Rancho Lazy-L

Lanthanum.  The design of this long, long poem is like the letter "L" laid on its back. For 3/4ths of the way it pokes along, slow & repetitive, sleepy... & then finally it stands up!  Like lazy Hobo, or Lazarus in his grave - a lazy Rus.  Like a Mississippi river-barge, or Mandelstam's "Egyptian bark of the dead."  


Or Lanthanum is like a still gray clam, rather dull on the outside... which finally produces a pearl. You have to be patient & willing to listen as it goes along - a very quiet turtle (or turtle-dove) song.


The numerical design of this poem is rather intricate and symbolic - something like a wheel.  But I will leave that for others to figure out....

poetry continuum

Next project may be some kind of essay, responding to the discussion around Marjorie Perloff's article on the Conceptual poets, and Matvei Yankelevich's response, & so on.  The effort to inject Russian avant-garde/Futurist/Formalist models and theories into the American milieu has a pretty long history.  The Language Poets expressed an affinity for same.  Perloff's critical formulae have an oddly recherche quality, and Yankelevich echoes that to some extent : they both set up the personal MFA-workshop lyric as the great stumbling-block to literary advance, the middle-brow bourgeois anti-intellectual mainstream conventionality which must be demolished and overcome.

I have an ongoing, longstanding problem with this maneuver... I remember arguing about it often on the Buffalo Poetics list back in the 90s.  My problem is that I identify with the contrasting poetics and worldview of the Russian Acmeists.  Of course there were crossovers and overlaps and collaborations between these two (or three or four) tendencies in 20th-cent Russian poetry - yet the basic contrast is there.  And I'm repeatedly impelled to try to articulate it, to re-draw that line.  For me it gets to the character of one's most basic sense of what the art of poetry is, is for.

Is art, is poetry, a radical detachment from experience - a permanent "making strange"?  Are the roots of art in the alienation effect - of consciousness detached from unthinking life?  This it seems to me is a fundamental article of faith among the modernist and postmodern avant-garde.  Even the efforts of Dada and similar movements to disintegrate the special status of the art object, to merge art with everyday life, seem to be rooted in an act of disjunction : of shock, of breakage.  The avant-garde seems tinged with violence at its core.  The Futurists' concept of "the word as such" really means the word uprooted from its origins in the whole continuum of a language (the history of words, of syntax, of rhetoric, of representation, of dialect... and of meaning).  Words were to be treated as things : not living things, but material - in other words, available (in an ethical sense) for artistic manipulation by force.

The Acmeists' shared sense of their vocation (I mean Gumilev, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, primarily) and of the nature of poetry is strikingly different.   The best word I can think of to describe this attitude is "continuum".   The "word as such" - for Gumilev, for example - is God.  Such an equation implies the whole panorama of Western cultural history.  The word - words - exist in a continuum : of speech, of sentences, of philology, of cultural history, of time, of theology... and of past poets and poetry.  You cannot tear off a piece of language by violence without harming the continuum.  As Mandelstam put it : "the Word is bread and suffering".

As I see it, this is a fundamentally "incarnational" concept of poetry.  We don't know words as detached self-sufficient entities : words are inflected and shaded by their presence in the poems of the past.  Words have a history in flesh and blood, and continue to appear there, in the matrix of human conflict and strife : not as instigators of more shock and violence, but as avenues for mediation and reconciliation (peacemaking, healing).

I think there's a mystical dimension to all this.  In the Acmeist sense of the "word as such", an aesthetic equilibrium arises which is really rooted in the unity of experience and representation, of intellect and sense, of word and flesh.  Union, oneness, harmony.  This is something I hope to explore more fully in another essay.

Why I am a Russian poet

COSMIC LOCAL POETRY

                Brown Univ. Bookstore, Providence, RI.  July 18, 2012

Stuart and I are here today as part of the Bookstore’s Local Authors series.  And we are local authors – very local.  But we’re involved with something global, even universal.  Poetry is a world endeavor, and we are caught up in that, each in our own way.  For my part, I consider myself  a sort of  Russian from Minneapolis.  I’ve been inspired by a group of poets based in St. Petersburg around 1910, who called themselves Acmeists : Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam.  Mandelstam defined Acmeism as “nostalgia for world culture”.  This is a concise summary of their sense of poetry as an enterprise in building civilization, and as poetry as a global, trans-historical continuum, a tradition stretching back into prehistory.  

