Here's another one, from 1969.

ACC. NO. 14 FOR 3/21/69

 
a tall creosoted tree
tangent to an irregular steelglass
object which is bent
out of shape
gray concrete rolls out following
redgreenblue objects of flat steel
black shiny object with red flashing dome
on top   two blue objects   congruent
with boots   they move around
communicate
other similar figures   many of them
move around also   they communicate
dumb bastards   can't they read
the roadsigns?

Here's another poem I wrote in 1968, published in Talisman ! It reminds me of some current movies. (These old poems surprisingly remind me of ee cummings + Yeats. I was a big fan of ee cummings in those days.)

FIFTEEN TONS FOR EVERY MAN WOMAN AND

 
Glass men march through clogged sewers
Nursing marshland dreams,
Cursing rattling ghosts.
They must protect a fragile falsehood -
Hide it behind tin medals,
Save it with searing metal.
Yet they know there is no hope,
And when their toys rain down
From orange skies, they frown
And say, "There was no other way."
"If we have to start all over with Adam and Eve,
I want them to be Americans..."
Glass men march through clogged sewers
dreaming of last days.

Peter O'Leary's review of fellow Minnesotan Gabriel Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook.

I have a strange deja-vu, reading this, & am reminded of a poem I wrote in 1968, which was published in the Blake School (my high school) literary magazine, Talisman (1969 issue) :

GOING SOUTH ON U.S. 61

 
rusted rails running to
Moose Lake, Bruno, Willow Creek
North Branch, Stacy, Forest Lake.
white farmhouse wanders by among
clusters of contraptions -
a dirty once blue pick-up sits
on concrete blocks
a crazy useless tractor, one wheel
sunk in spring mud
a wind vane creaks on a pole.
the brown once red barn
slides sloping into earth again.
restless freeway runs between
Moose Lake, Bruno, Willow Creek
North Branch, Stacy, Forest Lake.
where screaming metal screams past
screaming glass, and billboards flash
sun-scorched, unread scrawls.
dairy queens stretch their spray-paint
crowns across the road, one last try
before they die in the darkness behind.
telephone poles crash bravely through
the barrier, and men in blue shirts dig holes.
the stop lights are always green
and the towns
Moose Lake, Bruno, Willow Creek
North Branch, Stacy, Forest Lake
speed by without breathing
brown brick
Joe's Bar B-Q
gray grain elevator
then gone, flashing dull.
when they have gone, 
only the gray, billboarded, roadsigned
tongue remains -
always running, running to another
Moose Lake, Bruno, Willow Creek
North Branch, Stacy, Forest Lake.

Some new Lanthanum.

We now return to our regular programming. I've deleted the last post, which was my list of "25 random things" about me, which is a thing people have been doing in blogland. I was finally embarrassed by it - but not too embarrassed. I've decided to make it the start of a separate blog, called Random Henry. I may add to it now & then, or may not. More as a kind of memory-jog, hopefully, than ego-trip.

(My deepest apologies to RC, who sent a funny & enthusiastic comment to the 25-list post, which is now gone. Sorry, Reyes - but I got yr message. & thanks.)

Bloom, yes! Bloom, bloom, bloom. The Everyman from elsewhere. Pivotal.

& "Henry" is canonical, too. Henry Flower, that is.

Very absorbed of late in a book about the theology of 7th-cent. Byzantine monk, Maximus the Confessor, by Urs von Balthasar (I love that name). Title translated as Cosmic Liturgy. This reading has a lot to do, actually, with the confidence with which I proclaim the theoretical foundations of AIEE! Poetry.

Balthasar explains how Maximus synthesized Western, philosophical, proto-scientific thought, rooted in Aristotle and the Stoics, with Biblical & Christian theology - which was in the slow process of being formulated at the time, & which reflected some Eastern, Platonic, Gnostic elements which he (Maximus) tried to correct or oppose. (He ended up a martyr in the cause of "Chalcedonian orthodoxy", against a Byzantine theocratic government which was attempting at the time to shore up its military-political defenses by making dubious theological compromises.)

