I'm a little embarrassed to tell this personal story, but what are blogs for, anyway? When I read something enjoyable or compelling, I hold a little awards ceremony for the book or blog or whatever. I have a special bronze, silver, or gold medallion (cast in the form of a Havarti Moon surmounted by twin leaping Guernseys) fashioned by my friend and personal sculptor Guido Lunasco, who lives in a little hilltop studio overlooking the Arnosuch River in Tuscany; then I invite a few select companions (apologies to anyone accidentally left out) to my own study here in Luigilottodusto, and over a few bottles of choice champagne, we toast the winning volume (url site, whatever) and, suspending the medallion directly over the center of the award-winning object from a length of gold chain, by oscillating it slowly back and forth, I hypnotize everyone present and throw the award-winning volume about 10 feet in the air, whereupon my assistant, Fianciuletta Fellini, catches it in mid-air and places upon its surface a ceremonial baccio (kiss). Immediately afterward, with a snap of the fingers, I awaken the assembled entourage, and, strange as it may seem, the hypnotic spell convinces each and every participant that he or she has actually read the award-winning work in question.

Congratulations, award-winners !

Kent Johnson interview. Expand your mind.

Shanna Compton, whose endearing blog is new to me, and who must be deeply caught up in the incredibly rich and flavorful ongoing debate between the School of Fromagitude and the Avant-Gouda, forwarded me this important poem:

Ode on the Mammoth Cheese
   Weighing over 7,000 pounds

 
We have seen the, queen of cheese,
Lying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze,
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.

 
All gaily dressed soon you’ll go
To the great Provincial show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.

 
Cows numerous as a swarm of bees,
Or as the leaves upon the trees,
It did require to make thee please,
And stand unrivalled, queen of cheese.

 
May you not receive a scare as
We have heard that Mr. Harris
Intends to send you off as far as
The great world’s show at Paris.

 
Of the youth beware of these,
For some of them might rudely squeeze
And bite your cheek, then songs or glees
We could not sing, oh! queen of cheese.

 
We’rt thou suspended from balloon,
You’d case a shade even at noon
Folks would think it was the moon
About to fall and crush them soon.

                                        
                   James McIntyre (1827-1906)

Somehow I feel the soft texture & delicate aroma of this poem will have an appetizing effect on the whole prix fixe perplexity.

Attended RI Philharmonic last night. (knew Phil Harmonic & his brother Fred in high school. yeah.) Music by Berlioz, Prokofiev, Barber, Respighi.

Stirred by the emotional keys, later one of those thoughts occurred to me, the kind of thing we don't like to admit:

that our frenetic debates about poetics have missed something essential, which is that good poetry is emotionally expressive & expansive, in a way that touches the crowd, touches Everyperson, and that this elusive something is not measurable in terms of a political or aesthetic "position" nor by the minutiae of stylistic dissection. Thus the successful poets for the most part are elusive, evasive, noncommittal, &/or terse about "poetics", since it's a matter of an imponderable faculty outside the poet's control.

Mandelstam actually wrote several poems which address this conundrum of the "dream beyond reason" from various angles. From "Octets" (Moscow, 1934):

And Schubert on the water, and Mozart in the uproar of the birds,
and Goethe whistling on the winding path,
and Hamlet, thinking with fearful steps,
all felt the crowd's pulse and believed the crowd.
Perhaps my whisper was already borne before my lips,
the leaves whirled round in treelessness
and those to whom we dedicate our life's experience
before experience acquired their traits.

(trans. by David McDuff). this poem something like a Zen koan, to me anyway.

This is one of those late Mandelstam poems - one among so many - which come through for me even in translation.

He can still remember the wear and tear on his shoes,
and the worn grandeur of my soles.
I, in turn, remember him : his many voices,
his black hair, how close he lived to Mount David.

 
The pistachio-green houses on the foxhole streets
have been renovated with whitewash or white of egg;
balconies incline, horseshoes shine, horse - balcony,
the little oaks, the plane trees, the slow elms.

 
The feminine chain of curly letters
is intoxicating for eyes enveloped in light.
The city is so excessive and goes off into the timbered forest
and into the young-looking, aging summer.

Mandelstam, exiled in Voronezh, is remembering a fellow poet & Tiblisi, the capital of Georgia (near Mount David). (Resonates oddly for me, since John Tagliabue & his family lived a block down the hill from Mount David, a little hill in Lewiston, Maine.) The ordinariness of these lines is suffused with melancholy & loving memory. (Translated by Richard & Elizabeth McKane, from the Bloodaxe Bks edition of Voronezh Notebooks.)

I've repaired & updated my blog links. Sorry it's taken so long, folks : I forgot they were there. I don't use them much, on my own blog or other people's. I use the "favorites" bookmarks. My list is not inclusive or conclusive or representative, it's merely an "ive" list of links.

SIMPLE HISTORY OF HENRY

In the 1960s I started writing poetry, & liked the NY School poets a lot.

In the 1970s I had religious experiences & long wild wanderings & played a lot of music.

In the late 70s & early 80s I did community organizing & started ever-so-slowly getting back into poetry. I wrote very short, cautious, spacy, inhibited, somewhat imitative poems. I was in love with Osip Mandelstam & his wife, his poetry, their story.

In the 1980s I got more involved with other poets, like Edwin Honig & others in the RI area, & John Tagliabue, my then-father-in-law, who was (& is) a very enthusiastic writer, reciter, & interpreter of poetry. I read more widely, working to try to expand my range. I got interested in the long poem as a way of bringing in more things. I got very interested in Eugenio Montale's & Hart Crane's poetry.

In the late 80s & early 90s I started writing longer poems - influenced by Montale, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Crane, Pound, Olson, Williams, & of course Mandelstam. I wrote several of these long extended poems, & also experimented with traditional forms.

