Sent this comment to the 2nd in a series of long posts from a work-in-progress by Daniel Tiffany, conveyed by Don Share at his blog (Squandermania) :
"Very interesting subject.... & Mr. Tiffany covers a lot of ground, reconfigures a lot of received notions about kitsch.
Not sure I would want to identify the "poetic" so directly with the values of kitsch, however. Kitsch - in the sense of a mindlessly-manufactured product of mass commercial appeal, which reproduces (simulates) authentic art - ie. the binary kitsch/art - seems analogous to Coleridge's binary fancy/ imagination, in that the products of fancy are somewhat superficial & calculated rhetorical ornaments - frills, let's say - as opposed to the organic-formative-substantial structures of imagination. And for Coleridge the synthetic (as in "synthesis", not "artifice") power of the imagination to unite disparate aspects of experience into meaningful intellectual wholes is the essential mode & purpose of poetry. Poetry exhibits a vivid vitality which stems from its emotional empathy with that which is depicted - powers of ethos & pathos which are absent from many streams of analytical prose.
This whole discussion might well be framed by attention to an incisive study of 40 yrs ago by Harold Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion. Fisch begins with a critique of Eliot's rendering of the famous "dissociation of sensibility". The real split between poetry and prose occurred BEFORE the 18th-cent. flowering of bourgeois literature, which is the period of Tiffany's focus. The split began under the impact of dual 17th-cent. phenomena : 1) Baconian scientism, with its suspicion of language in general and of rhetoric and poetry in particular, and its desire to supplant them with a mode of "pure" scientific observation; 2) Puritan iconoclasm, with its emphasis on virtuous "plain speech" as opposed to the snares of flowery rhetoric, luxurious poetry. As Fisch demonstrates, when Baconian scientism melded with Puritan suspicion of language, a tremendously powerful anti-poetic animus was infused into the intellectual-cultural make-up of English-speaking society : an ironic situation which involved the elision or avoidance of the main stream of poetic sensibility and eloquence (the King James Bible). The repercussions of this fundamental divide are in very clear evidence in the stance and ideology of William Blake, for one example, with his "prophetic" attacks on Locke & Newton, etc.
This, it seems to me, is the locus of the real battle between poetry and prose, even today : it has less to do with the maneuvers of "fancy" (kitsch) than with the ontological (& social) status of the imagination."
8.31.2011
8.26.2011
Lanthanum is a Book
New edition of Lanthanum now available : Books 1 & 2. Larger print, easier to read, with introduction and extensive explanatory notes. Restoration of world civilization, at no extra charge.
8.24.2011
Grossman, Lerner, Maximus & all
The Poetry Foundation's Yak Disseminator highlights an interesting interview. Ben Lerner emphasizes his debt to the writings of Allen Grossman (my fellow Blake School graduate of previous generation) : a basically tragic perspective, mourning the limits of art, language & poetry, and the gap between Paradise and life as we know it. Lerner apparently finds a way to make this deeply ironic worldview work for him.
I've only read parts of Grossman's book (The Long Schoolroom) - it's on my desk, actually : but the reason I've left it unfinished is I find myself almost immediately resisting and disagreeing with his formulations. (Interesting that Grossman years back wrote a seminal short essay on Hart Crane, a poet whom Grossman clearly cares for as deeply as I do myself.)
I'm fundamentally an optimist - a comedian (in Dante's sense) rather than a tragedian. In my "Acmeist" world, wholeness - intellectual, spiritual, physical, historical, moral, cosmological - trumps division, irony and brokenness. Am reading again in Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor (as I try to get ready to work on the 3rd & final book of the poem Lanthanum), and encountering some clear cogitations on the nature of difference (distinction). For Maximus, difference does not automatically entail complete division, separation, or antagonism. Differences can co-exist, be harmonized. His thought in this vein is basically folded into an anthropology rooted in the concepts of divine Creation and Incarnation. The divine and human are dual and distinct, but are united "without confusion, without separation" in the incarnate God-Person. This unity is at the core of all the cosmic arrays of difference, of individual & species, of many & one.
In this perspective, an "Acmeist" poetics might acknowledge sharp distinctions between word & thing, art & life, poetry & truth - while at the same time remaining open (hopeful) to the possibility of their real coherence, their harmony.
I've only read parts of Grossman's book (The Long Schoolroom) - it's on my desk, actually : but the reason I've left it unfinished is I find myself almost immediately resisting and disagreeing with his formulations. (Interesting that Grossman years back wrote a seminal short essay on Hart Crane, a poet whom Grossman clearly cares for as deeply as I do myself.)
I'm fundamentally an optimist - a comedian (in Dante's sense) rather than a tragedian. In my "Acmeist" world, wholeness - intellectual, spiritual, physical, historical, moral, cosmological - trumps division, irony and brokenness. Am reading again in Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor (as I try to get ready to work on the 3rd & final book of the poem Lanthanum), and encountering some clear cogitations on the nature of difference (distinction). For Maximus, difference does not automatically entail complete division, separation, or antagonism. Differences can co-exist, be harmonized. His thought in this vein is basically folded into an anthropology rooted in the concepts of divine Creation and Incarnation. The divine and human are dual and distinct, but are united "without confusion, without separation" in the incarnate God-Person. This unity is at the core of all the cosmic arrays of difference, of individual & species, of many & one.
In this perspective, an "Acmeist" poetics might acknowledge sharp distinctions between word & thing, art & life, poetry & truth - while at the same time remaining open (hopeful) to the possibility of their real coherence, their harmony.
8.12.2011
Lanthanum 8.24
24
In Evening Land near Minnehaha Falls
in August at beginning of the end of summer
when chirring crickets commence their Sumerian
eulogy in 7/9 time when the walls tumble
down & the multiplex day a monarch butterfly
skitters down too into night’s monotone
(one late cicada out of the gloom) when
weaving swallows metamorphose into bats (high
up across the wistful pastel) & back again
then you’ll behold curious figures interlace
merge in a waltz of compass arcs across a
sixfold stone rosette out of Iran or Babylon
on an old stone sepulchre in Haifa (or Jerusalem)
between Jachin Boaz the two tall twin
amphorae (clay mimicking limestone) with a fan
of peacocks preening astride each funereal rim.
In Romania’s gold haze Czernowitz, Bukovina
the unmarked graves bend stoop with grass
of hot dog days under leaf-light shade (mass-
ive). & your imaginary friend (baobab, the
noman’s rood) becomes friendly little bird,
or tree (goldfinch, almond) tipping his eye
your way like a Chaplin hat or prairie (sigh)
all in one day, one night as soldiers slumbered
between night & day under milkweed portal
your starry canopy or wisdom-dome Hagia
Sophia in Cleopatra-coracle, light Cahokia
canoe or Memphis barge (small portable grail)
only some garbage truck, rumbling down 44
while the monarch waits on the balcony
near the microphones fate’s falconry
winging along toward Mexico (high cedar air)
8.12.11
Lanthanum : draft for an introduction
Short poems are usually better off on their own, without preliminary paraphernalia. But before asking a reader to plunge into the trackless Siberia of a work in verse that runs for hundreds of pages, if not miles, it might help to offer a brief survey of the territory.
Lanthanum is a work-in-progress, and I can’t predict where it will tend – but the poem is designed numerically around the number 57 (the atomic number of the element lanthanum), and at least in terms of simple length, this volume represents about 2/3rds of the whole – two books out of a projected three. And so I believe there are a few general things which can now be said about it. First, the poem has a narrator (the poet) who discourses in his own voice, but also assumes brief masks or personae, or speaks through (or by way of) distinctly different persons : Hobo, Maximus the Confessor, Roger Williams, William Blackstone, Berryman’s “Henry”, etc. Second, these splintered personae are aspects of a general ambience, at the poem’s opening, of loss, loneliness – as of a situation in which the speaker is missing a close friend, a companion, a beloved person. This predicament is never really clarified or explained : but in a literary sense it parallels the dilemma outlined by Dante in the Vita Nuova and Divina Commedia, or, going further back, the plot of the myth of Orpheus : in which the poet has lost a beloved person, the personal embodiment of love – and he must come to terms with that, and he goes on a journey to do so.
To some extent the poem itself is that journey. There is a mutual enfoldment of “orphic” song (lyric) with plot (narrative), of medium with message. In this way poetry offers a promise of healing through its own constructive elaborations : the “muse” becomes the imaginary friend who replaces the lost real friend. Obviously there is a real danger here of withdrawal into empty solipsism (literary, psychological) : yet there is also the possibility that poetry might become a proving ground for intellectual and spiritual resources beyond mere psychic substitution. This, after all, was the “comic” theme of Dante : that the loss of the beloved’s physical presence entailed the poet’s self-examination, a moral-philosophical struggle with the real nature of love itself. Something of value might emerge from suffering; what seems lost might be restored.
Obviously to speak of one’s work in the same breath with Dante’s is the extremity of foolish impudence. There is no point of comparison between Lanthanum and the epochal Divina Commedia. The latter is a didactic poem, in which the whole elaborate and fabulous architecture of medieval thought is brought to bear, toward the end of re-orienting the individual and culture as a whole toward everlasting goodness. Ezra Pound once famously complained that modern poets (and modern humanity generally) no longer have access to Dante’s Scholastic blueprints. And we don’t – at least not directly. Much of what was dogma now reads like myth; much that was taken for history has since become fable; what was understood as science looks now like dream. One cannot read Lanthanum and find anything approaching Dante’s encyclopedic morality play. The effort here is more primitive, basic : to investigate how poetry can re-intepret experience, the substance of things, in its own terms. The title (Lanthanum) is evocative of this aim : the reference is to something elemental, that is, number 57 in the periodic table of elements. Lanthanum : a rare earth which is actually not rare at all; named by its discoverer after the Greek word for “secret, hidden, overlooked;” of which one practical application is as part of a compound used in innovative road surfaces, in order to draw particulates out of the atmosphere (“clearing the air”).
I began writing this poem in December 2008. A few months later, in spring 2009, I had an extraordinary dream, which seemed to help focus and crystallize my intentions. The dream came out of absolute nowhere : I was looking at the Gateway Arch monument in St. Louis, Missouri. Now I have never seen the Gateway Arch, and prior to this dream I had never given it a moment’s thought. So the dream impressed me : it appeared to offer an implicit confirmation of some pathways I had been following in poetry for years. I have long been fascinated with structural frameworks for poetry, the technical and thematic analogues offered by mathematics and architecture. The origin of this interest lies in my affection for the poetry and life of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. Mandelstam, along with fellow Petersburg “Acmeists” Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, constructed an approach to poetry which offered a kind of architectonics of gratitude-for-existence. Gumilev called it “chasteness” : a moral conscience, a fundamental respect for unique and living phenomena on earth – as they are, humble or grand. Poetry, music, architecture share in this fundamental harmonics, transversing time and eras in somewhat Proustian/Bergsonian fashion. And in my explorations of these poets, I found affinities, both stylistic and conceptual, with the work of Hart Crane – whose long poem The Bridge offers a similar “architectonic” worldview : a paean to reality, grounded in material/historical particulars, on the one hand, and in a kind of cosmic-orphic optimism, on the other.
So my dream of the Arch served to confirm these compositional motives and directions. But Lanthanum is not only a reiteration of Acmeist or “New American” themes. The poem emerged before the dream, and its motives are deeper and more obscure than any enthusiasms I might have for fellow poets. The “plot” as previously sketched still shapes the song : an attempt to discover and come to terms with the deepest strata of love, reality, experience : an attempt at recovery (in all senses of the term). So the Arch begins to resonate for me : to serve as a sort of magnet, a multifaceted cluster-image of something at the spiritual root of time, history, life on earth. Something substantial and enduring, under the violence and suffering on the surface of things.
These are some of the dimensions of the versified wilderness up ahead. I won’t try to characterize my personal style, which is full of games and puns and secret allusions; such things intrepid readers will have to dig out of obscurity on their own. I am grateful to all of you, my readers, intrepid or not – and I hope you find something rewarding in these woods.