What the heck does this have to do with AIEE!, you ask?

The early & mid-Byzantine/Hellenistic intellectual era was primarily focused on formulating theological explanations & demonstrations - developing a shared understanding - of the mysteries of Christian faith, in particular the conundrum or paradox of the Incarnation - the "God-man". I don't have the capability right now to go into further detail on this, except to say that I find Maximus via Balthasar very, very illuminating. He seems to display a kind of "grounded" thinking - a supreme reasonableness - which helps him, as I say, synthesize the philosophical investigation of "nature" in general, with the logical organization of metaphysical concepts. He's a kind of Thomas Aquinas, yet perhaps with a more-heightened kind of visionary eloquence. A sort of Aquinas-Cusanus, 500 years beforehand.

The universe and history, in Maximus, hinge on the paradox, the conjunction-of-opposites, of the Incarnation. The Aristotelian, necessarily-symbiotic union of body & soul, in the human being, shows a kind of analogy to the unique union of divine & human in Christ. Moreover, the synthesis which we observe throughout nature, between the individual thing and its species, its kind - a synthesis which retains (beautifully) the logical substance, the integrity, of both aspects (individual & species) - "without confusion" - this synthesis is understood, again, as a sign or metaphor for the pivotal God/Man union.

All this is combined with Maximus's Aristotelian-Stoic understanding of the status of the "person". The individual person realizes the general potential of the unique union of body & soul. Generally, there is an emphasis in Maximus on the wholeness & integrity of created Nature - combined with an awareness of its absolute contingency with respect to an absolutely autonomous, incomprehensible Creator. It's the union of absolute otherness with complete humanity - "without confusion" - in the person of Christ (the "orthodox" witness of Maximus) - which is the pivot of history and the Redemption of humankind.

All this sounds like gobbledy-gook & blather, I'm sure - and in no way am I capable of even approaching an adequate precis of Maximus's very scintillating thought... but notions of subjectivity & personhood and individual realization - the uniqueness, the quiddity of individual things within an "organic" whole - have implications for a way of approaching - of writing & understanding - poetry, I think. James Joyce does some very interesting things along a parallel Aquinian-Aristotelian worldview (the extreme & elaborate quidditas of a fictional Bloom in a real Dublin, for example...). Joyce understood this as a kind of "medieval" poetics : but it goes back to Byzantium.

& some of this, I hope, can be seen as a consistent focus in all my henotic Henryesque Henrification projects (Stubborn Grew, for ex., is very Joycean in inspiration.)

I will be quiet about Flarf now. I've never blathered so much about something I know so little about.

I have been following & mixing it up a little with some of the blog-discussions about FLARF (Ron Silliman has linked to most of it). I have to admit, I like the word "flarf" - sort of a synthesis of fluff, laugh, and a dog barking...

My Theory on Flarf is that it is essentially a kind of Clowning - a primitive form of Comedy... its "serious" critical apologia are just another shtick in the program - Allamistakeo, as EA Poe put it... & those who take them seriously fall into a "serious" trap...

They are the Fellinis of contemporary American poetry (without Fellini's wistful sweet big-hearted so-Italian nostalgia - essence of Clown, purified to Super-Clown-Saint)...

So let's take this thought-experiment a little further : Flarf has become the dominant-hegemonic-canonical form of Contemporary Poetry! Whole Collegiate programs are devoted to studying & celebrating its Heros & Heroines... deeply-considered doctoral theses are defended & even written...

Paradoxically, Gabriel Gudding emerges as the Flarfiste's Flarfiste, since his critical pronunciamentos are both more deadpan-serious & funny than the flarfistas themselves...

Kent Johnson is celebrated as one of the Original Sad Clowns... his plangent personae & rumbustious challenges to the Establishment are recognized at last as nonpareil "bigfoot shuffles"...

Even minor poet Henry Gould gets his due in Flarf Kingdom! As the air-filled Shelley-balloon of Lilliputia - he of the enormous endless epic HENRIAD - there in his own private tiny Rhode Island...

