take on a topical or social topic so directly and clearly as I used to do, the way most good poetry does... I work on this sort of vague architectural impulse, trying to synthesize, evoke and project a holistic vision of reality & history, my view of things-as-they-are...

I still get rejected by the major magazines all the time. I'm not good enough for them, I guess. Funny thing is I still think I'm the best U.S. poet alive today. What the hell (bravado speaking).

I don't build my poems - my poems have built me. I work slowly & quietly, on my own. The poems span a continuum from the simple to the complex. I think many of the old poems, even of 30 yrs ago, remain valid & interesting. I go into regions few have explored. I have a musical sense.

Let them laugh, let them scoff, let them brush me off. Language has a stubborn lastingness. Maybe I will have the last laugh.

Mandelstam had an attitude I admire, a sort of faith or fatalism in the role of the poet - something that can never be dislodged from people's lives. Poetry is there, wherever the free mind & heart are responding to what happens to them in this violent world. "the well is always there". M. would say things to his wife & friends like "if the poet has something to say, he (or she) will make himself heard". (I'm not quoting exactly.) "If they need it, it will be found." He had this very weird confidence in the objective reality of poetry, & how it reaches into the people & culture from which it emerged. Poetry was healing & joy & gracefulness, it's there because people need it, & want it. Basically, he knew his own strength - & he also didn't care that much about his own "literary fortunes". He didn't worry about it. He was too absorbed in the poetry itself, & all the poets & poetry around him. He was a Pushkinian. And Pushkin was Mozartean. The gift was there - the music flowed. Everything else was a sideshow.

Lanthanum continues.

Ol' Henry in more Shelleyan days (early '80s). The little Dutch fellow there? My son Alex.

New rim-shot at Lanthanum.

There's a great passage from Hope Against Hope (maybe I can post it tomorrow) in which Mandelstam (via Nadezhda M.) contrasts poets & popular novelists - the latter decanting their gnosis from a superior (flow of liquids) position, down into the masses... whereas the former - the poets - are so busy with the spirit of inner building - akin to the scientific spirit, the selfless devotion to Riddles - they are so busy with their inward vocation - that they are like all the other mute confused ordinary people - ie. they don't talk down to their readers - they are one with their readers -

anyway, I experience this, working on my "quarrels with myself" - dimensions of inward memory -

poetry is truly a sort of pharmakon - the poison that heals - akin to fasting or prayer... very much akin, indeed, to pasting or (State) Fair...

Poetry is, as they say, memory & invention. Poetry is discovery through blindness.

(p.s. re this poem - over the holidays I was in Minneapolis, & went back to the Art Institute with my 81-yr-old mother... there's a wonderful (& early) "installation" piece - basically a walk-through standard "apartment building", much like the ones my grandfather Gould managed (& his father built) along the River Rd., & where I spent my 1st 2 years... (1952-54)...

- you walk into this grungy space & listen at the doors... when you bend your head toward the apt. door, a recording comes on, of whatever apt-like life is happening inside... you have to understand, this is so upper-midwest... so Twin Cities... we all lived (& still do) in these places... & you have to understand - I am not condescending here. We love these cozy-desolate places... they are home...

I don't know the name of the artist... but it's a permanent installation...)

Late-breaking news at Lanthanum.

Mandelstam : "Words are sheer pleasure, a cure for anguish."

This is quoted by Nadezhda Mandelstam in an important chapter in Hope Against Hope, titled "The Earth and its Concerns". About Acmeism & Symbolism, & the philosophical currents in early 20th-cent. Russia which underlay these literary attitudes or movements. Mandelstam &/vs. the thinker Berdiayev...

Here she also quotes her husband : "Thanks to the wonderful bounty of Christianity, the whole of our two-thousand-year-old culture is the setting of the world free for play, for spiritual pleasure, for the free imitation of Christ." She emphasizes M.'s attitude as the "grateful guest" :

"In his essay 'The Morning of Acmeism' he tried to give poetic justification for remaining attached to earth with its three dimensions : 'The earth is not an encumbrance or an unfortunate accident, but a God-given palace.' This is followed by a polemical passage about people who, like Berdiayev, cannot wait to get to a better world and regard life on earth as being literally God-forsaken. In the same essay, which was a kind of manifesto, he asked : 'What would you think of a guest who, while living at the expense of his host and enjoying his hospitality, actually despises him in his heart of hearts and thinks only of ways to outsmart him?' 'Outsmart' here means to escape from time and three-dimensional space. To M., as a self-styled Acmeist, three-dimensional space and life on earth were essential because he wanted to do his duty by his 'host' - he felt he was here to build, which can only be done in three dimensions. This explains his attitude toward the world of things. In his view, the world was not hostile to the poet or - as he put it - the builder, because things are there to be built from. Stone - the title of M.'s first published collection of poems [and mine] - is a building material which 'seems to crave for another mode of being' and longs to find its place in 'a vaulted nave' and thus joyfully interact with others of its kind. M. never talked of 'creating' things but only of 'building' them." [p. 266]

This passage and others like it had a very formative influence on me back in the 1970s. Imagine their effect on someone whose maternal grandfather built grain elevators and docks and other giant structures around the upper midwest; whose paternal great-grandfather arrived in Minneapolis in the 1870s on a steamboat, when the town was young, and set about building houses...

Here's a simple (beginner's) poem from my own first book, Stone (Copper Beech Press, 1979).

ARMENIA
               to N.M.

 
Under the mountain's weight,
the snow, the roaring waterfalls,
cold heights where the earth
stretches herself under clouds -
under the weight of mountains,
the dead weight of decaying soil
turns coal dust into diamonds.

 
Stone is clumsy, and groans -
red earth crushes the blind,
stones long to leap in the archway.

 
A willow-tree stands by the river
and sighs; the warm season rolls away
over flat water, the mirror of dusk.

 
In the shadow of the furrowed hills,
brick towers, open wounds and streets,
an echo floats in the falling air,
a birdsong stifled in the ribcage.
Belly and tongue have sealed a pact,
loins and heart have been enticed,
the whole city trembles; blind feet
drum the earth for their very lives.
And a woman wearing a veil of memories
draws from the pebbles her ancient signs:
feathers, broken shells, and sky.

new Lanthanum exhibit, over here...

The Redemption, you might say, is one of the consequences of the interpenetration of divine and human things. Mandelstam (in "Pushkin and Scriabin") sketches it as the act which "saves" the world, sets it fundamentally right : and since this has been definitively accomplished, once and for all, there is no need to re-invent the wheel, so to speak : the artist can simply be grateful for what has been done, and set to work (playfully) to celebrate that redeemed world.

It's a funny idea, easy to criticize from several angles. (There's a kind of underlying classicism to it, which maybe M. soaked up from Pushkin, Gumilev, Annensky, Soloviev... something Petersburgian. I don't know.)

But if we accept that there might be a grain of truth in it, what follows? If we say that the central dispute in American poetry has been between Memory and Invention, what would be the effect of Mandelstam's formula on this situation?

In order to accept or understand the notion of an act of divine Redemption in human history, we would have to be able, logically, to reconcile passing human experience with a kind of Absolute. Time with Eternity - the pleroma, the "fulness of Time". (Sounds like T.S. Eliot a little bit. I am curious now to read an Eliot biography - find out something about his reliigous conversion(? or return) in the 20s. There's Berryman, too, toward the end of his life...)

Perhaps an intellectual reconciliation of history with eternity would lay the groundwork for, would be one of the contributing factors toward, a reconciliation of memory and invention in art. Tradition and the new. The creative Now with its matrix, its context in Memory.

My (seemingly one-way) disagreement with John Latta last month, over the merit/authenticity of a poem by Wallace Stevens, is kind of funny, since I was the one who "framed" him (Latta) with Stevens (in a review of Breeze).

Today he has some interesting comments on sentences & lines, & quotes Lyn Hejinian quoting Soviet writer Osip Brik. Here's Nadezhda Mandelstam on Brik (which I read in Hope Against Hope a couple days ago):

"In the poetry of the period he (Mandelstam) prophesies the onset of dumbness ('human lips preserve the form of the last word they have uttered' - in 'Finder of a Horseshoe', 1923). It was in fact this line that Brik and Tarasenkov seized on as proof that M. had 'written himself out' - they gave little thought to the real sense of the poem before pronouncing this judgement. For them all means were fair in the struggle. Brik had turned his apartment into a place where his colleagues in the Cheka... could meet with writers and sound out public opinion, simultaneously collecting information for their first dossiers. It was here that M. and Akhmatova were first branded as 'internal emigres' - a label which was to play an important part in their subsequent fate." (N. Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope; The Modern Library, trans. Max Hayward)

The underlying give-&-take in American poetry : Memory and Invention.

Since Emerson, Invention has taken 1st place. The New American is a New Adam in a New World. Imagination creates its own History.

& there is some philosophical or theological validity to this perspective. For example, it is possible to interpret the sacred books of Christianity to support such a view, with one caveat : the "newness" of the New Adam was only made possible by one ineradicable historical event : the Redemption.