Lanthanum is a work-in-progress, and I can’t predict where it will tend – but the poem is designed numerically around the number 57 (the atomic number of the element lanthanum), and at least in terms of simple length, this volume represents about 2/3rds of the whole – two books out of a projected three. And so I believe there are a few general things which can now be said about it. First, the poem has a narrator (the poet) who discourses in his own voice, but also assumes brief masks or personae, or speaks through (or by way of) distinctly different persons : Hobo, Maximus the Confessor, Roger Williams, William Blackstone, Berryman’s “Henry”, etc. Second, these splintered personae are aspects of a general ambience, at the poem’s opening, of loss, loneliness – as of a situation in which the speaker is missing a close friend, a companion, a beloved person. This predicament is never really clarified or explained : but in a literary sense it parallels the dilemma outlined by Dante in the Vita Nuova and Divina Commedia, or, going further back, the plot of the myth of Orpheus : in which the poet has lost a beloved person, the personal embodiment of love – and he must come to terms with that, and he goes on a journey to do so.
To some extent the poem itself is that journey. There is a mutual enfoldment of “orphic” song (lyric) with plot (narrative), of medium with message. In this way poetry offers a promise of healing through its own constructive elaborations : the “muse” becomes the imaginary friend who replaces the lost real friend. Obviously there is a real danger here of withdrawal into empty solipsism (literary, psychological) : yet there is also the possibility that poetry might become a proving ground for intellectual and spiritual resources beyond mere psychic substitution. This, after all, was the “comic” theme of Dante : that the loss of the beloved’s physical presence entailed the poet’s self-examination, a moral-philosophical struggle with the real nature of love itself. Something of value might emerge from suffering; what seems lost might be restored.
Obviously to speak of one’s work in the same breath with Dante’s is the extremity of foolish impudence. There is no point of comparison between Lanthanum and the epochal Divina Commedia. The latter is a didactic poem, in which the whole elaborate and fabulous architecture of medieval thought is brought to bear, toward the end of re-orienting the individual and culture as a whole toward everlasting goodness. Ezra Pound once famously complained that modern poets (and modern humanity generally) no longer have access to Dante’s Scholastic blueprints. And we don’t – at least not directly. Much of what was dogma now reads like myth; much that was taken for history has since become fable; what was understood as science looks now like dream. One cannot read Lanthanum and find anything approaching Dante’s encyclopedic morality play. The effort here is more primitive, basic : to investigate how poetry can re-intepret experience, the substance of things, in its own terms. The title (Lanthanum) is evocative of this aim : the reference is to something elemental, that is, number 57 in the periodic table of elements. Lanthanum : a rare earth which is actually not rare at all; named by its discoverer after the Greek word for “secret, hidden, overlooked;” of which one practical application is as part of a compound used in innovative road surfaces, in order to draw particulates out of the atmosphere (“clearing the air”).
I began writing this poem in December 2008. A few months later, in spring 2009, I had an extraordinary dream, which seemed to help focus and crystallize my intentions. The dream came out of absolute nowhere : I was looking at the Gateway Arch monument in St. Louis, Missouri. Now I have never seen the Gateway Arch, and prior to this dream I had never given it a moment’s thought. So the dream impressed me : it appeared to offer an implicit confirmation of some pathways I had been following in poetry for years. I have long been fascinated with structural frameworks for poetry, the technical and thematic analogues offered by mathematics and architecture. The origin of this interest lies in my affection for the poetry and life of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. Mandelstam, along with fellow Petersburg “Acmeists” Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, constructed an approach to poetry which offered a kind of architectonics of gratitude-for-existence. Gumilev called it “chasteness” : a moral conscience, a fundamental respect for unique and living phenomena on earth – as they are, humble or grand. Poetry, music, architecture share in this fundamental harmonics, transversing time and eras in somewhat Proustian/Bergsonian fashion. And in my explorations of these poets, I found affinities, both stylistic and conceptual, with the work of Hart Crane – whose long poem The Bridge offers a similar “architectonic” worldview : a paean to reality, grounded in material/historical particulars, on the one hand, and in a kind of cosmic-orphic optimism, on the other.
So my dream of the Arch served to confirm these compositional motives and directions. But Lanthanum is not only a reiteration of Acmeist or “New American” themes. The poem emerged before the dream, and its motives are deeper and more obscure than any enthusiasms I might have for fellow poets. The “plot” as previously sketched still shapes the song : an attempt to discover and come to terms with the deepest strata of love, reality, experience : an attempt at recovery (in all senses of the term). So the Arch begins to resonate for me : to serve as a sort of magnet, a multifaceted cluster-image of something at the spiritual root of time, history, life on earth. Something substantial and enduring, under the violence and suffering on the surface of things.
These are some of the dimensions of the versified wilderness up ahead. I won’t try to characterize my personal style, which is full of games and puns and secret allusions; such things intrepid readers will have to dig out of obscurity on their own. I am grateful to all of you, my readers, intrepid or not – and I hope you find something rewarding in these woods.
8.11.2011
Lanthanum 8.23
23
They are always with you, ghosts in the shade
of the raven-knife – sprigs of the innocent,
personal sketches. Though death was sufficient.
They no longer suffer the human hell we made
for them (for ourselves) on earth. They
will not be transmuted by sublime Concept;
they are your brothers, sisters, & you wept
too late – the stain cannot be washed away.
Their water & wine run down into clay
glimpsed in an arc-light (everlasting form).
Their hope & sorrow are your paradigm –
their almond bark a sheepdog gate. A way.
It floats in the tattoo of an evening rain
that ripples like wind through the hair
on your arm echoes the few spare
notes of milk train waning over prairie
Where the motes gather & lost letters
raven-black on yellowed onionskin
outline of a cherished face on wooden
outside wall in Voronetș a potter’s eyes
light blue a painter’s olive-green the dove’s
grey deeps the ocean-sigh gull-cry oils,
oeuil in the mosaic mish-mash, the what-all
collage under almond ash oak-leaves’
deep shade those philosophic walls of a tree-
of-J the wisdom-loving love of Love (that
cricket-Magdalen a summer prodigy hove-
to ancient cicada in dying dogwood) free
8.11.11
8.10.2011
Lanthanum 8.22
22
The peaceful evening out of which the poem comes
or maybe doesn’t – the special quiet of the poem’s
own hum imposed upon squawky cacophonics (home
street home) of yon triple-deckered, cumbersome
dronopolis (I mean the poem of Providence)...
the quiet of homesick willow-violin, its wayward,
solitary hobo tune... what’s at the heart of it,
Edward? Figment of sister-dove flown hence,
mayhap – melodifying on her spiral Jonah-horn
between the dry ribs of a dead grey world-whale
somewhere (my heart, my heart). Hear, O Israel!
The chariot of Elijah & the steeds thereof – worn
like a bracelet round her Sabbath-tambourine!
Waltzing menorah! Footstep of Shekinah,
Bride... ancient familial concert-pal... J-
bird (furtive, always in flight). Has-been
Hobo’s will-be (again... again). ‘Member her...
Like a dream of the Gateway, she comes
from nowhere, some new whirr : freedom’s
Imago : quick-change artist (Shakespearean
erector set) : as if Earth were born anew
from flash of sympathetic lightning (Imago,
Imago) : as if all be splendor... & what do you
make of it, Horatio? A mortal debt last narrow
bed a love poured out like wine, like blood
at apex of the Sparrow Hills, one harrowing
hill at base of skull unknown, unknowing
lamp lambent, surrounded by fire (bluebird)
8.10.11
8.09.2011
What's new?
Seth Abramson compiles a grand list of some of the wee corruptions of the literary profession (Poetryland version), here. A good-intentioned list of good intentions gone awry, I guess. I remember thinking & saying similar things (if not so well) 10-15 yrs ago.
But then I suppose the alchemists of olde also had their array of petty schemes & self-serving vices, their egotisms & narcissisms & jivings & trimmings, in their day... but what we remember is that they were simply wrong most of the time - that their theories were based on myths, not scientific reasoning & experiment.
& I get the feeling today's poetry scene is much like the alchemy scene of yore... some underlying askewedness puts all those petty corruptions in the shade. I can imagine a literary culture that repents of, and washes itself clean of, all the vices on his list - purifies itself morally - yet still fails to produce any good art or poetry. It makes me think of Joseph Brodsky's provocative & Promethean assertion that ethics is determined by aesthetics. I don't really hold with this, either - but what if the fundamental problem is a failure of imagination? What if we are living in the deep shadow of the mythos-styles of the late 19th and 20th century - or a conservative reaction against these styles - resulting in the manufacture of cultural cliches on an industrial scale? I'm thinking of the shadow (the great Poe-ish raven-shadow) of the Baudelarian anti-hero & flaneur-dandy : the Dostoyevskian underground man : the Camusian Rebel : the Joycean/Svevoian Chaplinesque shlemiel. We inhabit an age of the pop-culture glorification of the anti-hero & the anti-heroine, oe'rtopped with an epicene academic culture of creative 'writing" designed to memorialize the same (our wild youth) in award-winning verse & prose.... & how does a culture with such a pre-installed & -approved Mythos - a zeitgeist, a worldview - how does such encounter the authentic, the real, anymore? This I would like to know.
I wonder if artists need to turn back to the "new" - but not the packaged & certified Modern, Postmodern, or Pre-modern new - but something actually.... different.... a vision of life based on a different set of philosophical grounds, a new architectonic, or an old made new (really new)... I actually think Hart Crane & Wallace Stevens, in their different ways, were searching for these grounds, this newness : but I'm showing my old biases there, I guess...
But then I suppose the alchemists of olde also had their array of petty schemes & self-serving vices, their egotisms & narcissisms & jivings & trimmings, in their day... but what we remember is that they were simply wrong most of the time - that their theories were based on myths, not scientific reasoning & experiment.
& I get the feeling today's poetry scene is much like the alchemy scene of yore... some underlying askewedness puts all those petty corruptions in the shade. I can imagine a literary culture that repents of, and washes itself clean of, all the vices on his list - purifies itself morally - yet still fails to produce any good art or poetry. It makes me think of Joseph Brodsky's provocative & Promethean assertion that ethics is determined by aesthetics. I don't really hold with this, either - but what if the fundamental problem is a failure of imagination? What if we are living in the deep shadow of the mythos-styles of the late 19th and 20th century - or a conservative reaction against these styles - resulting in the manufacture of cultural cliches on an industrial scale? I'm thinking of the shadow (the great Poe-ish raven-shadow) of the Baudelarian anti-hero & flaneur-dandy : the Dostoyevskian underground man : the Camusian Rebel : the Joycean/Svevoian Chaplinesque shlemiel. We inhabit an age of the pop-culture glorification of the anti-hero & the anti-heroine, oe'rtopped with an epicene academic culture of creative 'writing" designed to memorialize the same (our wild youth) in award-winning verse & prose.... & how does a culture with such a pre-installed & -approved Mythos - a zeitgeist, a worldview - how does such encounter the authentic, the real, anymore? This I would like to know.
I wonder if artists need to turn back to the "new" - but not the packaged & certified Modern, Postmodern, or Pre-modern new - but something actually.... different.... a vision of life based on a different set of philosophical grounds, a new architectonic, or an old made new (really new)... I actually think Hart Crane & Wallace Stevens, in their different ways, were searching for these grounds, this newness : but I'm showing my old biases there, I guess...
