Alcuin at Aa[X]en: Parts I & II

While I normally balk at expounding my poems, my latest work is so unusual for me that I believe it warrants something of an introduction. Several days ago, while scanning a number of articles on the New York Times online, I came across mention of one, Alcuin, who served as Charlemagne's puzzlist—and, of course, leading court scholar, poet, teacher, and theologian. Struck by the magnificent oddness of this historical fact, I, without premeditation, started to write a poem about Alcuin and Charlemagne. With neither plan nor design, the poem simply started to pour out of me. The tone is informal and conversational; the diction is at once colloquial and specialized; the form, especially in terms of lineation and stanzaic length, is organic. The content, moreover, is most uncharacteristic of my poetry: I weave together prior knowledge of the time and figures, facts and images about the time and figures casually gleaned from the internet and passed off as assumed knowledge, and my own imaginings of the characters, thoughts, and actions of and about Alcuin and Charlemagne. There is, upon reflection, a level of the poetics of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara in the poem, albeit subconsciously. I give you the first two parts:

Alcuin at Aa[X]en

I.

When he tired of the evening news

King Charlemagne would call for a digestif.

Not that he wouldn't get it for himself, in fact, would so

prefer, but his servants insisted on it.

There was always the concern of

good form. That didn't govern him, we need to be sure,

but it seemed to put everyone else at ease. Plus, with the mess

of layoffs and questions about the definition of monarchy

and the economy, it was...easier.

So he gave in, for their peace of mind, really,

as when he settled on donning that cumbersome diadem only

when the French ambassadors showed up at court.

A few sips in, well, a few sips into his second,

Charlemagne would call for a third (let's be honest)

and a fourth—no, this one's not for him—

which, his veteran servants knew, and the really sharp

ones remembered to include in the training of the new hires,

meant that the King was really putting in a call

for Alcuin. Charlemagne pretended he didn't know

(he's the father of Europe, after all)

but in the buttery and bottlery

the servants joked that Old King Carol must be constipated

again. Constipated, we take it, because Alcuin had stumped

him again with one of his puzzles. And thus the...digestif.

Well, Alcuin humored Charlemagne by pretending not to know,

which, it must go without saying, Charlemagne himself was

aware. What is it, my Lord? A hearty laugh would ensue

and with a manly smack on the back, Charlemagne:

You know, you always were my greatest acquisition.

More laughter, and some wisecracks about heresy.

In these moments Alcuin didn't miss

the winters of York as much. Maybe the warmth

of the digestif loosened him up a little more but

Master Flaccus felt the King took after his own heart

because they both understood that poetry and theology

were really no different from puzzles.

II.

Alcuin, was, shall we say, fond of subtleties and

contradictions. In the marginalia of his parchments

of Vergil's Eclogues—it was difficult, indeed, to decipher,

through the oat bran and milk residue,

given how worked over they are in palimpsests.

For example, he was obsessed for a time with

lines 37-41, Eclogue 8. The mala and malus, particularly,

although from what we can make of his annotations

this passage he believed key to the whole of the work:

Once with your mother, in our orchard hedge,

I saw you, a little girl, plucking dewy apples—

I was your guide—I scarcely had entered

my twelfth year, barely could I reach

the fragile boughs. I looked, and I was lost.

The pun, see, is mala (neuter plural, very important)

"apples" and malus (masculine singular, also important) "evil,"

though the best translation of the latter must have tortured

him. The garden scene, 12 years of age, apples and evil:

for a man who wrote, for God's sake, De fide Trinitas,

these things simply must leap out at you.

Contemporary scholars spill more ink on the issue of

the palimpsests, though. The prevailing theory goes

that some sacerdotal disapprobation convinced Alcuin

to scratch out the apple musings, as if he was onto too much,

though more likely it undermined some minor footnote

in a certain archbishopric press release

against the Saxon paganism, especially in the wake

of the Basques' obliteration of the troops

in the Pass of Roncesvalles. It does deserve mention,

however, that there is a fairly novel hypothesis gaining some

currency: that Alcuin, a man keen on forms, viewed

the palimpsest, as form, namely, as puzzle. Thus wittingly

tampered with his commentaries—a puzzle

for posterity to decode. Or at least tinker with. Either way,

it's a genius tactic to land some kind of immortality.

John K., 10/21-10/23/2009

Organ Music (Elegy 2)

The known world:

mother, thigh.