Grad students excavate & debate fine points of the Flarf Renaissance of Dramatic Poetry, rooted as it is in a fundamentally Dionysian attitude - play, play play! -'s the thing...

They will deliberate over the Flarferrians Oedipal relationship with their Father, John Ashbery - since his status as "original Flarfist" is a contradiction in terms (Official or "Tectonic" Flarfism categorically denies the existence of "originality")... this crux or dilemma hits hard, especially on the NY-School-derived Flarffers, such as Jordan Davis, Drew Gardner, Gov. John Connolly, JFK, "Toenails" Lantucci, Nada Gordon, Gordon Nado - who love-hate Ashbery, since their own literary identity derives from a non-identity with Ashbery, who's own non-identity generated the non-identical techniques of Flarf, so that an escape from suffocating identity leads to an identity which circles back to a suffocating non-identity which sounds very familiar... - so where's Berrigan when we need him? Back in Rhode Island, no doubt.

BRIEF NOTE ON THE STATUS OF THE "I" IN AIEE! POETRY

This is a deep, complex topic which I doubt I will be able to manage in the space of a few furtive key-taps at work. Let's recall, first of all, that the "I" initiates the phrase "Internal Emigre-Emigre", which suggests that the "I" inhabits a condition of (perhaps internal, inner) exile, and that the "subject", therefore, is always "on the move", traveling.

The best analysis of the self and the ambiguity of otherness, in relation to the grounding principles of AIEE! Poetry, can be found in Elena Corrigan's 2000 monograph, Mandelshtam's poetics : a challenge to postmodernism (SUNY Press). Corrigan argues that M's poetry & poetics cannot be subsumed under contemporary theories of postmodernism. For Mandelstam, according to Corrigan, the self is neither simple, essential and unitary, nor illusory and effaced by otherness. Writing is a distinctive process which synthesizes both estrangement and growth. The self, the textual "subject", grows and changes through a process of affinity or "kinship" with other textual voices (see esp. M's essay "Conversation About Dante"). AIEE! Poetry, in turn, as a kind of American offshoot of Russian-Mandelstamian Acmeism, shares and endorses the orientation outlined in Corrigan's study. We can see the outlines of this position in the very lexical and phonic attributes of "AIEE!" itself. The "I" of AIEE! is necessary, distinct and inalienable : but it is meaningless without reference to its place in the sound & spelling of the word "AIEE!" as a whole. Thus the microcosmic wholeness of the "I" is echoed in the structural wholeness of the natural forms in which it has its being (the word "AIEE!").

What must be repeatedly emphasized, however, is that the word "AIEE!", in turn, while integral and multivalent as a word-in-itself, is deracinated from its primary meaning unless we recall the first principle of AIEE! poetics itself : that is, the notion that poets, through their compositional labors, participate in a unique and distinct mode of verbal expression, whose perennial and substantial qualities - the process of "transfigurement" sketched out in the initial AIEE! Manifesto - bracket and subsume more temporary and local and timebound forms of stylistic change, within an overarching system of (worldwide, with variations) tradition. Thus the articulation of AIEE! Poetics is itself, also, merely an epiphenomenon (of self-awareness) within the larger schema or milieu of poetic transfigurement.

Many also ask : is I the "I" in "AIEE!" really just... Henry? The answer is : this depends on your definition of "Henry". Obviously my own view (as a Henry) might be blurred by proximity - however, I can state with some confidence that the "Henry" delimited by AIEE! Poetry is only a symbolic model for the distinct, inalienable quiddity of every single poetic subject and object. Thus univeral Henrification is simply an abstract index of the mysterious actuality & architecture of created & creative Nature. It might be appropriate to characterize AIEE! Poetry as not exactly "Henryesque", but rather "henotic" - ie., "harmonizing, irenic" - deriving from the Greek work for "one" (Hen).

AIEE! (AMERICAN INTERNAL EMIGRE-EMIGRE) POETRY : an extended Goof

Too tired from late night not to blather. Pouring white stuff outside. So here goes...

What, you might ask, can be AIEE! Poetry? Well, it's a homemade branding moniker for my poetry, obviously...