Obviously this particular caveat imposes a crux of dissonance or disagreement. But see Mandelstam's essay "Pushkin and Scriabin", which - at least in its own terms - resolves this problem (the problem or crux which divided Eliot from Pound, WC Williams and Stevens, in variant ways).

The mother of the Muses is Memory, according to the ancient Greeks. In the old days, poets were the professional rememberers, the technicians of mnemonics. But what is the American poet called upon to remember? I believe this is a philosophical & theological question. (Eliot raised it, in a deliberately provocative way - as a traditionalist... But I don't think traditionalism for its own sake is the answer. One has to rethink the issues in every era.)

What we are called upon to remember is our relationship to God : ie., the nature of the Trinity. A reality which involves Incarnation : the Word made Flesh. This is a hard thing to understand, put baldly like this (believe me, I know).

The poet remembers reality - as a familial relationship of spiritual and physical Persons. And such a memory has logical consequences for every aspect of life : historical, social, political, philosophical, scientific...

A familial relationship... I am thinking of the unique capacity of poetry, along with the other arts, to imagine and conceptualize and evoke the special vitality and emotional resonance of existence - to clothe it in human meaning. No other form of expression seems capable of even approaching the unspoken familial-theological sense of Reality and Universe that we are addressing (with our blunt instruments of religious vocabulary...)

Mandelstam's life & fate take on a clearer resonance when you see that he was re-enacting, with some solemnity (as was Akhmatova), Pushkin's war of independence - for a free literary culture, for the dignity of the (raznocinets, un-privileged, non-elite, egalitarian) writer - for free literature, free speech... & his poems (Mandelstam's) meanwhile form a very special & complex Petersburgian isomorph or palimpsest interwoven with Pushkin's... (like Nabokov, in another key)...

(something addressed, sort of mock-epic fashion, in "Henry's" search for "Pushkin the cat", in Stubborn Grew...)

I'm re-reading Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir, Hope Against Hope, which I must have last (re-)read about 20 years ago. This book has always been my Bible (aside from the Bible).

It seems as if the simple power of this book sort of spoiled me for contemporary American poetry. The basic organizing factor of contemporary American poetry seems to me to have been the ignorance of this book. "Simple power" is a good phrase for it. Reading it is like drinking cold, clear water. After it, most things American seem too nervous, too baroque, too cynical, too ironic, too self-centered...

I guess my stance might be abjured for a number of reasons. It would be seen as either naive & irrelevant hero-worship, or self-serving one-upmanship. All I can do is refer back to the power of the book itself, and the impact it had on me, for the first time, around 1977.

Passages like this :

"M. told me that in his poem about the singer with the low voice there was a merging of two images: the woman from Leningrad and Marian Anderson [whom he'd heard singing on the radio]. On the day he was composing this poem, I didn't realize he was working, because he was lying quiet as a mouse. Restlessness was the first sign he was working on something, and the second was the moving of his lips. In one poem he says that his lips can never be taken away from him, and that they will still move when he is dead and buried. This has indeed happened."

[see the opening of Stubborn Grew. I don't think I was consciously thinking of Mandelstam when I wrote the first line : "Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay."]

Or this passage :

"The work of the poet, as the vehicle for world harmony, has a social character - that is, it is concerned with the doings of the poet's fellow men, among whom he lives and whose fate he shares. He does not speak 'for them', but with them, nor does he set himself apart from them : otherwise he would not be a source of truth.
"I was always struck by the absolute character of the urge to serve - with and among one's fellow men - as an instrument by which harmony reveals itself. I can understand Shevchenko's lament - which M. appreciated only too well - about the way his poetry would not leave him alone, bringing him nothing but misery and not allowing him to pursue his craft as a painter, the one thing that gave him pleasure. The urge ceases to be felt only when the poet's material begins to run out - that is, when his contact with the world at large is broken and he no longer hears his fellow men or lives with them. There can be no poetry without such contact, which is the source of the poet's sense of 'rightness'."

The "absolute character of the urge to serve" as an "instrument by which harmony reveals itself". Good will, in other words. Good will & the vocation of the poet. This is very simple & profound & 'right'. [quotes taken from translation by Max Hayward, edition publ. by Modern Library]

& I guess I was somewhat prepared for the simple power of this book by prior intensive reading (roughly 1973-1977) of... the Bible.

New addition over at Lanthanum. Happy Newe Year, friends!

New poem-project happening over here.

I find fascinating the way John Michell (in Dimensions of Paradise) can describe, quite convincely (to me, anyway), how certain ancient texts conceal specific geometry problems. Plato had a sign over his Academy, didn't he, saying no one could enter who wasn't a geometer? I can imagine him assigning some of his texts (2500 yrs ago) as sort of riddles or puzzles to be worked out somewhat like Michell does. He compares, for example, Plato's two ideal cities - Atlantis and Magnesia, and shows how the former is a kind of imperfect shadow - geometrically speaking - of the latter; and that Plato meant this as a kind of emblem (or causal explanation, even) for Atlantis's corruption & eventual fall.

Michell portrays a kind of ideal Platonic-Pythagorean canon of symbolic (and actual geometric) numbers, rooted in nature and reflecting its dynamics and harmonies, and has the visionary panache to suggest that world culture needs to return, somehow, to the order symbolized this way. If he is, on some level, right - then it's possible to imagine that we are today, in a sense, living in a distorted, disharmonious Atlantis-world : and that the eccentric search for "sunken", "lost" Atlantis is a kind of search for our own lost Paradise of peace & harmony...

Some of his investigations are nothing short of astonishing. See, for example, the way he analyzes in great detail some passages in the Gospel of John, & shows how they are, again (by way of gematria), symbolic geometry problems & designs... if indeed there is something to this (which I'm sure mainstream scholarship keeps at arm's length - several cubits, anyway) the implications are mind-boggling...

As for a "new philosophical & literary culture" (see previous post today)... let me reiterate, my attitude has nothing in common with Plato's authoritarian values. I am a true egalitarian/democratic American in my bones. My political heroes are Roger Williams, Abraham Lincoln & Martin Luther King.

What I am referring to is the possibility of a new/old intellectual stance toward spiritual/poetic/scientific meaning - the reality of Mind & Cosmos...

I received a request from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (Cambridge, MA) to publicize this week's announcement of the winners of the Academy's 2008 Poetry Prize. Here is the announcement on their website.

Since the 1970s, periodically, I've become fascinated with number symbolism, gematria. The books of John Michell, something of a New Age (& old British) eccentric, on ancient/Egyptian/Pythagorean/Platonic canons of number & "sacred" geometry. (Related somewhat to viewpoint of another eccentric author, Giorgio de Santillana - see his book Hamlet's Mill.)

Much of it needs to be taken with massive grain of salt - in particular, the notions (unsupported by much evidence, if any) of 1) superior ancient civilizations (Atlantis & such), and 2) the extrapolation of Plato's arch-conservative and anti-democratic political tendencies. (Michell's sneers at democracy, & such.)

Yet I am, as I say, recurrently absorbed with such explorations of ancient number symbolism in both Plato & the Bible - the detailed measurements of the Ark, the Temple, the New Jerusalem (Bk of Revelation), the canons of architecture in Greece & other parts of ancient world, the correspondence of harmonic ratios, numbers, names, & themes in archaic literature...

& it shows up in my poetry, especially the long projects... maybe someday these works will be understood as playful percursors of a new/old sort of philosophical & literary culture...

This is something of a Hart Crane theme (cf. "Atlantis" in The Bridge), & a Whitman & Melville stratum... it comes through in sometimes (I think) funny ways in my poems (see for ex. the role of eccentric Minnesota Senator, Shakespeare crank, & Atlantis theorizer, Ignatius Donnelly, in Stubborn Grew... if you click on this link, you see the book cover - that's Ignatius, down in the lower lefthand corner).

(I guess I've blogged on this before...)

I like this essay. Andrey Gritsman's comments on tradition, imitation & necessary originality remind me of some things in essays of terrific Moscow poet Mikhail Aizenberg.

Yes, it's interesting to (boring old) me to think that the architectural-numerical dimension started also (along with so much else) with Mandelstam. He wrote several poems about buildings, and Omry Ronen (Approach to Mandelstam) outlined some of the complex internal architecture in two of his longer odes. This is what got me started down that path. It's such a big part of traditional writing, but 20th-cent. & contemporary poets don't seem to go there much.

In writing various long poems over the last 15 years I've found that the numerical calculations & structuring are very helpful, they become part of the thinking/planning process, they mesh with the subject-matter in various ways... I find these "rhymes", which serve to synthesize my own private experience with other things...

Music - architecture - poetry. Keeps the wrangling litter-world at bay.

John Latta today takes a swipe at Wallace Stevens poem & the comments about it (including mine, I guess) over at Harriet blog.

I read his comment as, like Linh Dinh's, another period piece. In this period of spleen, suspicion & condemnations. Yes, Stevens' poem is rather flaccidly & placidly solipsistic (A = A). It's not one of his best. But I get annoyed by the moralism which disallows, with self-righteous political overtones, any expression of even momentary calm or peace. Part of what poetry (& art generally) does is hold out these expressive images of goodness & happiness. Others call it, scornfully, "quietude". Well, to hell with them. Write your happy poems.

