From the days of John...

From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force. Pondering this passage from the Gospels (here, Matthew 11:12). Jesus is eulogizing John.

"From the days of John until now..." I understand this as making a distinction between two different time-periods, one being under the spiritual "authority" of John & all the prophets (since "John is Elijah who is to come"), and the other under the authority of the Son of Man (Jesus). Two distinct eras of the spirit of God. Now = where the person of Jesus is manifest.

"... & men of violence take it by force." This is a deep & resonant saying. Interpreted & misinterpreted again & again....

How do I read it today? Well, have been reading a fascinating old book (1940s) by Julian Morgenstern, The ark, the ephod and the "tent of meeting". Studying & speculating on the affinities between the ark, the Temple, and very ancient tribal war-gods and their symbols - their temples, their cult objects. The god of the clan & the tribe was above all a divine defender of the tribe : through prayer & supplication & magic & divination, the tribal priest-leader would call upon the god in the ark (or tent, or temple) to come to their aid in battle.

In other words, men projected their sense of actuality, of truth, of fate, onto their own symbol of divine authority & sanction. And these religious projections would in turn be ratified and codified by force, by shamanistic magic. Man's own alienated powers were projected onto their shared symbolic totems.

I don't see this as pure false consciousness & mystification : I see it as archaic humanity's efforts to grasp and control a bewildering and violent & chaotic & dangerous world. At the same time, I think it must be recognized as also a reflection of that violence - it is suffused with force. & I identify this dimension in part with what Jesus is pointing toward in this passage.

We are talking about very basic background or foundations of human civilization, I guess. And there are no hard & fast distinctions or divides - it's more like a moral/ethical continuum. What I mean is there is a gradual change from conceiving the divine solely in terms of power, force & violent control, and conceiving the divine in terms of mercy, mutual understanding, reason, compassion, kindness... peacemaking. & we can see this change emerging in the Decalogue (the 10 Commandments). Necessity is the mother of invention.... & when the Hebrews emerged from servitude in Egypt, it was the legal-political wisdom of Moses which adapted ancient forms of tribal worship, cult & divination toward the beginnings of a notion of the divine as universal moral law.

So when Jesus speaks of "from the days of John", and the "kingdom of God" formerly coming with violence, he is pointing, it seems to me, toward a basic, fundamental re-orientation : a recognition that in God there is no sanction for force & violence : that force & violence and arbitrary rule actually have nothing to do with those ethical strata & dimensions of life which are part of the "kingdom" (love, mercy, kindness, compassion, justice, peace, happiness, hope, joy...). "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God."

This dimension I see as the "underside" of authoritative religion... the Mary-Magdalen-at-the-Sepulchre side... the "poetry" side... & there are a lot of these themes running through my scribblings...

R.I.P. (Cesar Vallejo, Abraham Lincoln)

(& some background on them in July)

Lanthanum 8.1

1

Just a few stray notes eddy from the 88
(swirl over amber cove). Deflected light
on limestone cliffs hovers aft that
dark matrix-maze (starry checkmate).

Just a century and a half ago (forty days
& nights) the war began. A falling-away
at first, blind predator & prey ‒ then
slow allowance... leaky Cherokee gaze

of stricken countenance. Unmanageable,
unbearable... bearing it. Still. What
indeed will maintain the Union? Recalcitrant
crossword (Coptic?). O pregnant, impregnable

Rock, where are you now? Spar of galactic
ages... under the drab, defunct gaze of those
cleft, cloven Brady photos. All us leftovers
(me, you). Who recollects us now, O manic

one (forsaken stuttering Everyman)? Who
startles Lazarus-corpse from his cold hearth?
Only a flash from blind amygdala (Martha-
moth). Only a grace-note, silent (blue).

When you go beneath the earth (next week, on
your ring-structured Jonah-dive). Your rainbow
coo-coo turtledovey neck-of-the-wooer’s
woodland flight (shady, shady). Lake

of the Woods, maybe. Your own Yuri Gargarin
yurodivy St. Vitus dance ‒ your sister-dove’s
twins’ birthday, Dad (Mary, Mary). Love’s
homing pigeon’s aching back again (like a sign).

4.12.11

some new chords

...discovered some new (for me) chords, & wanted to tape them before i forget.

Pushkin & us (U.S.)

Individual poets, whatever their imperfections may be, are driven all their lives by that inner companion of the conscience which is, after all, the genius of poetry in their hearts and minds. I speak of a companion of the conscience because to every faithful poet, the faithful poem is an act of conscience. - Wallace Stevens

Have been reading interesting book on Pushkin and other Russian poets of his generation (The esoteric tradition in Russian Romantic literature, by Lauren Leighton).

Leighton explores the background in Freemasonry which, for the poets, included some knowledge & application of numerology, "cabalistics", and other esoteric codes in their poetry. She quotes Pushkin : "How fun it is to guide one's lines / with ciphers precisely row by row." & she investigates the incredibly sophisticated numerical design in Pushkin's gambling story, "The Queen of Spades". (Anna Akhmatova : "how complex, The Queen of Spades. Layer upon layer.")

But the numbers games of Pushkin and fellow poets (such as Bestuzhev, .a.k.a. "Marlinsky") were motivated not only by aesthetic "fun", but by a need for secrecy. In the early 19th century, revolution was in the air - Romantic poets (inspired by French & American models) expressed heroic aspirations for liberty, democracy, the end of autocracy.... & naturally, came up against the Czar & the secret police (cf. the Decembrist revolt, on which Leighton elaborates).

In fact, what strikes me, reading this study, is how (apparently) seamlessly knit-together were aesthetics and civics in the vocation of poet - in the poet's self- and public image. Poets were (re-)tellers of popular tales, romantic novelists, vox populi, "public intellectuals." They were also tangled up in webs of intrigue and complicity with the Czarist government, and the small (& murky) world of elite aristocracy. The oppressive might of a centralized, unaccountable government, in dialectical fashion, clarified the moral position of the liberal intelligentsia : & this continued even into the 20th century (see Mandelstam's remark - in one of his essays(?) - confirming his "sacred vow to the Fourth Estate").

I started thinking in a vague way, walking to work this morning, just how much this world of poets & literature differs from our own. Here, today, in the U.S., we tend to take political liberty for granted : the temptation is not so much in the direction of conspiracy or extremism, as toward a complacent kind of factionalism. The basic principles of government are not in question; instead, the debates are over how to apply them, and on what ethical-pragmatic-political grounds. We do not have so much a "liberal intelligentsia" as a political class, divided by party affiliation & allegiance to contrasting ideals. We have a nation polarized by partisanship, more interested in one-upping the opposition than in finding common ground. We have professional political careers maintained primarily by lobbyists & the media. Meanwhile, in poetry world, we have a sort of institutionalized "poetry class", dedicated to the idea of differentiating "poetry" as a special kind of substance and activity which requires special treatment, and distinct professional-academic institutions for its support. What is involved is a sort of abdication of the role of "poet" as free intellectual, of the poet as engaged writer.

I don't mean to assert this in order to cry "j'accuse" : I'm just as implicated in this abdication as anyone else - perhaps more so. I'm just trying to understand it. We hear the seasonal calls for more political engagement from poets and poetry : poetry should be more clear, more sincere, more virtuous, more popular. Meanwhile, in counterpoint, we have the seasonal & generational developments of special techniques & styles by means of which poetry is supposedly enabled to promote a more enlightened politics (cf., in their various ways, Language Poetry, the Cambridge School, Flarf, Conceptual Poetry...) .

Somehow I find something basic missing from both these wings of the poetry scene. Poetry is only hobbled by a dependence on either institutions or technique. Both of these approaches reduce poetry to a craft, a career, or a cabal. I tend, rather, to conceive of poetry as a gift and a spirit. The free-standing autonomy of the process of making art (& poems) is allied with imagination, a profoundly synthetic faculty of human intelligence. Yet this constellation of forces is not driven or motivated toward more autonomy (ie., indifference), but in the other direction : toward deeper participation. Here art is allied with science as free intellectual activity : and it's this essential freedom which allows art & poetry to bridge partisan divides, to question & evaluate political slogans & vested interests, to find common ground (often ironic) between supposedly bitter ideological opponents.

The kind of literary activity I am idealizing can only be developed on the fertile ground of literary tradition. We have to get beyond the knee-jerk experimentalism of the nouveau-nouveau (which is profoundly shallow & uninformed), as well as from the marketable brands of traditionalism which reduce poetry to a set of learnable skills. Poetry is a gift & a calling toward engagement. Craft is inseparable from intellect & worldview, as larger, holistic dimensions. On this basis, the dignity of poetry is something sustained by the inner, moral discipline of individual poets (integrity : Stevens' "conscience"), and granted by society at large : it is not an attribute of professional networking or social cliques.