In the late 80s & 90s I helped edit a literary magazine, Nedge, and was quite active in organizing readings at local galleries, coffee shops, etc. under the auspices of a nonprofit group called the Poetry Mission.

Also in the 90s I spent a ton of time co-editing a big anthology in honor of Edwin Honig, titled A Glass of Green Tea - With Honig, which came out very well (still available from Fordham Univ. Press). Also succeeded in getting Honig's Collected poems edited & published after years of work (Time & Again, available from XLibris). This is something I am proud of.

In the late 90s I wrote Island Road, a sonnet sequence, where for the first time I felt I was integrating something of my very early fascination with the NY School & my interest in Shakespeare's sonnets.

In the very late 90s I started writing my 3rd or 4th very long poem, which ended up being almost a 1000 pp long, called Forth of July. Some of it was published as Stubborn Grew; the sequels were self-published.

Also in the late 90s I got involved with discussions & controversies on the Buffalo Poetics internet list. I started turning my sense of dislocation with the prevailing modes of experimental poetry into a kind of polemic.

These polemics often drove me to a dialectical position-taking which was somewhat extreme, so that I began defending the notion of the poet's absolute independence from collectivities or social influences.

However, my deepest commitment goes to the notion that art is a means by which the imagination builds models of social relations and communities. I get the feeling that the source of my difficulties with the "experimental" community is twofold: first of all, I do not share the notion that avant-garde art and left-wing politics are simply 2 halves of a positive "progressive" phenomenon; secondly, I think perhaps I simply "hear" poetry - the poetry of the past & the near-present - in a different way; as something that has to be fully absorbed & appreciated before it can ever be tweaked, twisted, parodied or displaced. These two sources of my "difference" probably mean only one thing : I am simply more conservative than the poets whose milieu I attempt to invade.

I'm startled to find how much interest & controversy the mere listing of the Limburger Biennale finalists has provoked. We live in a terribly competitive culture; I long for the era of the potlatch, when communities of poets sat around the bubbling fondue kettle & shared their epic & romantic adventures with milk & other dairy products.

I am not going to post the list of finalists for the National Book Award in Poetry here. You can find this information at several blogs & news outlets. I can't cover everything in the world of What Is Poetry!! I try my best. Okay, I will list the finalists in the Limburger Biennale Selecte for Poesie (held every odd year in Limburg, CS):

Celeste Jaquin, for The Moon : Reflections in a Cheese Shredder

Barry Berry, for I Am Saying Cheese, Mother

Blythe Sparrow, for Cheese Wheel Dreams

Bob LeBoeuf, for Letting You Know Beforehand : Cheese Poems and Odors

. . ."History", as we know it, being a procession of illusory short-cuts which prove to be characteristic sins (& thus delays on Dante's road). Characteristic of the 20th century : the notion that since morality is merely an illusion, it could be made to serve (servant of force in the realm of action, & of innovation in the realm of ideas). Its trinity : Lenin, Stalin, Hitler.

Characteristic of the 21st century (so far) : my physical & economic well-being is the earthly paradise; as long as I behave myself, I don't need to worry about those other people. (Maybe this is every century.)

& I want to thank Kent Johnson for once again guarding the marches of freedom over there in Ron's comment box. I am completely bemused by the way this question of exclusion keeps coming back to haunt me from Buffalo. The world is as small as the buffalos in it.

Good morning, everyone. I am standing on my head as I type this. Thank you, thank you, please hold your applause, thank you.

In yesterday's (10/15) comment box at Ron Silliman's clubhouse, I made some comments about poetry as a subset of an extra-poetic realm one might call Paradise or the kingdom of heaven. These occasioned some conjecturing with myself as I walked to work this morning (fine October day here in New England).

I had written that poetry offered something of a "seeming short-cut (only seeming)" to that realm. But bumbling along the street this morning, it occurred to me that this "offer" stems from a mistaken or incomplete perception. It also occurred to me that these are deep issues which are beyond me & over my head for the moment.

Anyone who doubts that these are serious issues in poetry need only read Dante's Purgatorio, where the trip to the earthly paradise takes place in large part through conversations about poetry; the love-ballads of Dante's troubadour models are sketched as seductive "pauses" (or illusory short-cuts) on the difficult road to well-being. Or read his Vita Nuova for that matter, where writing poetry moves through an adolescent phase wrapped in narcissistic "love of love", to a kind of soul-saving endeavor, the writer's only (desperate) means of articulating a response to the beloved's death, & the truth about mortal and immortal life.

Poetry, it would be hard to deny, is a "seductive" mode of speech in any context, a mode that achieves its affects through pleasure. Poetry cults are founded on the seeming short-cut (to somewhere) it thus provides. Yet perhaps it can be shown that poetry also works on its readers more stringently, in the area of Pound's logopeia. The overall beauty of a poem perhaps rests in a balance of forces, an achieved rest which holds these forces in equilibrium : poetry/not-poetry, beauty/truth. In this kind of classicism, the effect of a poem is not ultimately seductive : in fact, by renouncing rhetorical seduction, by presenting a disinterested, independent balance of forces, the poem offers a model of health & healing. It does not take the place of paradise, but models the distance to its attainment.

It's funny to be thinking these thoughts in the context of RS's next daily message (10/16), which outlines quite coherently a sobering perspective, which definitely has an earthly paradise in view, blocked by forces of economic stagnation-tyranny leading to injustice. Silliman emphasizes the power of creative iconoclasm & innovation present in artistic activity as a model for response to hegemonic (& hyper-modernizing) injustice.