8.08.2011
Lanthanum 8.21
21
A whiff of old earth-smell after belated rain
leads me back to August, winding down
in Mendelssohn. Light fluttery bell-sound
of Heidi-piano... cicada sawmill-drone (against
the grain)... a slip of willow in his hand
will guide blind Hobo back to wavebent limbs
over the riverbank (yonder, where WW swims
in a dream that is no dream). A promised land
that slumbers yet beneath catastrophe – where
Melchizedek climbs from Cahokia mound
with bread, wine... where every Charlie chap &
Harlequin finds Pulcinella, somehow (near
edge of tsunami, by Heartbreak Ridge, under
petrified gaze of cratered power plants). How
can it be? The soul survives, the heart (slow,
slow) regenerates – these will not surrender... &
so today (in this RI holdout of veteran memory)
shall be no longer V-J Day, but Victory-of-J
Day – the Victory of J : kingfisher-melody,
furled seashell-game, Euphrates boat-shanty... for
a dream is a dream of Everywoman, Everyman –
unaccountable & indestructible; & this life
is tailfin of an ocean-mind (bride-wife
of buried ghost-Jonah); its denouement began
one night (a thousand years ago) when
a jay-pianist of Voronetș blue (perched, hidden
on an almond branch) let spout her siren-
88s (at a young fellow in far-off willow). Amen.
8.8.11
8.07.2011
Lanthanum 8.20
20
A Sunday rain soaks this recumbent spine
of Providence ‒ old town like a sleepy dinosaur
that would be lofty bird. Fine water-veil for
Iowa Isis, Osiris paddleboat ‒ some sabbath-mind’s
own fancy daydream (liberation, Jubilee).
Key to the highway ‒ like a roadside icon
leaning home. Faint inkling, rosy Rubicon,
rounded square beneath bus-shelter Milky
Way. Above that crossroads’ lowly drop
of martyr-blood, not far from Memphis ‒
Martin’s bull’s-eye witness, crosshairs
of a brooding sentience. At the top
of the tentpole of Polaris, the shrouded gate
of a third heaven ‒ architectonic of glimmer-
sense ‒ moss-grey intuition ‒ willow’s wonder-
branch. Out of Solaris ocean-mind, the frigate-
harbor of the human form. Just a sketch,
an outline of an understanding (sympathy)
hidden in wisdom-submarine (highly holy) of
an oscillating universe. A thought, a touch ‒
a mason’s 20-20 hand ‒ bent on restoration,
reconciliation, joy. Soul-victory is innocence,
renewed. That sign of love-swelled sentience,
a rood-sign planted over galaxies. Bus-station
by the frozen cemetery, near the river... at
the fringe of the veil of definitive quid. A
rain-wrought mandorla crowning your head.
Yours, mine ‒ equal, always. Elemental Fiat.
8.7.11
8.06.2011
Lanthanum 8.19
19
These gray clouds loitering, chary with rain
& that drop of red, far off in a black walnut
like a cardinal point, figure my inward Orient
on goldfinch ground (of flighty song, & pain).
You love the earth... so trust the magnanimity
(shady grey bran, intellectual) that formed it ‒
forms it, unaccountably, on All Souls’ Night :
this light-sped masquerade, spirit-birthday
frisbee’d on high, beneath a frosty brow
of Milky Way (insouciant, happenstance &
milkweed monarchy). Night wake of Argo-
salience... Europa-trail (scarred Voronetş blue).
& the signs in the sky, the prong in the earth
are only emblems of a sweet conception,
lamb-lamps of a fiery warmth ‒ your heart’s
limehewn scriptorium (wavy mandorla-berth).
O my little tree of Jessie O., adrift
in your shaky-leaf experience... your flow’ry
shallop-shell, your thunder-coracle... O be
at ease there in your honeycomb, left-
over wreath of empty hands... O bee
at ease. Here in woodlands of Bukovina
an ear can hear you still, steadfast cicada
(near rainbent eyelash-hull of almond-tree).
The throaty pigeon-maudit pecks at a bread-
crust (rarified coot of everyday gray stone);
she’ll watch for that gardener again ‒ the one
who looks for her (amid the veteran dead).
8.6.11
8.04.2011
Lanthanum 8.18
18
From Cahokian mundus in heartland, soaring
up a Finnish ladder (lofty thought-swerve)
to the finish line. Candelabra, spinal-nerve...
red leaves, rain-skimming back to commingling
clay. Like that vine planted on Jacob’s dream-
limestone, on the way from Padanaram ‒
after wrassling with a light-bermed, harum-
scarum heavyweight... meet the extreme
bow-taut communion (eyes, tears). Of sense,
intelligence. Here. Hear. Only here ‒ inhering
in your heart. So the mandala-rose coheres,
nearing... looms, beginning (woven-fine parlance).
This grail, this spousal, this conjunction ‒
plainchant of YHWH-shade, keening ‒ your
turtle-ghost, who haunts us, here & there...
sad-merry morsel, Everyman : Louis’ royal
unction-prayer (inward, homeward). Bare.
There are as many spirit-trails into this wood
as there are feet to walk them : the neighborhood
is infinite : but the way is narrow, drear ‒ your
own (lead-Lenten plumbline). Shaking off
the grave, the gravity, is not for Icarus,
but Israel (after the last sacrifice,
the burial). 12 gates to the city, O
my Lord. So, after 12 moons & a year
of doubtful drought, this double prong (folk-
tuning tong) leaps as a willow branch (divining,
rude) in my hands ‒ an eye in my hand. Here.
8.4.11
8.03.2011
Lanthanum 8.17
17
On a coign of Prospect & Waterman, near
bird-peak of Providence (Roger’s palace)
a crew of masons rectifies the balance
of Tuscany belltower ‒ Carrie’s sheer &
spousal sepulchre (Love is Strong as Death).
No pizza-tilt worktable here. We must aim
for the perfect. Orthogonal. Cusa’s Game
of Spheres ‒ spiritual akme. Starry zenith
of Einstein-wand (here, there... hear).
Heart’s hyper-geomancy requires no less;
its subtle foreknowledge, its feeling-sense
scans horsehair-spectra (near, far... near).
Why? Cuz th’hairspun plats of Prov’dence
depends on youse ptahticipation, Haht ‒
one global splinteling (careening charity)
dubbed on the brow of deep-down river-
sentience. Its voice a whisper, whole &
holy (wholly whole, by golly) from strum-
circadian, Circassian cicada-circus ‒ sum
of circles of the sun. One baker’s dozen
(almond buns). Get off the pogrom,
Oddity ‒ evening urns its bleed. Your
own. Settle up accounts with the fore-
crawdads (Mam’ship) for the fleet I AM
is faster than a canefield smartphone
(sliver-horn of mirror-Mammon) &
more real, churl. Under an amplified
sand viol... Rosie Oasis (swell-photon).
8.3.11
7.27.2011
Lanthanum 8.15 (& 8.16)
15
Summer in Providence is cresting now.
On the cusp of evening, seashell sunset.
Caribbean pastel pinks, blues... inlet
of cricket equanimity (in shadow
of night). The granite hand of the founder
floats over the prow of his canoe, at the edge
of the Terrace. Blackstone, brooding, hidden,
tries that pledge (in profounder flounder-seas
of lostness, anonymity, oblivion). Finds
it fair (& kind, & true). Soul liberty...
your spiritual magnanimity is poetry.
Your metaphysical gratitude binds the
ensemble in its upsurge of a cosmic urge
toward harmony ‒ that rose-petalled state
where many states & planets merge (what
forgotten melody-memory rises to the edge
of her cave-mound now?) in an almond curve ‒
an eyelid buried in the garden-cemetery... one
teardrop planted by the vernal sepulchre (wan
limping Wanda of an everliving-leaping vault).
Only the sign of the whisper, out of the shell.
Like a tattoo on the shoulder of a rocky brow.
Like an air out of nothing; like a game of Clue
or Hide n’ Seek (one eyelash, lofted out of hell);
or like a glance from a cherished face, toward you ‒
of measure, law & cognizance; of mercy, patience,
lovingkindness ‒ substance of soul-confidence,
ration of the bread & wine (of Magdalen-Yeshu).
7.27.11
16
Under the byzantine bickering in Washington
lurks a kind of autumnal undertone ‒ the wobbly
gait, the straitened happenstance of an elderly
citizenry (O senile generations...). Peevish
widower’s refrain (mothballed Uncle George)
‒ There’s not enough! Then cut some more! ‒
reverbs the pensioner’s paltry share (just one
lottery win, Chief, will even the score). Gorge
yourselves on bile & special perks, ladies
& gentlemen of the pork-fed Beltway!
You’ll buy a lengthy trial in the illusory
labyrinth-mirage ‒ yon Babylon-daze
of symbolic checkers (who’s keeping track?)
for egomaniacs (& other spoiled characters
with something to prove, absolutely
nothing to lose). Take me back,
little Sheba! chants remorseful Solomon ‒
the world’s too big to fail... meanwhile
the kids are not all right (Absalom in exile
twitches his next move, under a pseudonym).
The world’s too big to fail ‒ isn’t it?
Or maybe not... or maybe it’s just me.
Lately I’m alert to the flyweight harmony
of a simple salt ‒ that Black Sea anchorite
with hands chopped off (by tyranny) ‒ yet
continued writing his hopeful letters (elegant)
with imperial stumps... So what’s his secret,
Jason? What’s yours, Ariadne? Not yet, not yet.
There’s a revolving door beneath the everlasting
dome of heaven ‒ where fingerprint of Everyman
whorls in its sovereign mystery (of one is one
& all alone). Tattoo of trumpet... flowering.
8.1.11
7.24.2011
Lanthanum 8.14
14
i.m. Amy Winehouse
On this gray Sunday of indecisive rain
a lone rose plants a scarlet matrix in my
backyard hideaway, on scraggly stem. High
in blues, the sweet chanteuse, lost in the wine-
fields of one Detroit soul, has come down early
to her clay bed, has sailed away on a trumpet-
tattoo... blues mingled with red-eye (delicate
heart). White on black purred that pearly
pigeon, banding Machu Picchu with a shady
ululation-ring : flotation device for overall dove-
mind (reclusive, swooning into the earth, love-
light switched on). Under all the neighborhoody
spectra-differentia, a furtive song
of bran-matter & wine : of black in white
& back again : of human mind & heart.
Soul (indivisible, immortal) is forever young.
& needy of light. Rhode Island, for example,
is a state confessional : refuge for all those
troubled in mind (conscience) the footloose
founder underlined. Each soul a sample
of ruby, diamond ‒ forged from, blended
with coal & clay. Like that earth-mound
(Cahokia) under a tungsten steel-wound
Arch : both prong and spire, in a tensile
mend (grounded, centripetal). Your rare
earth path, your solo hum, your Amy-soul...
the limestone center of this wine-red world
is in your heart. Is resting in Elijah’s chair.
7.24.11
7.23.2011
Lanthanum 8.13
13
The sailors, Hart, the sailors in Barbados
fashioned lightweight seashell valentines ‒
mosaics, shell mandalas, roseate signs
(centripetal) of love-bent order (logos-
flowers). & as each visible valentine
is emblem of a violet thought (seal of
a mute immaculate intent, made real)
so every shipshape coracle, each fine-
spun sailor’s hobbyhorse, is like a shallop
sharing scallop shells, or key for a box
bearing hoards of keys : one spin unlocks
them all ‒ each moonshine signal-envelope
exuded by the softest, warmest, most
sequestered crest of life (encrypted pine
beneath the tides). Be Mine,
my Queen, my Cleopatra-Desdemona, ghost-
Ophelia, in the photograph ‒ couched there
(nearly bare) with tintype bit-part players, on
the sidewheeler (from Jewett City down
to Lima, gal). Thin bodkin-signature
on haunted lake, one sinuous moustache
(melodrama-miaow) ‒ negative footprint
off slim rafter’s board (lost heartfelt
Argonaut). Lips lift the calabash
on sounding wave, toward shaken die of
yearning-hurricane... Aye-aye. Your eye.
Scrimshawed in a rickshaw by & by, O
Cap’n Bligh ‒ patented & omnipresent (Joy).
7.23.11
7.21.2011
Lanthanum 8.12
12
Fresh scar of Omphalos, you plunged back
(through hurricane season) to the natal brine
or naval brain ‒ original River of Heaven
where your songs come from... (deep black-
&-honeyed Melville dream). & everything
grows implicate, symbolical, after the fact ‒
your heavy father’s red Lifesaver, racked
in his empty hold... the guilt-ridden ring
of twin clerical compatriots, collared
by strict safe-keeping (spinning through
Mississippi locks, each zigguratic Zulu
combine). You jump the wheelhouse, holler.