Overhead

the mystery of other

heads, strange

language of other voices.

Laughter. Shrieks.

Carnival is the organ music

that spins with

the green and white

wheels of light;

with the paper lanterns

in subtle swing on the strings

dangled between the yellow and blue

tented booths,

where the music smells of

roasted almonds, popcorn,

and hums

with the hiss of friers

and the fitful clack

of rings and buzzers,

mallets and bells;

past the games

and beyond the faces,

through this perimeter

the music

joins the swirling heart

of laughter and shrieks—

Child sees

there is another world

given

between the bodies,

opened

in the changing

direction of the laughter

and the shrieks.

Sees it is through the music

the light

spins and swings

the wheels and lanterns.

Sees a music

given to itself.

In this,

child has lost

mother, thigh,

but, given as breath,

must bear out

the absence:

to grasp at air

in which hover

the other heads,

the other voices,

thrust into

the other world

past the perimeter of bodies.

Child learns

to be lost, is—

the carousel of horses

with golden rods

through their hearts,

condemned to

the instant of terror.

If only there were saddles

for their savaged eyes,

if only there were bridles

for their mouths, pried

open in delirious

laughter and shrieks

that issue

in the quavering pitch

and unalterable

loudness

from the steaming calliopes

of their hearts.

Other Gardens, Other Nights (Eclogue 5)

As to better see a moon

we defer, as bodies, to the earth

in subtle and soft folds among the stalks

of luminescent hyacinth, and near enough to

the stone of our fallen figures for the warmth

of their newly flowering flesh.

In the garden,

at night. It is a garden of bodies. Of our bodies.

Pluck the moon that bends

the hyacinth to your lips, lift

its perfume to your nose. Take in its

light—it will bring sleep.

The bats are restless in their whorls, and must be.

They mark our heads with the number.

The number of all numbers. The wilderness of numbers:

Infinity. Sleep.

I will count the passing hours in your ribs,

the days in the phases of your lunar breast

as the moon travels through your body

into the bed of your womb.

Infinite womb. The garden of gardens.

I will not fall

asleep. Your body illuminated

fends off the bats from descending into my eyes,

and the city behind us—its ghosts as restless—

will not in tenebrous shudder pulse a pulse to match the truly

beating heart's. You are to dream,

dream past the edges of all sound, through

the face of the dark and the face of the water

at the other end of the infinitely-expanding

mind of God. There, you are to receive

a message.

Your hands sink into the earth,

your spine, your ribs. The last of your lunar

breast a crescent when, from your navel, emerges

the tree, the first and the last:

the tree of trees.

Your eyes two moons in the ground,

over which flash opalescent the myths

of the beginning, which are the myths of the

end. This myth of all myths.

And your mouth, another moon in the center

of the garden, speaks in the syllables of light

from the other end of the universe:

There are other gardens,

other nights; there are other trees—

a second tree of blossoming limbs

heavy with neglected pomegranates,

in a garden, beasts of earth

and birds of sky and fish of the threatening sea

restless in condemnation to

infinity, yoked to its burden.

A third tree. They were careful to split

the fruit to spill no juice on their fingers,

the seeds for planting, the seeds for an orchard

of trees, the orchard for a forest beyond the garden

for an earth of trees that block out the sun;

fourths and fifths, each a first and a last.

In the infinitely-expanding

mind of God there are infinite trees.

You wake in the terror

of the muteness of a tree. On your limbs,

pendent moons, and your branches,

heavy with marmoreal ribs.

And you cannot speak until the music

of the ribs ring with the direction of the wind—

it will come from the city behind us,

the city, real because we cannot see it,

and it will deliver the ghosts to scatter

the seeds of your moons. Some will fall to the earth

of the garden, some will fall

into the orbit of the bats. Some will rise

past the horizontal twilight into the womb

of the sky. And I will not sleep

until you speak with this music

of your ribs: the song of

salamanders and philomels,

of blood and ambrosia,

of thunder and first words.

The song of songs.

Rouses the Ghost: A Fragment

Sirens announce

a ghost

the trees are rattles

shaking immovable

in the earth

wet from long-awaited rain

quickens and pulse

even the wind surrenders

to the heavy-handed grope

silence.

