Happy 2010

Happy New Year, friends -

My bloggishness has slowed down of late, but I'm still hanging around. 2009 was fizzling out in December, after I made a fool of myself on the Harriet blog, getting into a needless tiff with Franz Wright... but then finally wrote a book review I'd been meaning to do for months (on Gabriel Gudding's poetry), & sent it off on January 31st. So that was a good way to end the year.

Over the weekend, sat down & re-read the whole of the Lanthanum so far. Have had misgivings about it, off & on. But re-reading it, I'm happy! Not perfect, but not a waste of time (let others decide). (A sort of oblique dove-muttering, I say.) On to Part Two, I hope.

Note on Mandelstam (& "the axis of the earth")

There's a short poem in O. Mandelstam's Second Voronezh Notebook which begins :

"Armed with the eyesight of slender wasps"

(see L. Schnairsohn's translations & commentary). Schnairsohn & others have remarked on the wordplay in this poem, on the etymology of (Russian) os - connecting "wasps", "axis" (of the earth), "Osip" (Mandelstam) and "Iosef" (Stalin). Schnairsohn's version reads, in part :

I don't paint, or sing, or draw
a black–voiced bow; I only pierce
the skin of life, and love
to envy wasps, powerful and sly...

I wish that someday I too could be forced
By a sting of air and summer heat,
To pass over sleep and death, and hear
The axis of the earth, the axis of the earth...

I've found a curious subtext to the speaker's desire to listen to the "axis of the earth" in G. de Santillana & H. von Dechend's unusual book, Hamlet's Mill, where (in appendix #14, pp. 377-383) they explore the Indo-European roots of a complex of words & syllables having to do with manth-, math-, mundus, mundil, mnd, etc. They relate these roots to various mythological & etymological meanings of "axis" or "axis-whirler", the cosmic "churn" which rotates the world-axis...

"Mandelshtam" itself contains echoes of "almond stem" or "almond branch"... but here we have a more archaic (Indo-European) layer of meaning. In the poem, Mandelstam puns repeatedly on his (& Stalin's) first name; yet this unspoken (conceptual) pun lurks there as well, on his patronymic.

Ol' Possum & me & Edmund Burke & Franz Wright &...

Just discovered that my 2nd marriage (in 1992) took place on TS Eliot's birthday.

*

Went down into the depths of the library stacks today (basement level B) to retrieve a copy of Edmund Burke's essay on the Beautiful & the Sublime. Discovered that the book I was looking for was slightly mis-catalogued (turned out to be a collection of essays on Milton, including a brief excerpt from Burke). But I thought perhaps I had written down the wrong catalog # (PR instead of PN), so I hiked over to the PNs. There by chance I found a book by a scholar named Ziolkowsky, on modern fictional representations of Jesus. I took it up to my work desk. I logged onto Digital Emunction (the group blog to which I've become addicted & attached myself leech-wise), where there was an animated discussion about Franz Wright & his poem in this week's New Yorker, which I had read a few days earlier. I took another look at the poem... & suddenly it struck me that Wright had (intentionally or no) written an allegorical poem, in which Wm Burroughs figured as Christ (here's the poem). An interesting day, for a librarian. Advent season.

Beethoven, Ol' Possum, & me

(p.s. turn the volume control way down before you play this!)

Followers of this blog might have learned how much I adore Beethoven's late String Quartet in A minor (Opus 132). It has turned up here & there in my poetry... never fails to move me. So I was amazed to discover, just this evening (in a NY Times article about a performance at Lincoln Ctr last night), that this work meant a great deal also to TS Eliot; some consider it a major influence on his Four Quartets. (The concert was a dual reading/performance of both works. Wish I could have been there!)

Anyway, this got me so excited I went & pounded out an improvised bing-bong Henry version (or massacre) of a couple themes in Op. 132... please forgive the Russian-bell effect...

Henry's aphorism

Every literary award is a consolation prize.

Late night last night with my old blues brother Jim Chapin, at the Mill. Neat place in old factory, out in Greenville - took me back to the 60s. Blues & folkies gather there to play for each other. We did some jug music with Jim & friends, heard some excellent harp players, & banjo & bluegrass singers...




Silly picture of Jim & Colette & me, several yrs ago

Berryman, Blackmur & the "American sublime"

The website digital emunction has posted a mini-essay of mine, on "the American sublime".

If you go to the preview of Lanthanum, & look at the 1st poem, I'm happy to see how the beginning (including the snow in line 1) predicted my daughter's cover photo. But I'm thinking especially of line 19. (The shade there, in the picture, is the shade of the bridge.) Forms a sort of "decussation" (cf. Sir Thos. Browne)...

Lights are on today at the dumpster island. Here's to one memorious detective.

Saarinen's tuning-fork

See Gabriel Gudding's excellent essay on the Gateway Arch. I hadn't come across the "tuning-fork" metaphor before, but it made an independent appearance in Lanthanum.

Saarinen synchronicity

Just 11 days shy of 11 months ago, in mid-December 2008, I began writing this long poem Lanthanum, which originated in an odd dream I had had a few days before, about the Gateway Arch monument in St. Louis (something I'd never seen, nor thought about previously).

On Monday, I finished the first book of Lanthanum (1st of a projected 3 volumes). Today I self-published it via Lulu (see previous post). & when I got home from work, & stretched out on the couch, & opened the NY Times... there was an article about a new exhibit at the City Museum of NY : on Eero Saarinen (architect of the Gateway Arch).



The gateway monument, by the way, is in the form of a "catenary arc" - the shape a flexible string or line makes when hung upside-down. Jasper Johns has painted a whole series of works incorporating the catenary arc.

Lanthanum Bk I - now in print

The first volume of Lanthanum is now available in book form. (You can preview it there.)

Cover photo by my daughter Phoebe. (View of Mississippi shoreline, from bridge in Minneapolis.)

& last of Lanthanum, pt. 4. Tout-toot.

& a little more Lanthanum. (Coming near the conclusion of part 4.)

some primitive Lanthanum.

(Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to show some of the original format on the blogged version. There are extra spacings between some phrases in the final 2 stanzas of this section.)

One way to read Lanthanum is to think of it in terms of Jasper Johns. The method of playing variations on a few favored symbols.... even some of the same symbols. Hart Crane is a major presence. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a catenary arch.

Lanthanum : another explanatory note

Lanthanum.... may be a little hard to read (too conventional? too unconventional?) - & even harder to understand.

It's a long poem, which is about 1/3rd complete at this point (at least that's the plan). It's slowly (hopefully) gaining momentum; it's a process of accumulation & syncretism, if you will, of symbols & images & meanings. By syncretism I mean (using the term very loosely) a mixing-together of personal & impersonal, private & historical, religious & cultural... aiming toward a kind of fusion - an amalgam, a lanthanum alloy or compound, meant to burn more clearly & brightly as it slowly rolls forward...

It's epigram or motto could be a line from one of Osip Mandelstam's poems : "an arch appears in my muttering" (or mumbling). The arch in question has many-sided meaning... but paramount is the reference to the Gateway Arch monument in St. Louis, which itself takes on a collection of symbolic reverberations or (metaphorical) analogies...

Lanthanum, downstream

another Lanthanum paper airplane

Lear-Lanthanum.

p.s. now linked to some of my books at Amazon. The only link missing as yet is my book partially set in the Amazon (Rest Note)...