Yet planetary batta-babbling of tango-tongs
will never cease, except by grace, cries
Everyman, fleet Falcon-Ace ‒ this prize
so steeps the tethered mantra of all song :
except by grace, which yieldeth grain by local,
keepsake earth. Each foreign, sanguine Eden
of each stranger-tribe ‒ each crime-ridden
bloodsoaked mythograph, each folksy focal
pinprick ‒ each herb & flower cloistered there
in arch-hives of the speechless yokels (weed-
diggers, well-doers) ‒ grace, dwelling in the spell
of humble ship-launches, handshakes... Love’s share.
Hart, you reign thus, with Herman, in the sea :
I hear you, lambent singer, where eagles gather
& serpents loiter, checkmated ‒ ‘mid feather-
rainbows of mimosa, cedar-fanes of Galilee.
7.21.11
Fresh scar of Omphalos, you plunged back
(through hurricane season) to the natal brine
or naval brain ‒ original River of Heaven
where your songs come from... (deep black-
&-honeyed Melville dream). & everything
grows implicate, symbolical, after the fact ‒
your heavy father’s red Lifesaver, racked
in his empty hold... the guilt-ridden ring
of twin clerical compatriots, collared
by strict safe-keeping (spinning through
Mississippi locks, each zigguratic Zulu
combine). You jump the wheelhouse, holler.
Yet planetary batta-babbling of tango-tongs
will never cease, except by grace, cries
Everyman, fleet Falcon-Ace ‒ this prize
so steeps the tethered mantra of all song :
except by grace, which yieldeth grain by local,
keepsake earth. Each foreign, sanguine Eden
of each stranger-tribe ‒ each crime-ridden
bloodsoaked mythograph, each folksy focal
pinprick ‒ each herb & flower cloistered there
in arch-hives of the speechless yokels (weed-
diggers, well-doers) ‒ grace, dwelling in the spell
of humble ship-launches, handshakes... Love’s share.
Hart, you reign thus, with Herman, in the sea :
I hear you, lambent singer, where eagles gather
& serpents loiter, checkmated ‒ ‘mid feather-
rainbows of mimosa, cedar-fanes of Galilee.
7.21.11
7.20.2011
Lanthanum 8.11
11
I had an encounter with a bluejay this evening,
solitaire in dogwood niche or perch, a lonely
lieutenant ‒ or maybe just at ease (one homely-
pearly moment). Looks around, intent, scanning;
watches me (through the window) watching him.
Animals are great actors ‒ each minuscule move
steeped in suspense (a rifled minie in its groove).
No wonder Egypt wallah’d hawk-head Wisdom ‒
hoary Horus was a watchful bird. But I digress.
Where was I? Bluejay watching. Watching me.
Involuntary improviser, memorious volunteer,
funereal... north-southern (riverine, I guess)...
African button, lost in the hold of a Petersburg
prison-ship. Melville’s tomb (honeycomb)
at the bottom of the sea ‒ small room
(portable) slivered in Marlowe’s eye (O mirror’d
Mag). Loaded magazine (a-glinting dirk).
The symbolism of these brassy, clashing cymbals
keeps one wondering & wandering forever & anon ‒
yet yon center of centers, yon gate of gates (hark!)
rests in your soul : yon Equalizer to the last degree
(Simon, Rupert). Just is. Just is the end.
When the Eternal comes, & you spend
your last penny on a rags-weedy gown, Marie.
So be it. Her humorous leg-kick or poke
in the ribs is evening’s promise : the memory-
star. When the whole weight of your soul, see,
is lifted... anima-child, bird-whistle-bone... look
there...
7.20.11
7.19.2011
Lanthanum 8.10
10
I criss-crossed the country on chicory highways
to visit my ailing father in the deep midwest;
past emerald orthogonal planes of pest-
control crops (inimical now to milkweedy
monarchs), vast calm ruminant spaces that
nestle on vanishing points of immemorial
homesteads. O this Lincoln-logos world ‒
full of illness & noise, yes, but also quiet
heroic Ohio highs-&-lows (those visionary
feats, O Hart) ‒ not to mention Pennsylvania ‒
where, in the evening, some sequestered cicada
perched aloft (silo’d, yet somewhat loud) tells me
‒ keep on keepin’ on, like the song says :
because the slanting sails of cedar telephone
poles still lean toward poignant sky, horizon...
finite, infinite... their polestar (immortality).
Because there is something deeply foolish in poetry
which corresponds to something playful (fairly
prodigal) about this magnanimous & silly-lowly
sower’s universe (frisbee’d through every
black & mustard by-way) ‒ the way it was
in the beginning - in the very beginning ‒
the veritable Beguine ‒ before our sinning
singèd the surface of a planet with such woes
as tears are made of. When we were naked
dancing on goatskin, unashamed ‒ robed
in garments of light, just light. Globed with
water droplets, water ‒ shaken awake (shaqed).
7.19.11
5.20.2011
Rapture & Poetry
My time is still unbounded.
And I have accompanied the rapture of the universe
As muted organ pipes
Accompany a woman's voice.
- Osip Mandelstam, trans. by James Greene
Until today (the day before the predicted Event) I haven't paid any attention to all the yap about The Rapture. It seems to be of more (comic) interest to the irreligious gabbosphere, than to soi-disant "people of faith."
One way to think about some statements of Jesus in the Gospels about the Day of Judgement, and what is called "the Rapture" (ie., to paraphrase : keep watch : no one knows when the end is coming : "on that day, one will be taken, and one will be left behind" etc.), is that they fall within a general Gospel/Biblical emphasis on a distinction between soul & body, spirit & flesh, invisible & visible, heaven & earth, eternity & time. Contrary to prevalent stereotypes - most of them originating with Christian monastics & preachers themselves - this distinction, in both Judaism & Christianity, is just that : a distinction, no more no less. It does not mean a denigration of the earth, the body, the visible, the flesh, etc. All these things from the latter half of the equation are to be accepted with joy & gratitude as gifts of the Creator. What the emphasis on this distinction of Spirit is meant to do is to restore the balance : to bring humanity back to spiritual wholeness & health, in a world overwhelmed by the fleeting & changing things of "this world." Thus the reminder of an End-Time - & the focus on individual alertness & awareness (ie. "let your loins be girded", for "one shall be taken & one left behind") - is again a kind of memento mori, and a reminder of the nearness (though invisible) of the "kingdom of heaven."
This is just one way (a low-key, common-sense way) to approach what is implied by the "Day of Judgement" exhortations in the Gospels. But I want to foreground this distinction (earth/heaven, body/spirit, visible/invisible) as an entry into what follows. I want to talk a little about poetry and "rapture". Osip Mandelstam points toward this theme, in the stanza above - from a late poem, written (not long before his final trip to Siberia & death) after listening (from exile in provincial Voronezh) to a recording of Marian Anderson, singing gospel music on Moscow Radio. Poets - in their visionary, enthusiastic, prophetic, charismatic, shamanic modes - have been associated with "raptures" from the beginning of time (isn't rhapsode a name for "poet" in Greek?). Plato memorably contrasted the "reasonable" discourse of the philosophers with the Muse-inspired, unpredictable flights of poets. The ancient kinship between poem & oracle was a cross-cultural given. What is involved here is the charisma of possession - of the in-coming of the God, the Divine, the Spirit : of a somatic/intellectual experience which transports the poet into a "harmonic" state, resulting in song : the expression, the narration of the holistic, visionary experience itself : Mandelstam's "rapture of the universe." We are reminded here of the apostle Paul's account of his sudden transport to "the third heaven" (ie. above the clouds, and also beyond the stars), where he saw things he could not put into words; and of Dante's journey to Paradise with Beatrice (which explicitly adumbrates Paul's confession). These are what you might call canonical examples in the history of "rapture." They are akin as well to the Gospel episode, when the disciples witness Jesus' Transfiguration - standing on the hill with Elijah and Moses - from earthly man into heavenly being.
Many people - maybe everyone, really - have experienced, at one time or another, brushes with the inexplicable : the uncanny, the marvelous, the serendipitous, the wonderful, the mysterious... the spiritual, the numinous, the holy. Encounters or events which one cannot (or will not) reduce to some rational explanation or verbal equivalent. For the rare saints & holy people among us, ordinary life, whatever it brings, is perhaps transformed into the "bread & wine" of spiritual understanding : for the rest of us, most of the time, we're O.K. if we can just stave off trouble & get through another day....
But I've had my share of such rare & extraordinary experiences. Some of them have profoundly shaped the direction my life has taken. As I've written about before - when I was about 20 yrs old (in 1972-3) I underwent a series of seismic psychological events - uncanny, charismatic experiences - which seemed to mingle faith, vision & poetry. As a result I was shaken out of my practical life and rational pursuits : I dropped out of college for three years; I hitchhiked around the country (& England) in a kind of cloud of pondering & meditation on the mystery of things. & in a sense I have never stopped seeking that understanding : in 1973 I was brought up short by a kind of rational enigma, which spurred my curiosity about metaphysical, spiritual things. But I misrepresent what I went through, if I narrate this as merely some sort of gnostic search for occult knowledge. It was really an experience of being moved & changed in the heart of my personality : morally & emotionally as well as intellectually. My life was changed.
One of the consequences of this - & because what I went through was all tangled up in my mind with my sense of myself as a poet, with a literary vocation - was that I was unable to return to academics & the pursuit of a career in a "normal" way. I felt I had been through something which no teacher or classroom could explain to me; moreover, I felt motivated to find a way to express what I was "seeing" & learning directly in poetry. Poetry, vision & experience seemed irreducibly entwined. And I think at least one part of the reason I've worked at a kind of low-level job in a library for 25 years, is that I needed that independence from any kind of "worldly" demands on my ability to express things in poetry. I couldn't teach writing, I couldn't study or pursue an academic degree in a "sensible" way, because the intellectual & vocational responsibilities involved would be more than I could bear. (I realize there might be other, less charitable ways of evaluating such diffidence on my part. I'm sure there are many sides to it - "character issues"... I'm explaining just one of them.)
But setting aside the autobiographical vein : what I mean to suggest is that these extraordinary events - these strange spiritual promptings (nudgings?) - have provided me food for thought now for a long time : a food which has never run out. & over the past few weeks & months I've sensed a sort of integration in my mind, of longstanding notions & new researches - connected with the long poem I've been struggling with (Lanthanum). Integration, synthesis... it's a sense of certain ideas becoming substantial, & harmonized with each other, so that they provide a sort of confirmation, a weight or substance, which I can carry around with me... in a state of mild rapture & joy!
This is really not easy to explain without degrading it in the process. I've been searching for images & rational analogues of something at the root of the poem (Lanthanum), which was an unusual dream I had a few years ago about the Gateway Arch monument, in St. Louis. I've been reading about architecture (Padovan, Proportion; Van der Laan; Smith, The Dome). I've been reading various things on the literature of the Holy Grail (Gemstone of Paradise by Murphy was especially interesting, as was an old book by Helen Adolf, Visio Pacis). I've been reading some theology, especially the Byzantine church father, Maximus the Confessor. I've been reading some physics & cosmology. From these & many other books I've been drawing nourishment, I think, for a sort of productive way of seeing, or way of understanding things in general. & out of all this there was not a single "Eureka!" moment - but a kind of drawn-out, successive, gradual, gradually-expanding & growing & strengrthening E-U-R-E-K-A !-sense... a real "rapture of the universe", as Mandelstam put it.
How can I say it? I can't. I've been trying to say it & express it & sketch it out in the Lanthanum sequence & other poems. But since tomorrow's supposed to be "The Rapture," let me on this special occasion try to articulate my own intellectual joy-glee-rapture as I seem to feel it & see it.