In my view (this morning anyway off the top of my head) this is o.k., but there are a couple problems with it. The first is that life-experience cannot be reduced to shifts and power-plays in the realm of political economy. The refusal to participate in such reductivity is one of the prime purposes of artistic activity. In & by this refusal art reveals the complexity that politics always simplifies. The second problem is related to the first. Through the free imagination, art represents the way that moral force is manifested by human beings; by the same token, a moral act is an act of imagination. There is a categorical breakthrough here which allows the free human spirit to assert an "authority" not bound by exterior necessity, violence or force. This imaginative freedom, of course, also allows for the danger of Faustian pride or egocentric withdrawal from the struggles of life. But the freedom of the spirit is also perhaps the only way that the essence of human nature & human dignity is expressed in the world.

This is the source of the problem I have with utilitarian, sociological, political gambits for "improvement" of & through the arts. There is no technical solution, which is what Ron seems to invoke in his call for artists to harness innovation for the betterment of the world. The moral imagination is not subject to innovation : it's a matter of commitment unto death, under circumstances no one can predict.

John Latta has been nominated for the prestigious Outside Award, for "originality, intelligence, and sheer guts". The award is granted annually to poets who somehow manage to step away from their computers and actually "go outside" of their habitats, into the "outdoors". There is no cash award; however, winners receive a used parka from the Outside Building Foundation.

Memo to China : Moon Made of Cheese

[Washington, DC] NASA official Don Cheddar, in a speech here to the National Council of Space Cheese Specialists (NCSCS), offered what he described as "a timely warning, a little friendly advice" to China's burgeoning space exploration program, noting that recent analysis of moon samples have verified earlier claims that Earth's sole orbiting companion, "our pale goddess of the night sky, that familiar yet-so-mysterious round lamp in the murk known to us simply as 'the Moon'", is, indeed, a primitive form of gorgonzola.

[sigh] & the more you talk about it. . .

Josh responds to my late comments on his latest.

Stevens drew some of his material for Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction from a book by Charles Mauron called Aesthetics and Psychology (Leggett covers this in the book I mentioned earlier). I find his/their attitude on these matters pretty persuasive.

It's not that social forces, history, politics etc. must be kept out of poetry, or can be. It's that all these things are part of the world of action, and that the aesthetic impulse or feeling which inspires poetry emanates from another place, the world of contemplation : a pause in reality and its demands, a Sabbath-day in which we simply contemplate without striving to change or be changed. The originality and freedom of poetry, its synthetic power to evoke and present reality in a new light, depend ultimately on this capacity to see & feel & invent without a social demand of any kind; an originary, independent, early impulse. Aesthetic response, creative vision. & then the listener or reader sees & shares it with the artist.

HGpoetics Not Included on the new EPC Blog list. As I believe they say in France, "plus caw grunge. . ." Or as good ol' Beantown Jimby likes to say, "Poetry is : Ignoring Henry Gould".

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
                    - Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

Re-reading B.J. Leggett's useful book, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory. Interesting chapter on what Stevens may have been getting at with the title "It Must Be Abstract". How he drew upon I.A. Richards' book Coleridge on Imagination to come to a notion of how the mind - whether in perception ("the poet of reality") or imagination ("the poet of fictions") - always abstracts : that all words are imaginative abstractions, creations of thought. In this way he plays/works with the imagination/reality pairing, without getting stuck (like some of his critics) on one prong or the other.

Mandelstam somewhere: "Love the idea of the thing more than the thing itself."

Byzantine icons, Nicholas Cusanus. "God" being a human concept, a name, for something we cannot really grasp; humankind as imago dei one of its imaginative corollaries, a concept which can come to have meaning both in contemplation & action. Coleridge on the imagination as the expression of the divine "I Am". An imaginative idea of the economy of the earth. "O what a piece of Work is Man!"

Leggett shows curiously how Stevens was also heavily influenced by a biographical study of Giambattista Vico, about the same time Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake.

Ed Dorn's hyperbolic version of previous comment:

To a poet all authority
except his own
is an expression of Evil
and it is all external authority
that he expiates
this is the culmination of his traits.

Feeling a cold breeze blowing from blogland since my stance on the Houlihan brouhaha. The world is as small as the people in it. Though I was harsher than I should have been on Fence (every magazine has its mix of good & not-so-good) & on the poem Houlihan chose from it (still, sans the sarcasm, I think my evaluation of it was about right).

Josh Corey has some interesting musings on Atlantean communityhood. I am far more sceptical than he is. If membership in the true a-g requires some non-aesthetic political mutual understanding or allegiance (as per Steve Evans), that's fine, if you want to be political; but it's not worth selling out your poetry for it.

The poet, in my view, is working with an originary, primordial, anarchically free mode of speech, the special aptitude of which is to absorb & transmute everything (political, social, religious, aesthetic) that comes within its range. I'm not saying it transmutes all these things in reality : I'm saying that within its own sphere it remakes them into something else (poetry). The values of poetry that remain through time & historical change are centered in this originality : we don't value Whitman or Dickinson or WC Williams or Crane or Pound or Stevens or etc., for their political opinions or social commitments, but for the original force of their poetry, which synthesizes all the various social & ideological & intellectual & emotional elements into something rich & strange.

I've said it again & again & again & again (see especially the interview with Kent in Jacket #10). . the ideals & commitments of various social & political communities may be very noble & fine, but when they try to use these values & ideological formations to make claims on poetry, they exude, as Mandelstam put it, "the unclean goat-smell of the enemies of the Word."

[added later:] However, the notion of poetry cleansed isolated idealized iconized - as if it were a living entity and not a human creation - only sterilizes the notion of poetry & dehumanizes its cult-worshippers. What's the answer to that? The poet, as poet, expresses human feeling & thought & commitments & values through & within poetry; this process cannot be judged, channeled, manipulated, massaged, promoted, or controlled by anyone or anything outside it, without corrupting it & losing its essence. (Pantaloons, indirectly, reminded me of this.)