Ars Poetica

I'm making these serial Youtube videos, reading my long poem... but I suppose I'm the very opposite of a performance artist. With a contemporary performance artist, or spoken word poet, or such, the PERFORMANCE - the video, the scene, the show - is ALL : the text is merely a script. With me, on the other hand, you have (on film) only the ghost of a text. You have to READ the poem (slowly, carefully) in order to get it. To "get" it.

Does this mean I align myself with postmodern textual obsessions, "language" games? Is the presence of the author, the speaker, displaced or disembodied or rendered ambivalent etc. by the controlling "text"? No. Rather, the text is a test, a trial, a labyrinth, by way of which everything is directed toward living, breathing, PRESENCE. It's not dissembling, it's not hermetic - it's personal. It's hide & seek. I write for readers.

Lanthanum 7.24

24
to John D. & Mary Ravlin Gould

As every poem is a summer sum
& every sketch a project of relations ‒
two points, united by a thread (conjunctions
of silver spider-light)... so that dove-hum

in the willow tree ‒ two mourning doves ‒
is one. Tomorrow is their 60th
(is it a diamond?) anniversary ‒ skittish
Hobo’s steadfast Mom & Dad, that is :

like one limestone outcrop in the Mississippi
whose bionic hieroglyph of layered streams
lifts up an evening stillness through time’s
wrack & roar. & tomorrow will be

another promise too, somewhere ‒ such
gracefulness engaging gravity ‒ when
limestone, sunlight, mark their honeymoon
together (near St. Anthony Falls). Watch,

then, Hobo : these unions are your own.
As every moonlit strand of Ariadne
threads through blind night its charted
labyrinth (a golden coign), so Blackstone’s

lightweight coracle is welded by an arc
of molten fire : & as the monarch wanders
point-to-point, unerring, to the high cedars
of his Lebanon (in Mexico), so the little spark

of her firefly-love will wind galactic splendor
on a spindle (at the hearth of life). So light
the leafy sprinkle from its ash-tree script...
so strong the bond of almond-eyed mandorla

(birchbark-swift). Where every sepulchre
is resurrection, & every heart immures
its grail... there, in a shady arbor in
St. Louis... or Bukovina. Near where you are.

3.26.11

Lanthan 7.23

23

& so Blackstone fell fast asleep, & dreamed
of Maximus, the Enunciator ‒ hived away
in his steep prison cell, by an azure sea.
Ninefold-more-monkish monk (esteemed

by Empress Theodora for his mellifluous
mind, his clarity ‒ his charity). It was
the articulation of a honeycomb ‒ those
bees of Queen Bea (Regina Magnanimous

in amber trireme, milky dome) made it.
All in one Netherlandish night. Curviform
like windblown home or prairie ship ‒ borne
on nine wings out of a cove (by candlelight).

& the magnetic force, the gravitational pull
of the ballast (hidden below decks, below
the water line). The centripetal prow
of that golden nine-sense, dodecagonal ‒

encrypted, engraved (with royal warning).
It was the enveloping sea, the shadow
of the Argo’s grave. It was she, of the
crow (Civitas Regis Regum Omnium) thing ‒

of the seal, of the talisman. The ravens’
meal. When the sea raved, & the sky
raged, & Jonah, shivering, readied to die...
then blackbirds flew, & a cave-voice bent

Elijah’s ear down low (where servants go).
Down to the sepulchre (its empty cup)
whence that voice (like a lotus) rises up :
gray omnipresent eminence. Fire-halo.

3.22.11

Lanthanum 7.22

22

On the eve of the vernal equinox this year
the moon drew extra-near, a super-moon. We
watched it rise over the East Side ridge, gone
round ‒ heavy cream-&-honey disk, the color

of limestone. Behind the State House dome
downtown, where we were standing ‒ by the
Masonic Temple, under the Independent Man
(Roger W.) ‒ by Veteran’s Auditorium,

where we were going. For the 11th symphony
(a veteran’s number) by that shady veteran
of Stalin’s reign (not-false Dmitri) : ironic paean
to the veterans of Kremlin Square (1905, & every

year after). One cyclone-harmonic blast (intense,
excruciating). With an octave for turtledove
in-woven like pain ‒ minor keystone of
its void (of agony). Until the last bell sounds

(at last). It must be heard to be believed.
& so the moon drew near, as spring drew nigh
as once a clay chamber became a ball of sky.
As if a shadow (under pyramids) conceived ‒

as if an image of the sun were set on earth
proportionate to recessed light. The greater
with the lesser light ‒ the joy (grief, later)
of the antiphon (of black & white). Rebirth

from death. The choir sings from its honeycomb,
its fugue, its counterpoint ‒ its pain, its counter-
pane. From depths of milkweed camouflage, where
monarchs reign (a seedy Lebanon, beyond all doom).

3.21.11

Lanthanum 7.21

21

A hint of iron spring in the backbone, like
that crook in Rififi, holding up the safe.
I am coming like a thief. Enough
will be just enough, murmurs Melchizedek.

Here’s the combo, my sweet pale
omen, my Peg in a square poulet, my
palomino. Tonight’s do or die. Pourquoi?
‒ Sez that beak of a coarse cousin, mal-

adroit (sans cinema) Corsican ‒ be
cuz. Bees cause your gemstone-blaze
(in the pink), like a happy hearth-maze
(quattro sorelli) horsing a roundelay

under a lampshade (d’accord). You’re
sweet, villain. For now. Comme tu veux.
You’ve got visitors (in the make-up room,
ma chère). So... your trip... les jeux

sont faits. What’s happenin? The key’s
in your hand, mon idiot, mon frère
(Percy?). They looks like brother & ‒
brr! ‒ oak (some hood!). C’est ma jeune fille.

Gotta practice my style o’harmonique, Sal
(this way, spaghetto). Fleurs, masques...
C’est fini. Les jeux... ‒ the ice ‒ fast!
I forgot his number... so revoir, Mel. So

long, the whole rotten bunch of you!
L’Age d’Or’s closed, for now. Here come
that black-eyed Irish clover, strummin’ her
baobab banjo. Let the bad guys go (for now).

3.17.11

Lanthanum 7.20

20

& that Henry... who was he, again?
His shoulders ached with balancing mistakes,
with stumbling around bumping into things without
looking. On his creaky Percy-fool wagon-

agate, his waning Charlie-horse... it will take
some amount of grace to set him ever straight!
Riding his windvane like a tied-on rooster, what
with a ladder of pushpins he spun & tore a door

of cork right through that lazy bull’s tin eye ‒
like a laser eye, Polly. Go lie aft, then,
mate, on your limestone bunk ‒ sigh your ashen
anthem, lonesome Lonnie, son. Why? Tell you why.

In the parallactic shade of the negative parable
you seize your shadow in the narrow mirror,
the dim back ward. & a beam from way black
yond reminds ye of what ye was capable, Abel &

Mabel, of shaping up to be. Back in the beguine.
By the birch tree scroll of river-life, the tree-
river aforetimes, even. The script was (whee!)
predictable, Zeke (wheels!) like them radiation-

spooks daubed in the cave-lobby, by the bone-
fire (near Narbonne, Guillaume). Crystalloid
lens by (drip, drop) eddy-curls (ridiculous in
celluloid). Long Curly lashes together a lone

Blackstone soul ‒ original sod-farm, Johnny ‒ her
yellow-sweet plum’s like Xanadu manna-dew by
sock-it-to-me stony crew. Meet me in St. Louie,
Suzy, Hughie... watch her glide on in. You’ll see.

3.16.11

Lanthanum 7.19

19
to the people of Japan

This March day, dressed in grey. Hollow
melody of turtledove attends one raging
ocean of destructions. Tsunami (anguish).
Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia-flood seeps through

abandoned stony vaults. & the lovesick
poet’s flimsy heart, a frayed basket... &
that fever-priest (manic, homeless) who
sets himself on fire... brief candlestick of

guttering street flame, against what storm.
Baptized with water & with fire ‒ where is
the rock of our foundation? voices choir...
amid such sweeping desolation. Lips form

the oval of their finis prayer (O mournful
hoopoe). There : there is the rock. The
Word. Is logos = ratio = proportion : a
portion-crumb of tears (O human imago).

We are baptized into the foaming waters
of its delta-source, straight from the rock.
Its Nile-mosaic, its covenanting ark,
its promissory arc’s rain-shrouded eyrie-

air. Its bending ligament, its last &
lasting testament, its all-encompassing
agape-argument. Its gift, its offering...
its death. Which is the death of death

itself, a last full measure of its vanishing.
Its limit-point, its form. Its grave.
For each grave is the limit of the earth.
One wave, one teardrop (harbors everything).