Speaking of Renaissance poetics... I am back deep into ancient/medieval number symbolism & gematria again. Might help me get out of my creative slump. I am reminded, reading things like Medieval Numerology (ed. Surles; Garland Press, 1993), of some things I was up to in Forth of July & earlier work. Influence of books by the likes of Alastair Fowler, John Michell.

Mathematics can actually advance composition. The symbolic symmetries of numbers. This is a huge dimension of pre-modern poetics, which we have simply buried out of sight. One of the most exciting discoveries of writing poetry, for me. It's in Melville (see Viola Sachs' book, Game of Creation). It's in my work! I'm not sure where else. (I'm sure it's in Crane.)

Forth of July is possibly the beginning of a kind of medieval push-back or resurgence of some kind. Maybe someday it will be understood as such. A labyrinthine-baroque cathedral, a counter-modern-American architectural wonder... meant to be seen as distinct from what anyone else is doing these days...

essentially an Acmeist project (Mandelstam : poet as builder). In fact I originally got into Alastair Fowler et al. by way of a study of ring-structures in Mandelstam's odes.

Re-reading some parts of Crane's Bridge. The picayune dismissals of Logan & Kirsch, like those of their predecessors in this vein, just miss the point. Someday when I get my act together I will write that essay about this. Yes, he is uneven, sometimes bathetic, sometimes bombastic. But when he is good, he is simply head & shoulders above anyone else. He is the genius of These States. In the section titled "The River", for example.

How does he do it? Marianne Moore called him "erudite". This is very apt. I think Crane better than all the rest absorbed lessons of Renaissance poetics. He mastered the measure of a rich pentameter. When he added this, first, to his native musical talent, and 2nd, to his sense of mythos (the symbolic plot - the "myth of America") - then what he accomplished in 45 or so pages is equal to what Olson or Pound did in 600 pp. of musical "notes"... (but it's not just 3 things... there's the essential 4th thing - that Platonic-demonic-orphic enthusiasm, that boldness, that inspired-fiery "afflatus"...)

Crane's work sets him in a small group, with Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, Poe... maybe Henry James, Hawthorne, Eliot, Stevens, a few others... the true original American masters...

Reading F.M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiae : the origins of Greek philosophical thought (1952). Nice short (apparently unfinished) book, full of fascinating ideas & information. On the origins of philosophical (non-mythical, pre-scientific) world-pictures. How they differ from the mythical; but tracing their roots back to the mythical. On the kinship & differences between poet, seer (or prophet) and sage - their common origination in the shaman. Explores Plato's view of the rivalry between poetry & philosophy. Explores affinities between Greek, Hebrew & Mesopotamian (Sumeria, Babylon) myth & ritual. Leans toward theory that the origin of mythical anthropomorphism of the gods lies in ritual : the rituals of sacred kingship. The king was the representative of the sacred, of cosmic order - the magic governor of seasonal change and spring renewal of fertility, crops, wildlife. Much myth involves succession of old & new kings (seems aligned with Frazer here). Remarkable stuff on comparative cosmogonies of early civilizations.

With this background, you can possibly understand Christianity as a synthesis or resurgence of : 1) Platonism - the transcendent Being, the One, the Mind which creates its model (the Universe); 2) Hebraic monotheism; 3) mythical sacred kingship. For believers, how you interpret the representation of the "sacred king" - Christ - would, I guess, determine, in part anyway, the character or rationale for your belief. Is Christ's (moral, spiritual) authority understood in a sort of archaic-magical sense? Or is Christ the "Everyman" - the anti-king - the antithetical (egalitarian) "king" of kings? Is Christian belief & practice a sort of re-enactment of spiritual kingship, or the transvaluation of same? (As you can probably guess, I lean toward the latter. I think Biblical religion from the beginning was a kind of semi-ironic transvaluation of the ancient Egyptian & Babylonian forms of sacred kingship.)

As for poetry - Cornford relates pre-Socratic & Platonic views of the poet as marked primarily by enthusiasm. Poetry differs from prose in that it is inspired, enthusiastic. Inspired by the gods, the poet sings beyond ordinary human capability, of things unknown (even to the poet). Seer, poet, & sage were originally all encompassed by the shaman. With the development of urban civilization and large political entities, the shaman's role is somewhat displaced by communal kingship ritual; the shaman becomes priest or adviser to the king; the roles of sage (present, wisdom), poet (past, memory), and seer (future, prophecy) are differentiated.

This time of year, with the low light & the wayward leaves, I can get into a northern, Minnesotyish, Bruegelish, medievalish, unheimlich-gemutlich state of mind... noticed recently that the opening poem in Berryman's Collected is a take on Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow". (Berryman & Henry : 2 sides of a Minnesota nickel.)

As for Berryman, Henry & that medievalish feeling, see (my hypertextual sonnet sequence)...

Joseph Harrington has been running an interesting monologue for several days on poetry and history... & I've been adding my 2 cents...

Re-reading yesterday's post, I see I made a sort of Harold-Bloomian slip. The one poem of that group which displays an oceanic sense of vastness is, of course, Hart Crane's Bridge. That's maybe one reason Crane is a favorite & was a model for me.

Thinking this morning about the long poem, Forth of July. Finished 8 years ago.

The poem was written within the context of other American long poems - Paterson, Maximus, "A", Cantos, The Bridge... and also with older epics in mind.

Maybe one of the distinctive qualities of Forth of J is how it conveys an impression of vastness. I don't think you find this so much in the other poems, despite their wealth of allusions & references. Pound writes with a kind of notation, a lightning-like shorthand. Maximus, perhaps, has something vast in quality, but Olson retains that sort of Heraclitean gnomic notation-style he gets from Pound. & Zukofsky displays a kind of incantatory music... but my poem has a different sense of space. A midwestern, Great Plains, oceanic sense...

I am sort of proud of this. The three "books" of the poem - Stubborn Grew, The Grassblade Light, July - are 3 distinct large panels, but they circle back & around each other; there's a directional flow as well. The middle book, Grassblade, is made with 7 chapters - like enormous singing frescoes, each one unique, but fitting together.

This oceanic vastness, this sort of singing joy... this is what I wanted to convey. It's a big vast happy poem. July, the 3rd book, is a sort of galactic explosion (fireworks).

*

I think at the root of what I am trying to do in poetry, over all these years, is an effort to express a special kind of spiritual joy, or joy in the spirit - and point toward its origins or foundations. It was a joy or exuberance I recognized immediately in Mandelstam, who has been like the Virgilian guide to me over decades. But it has its true origins in mysterious Christian charismatic experiences stretching back almost 40 years now.

I am trying to provide, in my poetry, both a literary-artistic model and a kind of poetic-rational-historical basis or argument or explanation or defense, for a way of understanding life. The spiritual joy has to do with a belief in the divine presence and work in the world and in history : the kind of brotherly-sisterly joy and charity which has its root in God, in Christ. A belief in the drama of earthly history as a whole : which is a kind of heroic-georgic restoration of the earth and mankind to a right relationship with God, the source, the creator. A belief in the ultimately personal, conscious and unified character of this dream we call life. In this view, God is Person, not in a sense that limits the divine to what we experience in an ordinary human sense - but rather in a way that lifts our own conception of what the personal and the Person might be to a higher, inter-personal, trans-personal, relational, spiritual and mysterious level. The fundamental work of this Person is compassionate healing, forgiveness & restoration - lifting us from our scattered narrow desires toward wholeness, the integration & healing of life as a whole. And history is the working-out of the restoration of the earth by the dramatic intervention of the "divine" in history. The confidence in this dramatic play-script of history is one of the streams feeding that sense of spiritual joy.

This is not to say, by any means, that the poem, Forth of July, is just some kind of religious tract... In fact the reader may find it difficult to square my general statements of purpose with the actuality of the poems. In my view, that's all to the good - since the work is primarily a record of artistic making, a grappling with poetry itself.

Rambling around in obscure reaches of library these days... hellenism, Greeks & Jews, Athens & Jerusalem, Alexandria, Clement of same, Simone Weil, geometry, numerology, mythology, ollyology (the ology of olive oil)... book by Marcel Detienne, Masters of truth in archaic Greece, about shift from myth to philosophy & changing role of poet... interesting comments on growth of philosophical-rational thought... something I'd never heard of, the idea that egalitarian-civic public space emerged originally from the social relations of warrior caste - how they would sit in a circle & take turns speaking from the center, planning strategy as a group of (relative) equals, managing division of spoils from the center of the circle... - this pattern contrasted with the culture of sacred kingship and mythical, divinatory shamanism in support of sacred sovereignty... Simonides as the first "modern" (professional, entrepreneurial) poet...

- basically I am always searching for my own understanding of religion & history, struggling to comprehend differing ways of seeing things... with my own biases & leanings... (for me it's a "professional" problem, as a writer)... & what all this has to do with the speech of the poet, the role of poetry in culture now... perennial riddles & problems around poetry & politics, writing, art and practical rhetoric - the poet, the philosopher, the saint, the priest, the scholar & the hobo... & the polis... & Time, Truth (aletheia), Reality... & the music of the inexpressible...

there's an interesting essay-monograph by Anne Carson, putting Simonides and Paul Celan side-by-side... title escapes me at the moment...