Murphy, in his book on the grail, sets himself the task of explaining why the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (in Parzival) describes the grail as a "stone." He explains how the tomb of Christ was considered to be carved out of stone - to be a rock tomb. He explains that the Church began sanctifying portable eucharistic tables, so that pilgrims & soldiers could receive Communion even away from churches proper. These tables were little boxes or stands, made out of stone & gems, beautifully designed, with small hollow sections - miniature replicas of the Holy Sepulchre - which held the sanctified eucharistic bread (Christ's body). He shows how Wolfram's descriptions of the grail seemed based on such portable eucharistic containers - Murphy even discovers a specific box (in a museum in Bamberg, Germany) which he believes may have served as Wolfram's model.
The implication of these affinities is that the grail is equated with Christ's eucharistic Body : which itself (the eucharist) stems from, is part of, the body of Christ himself (in the Sepulchre, and resurrected on Easter). The Sepulchre today rests under a domed building in Jerusalem. Domical structures (as Smith relates) are a very basic & global figure for the human "home" (being a microcosmic representation - from nomadic tent structures to Hagia Sophia - of the "dome of heaven" arching over the earth). Thus we have the image of the mortal/risen Man/God - Jesus - located in the symbolic "center of the earth" (Jerusalem) - beneath the microcosmic dome-home - & replicated in a portable eucharistic "grail", available to anyone who seeks it.
Thus far we are discoursing on symbolic-religious symbols (which, taken by itself, could be criticized, I suppose, as a species of mystico-antiquarianism). So let me try to explain how I understand a sort of philosophical analogue or parallel to these symbols. And I want also to try to relate all this to poetry.
I think the human mind & imagination have an inborn orientation toward understanding. The discipline of science subjects this drive, this orientation, to the demands of analysis, experiment & proof : but the drive itself - to understand - came first. The mind - the imagination - is synthetic : aiming for wholes, for completeness, for the integration of disparate facts & experiences. The urge to wonder seems primordial to me : and what it answers, what it responds to, is an awareness of the basic difference between nothing and something. The vast universe - something - stands against nothingness, non-existence. I remember pondering these things in adolescence - but it probably starts in childhood : wondering, questioning the origin of life, of the universe.
Further, I think there is a basic consequence of this original human wondering, which is a state of what used to be called "natural piety". It is a deep and mostly-unconscious gratitude for being : an attitude of thanksgiving for the joy of mere existence, of being-alive. Of course, many things (we all know them) work to crumble & debilitate this attitude of gratitude : but this doesn't mean it's not still lurking there, beneath all our fears & disappointments. It is too basic, too primordial, to be destroyed.
Now let me try to pull some of these threads together toward some sort of conclusion. Here's what I say : the true "holy grail" is a kind of portable state of awareness. An awareness of what? A sense of an underlying harmony. What is this harmony? It is a harmony of proportion : a proportion (ratio, logos) between the human & the divine, between humanity & God. In a stance of gratitude. Gratitude stemming from an awareness of the "createdness" of the visible universe : of something born out of nothing. And not only that : but also gratitude stemming from an awareness of this central proportion itself : that human persons - in the "architecture" or "ecology" (the dome) of their lived lives on earth - represent visible images of divine Personhood. The earth, as Mandelstam, put it, is a "mansion" - & we are "God's grateful guests". This is a very basic (& fairly traditional) insight - shared by another Petersburg poet, Gumilev, & by Anna Akhmatova : it was part of the "chaste vision" of the Acmeist poetic project of the early 20th century. On this most simple foundation of gratitude or thanksgiving, the whole normative structure of civilization is seen to be constructed. It is stated most clearly in the Gospels, when Jesus explains that all the law & commandments hang on two basic commands : "To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind & strength, and what is like unto it, to love your neighbor as yourself." This is the core activation of the most basic sense of faith in a divine or metaphysical or dream or dramatic order of cosmic reality : this is the "bread & wine" of the poetic vision of the universe - its "rapture." Under the estrangement of time, and change & mortality, this is the promise of a kind of Easter metamorphosis : a resurrection of the mind & spirit through a mysterious Approach of living Consciousness - the dramatic victory of "sacred history" - its epic plot, you might say - its "divine comedy" : the victory of spirit over matter, of immortality over death. This, you could say, is what Mary Magdalen "saw" when she found Jesus - "the gardener" - near the empty tomb. In another late poem, Mandelstam put this kind of deep rapture into words again, a poem which is one of my all-time favorites (translated here by Richard & Elizabeth McKane). The "clarity of a concept" - this is it.
To Natasha Shtempel
1.
Limping against her will over the deserted earth,
with uneven, sweet steps,
she walks just ahead
of her swift friend and her fiance.
The restraining freedom
of her inspiring disability pulls her along,
but it seems that her walking is held back
by the clarity of a concept :
that this spring weather
is the ancestral mother of the grave's vault,
and that this is an eternal beginning.
2.
There are women, who are so close to the moist earth,
their every step is a loud mourning,
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,
and be first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,
and it is impossible to part from them.
Today angels, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,
and the day after, just an outline.
The steps you once took, you won't be able to take.
Flowers are immortal. Heaven is integral.
What will be is only a promise.
And I have accompanied the rapture of the universe
As muted organ pipes
Accompany a woman's voice.
- Osip Mandelstam, trans. by James Greene
Until today (the day before the predicted Event) I haven't paid any attention to all the yap about The Rapture. It seems to be of more (comic) interest to the irreligious gabbosphere, than to soi-disant "people of faith."
One way to think about some statements of Jesus in the Gospels about the Day of Judgement, and what is called "the Rapture" (ie., to paraphrase : keep watch : no one knows when the end is coming : "on that day, one will be taken, and one will be left behind" etc.), is that they fall within a general Gospel/Biblical emphasis on a distinction between soul & body, spirit & flesh, invisible & visible, heaven & earth, eternity & time. Contrary to prevalent stereotypes - most of them originating with Christian monastics & preachers themselves - this distinction, in both Judaism & Christianity, is just that : a distinction, no more no less. It does not mean a denigration of the earth, the body, the visible, the flesh, etc. All these things from the latter half of the equation are to be accepted with joy & gratitude as gifts of the Creator. What the emphasis on this distinction of Spirit is meant to do is to restore the balance : to bring humanity back to spiritual wholeness & health, in a world overwhelmed by the fleeting & changing things of "this world." Thus the reminder of an End-Time - & the focus on individual alertness & awareness (ie. "let your loins be girded", for "one shall be taken & one left behind") - is again a kind of memento mori, and a reminder of the nearness (though invisible) of the "kingdom of heaven."
This is just one way (a low-key, common-sense way) to approach what is implied by the "Day of Judgement" exhortations in the Gospels. But I want to foreground this distinction (earth/heaven, body/spirit, visible/invisible) as an entry into what follows. I want to talk a little about poetry and "rapture". Osip Mandelstam points toward this theme, in the stanza above - from a late poem, written (not long before his final trip to Siberia & death) after listening (from exile in provincial Voronezh) to a recording of Marian Anderson, singing gospel music on Moscow Radio. Poets - in their visionary, enthusiastic, prophetic, charismatic, shamanic modes - have been associated with "raptures" from the beginning of time (isn't rhapsode a name for "poet" in Greek?). Plato memorably contrasted the "reasonable" discourse of the philosophers with the Muse-inspired, unpredictable flights of poets. The ancient kinship between poem & oracle was a cross-cultural given. What is involved here is the charisma of possession - of the in-coming of the God, the Divine, the Spirit : of a somatic/intellectual experience which transports the poet into a "harmonic" state, resulting in song : the expression, the narration of the holistic, visionary experience itself : Mandelstam's "rapture of the universe." We are reminded here of the apostle Paul's account of his sudden transport to "the third heaven" (ie. above the clouds, and also beyond the stars), where he saw things he could not put into words; and of Dante's journey to Paradise with Beatrice (which explicitly adumbrates Paul's confession). These are what you might call canonical examples in the history of "rapture." They are akin as well to the Gospel episode, when the disciples witness Jesus' Transfiguration - standing on the hill with Elijah and Moses - from earthly man into heavenly being.
Many people - maybe everyone, really - have experienced, at one time or another, brushes with the inexplicable : the uncanny, the marvelous, the serendipitous, the wonderful, the mysterious... the spiritual, the numinous, the holy. Encounters or events which one cannot (or will not) reduce to some rational explanation or verbal equivalent. For the rare saints & holy people among us, ordinary life, whatever it brings, is perhaps transformed into the "bread & wine" of spiritual understanding : for the rest of us, most of the time, we're O.K. if we can just stave off trouble & get through another day....
But I've had my share of such rare & extraordinary experiences. Some of them have profoundly shaped the direction my life has taken. As I've written about before - when I was about 20 yrs old (in 1972-3) I underwent a series of seismic psychological events - uncanny, charismatic experiences - which seemed to mingle faith, vision & poetry. As a result I was shaken out of my practical life and rational pursuits : I dropped out of college for three years; I hitchhiked around the country (& England) in a kind of cloud of pondering & meditation on the mystery of things. & in a sense I have never stopped seeking that understanding : in 1973 I was brought up short by a kind of rational enigma, which spurred my curiosity about metaphysical, spiritual things. But I misrepresent what I went through, if I narrate this as merely some sort of gnostic search for occult knowledge. It was really an experience of being moved & changed in the heart of my personality : morally & emotionally as well as intellectually. My life was changed.
One of the consequences of this - & because what I went through was all tangled up in my mind with my sense of myself as a poet, with a literary vocation - was that I was unable to return to academics & the pursuit of a career in a "normal" way. I felt I had been through something which no teacher or classroom could explain to me; moreover, I felt motivated to find a way to express what I was "seeing" & learning directly in poetry. Poetry, vision & experience seemed irreducibly entwined. And I think at least one part of the reason I've worked at a kind of low-level job in a library for 25 years, is that I needed that independence from any kind of "worldly" demands on my ability to express things in poetry. I couldn't teach writing, I couldn't study or pursue an academic degree in a "sensible" way, because the intellectual & vocational responsibilities involved would be more than I could bear. (I realize there might be other, less charitable ways of evaluating such diffidence on my part. I'm sure there are many sides to it - "character issues"... I'm explaining just one of them.)
But setting aside the autobiographical vein : what I mean to suggest is that these extraordinary events - these strange spiritual promptings (nudgings?) - have provided me food for thought now for a long time : a food which has never run out. & over the past few weeks & months I've sensed a sort of integration in my mind, of longstanding notions & new researches - connected with the long poem I've been struggling with (Lanthanum). Integration, synthesis... it's a sense of certain ideas becoming substantial, & harmonized with each other, so that they provide a sort of confirmation, a weight or substance, which I can carry around with me... in a state of mild rapture & joy!
This is really not easy to explain without degrading it in the process. I've been searching for images & rational analogues of something at the root of the poem (Lanthanum), which was an unusual dream I had a few years ago about the Gateway Arch monument, in St. Louis. I've been reading about architecture (Padovan, Proportion; Van der Laan; Smith, The Dome). I've been reading various things on the literature of the Holy Grail (Gemstone of Paradise by Murphy was especially interesting, as was an old book by Helen Adolf, Visio Pacis). I've been reading some theology, especially the Byzantine church father, Maximus the Confessor. I've been reading some physics & cosmology. From these & many other books I've been drawing nourishment, I think, for a sort of productive way of seeing, or way of understanding things in general. & out of all this there was not a single "Eureka!" moment - but a kind of drawn-out, successive, gradual, gradually-expanding & growing & strengrthening E-U-R-E-K-A !-sense... a real "rapture of the universe", as Mandelstam put it.
How can I say it? I can't. I've been trying to say it & express it & sketch it out in the Lanthanum sequence & other poems. But since tomorrow's supposed to be "The Rapture," let me on this special occasion try to articulate my own intellectual joy-glee-rapture as I seem to feel it & see it.
