An excerpt from his “The Green Radius” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “The Green Radius.”
A: The Green Radius is a long poem, in 144 parts, which is written in these rhymed, flowing, snaky stanzas, to suggest the constant flow of the Mississippi River, from its source to the Delta. Also the flow of memory, back in time – my own personal time, times of American history, and human time generally, in a sort of philosophical sense. And also this wayward flow of stream-of-consciousness, free-association babbling – which will probably seem incomprehensible or nonsensical to impatient readers. I started writing it on February 1st, 2023, and finished it in December, on 12/12/23.
There’s an underlying “French connection" to this poem. Just before I started writing I happened to see an old film of Eric Rohmer, Le Rayon Vert (“The Green Ray”). At first I planned to title the whole poem The Green Ray – but then I discovered another poet had given her recent book that same title, with the same reference to Rohmer! So I changed it, reluctantly, to The Green Radius, which in the end I found very fitting. Oddly enough, just as I was finishing the poem in December 2023, I watched a second very fine Rohmer film, My Night at Maud’s – which seemed to set its seal on the poem.
By “French connection” I refer to this sort of submerged French influence in American history. The course of the Mississippi flows through the old territory of the Louisiana Purchase. So it gave me a kind of cultural slant into the character of the United States, emphasizing New Orleans and a certain French/American ambience. But the poem tries to delve further back as well. The “French” thing leads to St. Louis, and some remarks by Herman Melville (in a short essay called “The River”) about the meaning of that place : where the ruins of Cahokia still remain. I try to delve back a little way into Native American and “prehistoric” dimensions of this land, in the context of the “Trump” era, and the attack on U.S. democracy, and the theme of corruption and fraud in Melville’s Mississippi novel, The Confidence-Man.
Here's a short opening section that brings some of these things into (blurry) focus :
3The poem is really no longer a work-in-progress : it’s a finished poem, and a sort of work-in-regress. A strategic retreat : Wallace Stevens’ “violence within pressing back against the violence without.” Amazingly enough, early in 2024 the publishers at a small press called Contubernales Books approached me, unsolicited, for a possible manuscript to publish! This has never happened to me before in my 60 years of writing poetry. The book is coming out within the next month or two. The cover design was kindly donated by the Saint Louis Art Museum, from a massive panoramic scroll painted in 1850 by an itinerant Irish artist, John J. Egan : a visionary panorama called “The Grandeur of the Mississippi”. Also, poet and scholar Gabriel Gudding wrote a sharp, provocative introduction, for which I am very grateful. Here’s a glimpse of the cover : https://contubernalesbooks.com/green-radius
With a green flash, the last light rose
from sunset. On the vertical,
above the dark horizon
like a wheat-blade – singular,
enormous. Bleeding as the Delta flows
widening on either side;
melding in diapason
eleisons of blue and red
over the mud-green, violet furrows.
2.4.23
Q: How does this project compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: I turned 72 this year. Getting older, for me anyway, changes your sense of time, memory, mortality. The Green Radius reflects that, I suppose, in several ways. For one, it’s shorter, more focused, than previous efforts, believe it or not! I’ve written about 10 book-length poems since the 1980s. Forth of July, from the late ‘90s – a trilogy of 3 books, Stubborn Grew/The Grassblade Light/July – is over 1000 pp. Ravenna Diagram I-III, written from 2012 to 2018, is a similar length. Restoration Day, published in 2022, is over 250 pages. The Green Radius has the most dramatic, “quasi-objective” scenario since Stubborn Grew, from 2000 (which is a kind of microcosmic comic-epic set across about 10 blocks of my hometown of those days – Providence, Rhode Island).
Long poems are a kind of curse, for both poets and readers. They magnify, exponentially, the already marginal condition of poetry within society at large. But it’s one of those curses that glimmers with the hope of becoming a blessing. Poetry for me is a kind of work, that gets more fluent and surprising as it goes along. And the phenomenon “poetry” sits up on a high, quaint, old-fashioned pedestal in my psyche – culturally, spiritually. I’m like Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet... I sleepwalk in a trance down this outlandish pilgrim’s path – keeping my diary, dating every entry in the sequence. I’m struggling with the moral/ontological state of the world; I’m struggling with my famous predecessors (Pound, Eliot, Dante, et al.); I’m struggling with my indifferent contemporaries; I’m struggling with the moral and political state of my nation; I’m struggling with my own flaws and stupidities. No one writes like me; no one knows my work; that’s the way it is. Sound familiar? I’m Henry, the Everypoet.
Q: You mention that this particular project is “shorter, more focused, than previous efforts [.]” Why do you think that is?