Orpheus, legendary ur-poet of Greece, was priest of Apollo, god of music and medicine : a pairing which suggests that art and song are about healing.  For the Greeks, this meant a restoration of health and balance through reason, justice, clarity, wisdom.  Orpheus, Apollo’s representative, fell victim to the frenzy of the cult of Dionysius : the music of the word was sacrificed to the fury of desire amputated from understanding.  Poetry appears at the edge of this polarity, between mind and sense, intellect and feeling, consciousness and dream.  The Acmeists looked to their national poet, Pushkin, as embodying such an equipoise – at the cusp between alternating waves of neo-classicism and romanticism.  

Mandelstam wrote : “Classicism is revolution.”  This had a special implication in the context of revolutionary 1920s Russia.  The Acmeists were seeking a paradigm, within art, for the sanity and equilibrium – the “nostalgia for world culture” – which they recognized in the poetry of the ancient world.  The Roman poet Virgil was searching for such balance in his own day.  His Georgics, ostensibly an agricultural manual in verse, was really a meditation on a world which had fallen from a Golden Age of rural peace, into an Iron Age of violence and war.  The “audacity of the poet”, as Virgil put it, was to re-imagine that Golden Age, by way of an all-embracing pity : compassion for a world oppressed by the rule of brutality, force and chaos.  This is the fundamental Apollonian vocation : through imagination and song, to bring mankind, us, back to our senses – our intuition of profound justice and harmony.  This is the inner meaning of Mandelstam’s “nostalgia for world culture” : he thought of Classicism in this sense as the future.  

To my mind, these ideas bring us back to the local, as well : for here we are, in Providence : we are Providence poets.  Providence, to Roger Williams, the city’s founder, is a theological term, closely bound up with the RI state motto : Hope.  Providence signifies a cosmic plan : the Master Architect’s (or Musician’s) intention to restore all things to their original well-being.  Note how the meaning of this word resonates with Virgil’s, and the Acmeists’, sense of the poet’s vocation.

Today we are awash in aggressive discourses, a feverish babble of new technological means and motives.  Many today would advance the image of the poet as master communicator : rock star, rapper, stand-up comedian, celebrity, social spokesperson, political activist, promoter of recondite ideologies.  But I think the most basic stance of the poet is as listener.  Dante wrote, “Love speaks, and I follow after, noting down her words like a scribe.”  The poet listens to a mute song : the whisper of conscience, the music of understanding.  And this means that we are all poets here – Stuart and I and each of you, who are also listening.                                                                                                                                                                                                             

 

                                              

                                                                                                             

                                                                                                             

                                                                                                           

Lanthanum 12.23

23

       ...nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, 

       and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.  They grasped not only the whole race of men then

       living, but... reached forward... seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon...     

          – Abraham Lincoln (Aug. 17, 1858)

Your birthday tomorrow, Grandma   born

on the 4th of July, 1900   far off there   in

Sunset Land   I’m thinking of you   & of

Great-Grandma   J.   2-wheeler captain’s

daughter   Jessie O.   Ophelia   the river-girl

now   at the end of this   milk-train rainbow

way back in   summertime   prairiespace   O

Jessie, little tree   I hear that lonesome horn

wail   my old St. Anthony trystle-humlet

suspended 7th   plunged into black earth

a shiny hinter-horn   of milky lanthanum

(dawn-anthem)   &   Amaranthousa   sets

her Pocahontaseal   a Morning Star   some

menorah-constellatio   over 50 more   their

hard-earned stripes   a chord (accord)   for

ear attuned   to Jubileeday (freequilibrium)

only a promise of   soul liberty   (Everyhew-

manever)   under these stars   their birthright

mine   may be   new birth of freedom   (night

brings dawn)   the sun of justice   risen again

to bloom   as once   on earth   in stable   born

out of the Pharaoh’s precinct   into happiness

just over Jordan (almondejoie) by wilderness

to mercy   forgiveness   peace   a Restoration

of all things   beneath two tender-tending wings   lark

tempering my mumbling   well, contrapuntal   polar

sarabande   (labor & rest   yin & yang).  Soar,

7/4   to 4x7 : welded   annealed   (almond birchbark)

