(Mule Stable Gray)
“One day the demons of America must be placated. The
ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for…” – D.H. Lawrence
Sources of
creeks and rivers. Earth humid black and rich. On the river ahead not far
distant. The wind was hard and against us. Passed through a broken country.
Wood pumice stone lava. Mule stable gray…
They brought
balls of cotton thread and parrots and spears. Maps rotten and spoiled with
rain, armor almost eaten through with rust.
(One day in
the old times when we could still talk with other creatures)
Soon the
news went around that the terrapin had killed the wolf and was using his ears
for spoons.
The spirit
of absolutism is everywhere apparent. Shouting his name to the echoing
solitudes. Intrepid conflict with obstacles without. Because he had thought he
had seen a great beehive.
They take
the form of stones full of living blood and flesh. The rabbit inside kept
singing…
a
cloud in the shape
of
an old woman kneeling
You, I’ve known you from
old
thighs a woven rumor of
feathers
scribbled in
the snowy margins
like
an insomniac’srestless prose
on a street where I
imagine
ghost-horses
hauntthe weird cosmologies
of some kid’s dreams
(no riders
just
manes passingbehind black branches
in tiny yards…)
(just apocrypha drifting
off
the city’s edge)
while shoppers
go on shopping
with dark
coats
at Christmastime
Of the book
rubb’d away
Of the lines
of the sun and the wrist
(followed
the wounded schematic
to a muddy path
that disappeared down
into the creekbeds…)
By the persuasion of some of them we went
into
ye great riverthat divides itself in 2
by
flashlight light he recognized
the woods
from his dreamon the riverbank
out in the old incunabula
(
here is the great tree
we
carved our masks from )
…sweated out
the fever
in a room
above a dusty
hardware
as a
notebook
lost in a dream
& if you wish to
become an owl
yr
little radio’s got
all these ghost songs
memorized
& if you
wish to become an owl
spell the movie of this
forest
with yr
eyelids shut
listen how water
shapes itself
in the
falling
& snow takes these
figures
into its
secret
light
if you wish
to become an owl
sit in the swamp
ten nights
wishing
to
become an owl…
[NOTE. With "The Croatoan Song Book" James Cook makes his entry into the tradition & lineage of American epic poetry ("a poem including history"), the focus here on the "lost" Roanoke colony in 16th century Virginia. The notes that follow speak eloquently to his sense of time & structure. (J.R.)]
An elegy. America as Loss, as Enigma.
DH Lawrence’s ‘one day the Spirit of Place must be atoned for…’
A work whose primary purpose is to exult the handmade, the homemade, the simply felt & created object as against the mass-produced, the cheap, the homogenous.
Reclamation of language from above.
Affirmation also of the vatic function of the poet. Of his role as a conduit.
Of the poem, as well as the chair or the dulcimer, as well as America itself, as a manifestation of the tension between the inner world & the outer world.
Focus on the Local as a key to the Universal.
[NOTE. With "The Croatoan Song Book" James Cook makes his entry into the tradition & lineage of American epic poetry ("a poem including history"), the focus here on the "lost" Roanoke colony in 16th century Virginia. The notes that follow speak eloquently to his sense of time & structure. (J.R.)]
The Croatoan Songbook: Notes for Jerome Rothenberg
SOME NOTES ON
INTENTION:
A prayer for & hymn
to America.
A psychogeographical
exploration. An elegy. America as Loss, as Enigma.
DH Lawrence’s ‘one day the Spirit of Place must be atoned for…’
A work whose primary purpose is to exult the handmade, the homemade, the simply felt & created object as against the mass-produced, the cheap, the homogenous.
Reclamation of language from above.
Affirmation also of the vatic function of the poet. Of his role as a conduit.
Of the poem, as well as the chair or the dulcimer, as well as America itself, as a manifestation of the tension between the inner world & the outer world.
The Croatoan Songbook
as a piece of American folk art, like the Watts Towers or “The Cuckoo Bird” or
an embroidery sampler.
Focus on the Local as a key to the Universal.
An attempt to map the
‘Dream-Time”, the Songlines of America. An attempt to trace a ‘spiritual’ map
of America through the contours of history, including typically marginalized
cultures, indigenous peoples, etc. in order to locate the moment of essential
loss.
A response to Robert
Kelly’s imprecation in his book In Time that
: “It is the true annals of magical time that need to be compiled – or if not
compiled then duly & accurately transcribed at each moment, in overlapping
palimpsestical overlays, vast collages of magical time in the dark & light
of which we will be able to perceive authentically as in books of ‘history’,
the true history of our race.”
SOME NOTES ON STRUCTURE:
The poem will consist of 32 movements, with each movement broken up
serially or composed of fragmentary gestures toward a lost wholeness.
A movement itself can consist of several individual sections or one
long section=fragments on a charged field of white space.
Picture each movement as a tectonic plate. The location where two
plates meet forms a tension which expresses itself as a geological event. The
tension in the poem results from this boundary. This boundary is also the
boundary between planes of experience, between cultures, between periods of
history, between lyric and narrative, between Phanopoeia, Logopoeia and
Melopoeia.
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