Murphy, in his book on the grail, sets himself the task of explaining why the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (in Parzival) describes the grail as a "stone." He explains how the tomb of Christ was considered to be carved out of stone - to be a rock tomb. He explains that the Church began sanctifying portable eucharistic tables, so that pilgrims & soldiers could receive Communion even away from churches proper. These tables were little boxes or stands, made out of stone & gems, beautifully designed, with small hollow sections - miniature replicas of the Holy Sepulchre - which held the sanctified eucharistic bread (Christ's body). He shows how Wolfram's descriptions of the grail seemed based on such portable eucharistic containers - Murphy even discovers a specific box (in a museum in Bamberg, Germany) which he believes may have served as Wolfram's model.
The implication of these affinities is that the grail is equated with Christ's eucharistic Body : which itself (the eucharist) stems from, is part of, the body of Christ himself (in the Sepulchre, and resurrected on Easter). The Sepulchre today rests under a domed building in Jerusalem. Domical structures (as Smith relates) are a very basic & global figure for the human "home" (being a microcosmic representation - from nomadic tent structures to Hagia Sophia - of the "dome of heaven" arching over the earth). Thus we have the image of the mortal/risen Man/God - Jesus - located in the symbolic "center of the earth" (Jerusalem) - beneath the microcosmic dome-home - & replicated in a portable eucharistic "grail", available to anyone who seeks it.
Thus far we are discoursing on symbolic-religious symbols (which, taken by itself, could be criticized, I suppose, as a species of mystico-antiquarianism). So let me try to explain how I understand a sort of philosophical analogue or parallel to these symbols. And I want also to try to relate all this to poetry.
I think the human mind & imagination have an inborn orientation toward understanding. The discipline of science subjects this drive, this orientation, to the demands of analysis, experiment & proof : but the drive itself - to understand - came first. The mind - the imagination - is synthetic : aiming for wholes, for completeness, for the integration of disparate facts & experiences. The urge to wonder seems primordial to me : and what it answers, what it responds to, is an awareness of the basic difference between nothing and something. The vast universe - something - stands against nothingness, non-existence. I remember pondering these things in adolescence - but it probably starts in childhood : wondering, questioning the origin of life, of the universe.
Further, I think there is a basic consequence of this original human wondering, which is a state of what used to be called "natural piety". It is a deep and mostly-unconscious gratitude for being : an attitude of thanksgiving for the joy of mere existence, of being-alive. Of course, many things (we all know them) work to crumble & debilitate this attitude of gratitude : but this doesn't mean it's not still lurking there, beneath all our fears & disappointments. It is too basic, too primordial, to be destroyed.
Now let me try to pull some of these threads together toward some sort of conclusion. Here's what I say : the true "holy grail" is a kind of portable state of awareness. An awareness of what? A sense of an underlying harmony. What is this harmony? It is a harmony of proportion : a proportion (ratio, logos) between the human & the divine, between humanity & God. In a stance of gratitude. Gratitude stemming from an awareness of the "createdness" of the visible universe : of something born out of nothing. And not only that : but also gratitude stemming from an awareness of this central proportion itself : that human persons - in the "architecture" or "ecology" (the dome) of their lived lives on earth - represent visible images of divine Personhood. The earth, as Mandelstam, put it, is a "mansion" - & we are "God's grateful guests". This is a very basic (& fairly traditional) insight - shared by another Petersburg poet, Gumilev, & by Anna Akhmatova : it was part of the "chaste vision" of the Acmeist poetic project of the early 20th century. On this most simple foundation of gratitude or thanksgiving, the whole normative structure of civilization is seen to be constructed. It is stated most clearly in the Gospels, when Jesus explains that all the law & commandments hang on two basic commands : "To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind & strength, and what is like unto it, to love your neighbor as yourself." This is the core activation of the most basic sense of faith in a divine or metaphysical or dream or dramatic order of cosmic reality : this is the "bread & wine" of the poetic vision of the universe - its "rapture." Under the estrangement of time, and change & mortality, this is the promise of a kind of Easter metamorphosis : a resurrection of the mind & spirit through a mysterious Approach of living Consciousness - the dramatic victory of "sacred history" - its epic plot, you might say - its "divine comedy" : the victory of spirit over matter, of immortality over death. This, you could say, is what Mary Magdalen "saw" when she found Jesus - "the gardener" - near the empty tomb. In another late poem, Mandelstam put this kind of deep rapture into words again, a poem which is one of my all-time favorites (translated here by Richard & Elizabeth McKane). The "clarity of a concept" - this is it.
To Natasha Shtempel
1.
Limping against her will over the deserted earth,
with uneven, sweet steps,
she walks just ahead
of her swift friend and her fiance.
The restraining freedom
of her inspiring disability pulls her along,
but it seems that her walking is held back
by the clarity of a concept :
that this spring weather
is the ancestral mother of the grave's vault,
and that this is an eternal beginning.
2.
There are women, who are so close to the moist earth,
their every step is a loud mourning,
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,
and be first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,
and it is impossible to part from them.
Today angels, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,
and the day after, just an outline.
The steps you once took, you won't be able to take.
Flowers are immortal. Heaven is integral.
What will be is only a promise.
5.18.2011
Lanthanum 8.9
9
New England fog shrouds a founder’s promontory
in delicate gray-green quiet. Moist light,
kind to the eyes. Prospect Terrace : height
of land above forgetful traffic (lethal, desultory).
Benign stone Roger leans from his avant-canoe.
Lifts hopeful beneficent hand... mimes the blind
seer’s foresight (insight). What’s in the mind
of Providence this morning? What borne anew
out of this misty-rusty matière, downstream
from piney swamp to Delta confluence?
Sign of the seal of the human arch : immense
message parked in a rushing homing pigeon’s light-
beam coda. Government be upon his shoulder,
warbles a sere Nazir : the servant-gardener,
the burden-carrier, kindly Samaritan : where-
ever two or three are gathered together... &
where you must go, I shall go too... these
are substance of a dovecȏte-code. Now I hear
the mournful drone of the milk train coming ‒
where the delta mingles Memphis garbage-boys
& the low hum of harmony of things. Matrix
of all unacknowledged goodness... sweetness
deep down there, Gerard (by George). Just
is. Who finds a footnote (horseshoe, asterisk)
(Aaron’s budding divining rod) will frame the
nonsense of those mumbling lips’ menorah-
tree. A metamorphosis of monarchs’
flight... limestone river-tomb burst into flame.
5.18.11
5.17.2011
Lanthanum 8.8
8
Unseasonable cool of this Providence weather.
Relentless gray clouds riding like the sea
against Labrador cliffs (far north, remote). If
we could dive, like Jonah, through the quicksilver
substance ‒ this galactic dream-stuff (through
this curtain of mirrors)... if we could ponder
the formula, like a thirsty Maximus, deeper
& deeper, to the quintessence of truth... &
say it ‒ where the 32 and the 1 make a perfect
33... through the cloud-shimmer of bass chords,
high notes... the whole 88 ‒ then that primordial,
irreducible Whatness would be... the actual Subject
of the Poem (the regal Word, the living One).
& it would be a Someone in disguise ‒ Peter
on tour ‒ paisan, gardener, ever-loving father-
brooder... shady Melchizedek (his bread & wine).
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
It would be a version of yourself, a shadow
of you : the greater portion of the Great
Proportion ‒ snowy mantle of the ratio.
A you made perfect lovingkindness (how
I do not know). As when a loving father
turns back to his child with a radiant look
to help him along the fearsome path he took
himself, long ago... here it is ‒ the farther,
farthest, deepest gate, my son, my son... &
out of the cold limestone & the rocky tomb
you emerge, Lazarus, Jonah, JB ‒ home at
last amid garden air... the eyes of Magdalen.
5.17.11
5.16.2011
Lanthanum 8.7
7
i.m. Bernard Greenhouse
The dogwood’s white cascades, under cool gray skies
like a mantle of foam across the terraced branches
‒ a petal-waterfall, or flocks of small white doves
that drift (as if one thought) on the evening breeze.
This shapely tree gives the suggestion of a dome
or movement of a cello, or a sturdy Greenhouse
(wrapt about his Countess). Where the whispers
of the sounds are born ‒ in young leaves, at home
on high. Only the bright thread of a glissando
lathed on a painful knot ‒ low note, Ruby ‒
rubato now, legato. It is the law of to be
or not to be ‒ the covenant with sorrow, Micky...
Alessandro... Absalom (my son, my son).
The everlasting boy is rabid for the sceptre,
now ‒ the crown of righteousness, the scimitar
of justice (make it right!). Roland, his chanson
for Charlemagne. & who will wear the crown?
Jason’s chasing Ariadne through the labyrinth
forever... lust & revenge pile up the plinth
of a putrid catafalque. The doves are gone.
On an almond retina, their silent flight, into
gray twilight of a late-born spring. She is
your alloy of steel, bumpkin; your mosaic law
woven hidden in the wave... your Sheba-rescue.
Who is, was, always there. Like that tiny figure
(Rex Artus) threaded through the iconic mish-
mash of a tall window (Otranto). Yon wished-for,
once & future tolling surf (étoile Jeanne d’Arc).
5.16.11
Lanthanum 8.6
6
When Hobo finds himself in rehab (a kind of harbor,
built on hardy cross-braced beams of honeycomb-
light) he makes a marvelous recovery, some-
how : harbinger of things to come. His neighbor
in the adjoining cave (one Lazarus, a gardener
from Lazicum) has seen it all before
but every time he wonders all the more. He
taps a whisper through the wall ‒ Did you see her,
Hobo? She saw you. Who? Madeleine,
your steadfast friend. Came each day, to wait
& watch beside your bed. Maybe you’ll celebrate
Thanksgiving with her after all. Thanks, cave-man,
mumbles Hobo (to his wall of stone). I’m still
in fragile health, he thinks (132 ailments just
now under his belt) yet healed I am, trust
me. Am hale & whole... one life left to fulfill.
The hospital (St. Magdalene) was planted in a park
one sabbath-day, once long ago (the specific date
no one remembers). From his bed, the late
reprobate looks out the window, tracing the arc
of a swallow’s flight : a bird built for the sky,
he thinks, as I was shaped for the clay.
Soon enough it will be Memorial Day...
he sinks toward sleep again. Never to die,
never to die... he watches his mother whittle
a baby boat for little Frisbee the leprechaun, &
letter its name on the bow (Sophie). Someone
will find it, she says to him - someone very far...
5.16.11
5.15.2011
5
Imagine you hiked up a song-path, pilgrim
following the beeline of a pearl-gray lamb’s-
wool cloak. Your GPS (like an eye-in-palm)
her phantom form ‒ one of the seraphim.
Into a crystal cave ‒ mouth of stalagmites,
candlelit. Night beehive, star-dome ‒
underground. Where dreams come from,
and memory... a jumble of anthracite
riven with iron threads. & she leads you on
as if blindfolded, like a magnet ‒ & you hear
the rustle of an unknown stream, somewhere
out of your own past (far-seeing, unforeseen).
It is an everlasting realm, she whispers,
turning halfway round ‒ where you were
before you were. A crystallographer
might understand : this crypt of aquifers,
this sky beneath a tomb (of petrified wood)...
& then I saw the petroglyphs, the writing
on the wall. Just one stick figure, hovering
beneath one dented arch ‒ an O for head,
an M overhead ‒ sketched with a crayon
of scarlet fire (edged with maroon & plum).
What does this mean? I whispered. Thumb-
print of an almond stem, she murmured ‒ one
burnt bud about to flower. From the dark baobab
of joy ‒ under the streambed where we followed,
singing. Then I turned too ‒ beheld the cave-
mouth burst with light... muttering Rahab, Rabbi...
5.15.11
Lanthanum 8.4
4
This patchwork poem could never be the whole
for which it was the hoped-for, hopeless emblem
‒ yet the Gateway Arch, that lofty steel amalgam
planted one night in my sleep, is just a symbol
too. For something greater, yet less visible;
more actual & omnipresent; ungraspable
except by some unmerited mercy, unpredictable.