3.14.11

today's plink-plonk

Lanthanum 7.18

18

Blackstone, a figure for the solitary soul
sketches a synopsis for a love story. A resume
of sorts (his own). His tricksy Ariadne goes away
& leaves him with a glittering thread ‒ raveled,

tangled in a woodchip. Leading... somewhere.
Through the blind maze. A scintillant &
coruscating lifeline, like the golden ring Crane’s
father would have tossed his bursting Hart ‒ there,

under the shadow of a Mexican volcano
(mammoth earth-mound; pyramid, or tomb).
Draws him to that pine-grove’s little room
cut into rock, where the monarchs go

(defying gravity) ‒ that milkweed, milk-train,
morning trail. Blackstone’s astigmatism-
vision scratches only stick figures, clunky-
spelunky glyphs, like prehistoric spaceman

icons. An orthogonal matrix, with sunny sphere
for Shakespeare-brain... and over this, an arc,
a lens (a curvature-canoe, a rainbow-ark).
His trademark gravemarker (Osiris-bier).

He loves to draw, & he would love to draw love
into his Ariadne-armillary (armadillo-track).
Where the glittering string straightens his back
into an upright L ‒ into its almond alcove (its

refining fire). Where desire is tempered
in the habitat of mercy ‒ its just attunement
on the octave of thanksgiving, gratitude... blent
spectrum of the iris of the eye (my Ariadne-bird).

3.12.11

Proportion & harmony

Have been reading a lot about architecture lately. Might have something to do with the fact that ongoing poem Lanthanum emerged out of an architectural dream I had one night (about the Gateway Arch in St. Louis).

Especially Richard Padovan's great book, Proportion, and another book he translated, by the Dutch monk-architect Hans van der Laan (Architectonic Space).

Padovan bases his book on an interpretation of Wilhelm Worringer's influential 1905 book on aesthetics, Abstraction and Empathy. Very basically, the impulse of "empathy" projects the human into nature, and then models art and architecture on a reflection (an empathetic imitation) of Nature. Whereas the impulse to "abstraction" is more basic & "primitive" : humankind looks out at reality as a threatening chaos, immeasurable, and (abstract) art is a sort of escape/shelter - a means of controlling chaos through imposing order....

anyway, that's just how Padovan gets going, & organizes his review of geometry, proportion, architecture & philosophy in the West over the past 4000 yrs.... it's the opposite of the mystical-magical occult numerological "Golden Section" theorizing which has been popular...

(I'd be curious to know if Wallace Stevens read or was interested in Worringer's monograph. A lot of the modernist artists read it.)

Proportion is the key to form, whether in architecture or aesthetics generally. But do we draw proportion from nature, or impose our own orders? Padovan describes how van der Laan sets out the basic requirements for proportion (the smallest element in an ordered ratio with the whole, and with the other elements), and discovers the "plastic number" - a ratio of 1 : 1.325 (close to 3 : 4), which is proportional through a broad range of whole numbers, & thus handy for the kind of incremental design of basic structures... And this is tied in with van der Laan's very original philosophy of architecture (an "abstract" approach, in Worringer's terms) in which humankind imposes form & creates relational spaces, "homes", within the infinite & measureless continuum of natural space....

I'm finding all this very interesting, anyway, in relation to compositional & thematic aspects of poetry... & I am trying to connect it with other not-so-architectural dimensions of Lanthanum....

like the theological musings on the status or ontology of the human Person.... Maximus, & all that. A trinitarian, incarnational theology sets up a relational situation, a kind of family kinship or resemblance, between God & Man, Father/Son & Spirit.... so to make it possible to unite the notion of "Man is the measure of all things" ("I say unto you, the Son of Man is coming at the right hand of Power"... Jesus says somewhere) - but not in a disproportionate, arrogant stance : rather in proportion with the other Persons of the trinity.... the Image and the Substantial....

More later, maybe. There's a connection in all this with my Mandelstamian & Acmeist leanings. OM's "domestic hellenism" is about the Word as an architectonic that "humanizes" the earth, makes it fit to dwell in.... Gumilev's "chaste vision" is an embodied kind of sense of proportion & harmony....

*

- & having digested as best I can the great syntheses in Padovan's multidisciplinary work (Proportion) - science, philosophy, architecture - I find my response is a sense of mystery, a recognition of the limits of human knowledge.

The book itself is really built like a large structure, a cathedral... on the simple ground of an essential contrast : between 1) the empathetic/Platonic attitude - which finds its human reflection in the (numbered) order of Nature, & understands human intellect as a union (or reunion) with the order of nature - rooted in memory (the mind as a blank slate on which impressions appear); and 2) the abstract/Aristotelian stance, which recognizes a fundamental break between inside and outside, human and natural, & understands the intellect as inherently active, formative, creative : what we know is what we make. Padovan shows how these fundamental stances return as leitmotifs through Western history : so the development from Locke to Berkeley to Hume exhibits a sort of dead-end for both empiricism and idealism - until Kant reasserted the human mind itself as formative agent of nature, experience, reality...

Padovan returns & grounds these abstract heights of western thought to the most basic & primitive human activities (building, shelter), by connecting a notion of the human intellect as active, form-creating (out of Aristotle & Kant), with van der Laan's sense of architecture as the basic human building-impulse. We know what we make, and what we make is a separate living-space (by way of walls) within the infinite space of nature : and in doing so setting up a ratio or proportion between the measured & the immeasurable, the inside & the outside.

Again, though, what I come away with from this reading is a sense of mystery, of the limits of knowledge per se. Because I understand the fundamental contrast - between Plato & Aristotle, idealism & empiricism, number & irrational space - as irresolvable on a purely intellectual or epistemological or abstract level. For me, all this is Athens : there is another & greater binary or contrast at play : with Jerusalem. As I understand it, the dimension represented by "Jerusalem" is the Hebraic-Christian understanding of personal, subjective consciousness & existence as the very marrow of reality : life. We live in an irreducible, inalienable cosmos of Persons : and the true proportion which maintains all life (which "created" the cosmos) is based not on knowledge or mathematics, but on love. This is the mediating "song of the turtledove" which is heard in our land (Song of Songs, which is Solomon's - the figure of wisdom).

Thus we inhabit, yes, something architectonic - filled with "number, weight & measure" - but also something more than architectonic, more than abstract, more than is found in your philosophy, Horatio. We participate in a fundamentally dramatic occasion : life on earth, life in the universe. A life rooted in kinship with one another, with relationship, with persons : where the ultimate harmonies & proportions are transposed to the ethical sphere, to the dimensions of love, to the plummet of the human heart.

*

Hart Crane's The Bridge is suffused with, & structured by, something like this kind of "dream-architectonics." I think my daughter Phoebe's photo on the cover of Lanthanum (taken from a bridge over the Mississippi, a few blocks from my parent's house - both sides of the family have lived in this area for 3-4 generations) evokes this dream-sense too.

Stewie's jam

Sleepy chords

Lanthanum 7.17

17

The old stone church, its simple commandments
Hobo left behind, has not left him behind ‒
under the chaste L of the lamb-lamp, its spine
of bone structure, marrow of the fundament...

of a law that makes a nesting-place for grace
amid kin, among strangers. Its arc follows him
into the wilderness of his lack-love, to limn
(in the abstract) its geometry, its resting-place ‒

like a map from the delta, returning to the delta
(Hobo’s pyramid of sighs). A sunlit eye,
submarine, filigreed with wavy festoons ‒ sky-
arch of acanthus, like a pattern of bear feet

leftover from the midnight pole (dancing
in a ring). Through curving lashes of palm-
leaves, & through the glinting rain-spectrum,
gleaming, shining... a human soul, glancing,

looks out ‒ like Promethean fire its light, its
smile... that will prevail. As through a translucent
babushka-doll (or wooden icon) wisdom’s acumen
twinkles through Hobo to Blackstone to ancient

hermit Maximus : who formulates (in chaste &
chastened syllable) a simple outline of the earth’s
foundation ‒ limestone sketch beside a lambent
surf’s salt curve. Where line & curve are one

like the dove that mantled & remained on Him
(as foam upon a wave’s bare crest) ‒ where kind
& personal are fused... where soul & grace depend
like the radius of a bowsprit’s arc (creation’s rim).