          7.3.12

O Happy Henry

Lanthanum 12.22

22   EVENING LAND

We drove to the curl of Sakonnet Point   at the

SE corner of RI   snuck past the private property

& the “keep out” signs   onto its pebbly spiral jetty

& watched the sun set, somehow   into the Atlantic

late early summer evening   the sun only an eye

veiled in lambent mist   57 fine shades of violet

most luminous sky   ever screened by retina   &

I saw   one kind round   rose   iris   in clerestory

lanthanum air-cathedral   through the vault

of steel   in heart of the earth   or simply

the heart itself   where 144 lines meet (ply

pan o’ply) an elemental number (all complete

now, fin)   for Love is Lake Victoria   of Poem

& Universe   the shared factor (O Unionverse)

both yin & yang   a givenreceptive   openness

infinitenfoldunfurled banner of Joy (freedom)

Love is egalitarian & kind   it will not break

the weakest willow branch   of orphan   poor

man   widow   it will endure with them,   for

righteousness   & justice   & when the scales

fall from our eyes at last   we’ll behold Scales

held in your palm   of matrix-lines   life-lines

a Romany (RIMN) hrmny, Maggie   28 pines

all swimming into view   &   one eye-in-hand 

prevails.   & the shadow of your hand   on my

brow   in the starlight   of Cosmos-over-Chaos

(olive mountain)   your paddlwhrlng S-O-S (O

sip & see)   Ja-El   Jessie O’L   little song-tree

        7.2.12

Lanthanum 12.21

21

I’ve lived for some years now   along Abba River

in Q’ville   a stream wide, deep, invisible   to which

Ocean is tributary   & stars are lights   each

in a niche of a bend   along its banks   a quiver-

full are clustered   at the center of the earth

matrix of bends & origami folds   a silvery thread

knotted tight   & gleaming there   the stream’s head

source &   watershed   (east   west   north   south)

This river’s where   inside turns out   & myrrh

turns mirror (by St. Louie MO)   where wanderer

goes OM at last   prodigal Absalom   to his poor

long-forsaken Solomon (Abba   Pop   Dad   Father)

& the tripod of their lost, lasting embrace   is

bond of universal steel   (titanium-lanthanum-

oxide alloy)   which is most tautwound   anthem-

flower   in the planetary plot   grave Providence

of all things   in those arms   their hands

united   fingers   interwoven &   unbreakable

palm-vault   beyond every Olympic pinnacle   of

bronze or gold   & racing now (triple-handstands)

toward that Finnish line   in summertime   halcyon

days   up north   (is it Karelia?  Sibelius swam-

pineland?)   where a vain little man   in his own

birch canoe (Longfellow?  Hiawatha?)   glides down

Minnehaha Creek   his boat festooned with 7 flags

of 50 stars (red, blue, purple)   a paper hat (or

tiny boat) crowning his brow   crowing   Excelsior!

paddling home   (homesick Frank   in his glad rags)

      7.1.12

Lanthanum 12.20

20

The star of redemption   the star

of the dead bees’ hexagon   a high-

five   hive-restoration   of planetary

dimension   fell to earth   not far 

from here   in a whisper   in your heart

because bees’ drone lays down a steady

basis   for high-flown   aerial remedy

seraphim   & cherubim   folded   inflight

hummingbird   honest wasp   monarch

toward e-axis (of earth)   pinwheel

historical   time’s dewplow   feel

the lightbreeze   from Everwhirr (arc

of Emmy’s M, see? squared)   in a darkroom

shaded by granite   limestone   waterfalls of

floating rock   where Everhmmn   (coral)

comes to commune   redeemed   from 

doom   to joie   happened once, only

in satyrsnffrplay of   Hézoodestiné   (a

crossroad rude   unflds bloomruse   selah)