Your own lambent grail ‒ a beehive vestibule
(mindful, heartfelt). The proud, the cold
cannot approach that fiery source (so near,
so quiet, listening) ‒ their hearts not here,
not there. Close by... shading a foretold
epitaph ‒ tattooed onto that breathing cenotaph
(carved across th’embarkèd lid of an amber
mandorla-circumference). Melek or Malakh or
Molokha-Regent, Prince du Mille Lacs or Laughing-
Water-Duchess ‒ borne away (bear with me) on
a barge (near White Bear Lake, upper Mississippi).
Toward your own delta of displaced memory,
the ripple-texture of the stream (up, down)
& the ragged willow branch that plows, unfazed,
against the current (knots of driftwood, flotsam,
slipping past)... its creaky-curving arm
in a gentle bend over the riverbend. Dazed
by its flickering implications, the summer sunlight
in a radiant matrix, moving with the water...
Love’s little ensign-sepulchre or Frisbee-spider
scoots for shore. Ridgeline. Cahokia sunset.
5.15.11
5.12.2011
An Amateur Defense of Poetry
What follows has no footnotes, no scholarly apparatus. Just my own faulty memory and groundless, amateur speculations.
*
When did poets begin writing "defenses"? My guess is that Philip Sidney's was one of the first, in Elizabethan England, around 1600. The Renaissance (or post-Renaissance) was in full swing, the Reformation was underway, the Enlightenment would be arriving soon. The Middle Age of faith was giving way to the Modern Age of reason & science. Prose was splitting off from poetry. Prose leaned toward facts, practical utility, rational argument, scientific evidence and explanation. Poetry leaned toward Art & Beauty (in caps), toward the emotional life, the life of the spirit, toward everything that could not be quantified & examined with objective detachment. The "defensive" stance, signaled by essays like Sidney's, represented a reaction against new pressures brought to bear on the traditional role of the poet-as-seer, as bearer and enunciator of ancient & communal knowledge - an immediate kind of understanding, outside the frameworks of rational argument or scientific proof. & I would say the division, the polarization, between the rational & the poetic approaches came to a head, was crystallized, in the shift from the discursive rationalism of the Restoration poets, to the imaginative vision of the Romantics (epitomized & defended perhaps most stoutly by Coleridge & Blake, with some help from Wordsworth).
*
But why does any of this matter now? The Romantics were a long time ago. Modern and Postmodern thought found other & seemingly more relevant ways to challenge any simplistic versions of rationalism or scientific positivism. But perhaps that is the crux of the problem. Poets have relinquished the debate to philosophers, physicists, biologists, commentators, theologians... to everyone except themselves. A defense, then, would have to involve a re-assertion, a new expression, of the cultural-intellectual authority of poetry. & poets themselves are variegated into all sorts of distinct groupings based on style, or on poetic theory, or by specific ethnic-cultural-historical-linguistic identifications. Often it is claimed that there is no such thing as poetry, only poetries. An intellectual defense such as I am suggesting, then, sounds like a tall order.
*
There will be no "return to Romanticism." But there might possibly be a return to something more venerable than the Romantics : a sense of poetry as matrix of cultural understanding, as source of vision. It seems to me that there are ways to step tentatively in this direction, from various points on the circumference. So here I will toss around a few hunches in that regard.
*
We could start by thinking of poetry as a kind of living monument or textual distillation of a culture's language. This is not a popular notion in these times. The focus today is on the immediacy of vernacular engagement : people find odious the idea of poetry as a kind of textual crypt of language. Yet something in the back of the mind nags every real poet like a guilty conscience : the language we speak is objectively beautiful; thus poetry ought to build lasting containers, expressions, exemplifications, of that language. Poetry ought to seek both the exquisite & the necessary - the best verbal equivalents of both experience & thought.
But to accept that challenge is to be confronted with considerably difficult consequences : for it means that new (or perhaps old) thematic demands are applied to poets & poetry. The "beauty of language" is not just sound-music, not just elegant wit & ornamentation. There is also the profound dimension of meaning & thought - forsaking which, poetry has already relinquished any claim to cultural authority.
To meet these demands, however, poetry brings to bear some surprising strengths. Because a poem is a kind of playful, seemingly-purposeless end-in-itself, it is capable of modeling the ends of things : forms, shapes, distinct entities, in their particularity, their integrity, their wholeness : in their identity as ends. The integrity, the self-fulfillment of things is echoed, modeled, sanctioned by the harmonious, inherent integrity of poems. This is a specific kind of verbal modeling (Aristotle called it mimesis) which is peculiar to poetry.
*
For Blake & Coleridge, Wordsworth & Whitman, Keats & Dickinson & others, poems are the verbal distillation of human acts of imagination. Imagination is a specific faculty, a power of the human mind : essentially a power of invention & synthesis. The human power of invention is likened (especially by Coleridge) to a supernatural creative Power (the origin of reality itself, as a cosmic whole, in the divine "I Am"). The problem that these Romantics had with the rationalism of the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, et al.) was what seemed to them a split between mind & heart, mind & soul, mind & spirit - between the reasoning, analyzing, abstracting mind, & the inspired imagination - its "sacred" representations of the whole of life, of life as wholeness.
The modern development of free-standing scientific rationalism, as the centerpiece of human thought, meant the inevitable sidelining of the imagination, and hence of the purpose of poetry and the role of the poet. These are, of course, far from new ideas! But I think they represent the fundamental cause for the essentially ornamental & trivial social status of poetry in the contemporary world. It is, in sum, a question of two things : 1) the growing alienation of poets themselves from a sense of poetry as a distillation of the best (most memorable) language of their culture; and 2) the historical shift from imaginative (verbal) modeling of truth, to its rational analysis & (mathematical) verifications.
*
Is it possible today to counter these two trends - to rebuild, in a new mode, some of the intellectual confidence of, say, a Blake or a Coleridge? Many poets, in very distinct ways, have certainly made the effort. My own sense is that there is no method, no workable approach built on rational discourse or stubborn will-power. I think back, rather, to Wallace Stevens' notion, expressed in many of his poems & prose "adagia", that individual written poems are merely traces of something larger, more pervasive - some "poetry" inherent in the marrow of life itself. Poetry is thus some mysterious yet basic aspect of "nature" or of the human, which comes to the fore by its own power - the faculty of imagination somewhat in Coleridge's sense. The human mind synthesizes experience - its ultimate or "authorized" expression - not in discursive prose tracts nor in mathematical formulae - but in poetic invention, the insight of the human imagination, the vision of the whole, the All (though of course poetry - being pervasive - is also visible, lurking, active, in prose & science & mathematics too).
*
& I predict that as historians, anthropologists, archaeologists & scientists persist in digging through the deep layers of human origins and the history of the planet, they will discover more & more evidence of the imaginative leaps of the human mind, which have emerged even in prehistory, to visualize & foresee amazing, "incredible" phenomena of the future (the vast, galactic, cosmic future), which we today find difficult to conceive or conceptualize.
*
When did poets begin writing "defenses"? My guess is that Philip Sidney's was one of the first, in Elizabethan England, around 1600. The Renaissance (or post-Renaissance) was in full swing, the Reformation was underway, the Enlightenment would be arriving soon. The Middle Age of faith was giving way to the Modern Age of reason & science. Prose was splitting off from poetry. Prose leaned toward facts, practical utility, rational argument, scientific evidence and explanation. Poetry leaned toward Art & Beauty (in caps), toward the emotional life, the life of the spirit, toward everything that could not be quantified & examined with objective detachment. The "defensive" stance, signaled by essays like Sidney's, represented a reaction against new pressures brought to bear on the traditional role of the poet-as-seer, as bearer and enunciator of ancient & communal knowledge - an immediate kind of understanding, outside the frameworks of rational argument or scientific proof. & I would say the division, the polarization, between the rational & the poetic approaches came to a head, was crystallized, in the shift from the discursive rationalism of the Restoration poets, to the imaginative vision of the Romantics (epitomized & defended perhaps most stoutly by Coleridge & Blake, with some help from Wordsworth).
*
But why does any of this matter now? The Romantics were a long time ago. Modern and Postmodern thought found other & seemingly more relevant ways to challenge any simplistic versions of rationalism or scientific positivism. But perhaps that is the crux of the problem. Poets have relinquished the debate to philosophers, physicists, biologists, commentators, theologians... to everyone except themselves. A defense, then, would have to involve a re-assertion, a new expression, of the cultural-intellectual authority of poetry. & poets themselves are variegated into all sorts of distinct groupings based on style, or on poetic theory, or by specific ethnic-cultural-historical-linguistic identifications. Often it is claimed that there is no such thing as poetry, only poetries. An intellectual defense such as I am suggesting, then, sounds like a tall order.
*
There will be no "return to Romanticism." But there might possibly be a return to something more venerable than the Romantics : a sense of poetry as matrix of cultural understanding, as source of vision. It seems to me that there are ways to step tentatively in this direction, from various points on the circumference. So here I will toss around a few hunches in that regard.
*
We could start by thinking of poetry as a kind of living monument or textual distillation of a culture's language. This is not a popular notion in these times. The focus today is on the immediacy of vernacular engagement : people find odious the idea of poetry as a kind of textual crypt of language. Yet something in the back of the mind nags every real poet like a guilty conscience : the language we speak is objectively beautiful; thus poetry ought to build lasting containers, expressions, exemplifications, of that language. Poetry ought to seek both the exquisite & the necessary - the best verbal equivalents of both experience & thought.
But to accept that challenge is to be confronted with considerably difficult consequences : for it means that new (or perhaps old) thematic demands are applied to poets & poetry. The "beauty of language" is not just sound-music, not just elegant wit & ornamentation. There is also the profound dimension of meaning & thought - forsaking which, poetry has already relinquished any claim to cultural authority.
To meet these demands, however, poetry brings to bear some surprising strengths. Because a poem is a kind of playful, seemingly-purposeless end-in-itself, it is capable of modeling the ends of things : forms, shapes, distinct entities, in their particularity, their integrity, their wholeness : in their identity as ends. The integrity, the self-fulfillment of things is echoed, modeled, sanctioned by the harmonious, inherent integrity of poems. This is a specific kind of verbal modeling (Aristotle called it mimesis) which is peculiar to poetry.
*
For Blake & Coleridge, Wordsworth & Whitman, Keats & Dickinson & others, poems are the verbal distillation of human acts of imagination. Imagination is a specific faculty, a power of the human mind : essentially a power of invention & synthesis. The human power of invention is likened (especially by Coleridge) to a supernatural creative Power (the origin of reality itself, as a cosmic whole, in the divine "I Am"). The problem that these Romantics had with the rationalism of the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, et al.) was what seemed to them a split between mind & heart, mind & soul, mind & spirit - between the reasoning, analyzing, abstracting mind, & the inspired imagination - its "sacred" representations of the whole of life, of life as wholeness.
The modern development of free-standing scientific rationalism, as the centerpiece of human thought, meant the inevitable sidelining of the imagination, and hence of the purpose of poetry and the role of the poet. These are, of course, far from new ideas! But I think they represent the fundamental cause for the essentially ornamental & trivial social status of poetry in the contemporary world. It is, in sum, a question of two things : 1) the growing alienation of poets themselves from a sense of poetry as a distillation of the best (most memorable) language of their culture; and 2) the historical shift from imaginative (verbal) modeling of truth, to its rational analysis & (mathematical) verifications.
*
Is it possible today to counter these two trends - to rebuild, in a new mode, some of the intellectual confidence of, say, a Blake or a Coleridge? Many poets, in very distinct ways, have certainly made the effort. My own sense is that there is no method, no workable approach built on rational discourse or stubborn will-power. I think back, rather, to Wallace Stevens' notion, expressed in many of his poems & prose "adagia", that individual written poems are merely traces of something larger, more pervasive - some "poetry" inherent in the marrow of life itself. Poetry is thus some mysterious yet basic aspect of "nature" or of the human, which comes to the fore by its own power - the faculty of imagination somewhat in Coleridge's sense. The human mind synthesizes experience - its ultimate or "authorized" expression - not in discursive prose tracts nor in mathematical formulae - but in poetic invention, the insight of the human imagination, the vision of the whole, the All (though of course poetry - being pervasive - is also visible, lurking, active, in prose & science & mathematics too).
