"To live well and write about it in whining poetry." Sir Philip Sidney. Apology for Poetry.
if we call this instead of Calender, Church, it is a bow to Fr. Chiniquy, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, where he includes among this half century the assassination of Lincoln. Since I have done JFk, why not include his Fifty. Since I also have done 50 years beyond the subterranean basement of them all. I did my wife about it too, for she and I have done 50 years in the institute of our own.This is an exercise in time travel and harpazos, callings out. If there is a premise that for all life to be worth something, one life must, then to document one life, or make the effort to, can justify the whole according to this, even recognizing that every life must also be unique. It is in those aspects of the unique that they all gain value.
There is also a belief that older people are conservative, maybe, but not in their memories and thoughts. What do they have to lose? So why not speak, even if imprudently, rashly. There is an experience of years behind it. What happens in understanding the result of our lives fifty years from now when the acts and passions of the 20s are 80? What happens to the rationalization of motives? What were they anyway, the passions, the people? What happened to them, to wake up to find them gone, leaving legacy and memory and obituaries and that the landscape once inhabited unrecognizable, the spirit of the times dead too, the roads, the tools by which people made their lives, books for example, like this one, poems about life in America, 1973-2023, and Austin c. 1968- 1980.
If nobody minds and I don't see it matters if they do, the substance of these poems reflects the place. It was on top the bare limestone rock of the Balcones Fault on this old sheep ranch in the wind and rain, land and birds, scorpions and septic tanks, sheep and heat and a hundred airs lying in a hammock between oleanders that the essence of this vision of America/Ameryca and nature formed, that these poems began. The trappers of dogs and gunfire on Hungry Hill and old stills echoed the Chartiers in habitation, rocks, slag, runoffs, but the massive flights of migrating birds, robins by the ten thousands in Feb and the smell of wild cedar made the place. As Levinas says, the place becomes the face, in poetry, not what I am, none of us know what we are, whether faithful or not, rescued from death to life still being done, which taken at its highest means lives hid with Christ in God, which has to be said to account for the unveiling that unfolds.
It's important to be born into a good family, recognizing good as in the eye of the beholder and what one thinks good another will not. So better to say it's important to make your idea of family good and increase from there. I hardly remembered that this was called America 2000, a presage of the millennial end of all the overpopulation and climate syndromes, race and tyranny, commercialism and war that the actions of the secret agencies would foster. People believed that Crosby Stills Nash Young Zappa Morrison and Beatles had integrity in search of the higher life, not that they were government implants to prepare an emotional program to mass build the collective. It is a record too of how much i believed of any of the programming and if that was believed then presents the question, what do I believe today?
These poems reach their fifty years forward from 1973 to 2023. Some stem from previous stints in Fayettenam, The Dog in Hay Street, or Asphalt Goose, others before that in central America, To Roosevelt, and in between in sojourn in Iowa city, corpses. Working on the Univ paint crew summers one day gave occassion to spend time in the Cadaver Room where a half dozen lat open on metal tables and many others submerged in deep coffin like cement resevoirs. Even older poems begin with St Brenden, Erik the Red, Columbus and Raleigh so the brakes of time are off, but back then, mythically, mystically the presage forward to 2000, at which we laugh because we are still here!!! make their entrance in that history. So there these stops in the origins of America stand for many more all of us made, as La Biblioteca Utopica, where Calendar was exhibited with books of 170 authors from 26 countries, "art done by everybody for everybody...aligned and transversal planes that frequently cross and mingle, an underground tradition fueled by grassroots activism in continuous transformations filled with insets, cards, postals, lithos, stamps, photos and more. The books of the Utopian Library were conserved afterward in an archive in Viareggio, a little like the way these are here on Amazon after "Fifty years ago today I picked up two boxes of / A Calendar of Poems: Encouragements for Such as Shall Have Intention to be Undertakers in the Planting of the New Found Land, Set Forth with Divers Reasons and Inducements, 500 copies from Express Press in Austin.George Bruce Moses (named for George Bruce Halsted?) (28 May 1950-22 May 1975)http://records.ancestry.com/george_br... did the cover of A Calendar of Poems (December, 1973) He had been painting large canvases of heads, glistening white with red outlines when he was stricken. Another contemporary, Victoria Donner (PMc) provided the photographs.
I had been in and out of amateur status, dishwashing and gardening, but an overwhelming need for cash and the coming birth of a daughter, required a re-up. That summer I canvassed the executive committee with intent. It was not an automatic hire because years before, as explained by one who remembered me from previously disrupted seminars, I had been let go for the sin of enthusiasm. There were just not any jobs in the evening school. This was to avoid being actionable. So with two hirings, the second at intervention of John Silber, but also two firings from the same department, the issue need proof. English had initiated a grade inflation index by then, because English was guilty of puffery. If you got a 1 you graded the student just like everybody else. Less than a 1 and you were tougher. Greater than a 1 and your student evaluations were suspect quid pro quo. I had one year as that Adjunct Temp, for they had forgotten my earlier incarnation in the linguistics department and talk of unionizing 600 TAs when the department chair started the Association of Graduate Students in English to forestall such union. I was elected co-chair of the Association on a platform of producing poetry readings to pay cash to the reader, which produced three occasions. I quit after these, didn't finish that august term. All was forgot, hired thrice but fired only twice. To win the teaching award was automatic loss of down.