His wine   over Dmmsdy   (D-day mortality)

is ours, O   humankind   O human kind

& so I sail   (dumb Percyfoil)   into your

meteorcasket, O   Hlyprst   one emerald ear

of wheat   kept   in Kievan grainfield   (blind

steppelevator)   Natasha Shtempel’s hope

& Hope’s   & Paul’s (the ashen one, the

ecumenical)   in the sadfields   in the

forest   west of Kiev (ancien Bury mantrope)

    6.30.12

Lanthanum 12.19

19

Hobo the poet (remember Hobo?) fell asleep

in patch of bronzegold roadside   day-lilies (on

his birthday)   at the end of May   & someone

touched the key of C   (the 29th?)   lost sheep

in a corral of Bach, perhaps   & had a dream :

2 big   rust-rose   28-spoked   ferrous wheels

the spokes   were made of cottonwood (heals

homesickness) & steel   welded without seam

& the wheels turned slowly, gently   into one

bi-petal bicycle   carting   an almond-shaped

canoe   which bore   an upright oak   (draped

with moss garlands)   the oak was Black   an

Elk stood guard beneath it   lilacs   shrouded

him from sight   in Hobo’s dream   he grew

so small   so dark   only a single rueful brow

with 2 black wings   & sea-blue eyes sharpened

could see him there   She alone knew

he stood guard so   within his rose & lilac

garden   his cave   a vernal quincunx   back

behind limestone rim   before time began   who

stood forever   with the oak   a kind of keel

true kelson   pointed   like compass-needle

toward   Étoile du Nord   & commonweal

(one Cosmopolis)   Hobo saw it too   still

shining   over Sirius, Evening Star   small

distant moon   little light   sweet innocent

sun-twig   asway on branch (old, bent) of

high ancient   night oak   sheltering   tall

6.29.12

Lanthanum 12.18

18

I circumambulate the Terrace on my lunchbreak

one dappled breezy Wednesday   early summer

stone Roger surfacing from rose-pillow (or

honeysuckle)   the green so green   a fluke

or Edencube (slighty dizzy)   hint of goodbye

farewell to place, or poem   (both, maybe)   &

sensing a stone   so preternaturally near   we

glance, awry   (mother, father   in mind’s eye)

another skim of dimensions   closer than we think

like still small voice   smaller & smaller   slight

change of pitch at matrivortex   vast light-

whorled galaxy   only   tiny   (Eternity-wink)

We come back to encounter   another One

so near   Love’s blind justice   balances our

inner ear   spirals to vanishmnt   by oar or

wing   like the little snail I saw this afternoon

pine-green   lost on the sidewalk   elegant   

ouragan-eye   unmovable dome,   portable

home   still small swirl   delicate   aimable

carapace   helm of unknown soldier   faint

whisper of Shakespeare   in the milky hamlet

of his mind   a cup of happiness   overflowing

through   Golgotha   to an Arden   ever-living

evermore   corral of hands   inwoven, implicate

& indestructible   the little snailshell home

the universe   in a friendly eye   aye, aye

Captain   lift anchor, Rose, &   hoist away

ineradicable oak-stem (frothy halfshell foam)

    6.27.12

Lanthanum 12.17

17

A bluegray bluejay   tearducts lined with black

floats over Vermilion   Hibbing-hub of Iron Range

little shadow crossing my path   passing strange

flash of refugee   speechless, seeking   way-back

machine   one lonesome-hearted   personal trail

to Itasca   unharmful cascade &  (er) beginning

spring of all  jail-springs   little Frisbee winging

his paper hat   free, now   down Arthur St.  (sail

on, Mendelssohn!)   Someone leans white hair

over rainswollen stream   into my delta-mouth

blue, gray   halfway...   Meet me, forsooth   in

Bobbie M’Gee St. Lou Healer E’s helio-chair

(a-hover overhead).  What be the J of Jubilees?