2.23.11

My new watch is my old watch

I took a walk this afternoon, around the East Side (of Providence). Sunny & brisk outside. I was cogitating the next Lanthanum passage... thinking about time & memory & my own time & memories... about Proust & Augustine & Nabokov, & a phrase from Nicholas of Cusa : "Thus time, since it is the measure of motion, is an instrument of the measuring soul." & I was thinking about how this related to 1) Aristotle's approach to knowledge, his affirmation of the absolute, the primordial integrity (in an epistemological sense) of the reality of individual, distinct, unique living things... empiricism, I guess, of a sort... (I really don't know much about philosophy - dropped out of the one ph. course I signed up for in college). & I related this sense of the soul also to 2) the Judaeo-Christian background, which is somewhat opposed to Plato's otherworldly idealism, since both Judaism & Christianity are all about hard & incontrovertible historical actuality (no matter how spun & mythologized) - about chosenness, redemption, Messianism, and Incarnation... about the History of This World, its fabric - the Greek "appearances" (which Aristotle wished to "save")... (ie., "Before Abraham was, I Am." That's a very soulful comment. It means, to me, that something in us exists before time & history.)

Anyway, I was very vaguely pondering all this stuff, in the context of some personal issues & themes & imagery in my poem - the question of time & memory & loss & recovery, of the things we love & don't love enough... wondering about the idea that "grace" or forgiveness allows one to re-enter the texture of one's own past, & love it & understand it in a new way... "Proustian" in a sense, I guess, or Nabokovian...

So, I was vaguely chewing over these things, walking along a side street on the East Side... when suddenly I noticed, down on the sidewalk... a wristwatch. In fact, it looked like a brand new wristwatch. In fact, it was the same inexpensive Timex "woodsman" wristwatch (sort of an outdoorsy, Boy Scoutish watch) which I had owned all through the 80s & 90s, & then lost or broken or worn out somehow, & replaced with a watch I have never really liked that much. I hesitated... but no one was around, no one seemed to be looking for it. "Finder's keepers," as we used to say back in Hopkins. Right there on the sidewalk, I took off my old watch and put on the new one.

It was a sort of epiphany, this afternoon - which belonged with the poem. I found my old Timex.

Lanthanum 7.16

16

Gray Seekonk ice is gone. Your river’s royal
blue today, Blackstone (kingfisher blue, maybe)
& trimmed with white ‒ a roving, silvery
sheen. Where you crossed over with your pal

Roger ‒ flinty Pericles of curious lone-
rosy city-state. You more quiet, private ‒
no less stubborn... the one who went
to live with Indians. The record’s scant, sown

on fearsome wind (your library, notebooks);
you’re somewhat anonymous, like a historical
Jesus (who avoided interviews) ‒ typical
Everyman, like her, me... & this the crux

I would sing, this quiddity : in chaste eye
of Aristotle, Blackstone, Joyce ‒
a sea of ex cathedra cymbal tones
that ripple from the stem of every ordinary

Dublin bloom. The deep & potent human faculty
of soul, whose pregnant salience is the spring
of springs ‒ its clear Itasca hoisting up
Big Muddy time : for every pain & difficulty

here is the matrix of a healing symphony.
It is a qualitative change, a change of heart
that comes on incognito... unremarked & quiet
as a dove’s low anthem, cooing from a factory

of forlorn bricks, out of a central fall (Babel
to Babylon). That building salience of song,
lifting ‒ as when a grim lambda, unstrung
on the retina, turns over... into smile

(El-trove, Red Rover, veltro). You know your eye
has something of a Finnish curve (like Saarinen,
or Tuonela)? Like a Hopkins lake ‒ deserted oasis
where Franks met Steins (for wedding, by & by).

2.20.11

late night riffle

Lanthanum 7.15

15

February afternoon. The sun through a mosaic
of little blue-gray cube-clouds, like a glowing
Inca wall. Henry collects his 50 states of wing-
nut flux... (77 J-sessions, for sake of one LP).

& the stream flows on, ungraspable (almost).
Time’s newspaper, after the paper boy has grown
& flown. All those anonymous hollows, sown
in red-veined wilderness (blown wilder, ghostlier

day by day) ‒ your own heartfelt Nowhereville,
O most AWOL Unknown Soldier. Dispossessed
of every predicate, as Aristotle sketched it ‒
eraser-point of description, inimitable windowsill

of bifocal-vision : what you know, of what
you have been, of what you have made, of who
you are. And as you are, you are : owl’s hoot
or nom de plume - a chapter in the ziggurat

& its demise (brick-breathing fiery Book
of J). What magnet trains this iron heart
toward its own sunburst? What alchemist
transmutes hungry desire to one sweet look ‒

one infant-newborn love’s Thanksgiving Day?
It’s just arisen... just a rose in your eye,
Sharon. Soul-salience, diamond mandala,
Almond Joy... one upright L at apex of a

wayward Noah’s arc (orthogonal, just) ‒
anachronic lanthan-cornice of Maximus-
Blackstone’s pursuit of personhood. Most-
sunny disposition. Ancient of Days... akme.

2.19.11

Lanthanum 7.14

14

This gray bird gravely mourning in the rock
shall not be moved. Rock-dove, rainbow-
neck... my pigeon-heart, filled with low
eaves, low-embered evenings. Aftershock

of earthy worlds. Those wheedling ravens
homing on their jasper nests (of sunken
anchors, knives, old nets) along forgotten
rivers ‒ droning (bass & catfish havens)

through steep hobo calendars (like iron).
Pretty soon Hen will do his spastic number :
1,3,2... (half-limping over that star-flower,
child). Mimic of a cold-cocked spring (one

Russian January’s janissary). & it is not
ashes’ temple he intones (the buried man’s
dry wooden corner). For the heart demands
answers (while the dove coos not today, not,

not today). Maybe tomorrow. (Promise.)
Answers it already knows, almond ‒ heartfully.
Hopefully (intuitive). The poem’s true play-
pen (play dough, play, Penny... play rusty-

green copper). Nailed to the mast
of a cedar-tree, in old Romania (or
beech). Where the fresco-church, for
centuries (of rain & wind) might last, &

last, yet. Where a wall of summer branches
flakes leaves that filter your philosophy,
Horatio... & rise through solid snow, Henry
‒ through river ice (Espiritu Santo, she sez).

2.16.11

Lanthanum 7.13

13

Birdy sings, Birdy, at the center of the earth
(shy, low, shy, low). Birdy of no form, no
comeliness. Pigeon (pi-Jean, pi-Jean), you
silly castaway, stray street-person, worth

less & less. A pig’s dungeon, maybe (Villon-
pissoir). Filled up with contempt, with
impotence, with rage. With rags (blithe,
Gadarene) of possessions. Old news (mon-

otonous, processional). Your soul (pearl
in disguise, disgusted). Ghost. Like mist
of melting snow in the pine barrens (south-
west Jersey, just past the freeway). Swirl,

pitch-black raven-Hellene (Isosceles) on
your silver tripod O... O Gorgon-trestled
railroad-Pythia... micro-knife, who wrestles
pins from hobo-tribes... my seedy-cedar sigh

of Lebanon (Romania). Birdy calls us
(on the jasper perpendicular ‒ the hand
out of the depths of the sea, circumfer-
and on fire) to the old union, my Valentinus;

Love’s rainy monarch’s milkweed wasteland
leads lightly to Cedar Mountain, somewhere
deep in Mexico. On an angle lifted in the air.
On an arbor-breeze... (old amber ampersand).

This human thread, purple... immeasurably
subtle (weft of butterfly across Armenia).
Aimless, free. My soul, my soul (Jessie
Ophelia, Jenny). Rainbow in clerestory.

for Valentine's Eve

This is a section from the long poem Forth of July. Tom Fleming was a childhood friend, passed away around 1990.

12
i.m. Tom Fleming

You would have been glad to be here today
Fleming to read the Sunday funnies
Aaugh! As Lucy lifts the 12-millionth football
and Charlie Brown flips for the 13th time Bonk!

A little sad too the way the everlasting ends
this evening light limping so slowly only lent
limpid toward the vague rim of tonight’s Milky
Way Sparky’s wavery quickness trembling

only lent now Good grief! While it’s raining the
Doctor is [IN] and you are uncommonly
weird like a Red Baron’s flying mach-lemon
in the mind of a pup and the rain it raineth

every day like frogs pummeling our foolish blind
shopping carts ah for I am sick of love he
cried running down the street in Lisbon
that twines with a tiny pulse a nub

like the distant crown of Shakespeare’s head
a curvature this pause or sigh this dome
between waves or salient mud-caked
seed so small set adrift (centuries

surrounded with fire your burning bones, Tom
a greenish Copernican flame in the marrow
planted amid the avarice of the pilots the raw
and envious violence of Ahab a mote

that will grow limpid) you know there are women
limping with this cenacle (like myrrh afloat
upon tears) (chambered in the upper tiers)
(up the stairs) helical of their wombs

unknown to us but only a promise
when the last full measure is poured out
beside the shores of great rivers the trumpet
sounds into the depths of that prairie siempre

2.13.2000

lanthanum 7.9 (with text)

Lanthanum 7.12

This section was written as a sort of riposte to an earlier section, written on the 4th of July a couple years ago. I'm thinking here about my grandparents, Edward S. (the WW I vet) and Florence Gould (born on the 4th in 1900). It's also a counterweight of riposte to this earlier section (Lanthanum 3.12), written on the 4th of July.