*
& I predict that as historians, anthropologists, archaeologists & scientists persist in digging through the deep layers of human origins and the history of the planet, they will discover more & more evidence of the imaginative leaps of the human mind, which have emerged even in prehistory, to visualize & foresee amazing, "incredible" phenomena of the future (the vast, galactic, cosmic future), which we today find difficult to conceive or conceptualize.
5.10.2011
Lanthanum 8.3
3
The frail ancient splintering dogwood over my head
(with its iron band-aid) leafs its white lightning now;
has been with me, swaying above me, bough on
bough. Steadfast curve, sky-rib’s brisk veer aft
toward homestead (victory at last). Unspoken
presence. Longing’s compass. My voice whispers
ash down from another tree (sea-green conifer) &
yet another (almond mandolin). Gray wind-token, or
memoir of memoirs. The song-turtle (its gypsy-dom)
dove deep. The turtle dove deep. Dove deep,
Jonah ‒ into the blind sea-night, where moon-pearls
keep, & gemstones shine like eyes, stars... dove
home, sang home. Its mark, its Orient (bull’s-eye).
Home in its shell at the center of the earth
(Jerusalem). Whose bending womb was berth,
Jerusalem : a-traveling home (nostalgic guy
in Babylon, who’s gal’s in Galilee). The creaking
murmur of this familiar tree ‒ my friend, my
pining amber (sap-glow in the cosmic dark). Why
seven years of waiting, Rachel? My heart breaking.
Why this menorah, shining fifty more long years?
To make an anthem for our wandering land.
Was it not we that wandered, Ruth? I’ll stand
beside you. So the song filled up with tears.
So the voice came from bottom of the sea
& height of sky; its sounding laughter
only echo of a secret smile (my daughter).
Eyelash semaphores dove, alight... look, see.
5.10.11
5.09.2011
Lanthanum 8.2
2
A baby half-moon (pale, spooked) winks up there
behind a wispy pane of clouds. Centered just
over the Mayday dogwood ‒ its phosphorus
petal-crosses branched in flaring armada-
wings, like Inca footbridges (through shady
Andes). Not the stringy spans themselves
but sign language (quipu for crossing over).
Toward that aerie, dove, darker than any
Crystal Cave, loftier than Milky Way;
through the posh, lost bole of a cosmic
cranium, abaft the train-hoot of a tragi-
comic orb (half-&-half confusion-whorl).
These are some of the advantages
of standing on earth. At confluence
of physicists, them calibrated dalliance
(haruspicatin’ on a livid prune). Plumbs
a mental multiplex, sans doubt. I wonder
if they vegetate too much? Unhealthy
habits ossify braincells, somebody
sermonized this morn (on the radio)
‒ and it’s not like they don’t know what they’re
on about, reports BBC. Hey folks! There’s
money in know-how! proclaims Spokes-
person Numero Tweetie ‒ pure air
for sale! Yet the moon is loaded with dust,
noted rotten prophet. Iz not for sale
yet. & we keep walking toward that hail
of atoms, Josh ‒ wh-why? Moon or Bust.
5.9.11
5.06.2011
Odd High Formalism
As the talking wheels of American Poetry World wring their hands over various issues (including hand-wringing), and gaze up at the unanswering blue sky crying "whither Poetry?" and such, I would like to outline, briefly, my prediction - not prescription, but prediction - for the general shape of the future, based on the general shape of the past. The past and future of American poetry lies with OHF, or Odd High Formalism.
Not "New Formalism," a 90s movement which called for a return to formal rhyme and meter and received forms (sonnets, sestinas, etc.). The generally reactionary attitude of that trend inhibited more profound experiments with form : as long as we went back to the good old tennis net so sadly neglected since Robert Frost's day, poetry would revive... no.
Nor do I refer to the formalism of the professional avant-garde, primarily represented by the descendants of the NY School, the Language Poets, and various offshoots of experimental Modernism. The formalism of these groups was terribly overshadowed by two influential & contradictory notions drawn from 20th-century philosophy and "theory," namely : 1) reality is constituted by language, and 2) language does not, cannot, really represent or refer to anything outside itself. It's not hard to see where such ideas might lead with regard to poetry : straight into very formal but also highly-mannered self-enclosed & solipsistic literary entities ("language poems" & such).
The perceived ailments & frailty of contemporary American poetry - it's academic effeteness, its anemic detachment from the larger, living world, its introverted fishbowl solipsism & narcissism, its loss of a public audience & the ordinary reader, etc. & so on - might be remedied by a clearer recognition of the main tradition in American poetry, which is none other than... Odd High Formalism.
What is the nature of Odd High Formalism? Here I can only sketch its main elements in a minimal way. Perhaps the best way to understand OHF is to consider the kinship between poetry, music, and public dancing. An era's leading styles of social dancing are paralleled in its poetry. A generation ago, in a series of books, Alastair Fowler analyzed the design properties of Renaissance poetry - combining number mysticism, seasonal or calendrical measures of time, the occasional thematics of major holidays, public events or persons. Poems were shaped to mimic the stately, ceremonial movements of social dancing. Think, on the other hand, about today's social dancing styles : mostly anarchic wiggle, bump & jump. & though fancier, more formal dancing seem to be making a comeback, it is still mostly limited to individual dancing couples, rather than the elaborate group dances of the past. And anarchic wiggle & hop seems like a pretty fair description of the formal approach of much contemporary poetry.
The poet launches into the poem : the audience or reader has no idea where it's going in a formal sense. It's free, it's experimental... it's of the moment, it's raw, it's real... these are the current values. Poetry wants to blend in with the prosaic activities of the world around it. It wants to be liked for blending in. But it will never be liked on this basis : it will only be held in slight contempt. Odd High Formalism accentuates poetry's difference from prose and ordinary life, by lifting its intricate and elegant formalities to another, higher, more intense dimension. Not a dimension of obscurity or elitism : rather a realm of highly-articulate order and elegance. The world of hip-hop and rap is closer to the ancient and Renaissance sense of poetry than anything being produced by the mainstream poetry factories. One may reject the hip-hop artist's often bleak, violent, selfish, cynical and misogynist worldview, yet still learn from hip-hop's focus on formal differentiation and intricacy (the meter, the rhymes, the word-play) - its separation from prose.
Most of the really great American poets of the past have been Odd High Formalists : that is, they have developed a highly-ordered & articulate formality which easily distinguishes itself from prose of any kind. It is inventive, personal, and suited to its own unique aims, rather than patterned on traditional schemes for tradition's sake (hence its "oddness"). Think of Marianne Moore's sui generis formal patterns; Elizabeth Bishop's elegant & playful designs; Emily Dickinson's construction of a poetic universe within a strict and minimalist formal pattern; Whitman's careful development of his own unique cosmic-bardic metrical form and manner; Melville's re-invention of the philosophical travel poem; Poe's highly-mathematical and calculated sense of poetry's rhythmic/tonal mesmerism; Hart Crane's re-invention of the Pindaric praise-song; John Berryman's manic formalism in the Dream Songs... the list could go on for pages. What these poets have in common is a bold - almost extreme - conception of poetry as an intense, highly-differentiated formal dance of sound, meaning, theme, occasion. The OHF poetry of the future will set a new standard of difficulty. This is not a poetry that will "blend in" easily with the prose world : it will be very much harder to write than what is offered at present in schools & literary communities. It will have to distinguish itself - by its formal qualities - from prose. It will have to offer a very high and strange dancing music, a relief - both from prose and from the mannered allusive theoretical academic obscurities which passed for "difficulty" in the last century. Only American Odd High Formalism will set the measures of the dance to come.
Not "New Formalism," a 90s movement which called for a return to formal rhyme and meter and received forms (sonnets, sestinas, etc.). The generally reactionary attitude of that trend inhibited more profound experiments with form : as long as we went back to the good old tennis net so sadly neglected since Robert Frost's day, poetry would revive... no.
Nor do I refer to the formalism of the professional avant-garde, primarily represented by the descendants of the NY School, the Language Poets, and various offshoots of experimental Modernism. The formalism of these groups was terribly overshadowed by two influential & contradictory notions drawn from 20th-century philosophy and "theory," namely : 1) reality is constituted by language, and 2) language does not, cannot, really represent or refer to anything outside itself. It's not hard to see where such ideas might lead with regard to poetry : straight into very formal but also highly-mannered self-enclosed & solipsistic literary entities ("language poems" & such).
The perceived ailments & frailty of contemporary American poetry - it's academic effeteness, its anemic detachment from the larger, living world, its introverted fishbowl solipsism & narcissism, its loss of a public audience & the ordinary reader, etc. & so on - might be remedied by a clearer recognition of the main tradition in American poetry, which is none other than... Odd High Formalism.
What is the nature of Odd High Formalism? Here I can only sketch its main elements in a minimal way. Perhaps the best way to understand OHF is to consider the kinship between poetry, music, and public dancing. An era's leading styles of social dancing are paralleled in its poetry. A generation ago, in a series of books, Alastair Fowler analyzed the design properties of Renaissance poetry - combining number mysticism, seasonal or calendrical measures of time, the occasional thematics of major holidays, public events or persons. Poems were shaped to mimic the stately, ceremonial movements of social dancing. Think, on the other hand, about today's social dancing styles : mostly anarchic wiggle, bump & jump. & though fancier, more formal dancing seem to be making a comeback, it is still mostly limited to individual dancing couples, rather than the elaborate group dances of the past. And anarchic wiggle & hop seems like a pretty fair description of the formal approach of much contemporary poetry.
The poet launches into the poem : the audience or reader has no idea where it's going in a formal sense. It's free, it's experimental... it's of the moment, it's raw, it's real... these are the current values. Poetry wants to blend in with the prosaic activities of the world around it. It wants to be liked for blending in. But it will never be liked on this basis : it will only be held in slight contempt. Odd High Formalism accentuates poetry's difference from prose and ordinary life, by lifting its intricate and elegant formalities to another, higher, more intense dimension. Not a dimension of obscurity or elitism : rather a realm of highly-articulate order and elegance. The world of hip-hop and rap is closer to the ancient and Renaissance sense of poetry than anything being produced by the mainstream poetry factories. One may reject the hip-hop artist's often bleak, violent, selfish, cynical and misogynist worldview, yet still learn from hip-hop's focus on formal differentiation and intricacy (the meter, the rhymes, the word-play) - its separation from prose.
Most of the really great American poets of the past have been Odd High Formalists : that is, they have developed a highly-ordered & articulate formality which easily distinguishes itself from prose of any kind. It is inventive, personal, and suited to its own unique aims, rather than patterned on traditional schemes for tradition's sake (hence its "oddness"). Think of Marianne Moore's sui generis formal patterns; Elizabeth Bishop's elegant & playful designs; Emily Dickinson's construction of a poetic universe within a strict and minimalist formal pattern; Whitman's careful development of his own unique cosmic-bardic metrical form and manner; Melville's re-invention of the philosophical travel poem; Poe's highly-mathematical and calculated sense of poetry's rhythmic/tonal mesmerism; Hart Crane's re-invention of the Pindaric praise-song; John Berryman's manic formalism in the Dream Songs... the list could go on for pages. What these poets have in common is a bold - almost extreme - conception of poetry as an intense, highly-differentiated formal dance of sound, meaning, theme, occasion. The OHF poetry of the future will set a new standard of difficulty. This is not a poetry that will "blend in" easily with the prose world : it will be very much harder to write than what is offered at present in schools & literary communities. It will have to distinguish itself - by its formal qualities - from prose. It will have to offer a very high and strange dancing music, a relief - both from prose and from the mannered allusive theoretical academic obscurities which passed for "difficulty" in the last century. Only American Odd High Formalism will set the measures of the dance to come.
4.15.2011
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...
"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...
4.12.2011
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
4.09.2011
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