Not sure if it makes sense to search for orderly psychological laws of social (or literary) behavior. Did anyone read the New Yorker article this week about suicide & the Golden Gate Bridge? The public policy of San Francisco for the last 35 years in that regard seems more perverse, sad & scandalous than the suicides themselves. Similar things could be said about homeless housing policy in New York.

Jordan is thinking about pain & exclusion. So's the Vatican today. From Reuters:

"The decision not to give the Nobel Peace Prize to Pope John Paul has disappointed Vatican officials and Catholics, who felt the ailing pontiff deserved it and may not live to get another chance.

``The pope is sick exactly because of the pain that wars caused him so he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize,'' said Anna, an elderly Italian, after visiting the Vatican on Friday."

"Stubborn Grew is the most important American poem published since 2000. Also, the moon is made of cheese."

- Bishop George Berkeley, Esq. LLd., Phd., PDQ.

"Paradise comprises about one square mile of Middletown bordered by Second Beach, Paradise Avenue, Green End Avenue, and Third Beach Road."
- James L. Yarnall, John LaFarge in Paradise


from "Once in Paradise" :

16

Aloft there on shale shelf, in cave mouth,
Berkeley's eyes drifted out to sea.
A pair of dicey gypsy barks
gambling on the shepherding waves.

You have your materialist peasants
nattering pedantically along with your
libertine idle blank-eyed statuettes O
London - and this jovial pleasant

noncholeric Irish bookish Dean
waves the Vico key in your face. And waits.
Waits for your double crosscheck, mates -
your doubloon that never comes - keening,

why have your forsaken me? In RI? Heaven's
not some dull neuteronian mechanical.
It's providential - and recreational!
A dream, again! - again! - Bermudian!

Note to Jonathan:

And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream,
  That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its
              farrow that so solid seem,
Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme.

--William Butler Yeats, "Blood and the Moon"

(Bishop Berkeley lived in Newport, RI for a few years, while planning his Atlantean school in Bermuda; he makes an appearance in the "Once in Paradise" chapter of Stubborn Grew.)

John Latta has a blog : Hotel Point

Good book of poems happens across my desk - As in Every Deafness, by Graham Foust (Flood Editions, 2003).

Article in NY Times (you may be able to find it here) on recent theory that cosmos is finite, & shaped like a soccer ball. Didn't Plato also say it was shaped like a dodecahedron?

Feeling out of poetry lately. (This usually means I have to go back to Mandelstam. Strange.) Anyway, here's another scrap from "Dove Street":

                  The dried-up leaf
  drifts from the tree
  like a sub-sub-librarian
  from the bookvault.  My muttering
  leaves the books behind, wanders away

   
                   under the sway of the amygdala. 

      
                                   *

Form & play : thus, a book of epistolary ghazals crosses my desk (Ghazals : Rai & Sohni, by Kuldip Gill. Victoria, BC: Frog Hollow Press, 2003).

Update : Experts Report Moon Made of Cheese

Lyric forms can be modes of play, not merely discipline. I wrote the Island Road sonnets as a way of playing imaginary time-games with Shakespeare.

The moon : made of cheese, definitely. It now remains for science to determine age, flavor, consistency.

Enjoying Jonathan's Homeric versions.

Something below from a poem in progress ("Dove Street"). My life seems to have simplified (or is it just my brain), & my "technique" seems to be growing more simple & bare.

                  Sleepwalking labyrinthine Providence.
  Orpheus in Hades, Odysseus on the wine-dark sea,
  Penelope, Eurydice (at the vanishing-point
  of their desire, at the end of the drawn-out tale).

   
                  My sister, my dove. . . 

There may be cheese on the moon, after all.

Reading in & about Maximus these days.

Not Olson's poem, nor his eponymous model (an Ionian peripatetic Sophist), but the Byzantine monk & theologian (600 a.d. or so). Maximus the Confessor.

Maximus was eventually martyred for taking a theological stand in the drawn-out conflicts between developing Orthodoxy & the various dissonant models of the nature of God & the Person(s) of the Trinity.

For most people, I suppose, the deadest of dead-ends & benighted controversies.

But reading an intro to a collection of his writings by Andrew Louth (Routledge, 1996) I was struck by a passage which seemed to have curious relevance to poetics. Much of the theological debate hinged on the question "What is a Person?" Here is Louth's passage:

"What is Maximus' answer to this problem? It is guided, as will now be evident, by his 'Chalcedonian logic'. Person is contrasted to nature: it is concerned with the way we are (the mode, or tropos), not what we are (principle, or logos). When he became incarnate - when he assumed human nature - the Word became everything that we are. But he did it in his own way, because he is a person, just as we are human in our own way, because we are persons. Maximus sometimes, as we have seen, expresses this distinction of levels by distinguishing between existence (hyparxis) and being (ousia, or einai): persons exist, natures are. Whatever we share with others, we are: it belongs to our nature. But what it is to be a person is not some thing, some quality that we do not share with others - as if there were an irreducible somewhat within each one of us that makes us the unique persons we are. What is unique about each one of us is what we have made of the nature that we have: our own unique mode of existence, which is a matter of our experience in the past, our hopes for the future, the way we live out the nature that we have. What makes the Son of God the unique person he is is the eternal life of love in the Trinity in which he shares in a filial way."

What struck me here is the idea that the personal is a way of troping on the common nature that we share : a way, not a substance. If we look at poetry as "troping" a personal "way", suddenly the debates over "lyric subjectivity" et al. take on a slightly different coloring.