12

A symbol is less than nothing, less than empty
word, husk of oblivion. Unless blooded with
life’s valve, heart’s pulse. Watered with
tears, that Liberty Tree. With the Thirty-

Third Division he was in the St. Mihiel drive...
for gallantry in action... Meuse-Argonne...
decorated... Silver Star. Verdun Medallion.
His Book of Common Prayer, peppered, hived

with shrapnel. Florence, at home, barely
grown yet. Father swept off in the flu
rampage. Starts going to church then (blue,
yearning). Born on the 4th of July (1900).

The sabbath day, the sabbath day
rooftops the world with its gray
cloudy clerestory; & my old tree
(shrub mountain laurel) blazes 33 ‒

99 strings of alpine bells (their echo-
avalanche). Thus I follow the yoke of
your wool-shrouded shoulders (odd murk-
moody bulwark). To that pin-oak (riveted,

revolving axle) where my seven weak
candles join the fifty stars. Galaxy
of mortal gravity & winking lights, cast
up ahead... Amalgam-sign (meekness,

fortitude). For the grain of the song stems
through suspension-spaces in a hollow nave ‒
as snowbound Berryman jumps from his grave
or branches nest above brave woodchip throng.

2.9.11

lanthanum 7.11 (with subtitles)

Experimenting with including the text with the video... have a few kinks to work out, but here goes...

Life as a left-handed Bluejay

About 16 years ago, around 1996, I started writing short interlinked poems, in a simple rhymed ABBA quatrain form. I was modelling them on some poems & sequences of poems I admired, by Osip Mandelstam. Written toward the end of his life while living in exile in Voronezh, a Russian provincial river-town, the poems were collected posthumously in the Voronezh Book or Voronezh Notebooks. I liked many things about these poems, including their very lyrical pathos and their sketchy, "outdoors", plein air quality - & also the way individual poems echoed & responded to each other in short sequences.

About the time I was just getting started with this, I remember sitting out in the backyard & hearing, for the first time, a bluejay really improvising - like a kind of strange scat-singing. Somehow this experience got infused quite deeply into what I was trying to do in poetry : the sketchy improvisatory element, but also the persistent desire to synthesize things, in longer complex works... the result, after a couple years, was a book-length poem, Stubborn Grew - which, just as soon as I finished it, triggered two even longer book-length sequels (The Grassblade Light & July). Finally, around 2000, I finished it, & called the whole thing Forth of July. (All these books, & others, are available here.)

That was over a decade ago. Since then, I've never really gotten out of the groove of that simple ABBA form. I've made a few forays in other directions, but never for long. I've written at least 2 more long sequences - "India Point" (in the book Dove Street), and Rest Note. Repeatedly, upon finishing one of these long poems, I take a deep breath & say to myself : "OK, that's it. Time for something completely different." Yet here I am, writing (for a couple years now) yet another poem in this vein (Lanthanum).

It's gotten to feel a lot like sculpture - or better, woodcarving. I'm very, very comfortable with it. But that doesn't mean it's easy for me. It's as though a special idiom, or language, or way-of-speaking, or mask (persona) has fused & intertwined itself with a particular form (these quatrains, in a repetitive-numerical design). & I feel most free & intellectually alive when I'm in the midst of composing these poems, working out the words & imagery & meanings I want to hint at or convey - elaborating, again & again, on old, cherished, half-expressed themes. When I'm not actively focused & composing the poems, well... lets' say the process makes me happy. So, this see-saw between writing & not-writing tends to make me feel perpetually a little on edge, off-balance... I'm in a co-dependency relationship with a left-handed woodcarving Muse. Something like that.

So I'm writing these long, seemingly-endless, repetitive series of poems, continuous variations on a simple form & a few themes. My approach does not have much in common with the short, direct-hit manner of much contemporary verse. & then another thing I was attracted to (& tried to emulate) in Mandelstam, as well as Hart Crane : a kind of indirection, an elusiveness. Maybe something like Edgar Poe's idea of the "vague." The truth is, I am slightly bored with clear, transparent speech in poetry - no matter how elegant, intelligent, profound or clever it manages to be. The meaning comes at you like a kind of aggression. I'm more passive-aggressive, I guess : I'm drawn to infinitely-absorptive poems - riddles, mysteries, puzzles, indirections. I admire musical imagery that signals a feeling before you understand it (if you ever understand it). I've steeped myself in this kind of indirection : it's a huge part of the persona or idiom I've projected. Readers might be tempted to misinterpret this as an expression of religiosity, mysticism, occult tendencies, etc. - but this would be a mistake. I like this kind of "secret" speech purely for it's game-like, puzzling, aesthetic qualities. I like the tune of something just on the edge of reason - like wind blowing through tall grass.

So I'm writing these endless, repetitive and obscure series of poems... again, not the most popular modus operandi these days. And I've grown tired of trying to win acceptance through the regular channels of the literature industry. I suppose people look at me & for many reasons think "crazy, eccentric." But put yourself, if you can, in my place. I'll be 59 years old this spring. I was writing poetry before most of the senior editors of our American literary magazines were born. After a while, you get a little discouraged - you simply grow tired of the rejection. I think I'm not taken seriously; I'm marginalized. Well, what can you do? I know something about copy editing, about DIY publishing. I've learned about YouTube (which I disliked at first). Now I've adapted my writing process to "instant accessibility." I write a section of my current, seemingly-endless work in progress : as soon as I finish editing it & shaping it up, I recite it on YouTube & publish the poem on my blog. No editors, no sifting, no middle-people, no problem. It's poetry as it happens, available immediately. Of course, I still don't get no respect - but that's not the main thing. The main thing is taking dictation from the woodcarving Muse (if she's still around today, like she was yesterday).

I don't go anywhere, I don't see anyone. I have a day job at which I must show up, bills, and family obligations. I'm a bookworm & a writer. I can't - & don't wish to - gallivant around on the lit-biz party circuit. I'll be 60 pretty soon. I'd rather try to concentrate, remember, meditate, contemplate, compose, write. As long as I'm still standing. I like woodcarving (it's a laurel tree).

Lanthanum 7.11

11

Poverello Apollo patches together some laurel twigs
or blackberry (always was a berry man) for a
memoir of his lost tree-limb ‒ O nevermore,
he raves (orphan Orpheus). Swigs

liberally from wooden cup of ruddy, runny
mead. Gathers motley woodchips for his
crazy-tilt word-house - a potent gray ace
in circuitous moor-dance (double solitaire).

Only turn the leaf over. The new leaf
(elliptical enantiomorph). The lens
of deep green ‒ scored to bronze &
Ionian bark (Karelian canoe). On a reef

in Petersburg. & like the lightness of rumors
through lofty aeries, elevations ‒ hopeful
murmurs, birch-kindling ‒ he finds a river-trove
in mute soil, blown loess, looming stillness (hers).

He’s merged with her murmur-shadow (Imogen,
imago). Like Charlie’s wagon with its axle, or
the bear with its growl... like St. George &
his rude crusade ‒ his rusty crow, his Injun

shade... his evening bough, its lengthening.
Like that pin-oak where the king was flown
with autumn leaves. Her grace, to be gone
until he understood : the dream-songe, ringing

out of time. That gray ace, hovering
like jasper crown over the bleeding heart...
& the lamp-lance... baobab, almond, cart-
wheeling Jesse-tree. Past 51 P (sky-written).

2.8.11

lanthanum 7.10

10

Hidden on the inner lining of an eyelid ‒ whose?
This hologram or macro-hole. Dangle-matrix
for raisin-fall of many a fair grape ‒ tricksy
mirror ever which way, like an eyebrow’s

bruised black eye, radiant with shooting stars
of ouch (agony galaxy). Still, bend of dream.
High vault that only you can reach, Centime ‒
penned in thy nonpareil & francophone corner

of desert, jungle ‒ whoever you are (burdened
birdy). Go down, Moses ‒ de day’s yo own.
Like me, sort of ‒ you. Get it? One
agate ray sees W.H. (in Willie’s hyper-learnèd

wail). What gray ace, Falcon ‒ after a great
long watch ‒ is yours to play? What raven
now dare caw thy rage? I’ll wager y’hat, men ‒
fished from mummers’ Troyes-town ‒ been ate

already. No? Nein? Could be, then (ten
to one it ain’t). & yet we’ll go for broke
around this yearning wheel again ‒ each spoke
a buried radius ‒ straight to your heart, Gawain.