& speaking of poetry & politics, long ago I related a tale about Simonides in old-fashioned poem, titled "Water Mirror", here. This was published on the op-ed page of the Providence Journal, Rhode Island's newspaper of record.

The New Yorker this week... poems by Stanley Moss & Clive James... 2 old pros... something historic... better than everything else in the issue (though James Wood's review of VS Naipaul biography a closet 2nd)...

Clive James, I have to admit, did a pretty good thing in "Signing Ceremony" : Yeatsian... the wisdom of old age... the oldsters coming to terms with being, really, tourists in the world... pretty well done, despite some falling-off (obscurity?) toward the end... despite the fact that we have moved, spiritually, beyond Horace, in the last couple millennia... really...

- my reservations having to do with his Whitman put-down in recent Poetry essay... which, actually, Stanley Moss's fine poem {"Peace") demolishes pretty much in toto... no rhyme & meter there, but a tour-de-force anyway...

As a poet - speaking strictly as a poet - my pride is in my style.

& what is style, for me? the result of an effort, through the medium of this art, to pull together, to synthesize & unify all the things I care about, the things I know - what I've learned, what I remember.

(Whether such pride is well-founded or misplaced, I can't say.)

All the people & things for whom & which I give thanks.

"What thou lovest well remains...
what thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee... [E. Pound]

Reading Berryman, Collected Poems (not incl. Dream Songs).

I find him hard to read. Not just because of the baroque syntax and vocabulary, but also the nervous strain, the angst.

This doesn't mean I'm not enjoying it. Just that it's harder going than I expected. Maybe I've read the Dream Songs over the years in a superficial way.

Reading John Berryman's Collected Poems (FSG, 1989 - edited & wonderfully introduced by Chas. Thornbury, of Northfield MN). Clearly I haven't read Berryman carefully enough...

- the truth is I have held him & his whole generation at arm's length for a long time... Berryman's (& Lowell's, & etc.) personal confessional psychological edginess just too close to my own reality show... part of the reason I fled (in a literary way) to Russia, traditional home of sanity & good sense (ha ha)...

Berryman leapt from the bridge down the road a few blocks from my grandfather's house, on my grandfather's (John Ravlin's) birthday (1/7), the way his granddaughter, my cousin Juliet, leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge, on her father's (Jim Ravlin's) birthday (12/7), later that same year... (I was 19 at the time, in college, trying to be a poet - reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, Marlowe's Faust)...

2 of my younger brothers jumped off 2 other (adjacent) bridges of the Mississippi, within the same 10 blocks or so (imagine extreme cold, dark, snow... winter...) & somehow, thankfully, survived...

I'm more interested in my grandfather's generation (Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot)...

Everybody (including Berryman) ends up in Minneapolis somehow, for Recovery... (Berryman himself rescued from jail by Allen Tate, & brought to Minneapolis, ca. 1953)... & then they write their obligatory satires on the Twin Cities... Berryman, James Wright... it's a minor genre of the East Cost literati...

I remember back in the 60's, one of my closest high school friends telling me about the bardic long-beard eccentric skinny Berryman's visits to his girlfriend's family home, on Thanksgiving (in the suburb next door)... reciting poetry...

I remember seeing his book (His Toy, His Dream, His Rest) on my friend's bedroom reading desk, & him telling me this... I was in high school - Berryman too complex for me then - but not for my friend... who (long after) became a prominent physician, in Los Angeles...

I know exactly where Berryman jumped. I've been there. It's usually very cold in January, in Minneapolis. But I'd like to visit his grave, in Resurrection Cemetery (Mendota Heights, St. Paul) - across the river, by the Indian mounds.

Mendota... sounds like Beethoven (probably Sioux).

Re-reading Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks. Brilliant, radiant intellect. One of the most profound books I know. The essay on Pythagoreanism. The equations or affinities she develops between mathematical and religious concepts. Comparable notions of suffering, kenosis and mediation. The concept of number and the (trinitarian) nature of God. French clarity, & some other kind of depth and passion... this book is one of the cornerstones of civilization.

(BTW see Charles Simic's little poem in this week's New Yorker. This is a poem about kenosis.)

On a different topic : strong sense, walking around this morning, of poetry as evocative dream. When the imagination is stirred by the evocation of a feeling-scene... remote, rare, elusive, subjective, personal. Rilke comes to mind. The legend of the poet wrapped up in song-feeling-memory. Distance, absence. Adolescence. Hard for me to describe this clearly. Attendant sense of a kind of betrayal or desolation of this reality, in the constant internet chit-chat (my own, especially) about "poetry".

*

(Maybe this isn't a completely different topic. There's a passage in Weil where she briefly analyzes the concept of the Trinity, and the idea of God as Subject, the one whose name is "I am"... & how it could be that God is wholly Love and Goodness, and also the active Subject, enveloping & encompassing all subjectivity... she identifies this with early Greek philosophers - e.g. Philolaus's terse saying about the One, whose first creation is Unity, the name of which is Hestia, or the hearth-fire... Weil outlines how this agrees with the idea of the Trinity...)

With everybody scrambling for attention, with the roaring demand for notice and recognition and validation, one can get very cynical, disillusioned, discouraged... it's happened to me... but we mustn't let discouragement rule the day. It's the vast storehouse of hidden, modest acts of kindness & generosity which makes art/culture possible (along with the malice & snobbery - & the talent itself).

I wouldn't be messing with poetry today if it hadn't been for those teachers in elementary school, junior high, high school, who brought us books ("The Charge of the Light Brigade", or A Gift of Watermelon Pickle, or Baudelaire), who insisted we recite out loud in front of the class...

& the poetry exists separate & apart from the ego trips... art is a renunciation or surpassment of wilfulness & personality... it's an upsurge from somewhere else...

I think back to my early reactions to the professional literary scene, the names, the magazines, the world of it all... the main feeling on my part was timidity, self-doubt, disorientation... the sense of not-belonging, of awkwardness, of being a provincial, on the periphery, a neophyte, naive, a bumpkin, tongue-tied...

& it's a curious thing, this capability to write... the pen counterbalances the psychological barriers, the personal character issues, proceeding to a sort of metamorphosis... the writer and the person a symbiosis of slightly differing elements... (a very shady difference).

Out of the blue, amid all the usual anxieties, chores, rejection slips, & so on, I actually received an enthusiastic response to Stubborn Grew, Forth of July. Someone found a copy of the 2000 Spuyten Duyvil issue of Stubborn, in that classic arcadia, a used bookstore, & started reading, & contacted me.

I certainly hope it's the beginning of a trend. This reader sent me back to the poem myself (I know, it may seem like I've never left...). It would be nice if people began to read it for pleasure, not as a chore ("gotta get through to p. 750 tonight..."). It was meant to be a pleasure. It was a joy to write.

Forth of July has a big spacy shape, a sort of singing quality, sort of light & jolly in most places... there's a consistency to it, amid the changes & labyrinthine processes... it tries to say things which cannot be said so literally, discursively... it's a poem... & I'm trying to say that poetry offers a distinct (& necessary) harmonic recapitulation of experience... Mandelstam's slanting, mysterious imagery & courageous, hopeful spirit is the reigning presence in the background... like a boat or a building, it's built on a tripod, the two lateral parts lean inward & outward from the central part...

... so somehow art & poetry are - simultaneously - an ecstatic response to nature, sensuous experience, memory, everything... and also the sublimation of that response. Its reflection in an intellectual mirror.

I know I'm assembling old sawhorses here...

What bothers me about the Spicer/hipster/aesthete/coterie model of the poet? I dunno, maybe I'm just a bourgeois philistine mediocrity. Or my inner imaginative model of the poetry life is a long table in some cold room in St. Petersburg (Russia), where Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam & the ghost of Pushkin are sitting around reading & commenting on a group of poems sent to them by young would-be Acmeists (like myself). Which reminds me of the years of editing a little magazine, Nedge, with Janet Sullivan, a fine fiction writer & sometime poet from Alabama. Or sitting around with Edwin Honig & Sylvia Moubayed & Stuart Blazer & others in a Providence house, reading aloud & examining each other's poems. The common denominator for all these experiences is a sort of objectivity and craft-consciousness which the group process brings to responding to poems. There is something universal & objective about it, despite our many and deep disagreements over the quality of the individual poems whcih came before us. & I think some kind of similar process goes on in a lot of editors' gatherings of various magazines around the world.

What results from this, in part, is a sense of the poem as a particular & unique artistic object, which stands or falls as such; an object existing in a big world of very unaesthetic experiences and things, which has to take this non-artistic world into its account somehow. The critical process of weighing poems brings our aesthetic responses into play : but there is a kind of coldness there too, I don't know exactly how to describe it - a kind of universal measurement, which applies across the board - like blind justice.

The coterie/romantic mode, on the other hand, seems intent on building a completely aesthetic counter-world - art as (bohemian) life, in revolt against the conventions, oppressions, repressions of the everyday. This is a very seductive, appealing image - the primordial Dionysian wildness, really. It's an inspearable element of art - our subconscious, so to speak. It represents the dreamed-of liberation from Everyman's diminished, tamed and collared faculties of aesthetic response to sensuous reality...