In my mental geography (responding to Ron today), the town of Providence lies nestled between the Crevasse of Quietude (somewhere beyond Dante St., on Federal Hill) and Mount Atlantis (to the left of the Doyle Observatory). I have always felt that the official poets situated in the Crevasse have overslept due to lack of sunlight (the Mount inhibits morning rays, even during Daylight Savings months), though perhaps it's a question of allegiance to King George (who Slept Here too, a few years before Washington Slept Here & composed his "Ode on The Second-Best Bed in the Republic" while snoring through his wooden teeth) and his stylistic anglossia tics & other bedbugs. But I digress, citizens. The Crevasse Assembly Poets have always been startling dreamers (HP Lovecraft actually dreamt his nightmares in perfect iamboid pentchompeter), yet this has not won them the universal acclaim & plaudits & laurels & ecstatic receptivity which is their unnatural due, and Sylvia (Bath-Towel) knows this, along with Helen (Book) Vendor, and I don't think that the energetic freewheeling American love-happy poets of Mount Atlantis will ever grant them the hospitality which their shadowy pathos, in other words, is their Otherness. They are dominant and hegemonic but not demonic, as some influential maggots & zines would have it. I love their work and read it constantly until my eyes begin to bleed. There is hope for the Crevasse now, since several scenesters from Boston have abandoned beloved Beantown for dear olde Providence, but I don't want to give away their names yet (for free, anyway - backchannel me about this). I live not far from there but try to walk uphill every day, into the sunlight, which I deserve more than Jasper Fledgling the current Poet Laureate will ever in a million years admit or even countenance, with such a countenance as his (it is some countenance!). Oh my freedom-lovin' people & freewheelin' bards of America! Thank You!

another inadequate sestina for Jonathan (from Way Stations):


SESTINA OF THE BOOK

         And once upon a time. . . she read to you,
 and all at once, time was a different time.
 A something you could feel – invisible,
 the way a breeze (when you were feverish)
 passed through the window and across your book
 and touched your forehead like an animal.

  
         The books taught you the name of every animal.
 As you forgot them, they remembered you –
 whispering come back, I am your favorite book
 just when they began to pass their time
 deriding you – the neighborhood gang (feverish
 with pride – tired of being invisible).

  
         They revealed the real world was invisible
 and beast was Adam's name for animal
 and there were herds of them, roaming feverish
 through history, lowing, howling for you
 – or for that shepherdess of fabulous time
 circling like a vision through your book. . .

  
         oh shepherdess of the smoothest book!
 You see her even now (she's invisible,
 but you see her) pirhouetting perfectly in time
 with the concert of the world – vegetable, animal,
 stones, stars, ocean, all dancing for you
 beneath her shadow, a sweet and feverish

  
         dance!  And it was wisdom to be feverish!
 As you drew closer, she was like a book
 unfolding a microscopic world for you –
 a globe of penetrating texture. . . visible
 inversions. . . tendrils of an animal
 unknown. . . the shell of involuted time!

  
         . . . so it wound, oblique, around your time,
 and whispered sea-foam until, feverish,
 you felt immersed inside that animal,
 a velvet valve, enfolded in a book.
 And you grew more and more invisible,
 and changed, and suffered no more – you

  
         who (once upon a time) had read a book
 while feverish boys (now all invisible,
 celestial animals) called out – hey you. . .

      
                                                           3.3.97

Old HG poem.

                  The wind exhaled, this world
  sprawled – a spring disaster, flocks of embraces
  in the garage, under the oil refineries
  hospitable sirens, waltzing on broken silver.

   
                  And night deepened around the temple,
  a yellow-black wafer, crust for the swans;
  and the wind circled the olives, a morning watch
  all night by the Kedron, all day by Euphrates.

   
                  And we'll meet again by the wintry river
  where we swaddled the sun in a double wreath,
  cedar and lilac, tangled in a knot of beaten
  gold – sea-roses, breathing in Jerusalem.

- I won that argument.
- Which one?
- The one about poetry.
- About what?
- Poetry.
- What about it?
- About what?
- Poetry.
- What - were we arguing?

Music notes from Little Rhody: Band practice in Woonsocket Monday night, with Bill the new keyboard player. Self-employed piano tuner. Has four pianos & an organ in one not-so-large room on 2nd floor. Plus dog & 2 flying cats. Not sure how this is done.

We talked about how quite a bit of complex-sounding music actually stems from hands finding the easiest way to make the chords. Bill's wife sang us a poem she had written about the man recently arrested in a supermarket there for licking a woman's feet.

something to read from toward the end of July:

         9

  
         Snow on the sierra   in Colca
 a decrepit little stall on Commerce Street
 where   on the spine of a bent ash tree
 they nailed the Mammon-sign from Ecuador

  
         leading yokes of oxen into fallow fields
 dragging four-man threshers into great
 cocks of unthreshed wheat   tending
 irrigation valves all night long   saddling

  
         and unsaddling animals   reaping alfalfa and
 barley   grazing vast drifts of pigs   shouldering
 litters of foreign personages   being punched
 in the face and kicked in the kidneys   going down

  
         into mineshafts   doing time in jail making
 rope or peeling huge mounds of potatoes
 while manacled and chained constantly
 suffering from hunger and thirst   almost naked

  
         seeing their wives dragged off   as in the murmur-
 mirror   the antagonist   stands in your way
 until a wolfram tongue-stone's   iron rod
 sinks   magnetic   toward the confusion-room

  
         of rubies   heavier than lead and   4 degrees Kelvin
 in that oven   10 billionths of a meter away
 from your atomic doppelganger   the quantum
 cubicle or   quern-mirage   a little horn or   clover-

  
         leaf nudging several cobalt atoms
 to form the walls of   the elliptical
 corral 20 billionths of an M-prong
 on the surf-face of a copper crystal

  
         I left five cents buried in a corner of the kitchen
 and   because of them I can't be saved   throw in
 another 95¢   pay it for  mass   for my salvation
 scan-tunnels toward   orchard-narod (neglected)

* The Clearing of the Vaults *

I have a lot of back issues of Nedge. I will send 2 issues of choice to anyone who sends a mailing address, while supplies last. (# 1 is out of stock already; very few copies of # 2 and 3 left.) Email which issues you'd like, and an address, to : Henry_Gould@brown.edu. Please include "clearing vaults" or "hgpoetics" or some such in the subject line of your email. It may take me a little while but I will get them to you.