Because the arc of this pinwheel tryworks is
grounded in you. This is the sanction
for each river-vagary, Hobo, each Western
Celtic bowerbird’s aromatic isola di rifiuti;

for as the spring leaps from the rock, &
wind shares its news, rocking the willow-limbs,
so the sleepy player-king slips from each grim
forecast ‒ pencil-thin, belovèd (able ampersand).

2.6.11

lanthanum 7.9 : for the people of Egypt

9
to the people of Egypt

If you were here now, Grace, I know you’d be there ‒
from your Pink Gate in Morocco, en voyage
today, to this Cairo kairos ‒ embattled assemblage
filled with fortitude ‒ in Tahrir (Liberation!) Square.

Grace indeed encircles this square : plain men
& women, standing up at last to their full height,
facing down the hireling bullies (Pharaoh’s night-
owls, rabid birds of prey) to speak again

their ancient birthright : liberty. One word
found often on Williams’ tongue, and Clarke’s,
the cityfounders, here in their young upstarts’
res publica ‒ along with another one (heard

not so much these days) : civility. Providence
divine ‒ the providence of God, they held ‒
had granted humankind the capability (swelled
from primordial springtime root) to sense

the right, the true, the just ‒ the common sense;
& so, in wisdom, kindliness & fellow-feeling
to love thy neighbor as thyself (deep keel
of every commonweal). Heartfelt experience

shows in its works, proven by trial : to stand
with the people, singing, we shall not be moved.
Upright, on the square ‒ a human treasure-trove,
a sea of civic light. Triangulate my headband

of purple, Grace, beside you, there ‒ from here
in Providence, off Morris Ave. (near its honey-
comb sphere, Temple Emanu-El). I’ll wheel my
mummer’s dance your way, fluting... What Cheer?...

lanthanum 7.8

8

Sings in the dark, where no one hears,
the deaf-blind fiddler, his secret way ‒
there in Bukovina, by that Tree of Jesse
flaking from old wooden logs (like tears,

in paint). Nobody’s song, & everyone’s ‒
the one without numbers, the ignorant
one (lone sum). Like stubborn plant
dead-centered on its half-wit revelations,

crippled vagaries of revery. Only,
possibly, co-revery (careening toward
recovery). If you’re there, that
is, windy beard-blown bard ‒ Henry’s

sown rye, oats, lea (unsprung) flung hard
a-lee (O wild, O light, O heavyweight JB).
J, be. Be tree. B Mine. Be three
in one, & all for thee, dark tan one (shard

of shepherd’s bole). Bucolic pin-oak, or
the king’s own regal-eagle hiding-place ‒ your
terrible, ferrous, bulbous salience (a meteor-
hole). Follow him down there, into the shelter

of nonentity (old rivery Hobo, medieval tater) ‒
into the core of primordial gravity (everywhere,
for Everyman). Earth-mouth. That feral O
you cannot know (where you must go)... waiter,

janitor, servant, slave... Melchizedek, dark
Sheba-spouse... dead weight in the tomb or
stubborn womb (of tomorrow’s bride’s bride-
groom). Bloom, wayward almond; homeward,

spark.

Jamming in Melaka (Malaysia), 2007

Filmed by Phoebe on her camera. In a park at the old Melaka fort, met this street musician, who let me play along. (It was about 95 degrees there, & humid : typical fall weather, I guess.)

Dark Lady on the bus

In the late 60s I attended Blake School, in Hopkins, MN (west of Minneapolis - poet Allen Grossman's alma mater) through high school. Every senior at Blake had to deliver a "Chapel Speech" at some point (I wrote a novella called Chapel Hill which describes what this involved). Anyway, my "chapel speech" in 1969 was a long poem, which came to me suddenly (one day in the fall of 1969) after I had stalled for a long time in the putting-together of that speech. The resulting poem (along with some others) was part of my successful college application to Brown U. I don't think I had ever read Shakespeare's Sonnets before writing this : the "Dark Lady" was just part of the cultural air. (Another element of the atmosphere was that Blake at the time was a "boys' school" : we were required to wear coats & ties every morning, in Chapel.) Anyway, here is the poem :

HIGH SCHOOL CHAPEL SPEECH

Hi there glad you could all come
just straighten your ties and listen to a tale
my name is Prester John
I'm a king from deepest Africa
ancient coptic christian
in heathen jungle,
where tigers and Tarzan
compete for prize money,
while cameras roll and monkeys scream
I'm Prester John
son of the magi
magi that's right magic
teller of lies/teller of truth/teller of lies
so just straighten your ties and listen.

I'm an old man
once I was young rolling in hay
heaving bright air through fields
bones of beasts not yet risen burned
me through laughter, silence.

Then one day
then one day the day turned aquick black
then back again new before I knew
I was pounding in the dark and afraid
but I could not go back to Smileand.

I pounded and frowned and groaned
pounded and groaned and frowned
groaned and frowned and pounded.
I moved slowly into enclosures of steel
then quickly broke them down
fearing dreams and fearing days
writing my name in different ways

(my name remember is Prester John, priest john.
your neckties are asleep. wake up and listen.)

So I climbed fresh-blaked on a bright bus
which wound its way toward washington
where we meant to carry candles, chant
and further exorcise the place.
we shall be a million strong, we sang
and we shall overcome. we rode like children.

and then
and then far back deep under the dark
rear of our bus arose a flower
arose a dark, dark lady on a seashell
from beneath the green seat
a dark, dark lady riding a seashell
a dark, dark lady riding a shell
and she drew me and drew me and drew me
back, back into the bus, back, back, back
back, back into the bus, back, back, back, back

(Wake up! Remember! I am Prester John,
mythical ruler in northern rockies
a holy flower colony of children
where our own few seeds sprout, and
we survive and live and grow.)

So she drowned me
and my lady and I were lost
and I was lost, and white washington
temples were lost and we awoke
exhausted in Ithaca, New York.
I read the news of Washington,
groaning in Ithaca nowhere.
My dark lady laughed her rage
and screamed her laughter
into frozen nights.
So I went away, away, away, away.

Wake up! This is the last time! Remember!
I'm an old man making food
in my children's colony, bearded
like Moses or Ulysses or Prester John
I rule my flower children with a fist
so they may survive in wilderness.
but my days grow yellow.
my children are not sane.
the ground lies fallow, while
my sons steal down the mountain to find
a hamburger stand, and my eldest now,
he wears a coat and tie, and my youngest, now,
he wants to be a business man, and my daughters, now,
they want to go to school...

(1969)

Tangled up in rose

Have been reading this fascinating essay by R.H. Winnick, on some evidence that Shakespeare infused the Sonnets with intricate anagrams on the name of his early patron, Henry Wriothesley (the most likely model for the beloved "friend" celebrated therein).

The opening sonnets strike a comically-avuncular pose, in which the speaker advises the beautiful young man to marry & beget children, in order to share & sustain his loveliness into the future, rather than imprison it in a barren self-regard. Gradually, however, the sonnets develop another theme : that though the young man may not sustain his image in an actual son, that image, that "son", will live on forever in the literary dimension of the poems themselves.

As I have written here & elsewhere, Shakespeare's Sonnets, had a terrific impact when I first read them (as an undergraduate at Brown) in 1973. My reading precipitated a psychic crisis, replete with uncanny coincidences, etc. - elements of psychosis, or near-psychosis. It wasn't only that I thought William Shakespeare was (somehow) addressing me personally, directly - through some kind of time-cancelling occult sonnet-semaphore : it was also that the strictly poetic power of the verses reinforced the sensation, the feeling of being so addressed.

More than a quarter-century of (I guess) relatively sane living later, I still recognize & must acknowledge that that long-ago crisis represents maybe the most important turning-point in my vocational development, if not my life as a whole. My immediate reaction was to renounce poetry itself : but the psychological claims of that crisis - along with my very early orientation toward a literary career - compromised any such absolute revocation. Eventually I came back to it.

& somehow my inborn gamesmanship (& maybe megalomania) push me (seemingly ineluctably) toward a further iteration of that strange encounter. I've written elsewhere about how my own sonnet sequence, Island Road, encrypts a sort of re-encounter with Shakespeare. I think also of all the poetry-games I've played repeatedly with Shakespeare, John Berryman, & the name "Henry." & now, reading R.H. Winnick's piece, I am thinking again... (perhaps giving some pointers to future investigators)...