I asked, as we watched   Natasha   the chimes

of freedom flashboom over grassland steppes

a cloud-bash   thunderstorm   & what it say?

It says   it says... Natasha says   my heart

is bursting   its watermain    with presence

of universal Heart   great & magnanimous

greater than mine, my sheepgate   Thou art

my house, my hearth   forever   overflowing

Ocean River...   for Jubilee is Understanding :

Note how Ghost climbs from grave   brimming

everliving life   impregnable & lofty   eagle-wing

or playful Jay   hiding in the spruce   fluting low

to me   for this   improvisational cosmos   is

hers forever   his always &   always new   goes

on soaring   past 57+ galaxies   red flame (or blue)

  6.22.12

Lanthanum 12.16

16

I woke from sleep again, to find myself

nestled in oak leaves on the Terrace, high

among tree limbs, with Natasha.  She grew shy

now.  The monastery of my lips is sealed, my

elf, she said – but tell me what you see.  Once

more I looked out through the greenery – &

seemed to see a huge assembly, ambling round

a circle... some sweet-solemn wedding-dance

promenade (far off, among the western clouds).

& at the center of the wheel, a blonde woman

I’d seen somewhere before... maybe Italian... ?

My lips remember now – small icon (housed

in RISD Muse.) by Lippo Memmi – Magdalen,

with small stone casket in her hands (delicate

myrrh-box, ornate, with tiny mirrors).  What

lay on its lid?  She was far off there... then

Natasha lent me her gemlens.  It worked

like a microscope : I saw the slim casket

was lidded with simple emerald slab, set

in magenta border, & graved with gilded

tracery of river-scenes : 4 rivers, poured

from jars by angels at each corner.  & there

were palm trees, willows, cedars by the water...

& Abraham, & Isaac, with a ram... a wingèd

angel in between, to save the boy...  It is

a miniature Paradise I see, I said to her –

but what’s inside?  Is M’s jewelbox for myrrh

alone?  Natasha only smiled at me.  Gee whiz,

I thought – this is a mystery.  I turned back

to the vision in the clouds... gazed deeply now

into her azure eyes, beneath twin-arching brow.

& suddenly a white-gold star-arrow turned black

                                  *

my sight.  This is Sirius, a serious star, a whisper

spoke.  Nearest to Venus, & the sun.  Keep

your eyes closed, for now – for from deep sleep

of Man, must rise the Sun of Man.  Rondure

of molten, labyrinthine, fibrillated gold slowly swelled

there, behind my lids... & without opening my eyes

I seemed to see that circling cloud-crowd cease

moving, turn to center of that wheel : dead

center.  Now the mirror-casket silently opened...

a shrouded figure (like a cloud) rose from inside.

The shroud was dusty, the figure dark.  Wide

shoulders slowly unstooped... bent brow lifted.

The figure spoke.  A quiet flute, melodious.

I am the melek of the milky covenant.  From dawn

of time, I have prepared your heart – soft stone,

harder than diamond... perfect, as Elkstone is.

Each man, each woman, every soul shall wear

my ruby diadem – to find their lives, & dwell

in peace within their earth.  All shall be well,

all manner of thing – now Earth begins to bear

its flowering.  I suddenly found myself racing

toward him, toward some Finnish finish line –

for Melek-MLK stood now beneath twin tines

of that bright tuning fork, centering everything...

I saw a rose wheel over St. Louis, the riverbanks;

I saw a triple rainbow underneath, over the Arch;

I saw the crowd around Mary M. begin to march

again – gaily, skipping & dancing, giving thanks.

Then I opened my eyes at last – saw the old church

across the street.  Redeemer Church (Episcopalian).

An old rose window beamed in early light – serene

beneath wingèd gray granite brows... (sigh).  Watch.

    6.21.12

Lanthanum 12.15

15

In Anno Domini 1099, the 15th of July (St.