Do I need such a thing? No, probably not. Is it upstanding & ethical or even intelligent to muck & mudgeon about with such things? No, I suppose not. I've been slumming for 15 years now (since the dawn, for me, of internet poetry conversation - Buffalo Poetics List) - verbally wrassling with my sub-subcultural compeers over Important Topics in Poetry & Related Topics... while the fine upstanding & successful poets shuffled along their diurnal rounds - publishing in magazines, books, winning awards, "placing" themselves in colleges, & such like... I could have started doing that myself Forty Years Ago if I'd had any sense... instead I became successively Jesus Freak, Music Bum, Hobo, Food Coop Manager, VISTA Volunteer, Junior Politico, Mandelstam Disciple, Family Man, Divorced Family Man... you name it, I've been there. Ranch Hand. Professional Resume Writer. Wholesale Produce Delivery Person. What the heck. (mostly, Sub-Sub-Librarian.)

So, getting back to the Subject... what is AIEE! Poetry, then?

AIEE! Poetry is the poetry of an "internal emigre". This was the Soviet Writers' Union label for a social-professional outcast - basically, a criminalized person under Stalinism - those who survived to milder times to become "dissidents" later - personae non grata, those who (to use the Greek word, lanthanein) (successfully or not) "escape notice"...

& how does one become an AIEE Poet?

There are many paths (& many internalized motives) to this exalted status. I choose to focus only on that aspect of this dilemma which most directly challenges the cultural structure which arranges my placement there (ie. I'm ignoring perhaps even more important, inner, moral or psychological motives). The aspect I'm referring to is the strictly literary or artistic orientation of said emigre.

There are two primary paths in American poetry today which the AIEE! Poet has chosen not to take:

1) The Path of the Professional Poet (PPP). The Professional Poet is the poet who is capable of correlating his or her craft - which may be of a very high calibre - with the established social rewards currently offered (teaching jobs, tours, books, awards & so on). The PP is an upstanding adult member of the World As We Know It - the Institutions & Organs of same. Poetry here is Part of Our World. & a very good Part of Our World it is.

2) The Path of the Oppositional Poet (POP). The Oppositional Poet is the poet who is capable of assimilating his or her craft to an ideology of Revolt of one sort or another. (The really deft OPs combine a Revolting Worldview with the constellation of said established social rewards (see #1 above) - but this is a side issue.) In fact entire large critical-parasitical counter-constellations have arisen, which habitate (in symbiotic survival mode) with the Institutions and Organs of the World As We Know It.

& so where do I, Henry H. Gould, scribbler of long standing, fit in here? Let's ignore the first path for the time being. For 15 years or so I have engaged in dubious battle with by-night armies of the POP variety. & wherefore? Well, there may be all sorts of competitive & aspirational (vain) motives in play... But again, I will emphasize what I think is the critical difference - the disagreements over the nature of poetry & poetic style.

Let me zero in on what I believe to be the crux of the matter. It's this crux of debate which initially arose when I began piping up on the Buffalo Poetics List these many odd eons ago; and I think it has mildly resurfaced again (hence this screed of mine) in the tiffs over Flarf.

The POP trend - originating, perhaps, with the divagations of John Ashbery in Tennis Court Oath, if not before - & leading into the playful ellipses of NY School, & the not-so-playful strictures of the Language School - developed initially in opposition, not only to the Old New-Critical establishment of the 40s & 50s, but also to the simultaneous personalization & informalization (direct colloquial talk) of American poetry of the 60s & 70s, led by Robert Lowell & John Berryman.

POP arose as an effort to differentiate poetry from the undifferentiated flood of prose & prosaic free-verse - & POP tried to do this by way of formalization, abstraction & de-personalization. Hence we have the contemporary anti-dialects of postmodern poetry : the "verbal-material systems" & "procedures" we know so well.

Well, let me tell you, the AIEE! Poet rejects POP in its entirety.

Let's look at the example of Henry H. Gould, for example. How does this particular AIEE! Poet actualize an approach which differs from both #1 & 2 above?