Winnick cites Helen Vendler's exploration of sonnet 67's word-play around the phrase "roses of shadow." He links this with line 2 of the 1st sonnet - "That thereby beauty's rose might never die" - which another scholar, Martin Green, has suggested, evokes (sonically) the name of Wriothesley (pronounced variably as "rizzly", "rizely", or "rozely"). Then Winnick unpacks a fabulous network of anagrammatic encryptions of "Henry Wriothesley" found in several different sonnets.

What I want to propose (with tongue only partly in cheek) is that one could read back through my own poetry for word-patterns and biographical patterns which actually emphasize the strange sense that Shakespeare was indeed writing to me and for me ("what's past is prologue"). Consider the manifold connections established in my work between Henry and Rhode Island (the first being that my birthday - May 29th - is also RI Statehood Day). Then there is the very long (600+ pp.) poem, Forth of July - the original title of which was Stubborn Grew the Rose. The line "stubborn grew, the rose" is underlined (bookends, actually) the 1st volume of that poem (Stubborn Grew). The poem is, in some respects, an RI epic (& we note that "Rhode Island" is another way of saying Rose Island). & further we note that Stubborn Grew narrates the adventures of a poet named "Henry" and his ghostly guide ("Bluejay") as they construct a kind of geomantic character - the letter "W" - across the landscape of Providence, RI. This "W" stands for various things... but in the context of this particular wild speculation, we remark some dimensions of that unusual name - "Henry Wriothesley." Henry... W... RI... risely... rosely.... Rose...

lanthanum 7.7

7

Blackstone’s laborious, painfully non-
Euclidean scribbles toward squaring the circle
(on anterior hypo-moose antlers) percolate
with improvisational symmetry ‒ some canon

of fifths, that wheels with all the little candles
sweating wax & blood across expectant earth.
& it is a kind of flute-call summons (a lovers’
lonely train-hoot, far-off track, or tendrils

of lilacs’ trailing scent) that beckons him
toward those blank snowfields on every map
where he must renew & be renewed ‒ like that
saw-tooth spruce shaking snow from its shoulders

straightening up & starting over (toward
Paulette Polaris ‒ redhead northern star).
O most laborious-harmonious composer ‒
scored for vermilion wind-vanes ‒ crowded,

crowing earth-choirs! Aurora sways now
over your shoulder (serpentine, spectral)
as you orient your glittering triangle
into a matrix of such local-honey sounds

as Beatrice herself might hive (humming,
habitation). For the geometer of bees
& homing pigeons sights by crosshairs
infinitely finer than your banjo-string,

Blackstone; her olive-almond glance
you mimic with your skitterish vesica
(or wandering eye) is like Jessie Ophelia,
that river-ark (a buoyant permanence).

1.27.11

Oren Izenberg intro

I'm very intrigued by this preview/intro to a new book by Oren Izenberg. It reads as quite clear & sensible to me... looking forward to seeing the book itself. Some of the emphases he outlines here seem related or fairly close to some things I've been blogging about (more incoherently) for some time : that is, the connection between a philosophical and ethical concept of "the person" as fundamental to our engagement with the aesthetic & artistic dimension of poems & poets...

I see this as a dimension I've sketched out elsewhere as "incarnational." A loaded (overloaded) word, I realize : in my scribbles it refers in part to a sense of life, reality, time, the cosmos, etc. as centered in, & somehow proportioned for, the person... the person as an ethical, teleological, aesthetic "end" or ultimate & self-sufficient framework or life-purpose...

A few days ago, reading a book by Hubert Damisch, A childhood memory by Piero della Francesca, I came upon a passage where Damisch discusses a theological concept called the Verbum infans, or "infant Word" (as the Piero work he analyzes is an image of the pregnant Virgin Mary). Damisch remarks that the Verbum infans, as (purely verbal) Word of God, in a sense disappears, or goes silent, as it is "made flesh", become incarnate, in the living divine Person (of Jesus).

The comment fertilized some inchoate ponderings on my part, which I am still working out. I thought about the particular aesthetic dimension of poetry - of the imaginative constructions of art & their inherent value as beautiful things, as ends in themselves. & I thought about how this involved representations : mimesis, recognizable impressions & images from the shared experience of both artist and audience, poet & reader. & I thought about how poetry seems to tend toward the dramatic : from the mini-dramas of a lyric poem to the full-fledged spectacle of a narrative or dramatic story, a novel or play. & I thought about something that Plato worried about : the danger that our artistic ("virtual") representations might actually displace or replace the reality which they represent. This is a way in which "Word becomes flesh" - the poetic word embodied in dramatic mimesis - which loses itself, goes silent, is absorbed in the larger synthesis, the synthetic whole, of its mirrored images.

How might poetry resist this displacement of reality, this turn to the self-absorption of its own mirrored irreality? I think perhaps poets themselves resist this pressure of the unreal, in various ways... One way they might do this is through a kind of reduction or abstraction - an intentional self-limitation. The poem does not aspire to be a "universal whole" or total mimesis : rather it aims for its own quiddity, or unique integrity - which might very well involve the making of literary fragments & very short poems, rather than cosmic epics or play cycles. (I'm thinking of this in terms of my original reaction to reading some short lyrics by Mandelstam in a Providence bookstore : how I was so taken with their brief, sudden, puzzling, musical but mysterious imagery. A kind of "experience-shorthand" or telegraphy.) Another way that poets might offer resistance is through the intentional cross-over or intercalation of person & poem, of art & experience : with the result that in responding to a poem we react to the presence of both a person & a poem, an artistic creation and a personal communication.... Poets & poetry have a way of pushing through the barriers erected between the objectivity of the art work and the personal charisma or presence of the poet....

But I have to think about this some more. (Paul Celan dealt with some of these questions in his little story "Conversation in the Mountains"...)

AA

In my (imaginary) American version of Russian Acmeism (the St. Petersburg poetry group of roughly 100 yrs ago), there are certain basic AA ABCs :

1. Making poetry is a free & independent activity, capable of constructing its own means & ends, with its own inherent value & meaning - something to cherish & enjoy, aside from any spiritual, religious, political, ideological or economic usefulness that others may demand or ascribe to it.

2. Yet AA "autonomy" differs from standard-brand Modern & Postmodern orientations, in that AA's independence is not dependent on revolt. There is no violent severing of the bonds of ordinary life, history, or culture in general. In other words, the freedom of a poem is not dependent on either a private (hermetic) language (a symbolic code) or upon verbal or logical incoherence of any kind.

3. To put this another way : in art & poetry, acts of free exchange, of sharing, are of the essence. But how does one share the unintelligible? One doesn't. The AA has a certain faith (or hope) in the ground of culture, no matter how storm-beaten & humanly corrupt & problematic & crisis-ridden. We are intelligent & intelligible beings; nature is fundamentally intelligible, if mysterious; poems want to participate in this circus of meaning.

4. In terms of aesthetics (let's say), the art work is a kind of thing, a quiddity, a distinct whole, distinct from everything else. We enjoy wholeness; we enjoy exploring the distinctness of things, their difference. Poetry is the art of the word. "The word as such," as the old Russian Acmeists used to say. Words themselves - the material of poetry - also exhibit wholeness, as well as sociability (as they join in the carnival of speech, grammar, sentences, style). The AA treats the wholeness of the poetic material with kindness & respect & care. Words are not torn violently from their milieu - at least not without some intelligible (if cryptic) purpose. Rather the AA poet seeks the elegance of the mot juste, & the rightness of the accurate statement. For the world as we know it deserves no less; and we know no other world. The unknowable remains, as Gumilev (the Russian Acmeist) says, what it is (unknown).

lanthanum 7.6

6

Close the books now, blear-eyed Willie,
Blackstone mumbles to himself. So glad
brother Roger lingers near ‒ my Galahad
of old soul freedom doctrine ‒ principium he

balances on delicate line (drawn from nature,
plein air). That is, give unto Caesar what’s
his dues; unto God your inner weather. Chaste
chestnut of unseen mercy, secret charity ‒ your

innocent conscience, or consciousness of
innocence (my child, my child). Pearl
signet of my days in the sun, sweet girl
(your dance, your prance before the stars

were, maid). For this, that St. George of old
Rhode Island, steely armorer of his own city-
state, set up a wall of separation : civility
for the brash mint-silver’d world ‒ & gold

for its hallowed background (vested, chaste,
sequestered from all eyes, save God’s alone).
So my song’s but a game for whistling home,
sezto humself. Memory-gnomon (if so graced)

for Noman Everyman (fret like a viol
in a triolet). He leans there, solitaire
into the pine of his foot-pedal. Where’s
the bride of my joy then, brother Will?