. . . but the 4th factor, which I left out :

poets just can't help it. We are one of the singing animals.

Thinking this morning about three things that influence poetry-making, yesterday and today:

1. The inherent exploratory quality of every creative effort, whether in art or anything else. The blank page & its first words face the pre-existent world in all its tenured prestige. Thus there will always be an inventive aspect to original creation.

2. The present-day separation between fiction, poetry, and music, which creates challenges and opportunities.

3. The combination of the first two factors, in the context of a limited audience for poetry (compared with that for both fiction and music), generates an intensified self-conscious, or reflexive, quality in poetry. Creativity is at least as much autonomous and self-absorbed, as it is social and "opportunistic"; the isolation of poetry complicates the rhetoric of its address to an audience - leading poets, in poetry, to question the "fiction of fiction" and the authenticity of every literary mode and manner.

Tried a little experiment walking home today : looked at things as if I were in a Bruegel painting. I saw the firm prehistoric charcoal outline marking the integrity of human figures; the fine detail in the distance; the feeling for trees. Missed some of the warm colors. (Used to do this kind of thing after Fellini movies, back in high school.) Some little kids yelled at me from a 2nd-floor window, trying to get my attention : that was Bruegel too.

Could be done with all kinds of artists, I guess. if you do Bosch or Francis Bacon, though, you might want to bring a friend for company.

Another blog-range response to Jonathan :

Lake's outline of the effect of lineation, syntax and meter in poetry in this particular essay is clear, simple to the point of simplistic, bare-bones, basic, unoriginal, and accurate. I don't see anything particularly Victorian about it, maybe because I'm a Victorian?

But what interested me about it was that the analysis of poetry came through a description of fiction & narrative - how the minds of writer & reader "dream" & evoke the mimetic signals in the text. He points out how the mind shapes "wholes" (in a "fractal", recursive expansion) out of these minimal but subtle & delicate language signals. This really is an area which I think you can make the argument has been dealt with mainly through disruption, "dis-figurement", in postmodern poetics.

My own interest has been engaged in the composition of long semi-narrative poems in which story & landscape & character "appear" in surprising ways, which experience makes me think there is more to be discovered through such synthetic rather than disjunctive processes.

Jonathan has a very different take on "Enchanted Loom". But if the Atlanteans are still struggling with the shade of Richard Wilbur, you have to ask what year they're in. I don't buy all the left/right brain biz either; but the point of Lake's article was not to give a balanced assessment of the true meaning of Derrida or a compassionate study of Stein's poetics. It was to argue for a different paradigm for composition and reading, stemming from new discoveries & theories (or are you going to dismiss all that, too?) about language. I also don't buy the determinism implied by a "science" model, but that doesn't mean I'm ready to cancel out all of the descriptions (of the nature of reading & writing) it provides.

I think the remarks in previous blog post (on Mandelstam's Redemption/free-play symbiosis) run parallel to some of WH Auden's discoursing. Also, I think the following excerpt from a poem titled "One Evening (Early Spring)" (which appeared in the Jacket interview) illustrates some of Paul Lake's comments on fractal-recursive order in poetry:

         7

  
         Around the synagogue in the evening light
 the houses cluster in their modest drab integrity.
 Walking through their vocations (under blight
 of a voracious contracting whirlpool city)
 the humble continue. . . gathering on holiday
 outside the bronze double doors of their temples.
 The writer (an unnoticed bystander) crumples
 a scrap of crosshatched paper and throws it away.

  
         And the wind lifts a corner of the scribbled page,
 not yet finished with the end of the universe.
 Over the brilliant dome a small cloud of rage
 disguises the sun – cries:  I will immerse
 in tears – I will burn with fire – I will erase. . .
 (– pretending once more deep within heaven
 not only to destroy all creation and then
 again rebuild the whole cracked edifice

  
         but to do all this in the manner of a scribe
 with one hand at his aching brow and one eye
 peering at a mossbound, moldy parchment –)
 and Lord, we have deserved your diatribe.
 The parched earth groans for a comet's finality.
 Your mortified heart stretches through space and
 swelling spreads (ubiquitous) the fiery ointment
 of your love, of your forgiveness, of your peace.


      
                                                3.26.97

As of today I am renouncing the terms avant-garde, post-avant, progressive, or experimental with reference to poetry, and taking a page from good old Minnesotan Ignatius Donnelly (who makes such a brilliant appearance, along with Thomas "Little Nappy" Dorr and magic-man Bluejay, in Stubborn Grew), I am going to refer to everyone somehow aligned with those terms as "Atlanteans" (also in the Hart Crane-ean sense, I guess).

Anyway, those Atlanteans who have been able to absorb, with some spoonful of composure, the tectonic shocks of the Houlihan squabble, may want to move on to a critique of a different kind - based on a cogent & sweeping argument about the nature of language in poetics : "The Enchanted Loom", by Paul Lake.