A: Poetry for me seems to involve quite a bit of negative capability. Unconciousness, serendipity. As mentioned previously, my getting older has something to do with the pressure to be focused, precise, more intense. But really, my sense is that the stars were just aligned in my pregnancy phase, pre-compositional. By that I mean the themes, the setting (the Mississippi), and the style seemed to coalesce and work together. The FLOW, the simple water pressure of the river, unlocked a whole set of dams and levees – in memory, in history, in art... Also, that “violence without” – the sense of danger, of “existential crisis” for my country, in my country, the United States, right now – definitely fueled the intensity of focus, such as it is.
Q: With, as you say, ten book-length poems published over the past few decades, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?
A: In some ways I just keep writing the same poem, over and over, with variations. This theme of “journeying into the interior” is part of all the poems I mentioned previously. It’s been a bit of an Orphic track : me, in a trance, following my Dark Lady, my Eurydice, my Beatrice, into the darkness, into the light. I feel as I get on with things I’ve become (over the decades) a little more independent of past influences, a little less prone to bombast or mimicry. I hope so anyway. I see my marginality and irrelevance as a very real problem. I don’t blame society or po-biz for that anymore (whereas I used to be pretty snarky, with a chip on my shoulder). I’m trying in my current work to become more clear, more comprehensible. And I feel the only way I can do that is to clarify more forcefully my own intellectual, rational, and spiritual beliefs, my “vision of life” shall we say. This is maybe the real substance of this stumbling pilgrimage I’ve been on for decades. I just finished a new sequence – only 27 pp. long! – and published it as a chapbook, called Parmenides in Minneapolis. I’m trying both to focus more intensely, and SING more resonantly, at the same time. I really like “Parmenides” so far. Maybe there will be a couple more brief 27-pp. sequels.
Q: Do you have any particular models for the kinds of work you’ve been doing? Are there any specific poets or works in the back as your head as you write?
A: In the early 1980’s, when I was getting ready to write such poems, Hart Crane and Ezra Pound were both powerful influences. Pound for his epic ambition and the interesting way he dove into and absorbed History (I’ve always been big on History). Hart Crane for his absolutely astonishing genius – the way he took on an epic ambition similar to Pound’s, but infused it with music, and grace : an elegant architectonics. I had a fairly conscious motive to “stand with Crane”, against both Pound and Eliot, as a stylistic benchmark, or paradigm – how to reflect a specific AMERICAN spirit and sensibility in literature/poetry.
The other central influence has been Osip Mandelstam. In some ways I found affinities between his lyric modes and Crane’s. But for me, Mandelstam is at the center of my personal pantheon. I am drawn to him as to no other. I learned only later that Paul Celan felt the same way about him.
Q: What is it about the form of the long poem that appeals? What do you feel is possible in your work through the form that might not be otherwise?
A: As a kid, as a teenager, I read a lot of novels. For me there was no comparable pleasure to that of being absorbed in a fictional dream, like a vast lambent meadow, or a dark forest. I’ve written plenty of short poems. Recently published a book of them : Continental Shelf : shorter poems 1968-2020. But I’m sort of a philosophical monist, an idealist... “The World as Meditation”. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God : He was in the beginning, and through Him all things were made. Serious stuff. Behind all our fragmentary trivia and chatter, there is this serious listening silence. I write long poems because I want to express this implicit solemnity, this seriousness behind all things. A poem could be a Gate to the Way. Not in a doctrinaire sense. But life is a “vale of Soul-making”, wrote that agnostic John Keats. The epic, the long poem, express a drive toward wholeness – holism, oneness... Union. The Green Radius is all about “saving the Union”.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: Certain poets have become real or imaginary friends. I mentioned Osip Mandelstam. Another Russian poet I feel very close to is the late Elena Shvarts (we were trans-continental friends for a while). The Vancouver poet Lissa Wolsak is very dear to me. I always go back to Eugenio Montale : he is the warmth of the sun and the music of Europe. Shakespeare has haunted me, literally – and still does (I wrote and published a memoir about that, titled Holy Fool). Another Italian I love is the novelist Giorgio Bassani.
Now I’m finding some new things – going back to early pre-Socratic philosopher-poets, like Parmenides, Empedocles... and Apollonius of Rhodes, epic poet of the Argonautica. I’m trying to learn a little Greek for that. By way of Empedocles, oddly enough (who was said to have fallen into the volcano at Mt. Etna), I went back to an old favorite, Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano) – and through Lowry, to the mysterious and marginalized Conrad Aiken. I feel a special kinship with Aiken. He wrote a kind of shadowy twin to Hart Cranes’s The Bridge, a long poem, called The Kid, which I find wonderful. The Kid pivots on the story of William Blackstone, a kind of spiritual hermit and scholarly pioneer in colonial Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Before I learned of Aiken’s poem, I had written a chapter for a long poem, The Grassblade Light, titled “The Lost Notebooks”... about William Blackstone. Aiken might just be a forgotten sleeping giant of American poetry. I can identify with that. 🙃