Gould's poetry is founded on two very basic orientations or principles. Firstly, (1) he thinks of poetry as a distinct medium or mode or form of artistic expression, which by means of its roots in past & very ancient practice, maintains a kind of autonomous & healthy - one might say perennial - presence in the cultural-intellectual life of humanity. This distinct and autonomous mode operates as a kind of translating or transfiguring process : absorbing the events & discourses of real history & experience, & reconfiguring or transmuting them into its own distinct idiom. & here is the key corollary : this process of transfigurement is the radical activity of poetry per se, which brackets or supercedes both the ideological (political) and stylistic (aesthetic) dynamics of stylistic change.

Secondly,(2) - with (1) clearly in mind as a basis - Gould's poetry is rooted, along with all authentic poetry, in an inner telos or drive toward clarity, wholeness, and recapitulation (of experience). Poetry, in other words, aspires to simplicity-in-complexity : to the making of a clear & compelling mirror (the simple) of a differentiated and substantial reality (the complex). & this aspiration in turn is grounded in the sense of firm ontological ground itself : an Aristotelian-Aquinian-Maxi-musical notion of a holistic Cosmos consisting of Real, Integral Particulars (Individuals). Things are Real, and unmistakably Themselves (ie. they are not simply identifiable with, or reducible to, their various Descriptions or Labels). History is an Actual Record of the Real Process of the Change & Development of Things through Time. & Poetry is the Distinctive Expression of the Real Individual's Intellectual-Aesthetic Synthesis of the Real Actualities So Described. Personhood & Individuality are substantial and irreducible. So, also, are Intellectual Universals & the Process of History - the relation between the Individual & the Social-Historical (Common, Universal) Actuality.

Poetry, in other words, has a substantial intellectual grounding in Truth. But this grounding is not simply a given : it is the result of the Poet's own effort to discover & synthesize more General Truths. It is the grafting process of the unique & playful act of artistic making with its own wider contexts. Thus Great & True Poetry upholds this crown of artistic endeavor - this grafting process with the intellectual & experiential currents of the Real & Actual Larger World of Time, Space & History - as the real fruit - the ultimate aim & original source - of its own Traditions.

Gould's multifarious extended poetic Projects - all the long & short poems - can thus be viewed as forms of poetic Orientation toward a Larger World. Through the mode of art, poetry invests Experience with formulae of intellectual-emotional Meaning : the underlying structure or holistic arrangement of these discovered Meanings reveals a distinct Viewpoint, which simultaneously expresses Individual Personhood and World-Historical Reality. It becomes a "Henry" World, in other words : "Henry" cannot be exiled from his own verbal model of Truth.

So Henry's status as AIEE! Poet - or Internal Emigre - is like the reversible many-colored coat of that (subjective, artistic) World where Henry is always "at home". & the lights are on.

This orientation - in which Particulars & Individuals are both (1) real & Substantial & Inalienable in Themselves, and (2) part of a Real & Actual World-Historical Process or Drama which is inherently more than the sum of its Descriptions or Verbal Models - is clearly at odds with the POP trend. The POP trend, as a mode of Postmodernism, (1) denies the substantial Reality of said Realities, and (2) replaces them with a variety of Explanatory Overlays : these are the ideological-intellectual Discourses or Filters which POP has adapted to the mode of Poetry. In the process of such they must also Deny the Existence of Poetic Tradition (the mode of perennial Transfigurement I sketched out above). You might fairly ask : how does such Transfigurement differ from the Postmodern Overlay-Description? It differs in that Transfigurement bears witness to an allegiance to Realism or Truth. What Postmodernism (& the POP) denies, the AIEE Poet celebrates.

& It Has Yet to Be Noticed (lanthanein) that the Drama (a comedy of sorts) of the Internal Emigre-Emigre Poet - the irreducible inalienable Henry of American Poetry - is returning, is returning, is returning home again...

(p.s. I have deemed this Blast worthy of postage over at Essays + Reviews...)