What I'm talking about, however, when I refer to the Acmeist mode & its like, is a contrasting "Apollonian" image of art and poetry. The poem stands alone and aloof - apart from the Romantic context of being-an-artist, of the artistic life, of "everything is poetry", of aesthetic impressionism. Its inner perfection and refinement - its balance of reason and sensation - obviate the need for either reaction or revolt. The work of art as a form of balance, equilibrium, sanity, order. I suppose this is a form of classicism...

Actually these two modes are probably both necessary, and in sort of a dynamic and productive dialectic. It's not like Akhmatova & Mandelstam, for example, didn't live very arty/intellectual, refined, extremely liminal and sometimes bohemian lives. But the process of responding to individual poems is a craft process - this is something the Acmeists continued to assert. The poem then - through the sifting of critical objectivity - & somewhat counter-intuitively - becomes a free-standing, & free, aesthetic object, a sort of microcosm. & this process of craft and craft-mastery lends poetry that distinction, that Pushkinian social dignity, independence and authority. The kind of dignity we recognize in a musician who has mastered not only the instrument, but the music and the traditions of his or her fellow artists. This is something we ought to strive toward in poetry as well. The craft-memory of artistic tradition is essential to cultural-historical memory in general - which, in turn, is essential to civilization.

(I was reminded of this last night, while playing jug band music with Jim Chapin and the KC Moaners, at a fundraiser auction for a local community garden - a total joy. & an honor to play with Jim, who is an authentic master of blues & country music (he was featured on the King Biscuit Hour radio show in Helena Ark. this fall).)

& we have to remember that, in the U.S., there are different schools, tribes, almost dialects of poetry. & this sort of critical process goes on in various distinct contexts & social patterns. & meanwhile the polemics & the politics go raging & burbling, inconsequentially & phantasmally, on, from top to bottom of the scale of notoriety & sway - from Helen Vendler down to me.

John "Coffee" Latta carries on with his grand one-man 12-bar table-talkin'... the emphasis here always on the thick sensuous texture & partic'lars of every thing every day... & as the fountainhead of art & poetry...

Now today on Jack Spicer's modus non operandi... which I find very appealing, but I'm just not so social in that way... & I tend to think, as I read this, in a contrary direction... that is, for every Ben Jonson & his bibulous coterie, there is a lone obsessed Milton, working out her heavy, complicated, hard-to-berth design... the idea that underneath a Shakespeare play there is a kind of implicit imaginative scaffolding, a guiding cluster of themes, Mandelstam's conductor's baton... the reigning idea, the master plan, the builder's dream... slow to develop, hard to find, creating external situations for the said laboring poet which are more like mistaken illusions or social camouflage, than definite arty "scenes"...

& then the bohemian life represented by Rimbaud & Spicer & all, well, perhaps it's like two necessary poles of art-making... hot & cold, compagnevole & solitary...

I found this essay by Camille Paglia very interesting, & it sent me to look for her anthology (guess I'm one of the few people in America who hasn't read it). Of course I've heard of Paglia, but never actually read anything she'd written.

She strikes me - from a quick scan of this essay, anyway - as a sharp-eyed reader, with high standards for the deployment of literary language, an independent mind. She also strikes me as a kind of populist - which is great in some ways, but in others, not so great. Seems like there is a danger, with criticism, of making narrow and absolute judgements about what poetry is or should be.

Poetry happens on a variety of wave-lengths, and a lot depends on what direction the poet is taking it, or it is taking the poet... what is the context, what are the literary aims, what is the particular application? (Contra Paglia, for example, poetry can overlap with philosophy.) Poetry is flexible, it's not just one thing - it doesn't all or always fit the common denominator of anthology-material.

But she's right to focus on this very issue of the ordinary reader. I'm surprised she didn't like Auden's famous "Musee des Beaux Arts". Have to go back & compare the poem to her take on it.

John Latta points today toward what looks like an interesting book in the Paterson vein.

On the radio in the car yesterday, I caught part of an interview with Sebastian Horsley, whom I'd never heard of, but I see (from the Wikipedia entry) is quite the dandy, child of wealth, rake & attention-getter.

Anyway, he was going on in a sort of exaggerated manner, praising famous writers while simultaneously pouring contempt on poetry, bookishness, the unlived life, etc. One of his heros is Byron - not Byron the writer, but Byron the bohemian bon vivant. He insisted that the real writers are bold high-livers, risk-takers, unconventional taboo-breakers, artists of living, people who thrive on rich, rare, edgy and exciting personal experiences, which is the only source of good writing.

Maybe he's a character in a Borges story.

It occurred to me that this person does not really understand the psychology of reading, and its relation to writing. For serious readers, the adventure began in childhood - when books were not a substitute for living, but an integral part - its light, its flavor, its feeling.

Later on, things change : the silence of books and libraries really do pose a sort of counter-world to the noise of the everyday, the active, grown-up life. But the secret lure of the strange text remains, for some of us, the most interesting adventure.

Barack Obama, President-elect. Maybe we should have seen it coming : ever notice how Kenyans tend to win races?

Workin' on some poems, sending them out.

Hope to get back to chit-chat here one of these days.

There are two great pitfalls, two great scourges, the Scylla and Charybdis of contemporary poetry. On the one hand, talking down to the general reader (through condescension, facile suavity, or flattery). On the other hand, talking only to fellow poets (the coteries, the cults, the academies). Both of these extremes are, basically, shortcomings of style, and both have a powerful deleterious effect on the general literary climate.

Good poetry somehow discovers the middle path (through the Gates of Wrath).

Reading poetry of Delmore Schwartz. I've read Humboldt's Gift, I may have even started the James Atlas bio (after reading the Bellow novel); but never read the poetry.

He's good. I've missed a lot.

Loitering still amongst Berryman & his pals (Lowell, Jarrell, Schwartz...).

Everybody should read Jarrell's essay "The Age of Criticism", if they haven't. Now! Foretells, way in advance, the Coming of the Theorists, describes the Pomposity and Myopia of Critics (they feel themselves a little Greater than the rest, because they only read The Great), the Laziness & Lemming-ness of the rest of us (non)Readers... how the good Critic is basically a good reader, an explorer of the un-touted, and someone prepared to stick his or her neck out, rather than follow safely along after what others say... Jarrell is gently biting & hilarious on all this, I can't do it justice here.

Like his poems & Rilke translations, too.

Re-reading memoir by Eileen Simpson, Poets in their Youth - her life with onetime husband John Berryman, experiences with other poets, novelists & critics (Lowell, Jean Stafford, Schwartz, Blackmur, many others). Got me going back to Berryman's reviews & essays.

Want to read further & more diligently... feel the need to re-think, re-experience the whole background & history. Berryman's omnibus review from 1948, "Waiting for the end, boys", is fascinating. Lowell & Berryman had worked so hard to master the tradition, the past poetries (as they knew them). They had so much poetry, by so many poets, memorized. Berryman's review very acute, very witty.

Reading "The Kid", by Conrad Aiken. Poem in several sections, a kind of "American myth" poem. Interesting to me in its affinities with Crane's Bridge, and its focus on William Blacksone, the "maverick" early settler, preacher, scholar, orchardist (Boston and Rhode Island). A lot of WB in my poems. The epigraph to "The Lost Notebooks" (opening chapter of Grassblade Light) is from Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano :

"– "Talking of corpses," – the Consul poured himself another whiskey and was signing a chit book with a somewhat steadier hand while Yvonne sauntered toward the door –"personally I'd like to be buried next to William Blackstone –" He pushed the book back for Fernando, to whom mercifully he had not attempted to introduce her. "The man who went to live among the Indians. You know who he was, of course?" The Consul stood half toward her, doubtfully regarding this new drink he had not picked up."

I found out later that Lowry had been a student of Aiken's.

Speaking of Acmeism... here's HG Poetics in Russian -

A poet's special pleading only goes so far. Poems of necessity make their way in the world completely on their own : their making is both counter-intuitive and intuitive, their reception by the public is no different.

Everybody has a unique personality, carries around their own baggage. Maybe I identify my own obsessions too directly with those of the public world... maybe I need some distance & objectivity.

- who knows. It's complex & intuitive (this matter of creativity). The mind (or the whole person, the soul) leaps ahead of itself, to take the place it somehow (instinctively, intuitively) senses is out there, waiting : the opportunity, the open door.

The "Acmeists" aimed for their own sort of public speech or craft, a certain "classical" worldliness. I suppose it's laughable to think of me & my writing in these terms. But in relation to the "American Acmeism" proto-essay posted here a few days ago, I thought of this poem from Dove Street, also posted here quite a while back : "Fragment from Purgatory".

What's interesting is that the poem addresses, sort of allegorically, what I called the authoritarianism of the Eliot/Pound strain (they are the two figures on the erratic ship), as well as the New-World ideal of freedom. Dante shows up here, and also Whitman, in the hobo figure at the end - who quotes a poem by Edwin Honig ("Freedom builds within/or breaks your bones" - from his poem "Cuba in Mind"). So here in this poem are the 2 ends of the spectrum I sketched out in the Acmeism essay (with say Eliot and Crane at either pole).