John K., 12/10/2007, selected and edited from "Rouses the Ghost," 10/11/2009

Two Etymologies: Poetry & Art

I have a number of pots on the stovetop. "Bed: The Essay, Part II" and "On Direct & Indirect Experience: The Work of Art in The Age of Digital Reproduction" I have placed on the back burner. These are still climbing to their boiling points. I have started "Meta-Crisis: Some Thoughts & Concerns about Art," but must let it simmer for now, as to synthesize better the ingredients. Then there is Bed: The Sequence, poems about the bed. This sequence, I am thinking, may organize itself around the 7 Valences I discussed in "Bed: The Essay, Part I." The number 7 is irresistible, but I don't want to script a recipe for it. And we also have my ongoing Eclogues and Elegies, which have no recipe, as I am striving to embody the precepts and principles of seriality. Plus, I feel a new poem emerging out of a conversation I had with a friend this weekend. I am not sure whether it will become an "Eclogue" or an "Elegy" or neither. But I'd hate for it to be a Spicerean "one-night stand" poem.

In the meantime, let's get back to the basics with a couple of etymologies. In this edition, I want to look at two cornerstone words in our creative lexicon: poetry and art.

Poetry

Poetry (along with its archaic cousin poesy and the suffix -poiesis, among other incarnations) first derive from, you guessed it, Latin, by way of French forms that are nearly identical to their English cognates. The Latin roots have three permutations. Poēsis is the "art of poetry"; poēma is a "poem" or "poetry" in the collective; poēta is a "poet," "playwright," a "person of great skill," or an "artist." Each has a Greek ancestral equivalent that ultimately originate from the Greek verb, poieo (ποιέω). The verb is flexible and polysemous, meaning "make," "do," "produce," "be the author or cause of," "prepare," "acquire," along with a slew of other variations. This word, in turn, comes from the Proto-Indo-European *k^u̯ei-, which means to "stow," "gather," or "pile up." The root is embodied in a handful of Indic languages, and means the same as the root, with a few delightfully rich variations: the Sanskrit, kāya, "body," and citrakāya, "tiger" (literally, "speckled-body," giving us the word cheetah.)

The etymology of poetry is wonderfully tangible and apropos to what I think poetry, in fact, is. Poetry is very much a made thing, a pile of sounds and images gathered and arranged, a heap of stowed meaning. The etymology reminds me of Frost's "The Wood-Pile," of Stevens' "Man on the Dump," of Lorine Niedecker's "condensery" in her "Poet's Work," of Duncan's "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow." The etymology of poetry, I am sure, was not lost on Duncan.

Art

Art (with its kin artifice, article, and co.) derives from the Latin ars, artis—a feminine noun primarily meaning "skill," "craft," and "trade" used frequently to refer to the work of craftsmen, tradesmen, and, well, artisans. While the word does secondarily mean "a work of art," it also signifies such things as "invention," "trick," and "stratagem." But the meanings don't stop there, as ars diversely denotes "military tactic," "manner," "method," "means," "science," "theory," "profession," "occupation," and so on.

Artifice is a combination of ars and facere, "do" or "make," thus forming the sense of "a making by skill."

The Proto-Indo-European source is the simple *ar-, meaning to "fit," "suit," and to "join." The cognates in Indo-European are far too abundant to list, but here are few of the very many English ones:

adorn

arm (body part; weapons)

army

alarm

arithmetic

order

ratio

read

rhyme

rite

Math, science, reading, religion, war—all arts, all telling the story of man.

The etymology of art reminds us of art's physicality: of colors, sounds, shapes, rhythms, notes, motions, lines orderly ordered, suitably suited, fittingly fitted. But, more importantly, of colors, sounds, motions, etc. joined in novel, challenging, and unexpected ways. Art is not first of the intellect, but of the hands, of the body, of things, of the world.

Details are thanks to my Amsco Latin Dictionary (2nd ed.), www.etymonline.com, The University of Texas at Austin's Indo-European Lexicon available at http://bit.ly/2HDcgC.

Triptych 3: The Ghost Said, "The House is a Body"

First ghost. Said, "Head is a hallway." Evidence, 8/24/2009. John K.

Second ghost. Said, "See-through skin." Evidence, 9/2/2009. John K.

Third ghost. Said, "Aorta." Evidence, 9/2/2009. John K.

Triptych 2: There Are Ghosts of Sun & Rain

First ghost. Evidence, 8/27/2009. John K.

Second ghost. Evidence, 8/27/2009. John K.

Third ghost. Evidence, 8/27/2009. John K.