Good Will? & forth from the mandala
full of starry tinder in his eye, she comes :
an eyelash curve... silvery strand from
Natasha’s temple... cosmopolitan, selah.

1.24.11

brief chord sketch

lanthanum 7.5

5

Windblown snow-motes in the frozen sun,
winter sparklers, light-quanta... each
fresco’d in its own fleet galaxy.
Blackstone pries open Maximus again ‒

rapt in a riddle of his three-in-one. Some
summa-sum, encompassing cross-
purposes ‒ lassoed canoes, tossing
through gray Atlantic gust, pale, grim...

& all the while, shrouded in steerage,
the rose in the lute sings out, persistent,
mild. For the widow in the window, stranded,
near ‒ strangely buoyant, imperturbable...

So all my leewordings are just one song,
he mutters; seeds of one shady alas, alack
blown from green milk-way’d shofar-sack
(scattered, aloft). To lean the blue prong

of my fault-lines against your equilibrium
on the meridian of every latitude ‒ & give
thanks so, & be at peace (even in this dive
of tainted chips, a-bob on the burnt flood

of all betrayals). Hope is the anchor,
mumbles stubborn Will, though it curl in the
parallax of wistful memory. Bend your eye
now inward, heart; fond navel-admiral, or

ostrich hovercraft, wild silly peacock
of my soul, we’ll step a wedding-march
at last, under a canopy of April, May ‒
under the arc of the seal’s sea-rock.

1.21.11

They builded better than they knew

Have been re-reading the incomparable Architectonics of Humanism, by Lionel March. This is a profound exploration of ancient architectural methods (& their survivals in medieval & Renaissance eras), which involved the synthesis of math & geometry with the gematria, or numerology of words & names (back when ancient Greek & Hebrew alphabets & numerals were one & the same, and every word had a corresponding "number" - the Greeks called it the pythmen).

In a chapter investigating Roman architecture, he analyzes a (conceptual) building model described in Vitruvius - the basilica of Fano, & suggests not only that the full name of "Vitruvius" is encrypted in the dimensions of the building, but that Vitruvius might actually be a nom-de-plume of Roman polymath Varro, whose name is also encrypted, numerically & geometrically, in the design. Furthermore, March finds that the name of Julius Caesar - one of Varro's friends - is also memorialized in key elements of the building's design.

Now this I found especially interesting, because the pythmen, or root number by gematria, of Caesar's name, is the number 528. When I read this I almost fell off my chair. Because I've played a lot of number games, using names & dates etc., in my own poems (in this methods are a throwback to some very old bardic procedures). And the long poem Forth of July - especially the 3rd book, July - is quite involved with this number (528). July was finished on 5.28.2000. 5.28 is the date that William Blackstone, New England pioneer & a sort of "keystone" for the book, was buried on his property in Cumberland RI. July's chapters are also structured as 5 parts of 28 quatrains each. Moreover, one of the key verbal themes/games of the poem is a sort of turning inside-out of "Julius" (Caesar) to "July" (or Juliet, or jewel-eye, or "J", etc.) : which is intended in part to represent a kind of overturning of empire, militarism, "Iron Age" values (Caesar), & their replacement with "Golden Age" (or "Jubilee") values.

What I didn't realize, when I was "building" this poem, that the actual "number" of Caesar's name - & Vitruvius' symbolic building - is also encrypted in my poem...

lanthanum 7.4

4
cold virgin snow upon my heart

So walk with me, says Hobo-Blackstone-Maximus,
once-impounded rare-earth future eagle-ghost
(of millions of estrangèd shades, the host).
Let’s contra-dance along irrational diagonals

aside the squires of New Jerusalem!, he cries;
& so we do. Toward heart’s own inmost bridge
(its arc a silver Russian willow leaf ‒ knife-edge
perimeter of ancient almond shell). Mine eyes’

own gateway, longing for home : backyard garden
sequestered in Shakespeare’s glance (your eyes,
your smile). Magnetized enantiomorph (trice-
grounded lightning-bolt). A figure dwells therein ‒

one like unto a lamb-Mandela, whose blood & sweat
imprints your own Shaker-mandylion... a blooming
aerie-rose, beneath whose circling light (zooming
& skidding) goes thy sweet daughter (mote

without fright, in her cascade-canoe). & while
Apocalypse looms, & earth wobbles on its pivot,
& the signs are changed, constellations hefted
from their traces ‒ just then, just now - the sail

bumps its foretold horizon (white as snow, &
black as steppe soil, Bukovina compost). Betwixt
this crack in the galactic hinge, a yew-turned
bow, a sprig of green, springs up (almond

surprise)... Melchizedek comes from his tents,
smiling ‒ King Melek (out of lakes-jungle) emerges
like a star ‒ a member of the milky choir (Taigetos
honeybee) sings from the amygdala (its Sheba-sense).

1.17.11

Tu comprends

Lanthanum 7.3

3
Place... makes it possible to name.
‒ Charles Olson

Dazed, numb, numbering... Blackstone pioneer
taps his fingertips (pianissimo) upon a plain
ice cube. Black, Blackstone ice. Thin man’s
narrow mirror, wintering o’er a sneaky river

(snaking south). Translucent membrane
wiped clean by snow. Divide Roger Williams’
parabola-canoe crosswise, across the gunwales
(he muses) you make enantiomorph ‒ one

figure for twoness. Thinks on the young widow
across the way ‒ there we hung up our harps
& cried. One still takes air, walks, weeps ‒
while another sleeps underfoot (so long ago).

Muted Orpheus, loco Ulysses, brought to stillness
somewhere in the wilderness. Aleppo, maybe ‒
Salem, Providence...? A milky track (blindly).
Iron magnet weighted with lead (lawrencium,

krypton) spiraled by simple gravity to a center
of centers, a stone of stones. Hexagonal
sun-kite, adrift above Rio ‒ or solitary snow-
flake (landed on the Rock). Almond of winter.

Your arc of memory, half-buried in limestone
cliff, Blackstone ‒ earthborne prong
you must make for home. So long,
pilgrim. Like a steely kind of smile, lone

rambler, reflected in the Lethe-water (Nile).
Gone not-really-gone. Just hide-n-seek
through spindly galaxies, Sully (meek
pilot; Melchizedek). Rose aisle, precessional.

1.15.11

Method not a method

Teaching? .... I could probably teach grammar & composition. If I had to, & if I prepared myself, I could probably teach a passable intro course in history, philosophy, theology, literature...

Yes, I could teach grammar & composition, and I could teach literature, but I don't think I could teach poetry writing. Why not? Because the only method I know is inspiration. & inspiration is not a method. & most of the "methods" taught in poetry writing classes just get in the way of inspiration.

As I understand it, poetry is deeply-rooted in something you might call "breaking-into-song." No one breaks into song without being lifted-up, being inspired. There is something holy, sacred, & surrounded-by-fire in this experience, this song-rapture. The words, the poems, the traces of such inspiration give off the heat & light of that experience, & are tinctured with that "divinity", that sacred awe, that... apartness, strangeness...

Don't get me wrong : I don't think inspiration is a replacement or short-cut for craft & hard work. I just tend to think that that kind of labor - the path from "grammar & composition" to inspiration to finished work of art - is best struggled at sort of privately & indirectly. You must wrestle with the angel to win your birthright. Not necessarily in solitude, by any means : but it should be an individual artistic search. Otherwise there are too many middle-people involved, muddling up the distinction between writing true poetry and versifying, between inspiration & method.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but this is how I've always understood poetry. & I can't teach inspiration : I can hardly ever find it myself.

In Memory of Salman Taseer

O hear, Pakistan : those who murder in the name of God are the true blasphemers.

Long & winding Rhode

Serendipity... I have a postcard from James Merrill, who was a friend of my Uncle Jim (Ravlin). Jim was my mother's older brother (by 15 yrs). My mother (Mary Ravlin Gould) was a childhood friend of the granddaughter of Longfellow (the daughter of "laughing Allegra"). (My mother had her first drink - sherry - in the Longfellow home in Portland ME, when she was 13.) In the late 1990s I wrote a book-length poem called "Stubborn Grew", the plot of which turned on the fate of Jim Ravlin's daughter, Juliet Ravlin (my cousin). It was published in 2000, at Tod Thilleman's invitation, by Spuyten Duyvil Press. Tod wrote to me that my long poem reminded him more than anything of James Merrill (a poet I have in large part avoided reading).

See you, so long