But I'm realizing lately that a poet has to step out and speak to the crowd. Theorizing and explaining and meditating and experimenting are necessary but not sufficient.

How this happens, though, is very complicated... since we live in a noisy age of self-promotion and gimmickry, of surfaces, not depths, sensations, not memory or knowledge. In the old days a poet like Yeats, for example (or Pound), would get up on their soap-box and declaim in the old bardic way... but nowadays maybe the poet has to be a master of quiet and silence... "slow poetry" of a sort... to speak clearly, yet neither mumble nor shout...

Posted a comment to William Logan's latest piece on Hart Crane, at Poetry Foundation website.

While I was in Sugar Hill, NH (literally just down the hill from Robert Frost's place), I read Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" for the first time. It took a while to get into it, but once I did, it was a very good read...

- reminded me of the "Indian" sections of Crane's The Bridge. I mean Crane must have been aware of what Longfellow had done. Both poems are narratives, with beginning middle end (unlike Pound, WCW, Olson). Not really fair here to Pound, WCW, Olson... but, even though all three actually have these 3 parts (beg, mid, end), the parts are overwhelmed (unlike in Crane or Longfellow) by the melodrama of the (Whitmanian-Dantean) speaker-poet... Crane & Longfellow, in this regard, are closer to Chaucer, the Ur-Poet...

Longfellow was actually in touch with an Ojibwa poet at the time of writing - Kah-ge-gah-bowh or George Copway. "Song of Hiawatha" publ. in 1855 - same year as Song of Myself. Longfellow went to meet Whitman in Camden NJ, in 1876 (when Longfellow was 75). Something interesting could be done with the "binary" relation between the poetry of these two men. Whitman treated the wounded soldiers during Civil War; Longfellow's son was wounded in same. (Longfellow's wife died, in harrowing circumstances (her dress caught fire), 3 months after the war began.) The meeting between Longfellow & Whitman. Link between 19th & 20th cent. Amer. poetry. The complementarity of the two. The resolution of dualities. (With Poe as 3rd party, witness au contraire, devil's advocate.)

Balance Longfellow's acute erudition (ie. the amazing parallel between Ojibwa song and Finnish Kalevala), with Whitman's acute ear for the colloquial, the actual... & note Hart Crane's amalgam of all three (Longfellow, Whitman, Poe). (Marianne Moore said she liked Crane, in part because he was so erudite...)

My mother had her first drink in the Longfellow house in Portland, Maine (she was 13 yrs old; the drink was sherry). (It was a momentous occasion, since my maternal grandparents were both teetotallers.) She was best friends, & near next-door neighbors at the time, with Longfellow's great-granddaughter (whose grandmother was the famous "Laughing Allegra") - both families lived along River Road, in Minneapolis - about 3 blocks from where John Berryman jumped to his death.

Thus my mother tagged along once on the Longfellow family summer vacation to the Maine coast.

My father - a fairly unpoetic fellow, in some (not all) respects - used to recite bits of Longfellow ("By the shores of Gitchee Gumee..." or "This is the forest primeval"...) - Longfellow was required reading in his day. Besides which, a replica of the Longfellow House (from Cambridge Mass.) was built near the celebrated Minnehaha Falls, down the road... & many towns & lakes in Minnesota are named after people & places in Longfellow's famous poem.

Actually, reading the well-researched, etymologically-subtle "Song of Hiawatha", I was reminded of parts of In RI, full of Narragansett vocabulary. & both Hiawatha and Forth of July owe a debt to the Finnish epic, the Kalevala...

Up in NH was also reading Charles Mann's very interesting best-seller, 1491. Had a curious effect on me... speaking of Columbus Day... maybe someday Crane's Bridge will be understood as a sort of bridge (one among many) between old (Eurocentric) civilization, & yet-to-be-understood or recognized "prehistory" of New World... there are also a lot of "premonitions" in my poetry in this regard... things I wrote, the significance of which I didn't understand completely... ie. the theme of clay, the peacepipe (calumet - Pipestone, MN)... "Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay" (ie., the peacepipe) -

Like this bit from July (by way of Herodotus, Longfellow, Mark Twain, & David Treuer) -

 The secret of the Upper Midwest   under
 the cold winter snow   and by the lakes of summer
 is a cozy   gemutlichkeit   familial   merciful
 and so I remember your red nose,

  
 Grandfather   today   on Epiphany (your
 birthday)   how you leaned over the Christmas
 fireplace   stiffly (past 70 years)   to stir the sparks
 of last year's evergreen   as the colored rays

  
 of the little lights   played   in your snowy hair
 and as the ghost of Mary Negus   dressed
 bright as a cardinal   drops deeper reds
 (Ethiopian   rubies and   sealed carnelians)

  
 across the snow   and as   the laughter of Florence
 Ainsworth   penetrates   like Minnehaha
 or mouth of Nile   through the endless   ach-ach
 peace pipesmoke   of Edward S.   (a censer-

  
 rifle)   and as the children gather by your feet
 they are ghostly now   as these ghosts gathering
 in my lines   when the front rolls in   like a wraith
 from the southwest   spreading a wide fan

  
 of shadows and rain   over the prairie
 maybe you'd be by the upstairs   window,
 looking out   through the big black bars
 of the oak tree   toward the gash   of the river

  
 moving there, hidden   between the steep slopes
 and Dad will get up   and put down the paper
 (ROOSEVELT SPEAKS TONIGHT)   where piano
 music   curls on the bench   and as rain   pulses

  
 down   and the storm finally breaks   maybe
 you'll see the strange   incandescence   the
 last light   burning through beneath
 the storm and   your face like a
  
 smaller star,   leaning there
 against the   clear pane –

    
              *

  
 Gemutlichkeit or no   it's the story of a star
 I'm just a poor   wayfaring stranger
 and   the people don't dream; they work
 a long, long way   from my home

  
 active, energetic, prosperous, practical
 the happy result is manifest all around in
 the substantial outside aspect of things,
 and the suggestions of wholesome life

  
 (but Marion City is an exception.
 Marion City has gone backward in
 a most unaccountable way.  Doubtless
 Marion City was too near to Quincy.)

  
 like Henry Clay Dean   if the ground had been
 sodded with greenbacks   scarecrow Dean
 in foxy shoes, down at the heels, socks of odd
 colors, relics of antiquity   a world too short

  
 small, stiff-brimmed soldier-cap hung on the
 corner of the bump of   a just audible ripple
 of merriment (forearm unprotected) which swept
 the sea of faces like   the wash of a wave

  
 and now the stranger stepped back one pace
 nobody listening, everybody laughing and
 whispering   (along here, somewhere
 on a black night   ran some exceedingly

  
 narrow and intricate island chutes
 by aid of the electric light.  Behind was
 solid blackness – a crackless bank of
 it   ahead   a narrow elbow of water, curving

  
 between dense walls of foliage   and here
 every individual leaf and every individual ripple
 stood out   flooded with a glare as of noonday)
 passed Prairie du Chien   after some hours

  
 progress   through varied and beautiful scenery
 reached La Crosse.  We noticed that above Dubuque
 the water of the Mississippi was olive-green
 rich and beautiful and semitransparent,
  
 with the sun on it.  And I remember Muscatine
 they use the broad smooth river as a canvas
 and painted on it every imaginable dream   it is
 the true Sunset Land   so good a right to the name.

  
 Go upstream   deeper into the green caverns
 as in all these Upper-River towns   the majestic
 bluffs   this region is new   blanketed with
 Indian tales and traditions   Draco

  
 and Romeo and Juliet of   White Bear Lake
 and the bear caught her   she and the blanket
 you get yourself all worked up about the
 blanket   snowed under   like a star in a Kali-

  
 black stoneboat   pivoting   he began life poor
 and without education   on the curbstone
 with his book   unconscious of the tramp of
 passing crowds   to let a dray pass

  
 unobstructed   there are many soothsayers
 in Scythia   but the class of effeminate persons
 called "Enarees"   use a different method
 take a piece of the inner bark of the lime-tree

  
 which they say was taught them by Aphrodite
 and cut it into three pieces   which they keep
 twisting and untwisting round their fingers
 as they prophesy when the king of Scythia

 
 falls sick   Lincoln had known only this quiet house
 he was six when his sister Irma flew in the door
 with the white man she announced   she was
 going to marry   "Later on"   Sioux

  
 Lincoln bolts   swoops   slams   out of the house.
 Until the unholy train comes tearing along
 ripping the sacred solitude to rags
 the locomotive is in sight from the deck

  
 of the steamboat   his clothes differed in no respect
 from a "wharf-rat's"   except they were raggeder
 they retreated to other city haunts in shame
 since it was launched in Minneapolis on May 29, 1935

  
 Lester and Vera approached the train unnoticed
 they boarded the broken steps of the sleeper car
 the errant lights of the yard bosses sprayed the
 side (their rusted hulk star-manger   Hiawatha)


      
                                       1.6.99

If you read Gibbon or any of the later historians on the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages, and set them beside Dante's recapitulation of ancient and medieval culture, you realize very clearly that Dante is an upstart. His Divine Empire rooted in Rome is a dream, a fantasy, an excess, a surplus. That's perhaps why Blake, another excessive surplus dreamer, illustrated Dante. In fact all the great poets throw themselves into this liminal region of dream, imagination, irreality. Poetry itself is unreal, surplus : consider the pop-culture image of "poet" in America.