- speaking of flarf, I gave a reading last night with major local flarfiste Mike Magee & 3 other poets, down at Tazza, courtesy of the gallant Mairead Byrne's monthly series. read some bits of Lanthanum. Mairead re-recited E. Alexander's inaugural poem, with blues quartet backup. Fun.

Having minor comment-box skirmishes about flarf today, over at Possum Ego. Kind of fun.

Maybe'll spur me on to another screed or manifesto. Oh boy!

from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man :

"--To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most
satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the
necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the
qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: AD PULCRITUDINEM TRIA
REQUIRUNTUR INTEGRITAS, CONSONANTIA, CLARITAS. I translate it so: THREE
THINGS ARE NEEDED FOR BEAUTY, WHOLENESS, HARMONY, AND RADIANCE. Do
these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?"

He makes it sound easy... but I'm liking better what I've been delving into in Maximus the Confessor.

THE EXILE OF THE CLEAR, THE DETERMINATE, THE INTELLECTUAL, THE PERSONAL (IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY)

- or something like that.

By clear and determinate I'm thinking of Maximus's (Aristotelian) high valuation of the particular individuality of every thing - each part of a whole retains its unity and uniqueness, as part -

the universal only exists in relation to the particular, the specific - & vice versa -

If we have the fortitude to look at time & space & history & experience as real, actual - then part of the poet's task might be to grasp & reflect, as clearly as possible, this set of limited and determinate actualities - & synthesize them, transpose them into form(s) of intellectual meaning - & in the process express the very unique whatness & quiddity of himself or herself, as unique being/creature/person... this I think is in line with both GM Hopkins & Joyce... doesn't Hopkins call it "selving"? Maybe not. Inscape. & History.

(For Maximus this harmonic many-in-one is underwritten by the utterly ungraspable simplicity, unity & quiddity of its Creator... the integrity of wholes & individuals is an imperfect reflection of that incommensurable divine integrity...)

But the recent generations of postmodern poetics (from Buffalo unto Flarf) seem determined to dismiss & deny such quidditas...

- more later maybe -

Lanthanum, today.

Great slang over at Latta today. I'd hate to see him wing into me. Loved the photograph at the end of the post.

I had been planning to look for John Berryman's grave while I was in Minnesota over the holidays. Resurrection Cemetery, in Mendota, just south of Twin Cities (across Minnesota River). Didn't get to it. Too durn cold. Maybe this summer, if I get out there.

I did visit (Frank Gehry-designed) little museum on U. of M. campus (Weisman Gallery) - just down River Road from parents' house. Big picture windows look out on Washington Ave. Bridge. The museum is located in a corner of riverbank where Berryman took his fatal leap.

Why this particular interest? Well, I feel personal connections. Have written about this before. (I guess he's part of this whole elegiac-homesick attitude I have about my home town - that's one aspect of it, anyway.)

& he's kind of a liminal-pivotal figure, between old & new. ie. the scholarly attitude (even though he failed at it much of the time). The Shakespeare studies, his devotion to Yeats, his old-time bardic-vocal manner. These are the "old". The new is - personal-confessional-anecdotal-slangy style. & how he grew out, or away from, some of the egotism of that (in an excruciating way) toward the end. A purgatorial path. Into the cold & snow. Sad but real. He carried a lot of psychological burdens - "inner demons", as they say.

("dream songs" - a phrase the Ojibwa used to describe their music.)

"Resurrection Cemetery" - a pretty good general description of human history & life on earth.

Maybe Hobo is to Henry as "Henry" is to Berryman. They might start dancing around in a circle soon. There's something of each of them in the others.

Lately writing poems feels very much like sailing a small boat through mist & fog, near a shoreline, or islands. I have my primitive compass, boat, rudder & sail - that is, the basic themes (more like perpetual problems) I keep obsessing about. & I have only the vaguest idea where I'm headed (though I try very hard to discover that). But as long as I keep working at it - & it is work of a sort - then unexpected little details of sea- & landscape tend to crop up.

S'more Lanthanum.

Lanthanum slowly advances...

& Happy MLK Day...

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