I think this is a very elegant and thought-provoking essay, perhaps groundbreaking for some poets. Groundbreaking in that Lake first of all uses contemporary science (chaos theory, artificial intelligence, cognition studies, etc.) as an Archimedean lever against both modern & postmodern orthodoxies regarding the nature of language. He quotes cleverly from Jonathan Swift in the process. Then he shows how these same scientific developments, by changing our understanding of order, meaning & information in nature, have correspondences with the process of literary composition and reception. (His holistic analysis chimes very cutely with the report circulating - which I mentioned here yesterday - about the findings of a British researcher, showing that our minds easily translate sarcbmeld wrdos, as lnog as the fsirt and lsat ltetres are in pclae - we read them holistically in a natural way.)

I think if poets can get past the attack on Language poetry (which, by reading it only as a manifestation of an outmoded philosophy of language & art, is only a partial reading), they might find Lake's ideas very useful for generating new models of writing, reading & teaching poetry (on the relation between text, fiction, and imagination - on "implicate" literary wholes & the relation between writing & reading - on how imaginative-fictional order is paralleled by different techniques in poetry).

I have a few reservations about the essay, after a first reading. First of all, how could anyone not like Tristram Shandy!! Secondly, I think the argument is faintly shaded by the potential for simply a new form of deterministic naturalism. The notion that small particular events are all implicated in larger, determining folds of meaning, could imply merely a new, more sophisticated Newtonian machine-universe. Furthermore, to argue that literature is the transmission between writer & reader of these information-wholes, and good literature refines these transfers, elides an elusive but fundamental element : the notion of incommunicability; that there are things or concepts or realities that are at the edge of or beyond speech & expression. In my view, this aspect is tied very profoundly with the adventure of poetry-making. In fact I might propose a kind of counter-complex to Lake's complex of wholism-information-communication; it would read something like uniqueness-incommensurability/infinity/freedom-silence.

Tristram Shandy's hilarious self-decomposition of the "book", the literary artifact, the embarassing "thingness" of people, novels & books all together, points, in my view, toward the inescapably imperfect and inescapably human fundament underlying all our theories & productions of "reality". But this fundament can be understood in a comic sense. I can only translate this into religious terms, which is my fumbling version of the incommunicable. As I tried to describe it in the interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket (which, by the way, shows all kinds of parallels with Lake's essay), it's for me an "incarnational" poetics, summarized perhaps best in Mandelstam's essay on how western art was set free by the historic event of Redemption (unfortunately I can't recall that essay's title; will try to find it). In Mandelstam's terms, Redemption released art into a realm of free play, without any shadow of determinism or responsibility to anything beyond itself. For me, this symbiosis, redemption/free play, says something about our "existential" experience as human beings. "Death on the cross" corresponds existentially with Everyman's consent to mortality : we suffer and die freely, in order to discover essential or ultimate freedom itself, in order to experience spiritual rebirth & "the freedom of the children of God".

Art as free play - freedom taken to its anarchic, human limit - is an essential aspect, an equal counterpart to the drive to share & communicate information. Tristram Shandy is a glorious representative of this case. & there are many 20th-century examples as well, which cannot easily be dismissed by a new scientific paradigm. But "thought is free", as well - and I think Lake shows very clearly that new perception can and should lead to new and much-needed artistic values in the 21st century.

short story by I.B. Singer in this week's New Yorker. spiritual thought-lives of wild & wacky Hasid rabbis. extraordinary.

As for perception of wholes. . . sometimes I think I get clearest ideas around 4 a.m., when I can't sleep.

Pondering this morning about the contention over styles of poetry, & the proposal for a debate, I thought Gabriel Gudding got it right (on his blog recently) to emphasize the importance of wonder & surprise. A debate format would probably result in fiats & pronunciamentos that the pronouncers have no right to make, a needless taking of sides. More subtle distinctions might be elicited through exploratory conversations. (ps Chris Lott says this better.)

Wonder & surprise, wholeness. From the vantage of 2003 it's possible to look at a numbered span of literary time, say 1950-2000, without a spirit of judgemental contention so much as attention to & appreciation for a vast poetry tundra, a unique efflorescence (maybe not really unique, but certainly unrepeatable); making possible a certain critical response - a distancing of our own - without reductive polemics. Ironically, Ron Silliman's blog is exemplary in presenting a sense of that vastness, side-by-side with the polemical maneuvering which doesn't do justice to the era.

Wonder & surprise. Besides all which above, when I think of poetry as a phenomenon at 4 a.m., its essence becomes only more strange, spectral & mysterious. I begin to sense it as a kind of mana, a word-flesh of a sort, passed from poet to poet, from ghost to ghost. The stylistic & technical discoveries & fireworks of individual poets I see as forms of deflection (or inflection?) - rocketing off the poetic black (w)holes of earlier poets. Thus the emphases of Olson or Niedecker or Ashbery or Lowell or Bishop or Berryman or you-name-um are a kind of verbal clothing, shrouding, hiding of something. . . and you begin to see the variations played by an Olson or an Ashbery or a Zukofsky as filigree overlaid on impulses recognizable in Eliot or Pound or Stevens, & themselves doing the same from previous eras. . .

the unique-intense intelligibility - the verbum ipse - expressed through the individual sensibility - a mana stretching back to the psalmist David, dancing & singing naked around the ark of the covenant, and before that to the shaman or woman muttering oracles beside a version of the pythian tripod.

The process of poetic making seems to involve the individual poet's attempt to find a form for that essential intelligibility; it must be intelligible to themselves & fit like the finest woven coccoon before it will be intelligible eventually to anyone else.

This from an email going auornd tihs mroinng:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheeahcr at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the
frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses
and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.

Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a
wlohe.

I spent so much time looking again & again at the Bruegels in the Kunsthistorische Museum, that I missed out, I see, on an apparently unrepeatable Durer exhibit at another museum (which the NY Times told me about this morning). Bruegel has a hypnotic affect on me. (I seem to be susceptible to these mild trances, as with Mandelstam in translation, or the scent of pine needles, or Wanda Landowska playing Mozart; could be a character flaw, or a throwback to a hunter/gatherer instinct, or too much reading in childhood, or dropping acid in the 60s, or all, or none. . .)