The Bible is surplus. The prophets were surplus. God Himself/Herself is surplus, excess, unreal.

Only, when you begin to think about the underlying, basic actuality of time and mortality, then what is real and what is unreal, what is surplus and what is necessity, tend to get switched around... a "transvaluation of values" (so to speak). The scandal of Resurrection implies the funhouse mirror of reality as a whole, in general...

One of the Church Fathers wrote, "I believe because it is absurd"... or something like that...

Heading up to the woods for a couple weeks. Be back around Columbus Day. So long, friends -

So I finished the Divina Commedia last night (in what I think is the very fine Mark Musa translation). Dante gives off a sort of M.C. Escher effect : an oscillation, due to the blending of fact and imagination. Is this Paradisal scene for real? No, it's "virtual", it's a pageant; but every element is grounded in Dante's sense of (ideal, philosophical, yet also ultimate) truth; thus the representative, verbal order impinges on "physical" actuality - the surreal order of the prophetic Word... so there's a wavering back and forth, actually a philosophical test of the reader's own beliefs and reasoning...

This passage struck me - Paradiso XXVII, lines 118-120, where Beatrice is beginning to explain the superfast sphere of the Primo Mobile, the surrounding ball of "light" of God's making which encompasses all creation :

"How time can hide its roots in this sphere's vase
and show its leaves stemming through all the rest,
should now be clear to your intelligence."

- it reminded me of the opening stanza of my own long poem, Stubborn Grew -

Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay.
A spring breeze flows through the branches on the terrace.
The city below flutters and flaps, roars
and drones like a resurrected bumblebee.

There is a lot in Stubborn, and Forth of July as a whole, about clay and pottery wheels (partly because my mother was quite a potter while I was growing up). The wheel of time spins through the clay, and the lips of poetry spin their own complementary vortex.

... then again, of course, poetry isn't just an arty game of echoes. But I'm talking about some of the impulses that inform my obsessed engagement with it...

Have been reading Divine Comedy in English, Mark Musa translation. The first time I've gone steadily through it - have tried dutifully in the past to read it in Italian (without much success), have read Singleton & Mandelbaum translations, but usually end up slowing down so much I lose the thread. It's going better this time, even though when I picked up this book (Portable Dante) I thought it was the Laurence Binyon version, which I really wanted to read...

Going through it steadily, you see how each part (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) really builds in momentum and intensity... you also recognize the slow stretches, the not-so-successful passages... it seems (for me anyway) to humanize the great Maestro - you sense him working out the compositional problems... (though I know I'm missing most of the Italian subtleties).

A little bulb went on as I was somewhere in Paradiso last night... felt I was more aware for a moment of the inventive, image-making, image-shaping activity going on... and it reminded me of two things : first, my initial sudden attraction for a book of Mandelstam poems in translation which I came upon in a bookstore back in '78 or so - and what it was that attracted me : the startling-mysterious images; second, a childhood memory of how strong the attraction was I felt for toys, artworks, small objects, toy soldiers... the visceral delight I took in seeing such things...

So these thoughts were going through my mind, and it made me think of another two things - a couple principles of Acmeism (in the Gumilev & Mandelstam version, respectively) : the emphasis on imaginative clarity, clarity of vision; and secondly the emphasis on the continuity of poetic tradition. And the thought occurred to me that perhaps one could say that both of these principles have some unconscious roots in that childhood fascination with both making (invention) and perceiving adorable objects, toys... thus our good poems are inevitably a response to the self-contained radiance, the toy-like mana, of previous poems, of models... and that poetry participates (with the other arts) in this process of active imaginative invention and shaping of images and meanings, forming models of beauty meant to have some kind of equivalence or relationship with the order & beauty we encounter in nature and experience...

So to get back to my wacky crusade, an "American Acmeism" would recognize that poetry does not always re-invent the wheel by simply transcribing anecdotes of individual experience; rather it's always engaged with these charismatic models (other poems), with the sound of poetry as some kind of organic, synthetic entity in its own right, with its own living aura and tradition... that poems emerge in a context of other words, other sounds, other poets... As that paramount toy-maker Wallace Stevens put it,

"Perhaps
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master."

Some follow-up to previous post...

"Acmeism"... it's not the specifics of the Russian phenomenon that interest me, it's the indications of a general stance and impulse. It would be silly to try to replicate or import "Russian Acmeism" per se (& I'm sure many would find previous essay silly on the face of it).

The combination of theory and practice - ie., to be more precise, the example of living poetry culture - represented by Mandelstam & co. is what draws me.

And the key thing is that I agree with Wallace Stevens's & Hart Crane's basic position (standing on the shoulders of Whitman, Melville, Emerson and Dickinson) that "America" offers an appropriate place for poetry to spring up. Poetry can "originate" here just as well as anywhere else. This is slightly different from the positions of Eliot and Pound, who were under the influence & shadow of Eurocentric and expatriate Henry James. Pound's conflicted-aggressive attitude marks him as an "upstart colonial" (with the emphasis on colonial) - paradoxically, he remains stuck in that attitude of (rebellious) epigone of James.

I know this sounds like I'm working out "positions" which became antiquated decades ago! & the reason for that is that, as I stated in the essay, I feel myself between Eliot and Crane. My "religion" is not Romantic-transcendentalist (Crane), neither is it exactly "medieval-traditionalist" (Eliot) : it's somewhere in between. My "America" is not exactly nationalist, nor purely imaginary (ideal); it has roots in colonial New England, in Native America, and in Europe.

In this regard, Mandelstam and Akhmatova (& Brodsky also, to some extent), by giving an example of how a poet can be both Russian and global (part of "world culture"), offer me a slightly different model for an impulse they share with Pound and Eliot (that is, the impulse to participate in "European poetry" as an organism, a unitary phenomenon). And this difference, for me, makes it possible to envision a kind of middle way between the Americanists and the world-culture expatriates.

I'm going on like this (oddly enough) because I believe that what a poet does can't simply be equated with or reduced to his or her literary genealogy. It can't even be reduced to "art" (in its Poe/Baudelairean Symbolist-Modernist formations). It's something more distinctive, autochthonous, uncanny, and "contemporary" (Now). So I'm offering here a sort of imaginary "genealogy" for the relatively sui generis activity of my own poetry-making.

AMERICAN ACMEISM : AN IMPROVISATION


... & so what do I mean exactly by "American Acmeism"? Here are some free-form disorganized top-of-the-head answers to that question.

1

What is/was Acmeism? The Acmeists were a small informal group of mostly St. Petersburg poets in pre-Revolutionary Russia, led by Nikolai Gumilev, and expounded/expanded-upon in a couple of interesting essays by Osip Mandelstam. There's a brief Wikipedia entry here. The Acmeists emphasized craft, clarity, neo-classicism, respect for history and cultural tradition, a suspicion of mysticism and vague other-worldliness (Symbolism), as well as of radical nihilism or a-historicism (as in some flavors of Futurism).

Mandelstam built a very baroque and imaginative superstructure on this simple platform, which involved both a "longing for world culture" and a kind of Bergsonian or Nietzschean enthusiasm for ana-chronism, the Eternal Return, a Renaissance-like sense of the infinite possibility of renewal through ancient texts and poets (Ovid, Villon, Dante...).

Mandelstam's this-world optimism, his gusto for reviving the Classic - a kind of millennialist desire for a new Golden Age - can be usefully compared to the "New America" enthusiasm of Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, & in particular the Hart Crane of The Bridge : this was a neo-classicism with a folk-America, nationalist strain, a very deliberate counter to TS Eliot's Anglophile, reactionary & disillusioned stance. However, at least in Crane's case, it was also different from the radicalism of some of the more "futurist" moderns like Pound, Stein, WC Williams. Crane, as with Stevens, put less weight on the "experimental" surface of style.

2

Lots of things have changed since the heady days of the early 20th century; in fact the entire "climate of reception" of today, and literary culture as a whole, might be fairly unrecognizable to those antique Twenties scriptonauts.

But history in the larger view is still history; Reality with a capital R is still Reality, however mysterious; and some of the underlying philosophical and artistic ground remains similar to what it was in those days, if not exactly the same. And if history and Reality are relatively unchanged benchmarks, then it would, I think, be possible to reconstruct, reconfigure, and restore, in some ways, an Acmeist literary approach.

In other words, if I call myself an Acmeist, what do I wish this to mean? What would "my Acmeism" be?

An American Acmeism - my Acmeism - would be a name, for one thing, for a certain set of general beliefs about nature, culture, art, poetry, history, religion... a working philosophy, a pragmatics. We live in a polyvalent and polyvocal world, where poetry means different things to different people - and in many cases, poetry involves a reflection of very diverse and variant worldviews and ideologies.

For me, anyway, this notion of "worldview" is important, because I think poets participate in the broader activity of culture-making. Nothing happens in a vacuum; art is original because it is aware of its conditions and the context of its making - it is, actually, the process of reflecting, and reflecting on, those conditions.