Henry’s Day, back then) the 1st Crusaders

repossessed the Sepulchre (a tomb, still bare).

Gorged on fanatical massacre, the gluttony

of boots, they knelt there (pondering the absence

of a sign) & celebrated their conquest – the new

Lords of the Holy Land (awhile).  Then, in 1132

(33 years later) deep in Calabrian hinterlands

was born that blooming prophet of the Holy Ghost

(Joachim... Fiore).  Upon whose hoary sheepskin

manuscripts was scrolled a radiant-obscure vision –

an eagle falling from the sky... rainbows, interlaced

in 7 rings, over a host of men & angels, rising

from the mountains of the dead.  To meet

the God of Hosts, returned : & so complete

6 ages of yearning & hope, labor & suffering.

I say, our planet pivots on the contrast here :

kings’ desolate dominion in a code of war

or spiritual power of a slave of slaves.  Poor

Francesco, with his lambs – stigmatized minor

fratello to Jesus... groom to his grey sister-

dove (miadonna Povertà).  Monk Joe beheld

the rough, rude, solitary path (ragged, unshod

up dreary hills) each soul must mount... ladder

to restoration of all things.  Earth & heaven,

futurpresenpast... one round square dance,

with panagyral pipery.  Millennial romance...

the promise of Natasha (in her oaktree den).

      6.15.12

Lanthanum 12.14

14

In the cradle of civilization, in Mesopotamia

a shepherd stretches 6 tentpoles at midnight;

his house forming a little world, set right –

earth, sky, stars, 3rd sky.  Through camera

obscura (liminal minima at apex) rises a 7th pole

of smoke, from his hearthfire.  The ancients say

through that black hole, in former times, a tiny

heaven-stone – turquoise, with scarlet aureole –

plummeted, was pulled from fire... a blazing 

coal.  Shepherds fell to worshipping the stone;

they carried it (cloth-wound by veiled maiden)

on camel’s back, to aid in feuds.  A fine glazing

of gold was wrought around the gem, til it became

more precious than opals of Trebizond, diamonds

of Kalamazoo.  It was the signet of a royal bond

of marriage between sky & earth – its diadem –

imprimature of human home.  & now, a mass

of Quakers, in volcano, gather for silent mass –

the stone (furtive minnaschool, portable mass)

assembles gravity (protonnage) under a mass

of skimming photons... & Man (species-mass)

turns to face the 7th pole, of cloud & light (ol’

Hadrian’s W, colliding motes).  With bluff hello,

one Higgs bison slants across green Oxford pass...

slight air force-particle, breezy Soo Line.  She

who holds the key, surely, to auld dawn song

(Latin, Greek, Calabrian)... it flows her, all along,

odd flower, toward an even Eden-stone (coo; see?).

  6.21.12

Lanthanum 12.13

13

summons up remembrance of things past).

The sum of summer suns, & shady groves.

The regal Word, lasting, sustains our loves

& raises them, renewed, & holds them fast

to Paradise – a Petersburg beyond all puny 

tyrants’ paltry sway.  Their temporary swag-

swagger, these staggering boyars of gulag...

each chill-fired terror of the territory...

fuming mob & desiccated Pharaoh... all

shall go : all shall bow down before le Règle

d’Amour.  Who comes disguised as fruit-seller,

orphan... persecuted woman, broken crawl

of superstition-scapegoat... fraud’s victim,

a bully’s game.  Who travels incognito,

silent... Blackstone in his orchard, or

the gardener near Olivet... It’s him,

she cried.  My Everyman : is He.  World

pivots on her utterance... as the wasp

needles the axis of the earth.  Osip,

disguised as stolen meal... goldfinch, hurled

up to eternal granary.  To feed there, &

to feed... among the atoning seraphim.

We shall return there, you & I, some

summer evening – Anna, Elena, & Marina –

Gumilev, Brodsky, Osip & Hope... all singing

pilgrims to the akme-stone : that human grail,

that cup of sorrows turned to joy, that real

St. Eu – chrism of Louis & T.S. (sobornosting).

      6.20.12