I like everything about Bruegel, but especially the warm-mute colors (could be simply an effect of aging, or ripening), and the little details in the distance, people, trees, houses. . . feel like if I keep looking, soon I'll be able to go around the corner of one of those narrow streets (I used to like miniature toy soldiers, too). In one of his Seasons paintings (there were 6 seasons in the Middle Ages), late autumn, with the bringing in of the herd in the foreground - I noticed that the outline/shaping of the cattle closely resemble the prehistoric cave-paintings in France.

Bruegel's Seasons are local-cosmological; he is a realist, whose vision nevertheless plays chords on several emotional-intellectual octaves at once; the mundane-goofy Now harbors a muted background, a vanishing point. Such slow painting gathers Now into "transhuman" time; absorbed in these scenes, I felt that Bruegel's Now was overtaking & replacing my own.

It's like the slow painting of Proust, gathering experience to a point of retrospective epiphany, which sets the immediate & the mundane glowing in a strange way. Joyce, also a natural Bruegelian.

(Bruegel shows up on page 2 of Stubborn Grew, & many times after; in that book I try to be local-cosmological & comic-deep also. The larger poem (Forth of July) tries to ring changes on this concept of a retrospective (or recapitulatory) Now, to link the aesthetic & the cosmological, somewhat in the direction of Crane's Bridge. I wrote more about this early on here in hgpoetics, around January.)

Here's something apropos to literary debates, from Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities:

"Ulrich thought privately that it would be just as easy to agree as to argue. Contempt showed as clearly through the politeness as a tidbit in aspic. He knew that Walter would again be annoyed with what he had just said, but he was beginning to long for a conversation with someone with whom he could agree completely, for once. There had been a time when he and Walter had had such conversations: the words are drawn from the breast by some mysterious power, and not one word misses the mark. But when one talks with antipathy the words rise like fog from an icy plain. He looked at Walter without resentment, certain that Walter also felt that the further the conversation went the more it was deforming his inner convictions, but that he was blaming Ulrich for it. 'Everything we think is either sympathy or antipathy!' Ulrich thought. At this moment he was so vividly struck by the truth of this that he felt it as a physical pressure, like the bodily contact of people swaying in unison when they are jammed together. He looked around for Clarisse."

Jordan Davis wrote something on his blog like this (about sympathy/antipathy) about a month ago.

Maybe a kind of Viennese attention to emotional undertones.

There's a neat "Museum of Sound" in Vienna, with an interactive room devoted to the science of harmonics. At one station you experience how any kind of rhythmic drumming, as it increases in speed, begins to sound first like a car engine revving, and then turns into a musical tone (with an ascending pitch). Another station in the same room illustrates how speech sounds - vowels, consonants - have effective overtones & undertones just like music, which among other things activate "color zones" & other responses in the brain (again, as in music).

Gabriel Gudding posted a remarkable statement on "position-taking" while I was gone. May try to excerpt it here; worth quoting. I agree with him 99.9%; or, in other words, I agree with him completely on a certain level, and on another level am in slight disagreement.

I agree with him on the comic (& sometimes tragic) fallibility of all our assertions.

I agree that the internecine poetry wars have an overall effect similar to the one characterized by the Musil quote, above.

Where I disagree, I guess, is the implication (and perhaps I am mistaken in drawing this conclusion from GG's statements) that all this futility should inevitably enjoin unanimity-through-peacemaking. Sometimes differences are unavoidable. Is peace without unanimity a possibility? I think so, if we recognize & acknowledge the inherent value & the contributions of our antagonists.

So, I see how generous Ron Silliman has been, while I was out of the country, to acknowledge my presence in these poetry issues (and Kent's & Gabriel's) despite that fact that I am in sharp disagreement with his "theoretical position".

On one level, my fulminations against "avant-gardism" fall both within the category of Gabriel's general human foolishness (& aggression), & Ron's category of doomed traditionalism (like King Egbert(?) drawing his sword against the sea).

Still, the other side of the coin holds my basic position, which is as follows:

In Democratic Vistas, Whitman exalted the English language for its supple attention to the matter-of-fact, and glorified it as the language of freedom. This concept does not, in my view, put Whitman among the victorious "crazies", as Ron Silliman would have it (in his blog post of Sept 15). Nor does Emily Dickinson's precision & concision read like craziness either. The binary theory of American poetics simply replaces one illusory orthodoxy with another. Gabriel Gudding's prose & poems show repeatedly (through eclectic quotes from "obscure" old authors) how the Old is actually the New. What would be new, for now, to me anyway, would be a poetics of multivalent directness, communicability : a poetry which absorbs & musicalizes the news we read in the paper & the things that happen to us every day; as I wrote months ago on this blog, the Now, as opposed to the New. I hear the inevitable protest that this is a vague edict, which is unfair to the pioneering, testing, resistant avant-garde. But my general point is that poetry is a difficult art : promoting the "experimental", as if it were something you get for joining some school of literary practice, merely befuddles critical response; and I use the example of a possible communicable-real poetry, a poetry of direct address, because this is a value of poetries that the standard US avant-garde would find inimical (such as some of the poetry of the 18th century : Pope, Goldsmith) merely because it comes out of the past and out of a culture concerned with (those evil) "norms". Ron Silliman's characterization of the Houlihan attack as simply another benighted & doomed journalistic sub-defense of the normative Olde Guard is not quite accurate. Houlihan's example of a valuable poem (by Franz Wright) would have been thrown out of court by traditionalists, New Critics, & Language Poets alike, yet it works, because, as she pointed out, it succeeds in communicating (aesthetically) a difficult and authentic reality.