Basically, the model of Russian Acmeism appeals to me, because in my reading of Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and others who followed them (such as Joseph Brodsky), I find a harmony between basic cultural-historical attitudes, artistic allegiances, and the artworks themselves. In other words, the worldview and the poetry mutually support and guarantee one another; the "ideas" are manifested and "proven" in the works.

Scholars (& Russians!) might not find my reception of these writers to be sufficiently critical; but then, to be critical is their calling and business. For me, these writers serve as benchmarks, models and inspiration. Indeed, it is Mandelstam's "longing for world culture", and the poetic models he derives from that longing, which in turn provide a new lens for perceiving the weights and values of American poetry - the affinities and differences which impinge on the understanding of our own (American) cultural history and poetic developments (for example, the affinities and differences between the "classicism" of Frost and Crane and H.D., and the visions and allegiances of Akhmatova and Mandelstam).

3

In thinking about the appeal which M's "longing" has for me, I am brought unavoidably to certain philosophical or religious underpinnings of my own - my own "worldview". But I hesitate to dilute or debase the concepts themselves, by way of a glib summary, a reduction to tags and slogans.

So in sketching this out, I want to say that I seem to hold two contrary attitudes in suspension. Let's say that Eliot and [Crane/Stevens/Joyce] stand as figures for the two ends of this spectrum.

On the "Eliot" end, I believe in a supreme order or logos in-forming Time, Nature and History : what Mandelstam referred to, obliquely, as "the Christian calendar". History itself is a story : incarnational, actual, irrevocable, ineluctable. As such, the vocation of Israel, and the Christian Incarnation and Redemption - no matter how confused and in the dark we may be about their "final" meaning(s) - are the pivotal points of reference for human knowledge and experience.

This is a cultural order, which immediately contextualizes the meaning of more local or national historical events and artistic developments. Culture as such fuses and transmutes the ordinary and "natural" growth of poetic making and artistic activity. This is one way of representing M's "longing for world culture", his (very Petersburgian) desire to unite Russian destiny with European and world culture as a whole. Eliot, in this sense, represents a somewhat similar impulse in relation to the culture of the United States, though their personalities and underlying vision of things could hardly be more different.

Then, on the (so-to-speak) "Crane/Stevens/Joyce" end of my view of things, stands the role of the poet as original maker, as Orphic-Romantic visionary. Here the poet (and reader) is a free and independent interpreter of the given : that is of the historical given, of the script of history. Nothing means anything without interpretation : I take very seriously the Gospel statement that "the Truth shall make you free". There is a playful spiritual optimism lurking in these three writers, a whiff of absolute freedom - something that was snuffed out in Eliot and Pound, as a consequence (or a symptom) of their authoritarianism and reactionary world-weariness (post-WW I). This optimism is also in Mandelstam and Akhmatova (despite her grief-filled, elegiac sensibility) : a spirit of confidence and endurance. There is no poetry at all without this point of absolute, self-sufficient, spiritual originality : only for me this is complicated by an underlying "Trinitarian" understanding of the human person (that is, we are, in the most basic sense, the children of God : the living images of God : and we depend on the "Spirit of the Creator" in the very substance of our being). So it's a "relational" notion - not a Renaissance-ubermensch-Romantic idea - of creative originality. This is why, in my mind at least, I situate myself spiritually between Eliot and Crane/Stevens/Joyce.

4

So what would American Acmeism be about, besides representing a sort of boilerplate for my own poetry? It would be about re-reading and re-valuing the American poetic inheritance in the light of its affinities with the Russian Acmeists and their own allegiances (to world culture, to Hellenism, to historical memory). It would read Stevens' celebrations of this-world and of poetry itself ("the poetry of life"; "poetry is the sanction of life"; etc.) in the light of Acmeist culture-making. It would hear Mandelstam in Frost's line about "one could do worse than be a good Greek"; it would read M's "domestic Hellenism" in Crane's renovation of Pindar. It would see the devotion to craft and the spiritual optimism of the Acmeist ethos in some of the early American modernists. And these readings, in turn, would provide a new ground for understanding where we are in American poetry now. It would go to the neo-Aristotelianism of the Chicago Critics, and find affinities with Gumilev's concept of the poem as a dramatic-cultural act (as opposed to simply a "verbal construct", in the too-familiar terms of the Russ. Formalists and the New Critics and the Language Poets and the post-structuralists etc.). In Aristotelian fashion, it would re-think "form" as something far deeper and more elusive than the surface elements of meter, rhyme or stanzaic design : something much more closely interfused with both "meaning" and "plot".

The consequences of these basic orientations call for much more, and more imaginative, exploration : here I'm just re-formulating and restating ideas the readers of this blog have encountered before. But as they well know, I never tire of re-affirming my allegiance to those famous Petersburgians.

(p.s. I've added this post over at the Essays.)

Have been revising the previews of my books over at Lulu.
You can buy these cute little books there, or download them for $2.50.

I have been very focused on writing these poems for the last 20 yrs or so, to the exclusion of much else. I work in a library and I try to keep my obligations to a minimum, so I have time to write. This doesn't guarantee anything, of course. But I'm happy with my work. My poems are quiet and simple, outside the mainstream, unknown, building their own virtual America, containing the vast (midwest) and the minuscule (Rhode Island). A sort of Byzantine-American Acmeism - an answer to the historical-aesthetic worlds of Pound and Eliot and Williams and Stevens and Frost and all, by way of Crane and Mandelstam and Berryman, along with myself. Simple, quiet and original.

Doing some reading in Alexandrian "bucolic" poetry - Theocritus et al., & Virgil's Eclogues. Also interesting study, Pipes of Pan, by Thos. Hubbard, on "intertextuality" in pastoral poetry.

The librarian-poets of Alexandria. Bookish scholars transposing epic to something less grand, more scribal and allusive. "Bucolic" poetry as not so much about rural vs. urban or nostalgia for the countryside, as allegories of actual poets' rivalries, their shared (intertextual, allusive) meanings. The contests of the "shepherds".

Sometimes I read things like this through the lens of what I've already written. Somebody someday might see Forth of July through an "Alexandrian" lens. Grassblade Light, the middle book, might be set beside Theocritus' 1st Idyll, about the Adonis-like dead shepherd, Daphnis, and the "Sicilian songs" sung by the rural shepherds. Grassblade enacts a sort of "ghost dance"/Ojibwa/shamanic resurrection ceremony for "dead shepherds" Hart Crane and John Berryman (along with the mysterious Juliet). It transposes its own "epic" narrative into a series of "songs", lyrics, "dream songs". And it's modeled, structurally, on a castle built by Emperor Frederick II, the ruler of the Kingdom of Sicily (Castel del Monte).

I guess it's a stretch. But nevertheless its one of the ways those who should be reading me could read me!

Whole lot of quietude here at HG Poetics. Shifting gears, I guess.

In my 40-yr weird trip making poems, I seem to have bumped against a few solid corners :

1. Poets are born not made. You either have it or you don't. Nevertheless, it takes effort.

2. I want to write for readers and the public, not for other poets. I don't like coteries. It's not a group project. Poems are not composed by committee. (Truth and beauty are elusive, unusual.) Nevertheless, in my writing, I get into conversations with distant or deceased poets. (I suppose this could happen with contemporary, living poets, too... but it hasn't yet, as far as I know. On 2nd thought, I guess I was in conversation with the NY School poets back in the late 60s & early 70s. It was a one-way conversation - ie., imitation.)

3. The literary world is a consequence of the fact that poetry exists, not the other way around. In other words, the labors of lit-biz do not produce poetry; they are a commentary on it.

4. My own motives and ambitions in making poetry are quite mysterious, obscure - especially to me.

Very sorry to hear that Reginald Shepherd passed away.

Picked up a booksale copy of Elizabeth Bishop's Questions of Travel, for one dollar. Reading it today with much delight.

Though often playing with "forms" (sestinas, ballads, double sonnets...), she never comes across as "formal", or a formalist. Too much sly humor, too much experience, pathos, actuality, perception, fellow-feeling... nothing academic about it.

Been kind of a drought here at the ol' blog. I seem to be undergoing mild sea-change, in approach to writing, poetry, etc. Thinking a little differently, imagining differently. It began after finishing Fontegaia series, a couple months ago. Then the Colrain Conference. & working on shorter poems.

Perhaps those long-poem projects, & all their dense subject-matter & background reading etc., resolved the question of style for me. & also set in place a certain attitude or stance toward the current literary environment. Gave me a sort of context (if only subjective).

Now I'm afloat in a new framework... new/old issues surfacing, questions coming into play. Memories, too. I'm sort of inching along with it. Not as ready as before to issue pronunciamentos.

Reading Leopardi again, an interest from college days. In Italian, he's on a par with Keats (in the poetry) & Coleridge (in the criticism). Found a copy of an old aquamarine blue paperback translation by Iris Origo & John Heath-Stubbs, of prose & poetry, which I used to own 30 yrs ago. Also reading an interesting monograph by G. Singh (Leopardi and the Theory of Poetry). Curious whether there's any Leopardi background in Wallace Stevens.

Not much news here. Reading by & about Giacomo Leopardi. Writing some short poems.