Spiritual enlightenment could be had on the Quadrangle in those years. Raja Rao, his nimbus intact, thought the philosophy bldg built on top of Indian burial mounds. There were extensive steam tunnels under the campus. G. V. Desani took disciples, if they would sit on their feet. An easier form of Tibetan insight if you would not verbalize the think, not think, cardinal, but instead think, bird-birding. At Hare Krishna you could dance and eat sugar but should not engage in sex. Tarot and Golden Dawn were available for a song, not the song of deliverance of David, but astral batteries that came with controlling the universe. As one said to me, "you're not Christ? I'm sorry to hear it."
Illumination was of the people glowing from the mushrooms
harvested from cow patties in Bastrop. A botany student ahead of his time was
growing salvia divinorum in the botany department's greenhouse, all leggy
though. One of the employees I had at the drug garden brought in his banisteriopsis to take the air and sun
for the time he worked. He wanted to keep his lunch in the refrigerator, but I
had a fear of its radioactivity. We did have a good supply of rats. They went
for the seedlings but not the ayahuasca. Just to keep current I read the
McKennas along with Schultes. Datura and amanita were not allowed on campus,
but there were families of communal living. You could experience big brother
too, and if inclined to mere sensuality and had connections, recruited on a
select basis, could sail with professors on their yachts. Three different
people in those years, I don't like to call them men, offered me their wives
for the night or day in exchange.
These may not be exactly what Arrowsmith had in mind when he argued for "a
free and unindoctrinated habit of mind," but they were cheek and jowl with
the “timid, unimaginative, debased, inefficient, [and] futile”...humanists who
“had betrayed the humanities.” He said that the central “enabling principle” of
the humanities was “the principle of personal influence and personal example.”
New chairman Joe Moldenhauer declared in that last year of my Temporary status
that no member of the English department could at any time talk to the press.
Authority makes them mad. He ate this decision every day for lunch. That was
for the tenured. Nobody imagined Temps could talk.
Arrowsmith called for “visible embodiments of the realized humanity of our aspirations, intelligence, skill, scholarship; men ripened or ripening into realization." No doubt he would say men and women or he would have no pie. But the gender wars raged among the elite, "“timid, unimaginative, debased, inefficient, [and] futile,” because the humanists “had betrayed the humanities.” Not to get too far ahead, “liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained,” quoted Ted Kaczynski. But the visible embodiment of realized humanity is more common than the superman ideal. Realized humanity in self sacrifice, family, children, fidelity, prayer, participating in the universe, the community, planting trees is controlling those urges toward denigration and anger that decompose the human fabric.
Jarry
It was poetic research, finding the gold tree as a mine in the earth from renaissance Italian speculations, a metaphor, like the last chapter of Donne's image of Virginia is a metaphor of the new man. You can refer this kind of science to Steve McCaffery, Canadian Pataphysicist, but I did not know him at the time. My introduction to Jarry’s Ubu was through Roger Shattuck's and William Arrowsmith's students who were offended by the coinage of the term King Ubu instead of Ubu Roi. How they puffed their Ubu Raw! Which may be patapuffery. They were real pataphysicians. One was a priest at a something catholic church that follows Bishop Ledbetter. These fellows put marijuana into the monstrance on the altar during mass to give it a charge and smoked it after. What of such antics when at Texas cloverleafs prickly poppies bloomed and acolytes were out at night slitting the sides of blossoms? Solid Jarry stuff, disappearing rituals in the Texas capitol rotunda, astral batteries to heighten their power to identify the angels that surrounded a particular customer.
Do you think three or just one archangel? And whose biding does it? The head of all these was robed in gowns for services which ordinary people could also attend. An ex-military whose wife was psychic. She asked me once, it being early August, what an eclipse meant, there was one due later that month. I regret saying, "death." Her husband died two weeks later after celebrating the mass; he still had his robes on from that meeting with the altar boys.
Coltrane
All these believed more or less from beginning to end that all possible world histories will simultaneously come into being, that “the kundalini of the entire human race is rising.” I didn’t seek this theme, not because I missed ZARG on first reading because my copy had the page ripped out of that edition, no doubt it hides in somebody's wallet hoping to recognize the dragon, "the old Midgard Serpent whose awakening shatters the illusion of reality in the old Norse myth." Its equivalent is the Coltrane Church of Electroshock "anointed universal sound from the throne of heaven incarnated in one Sri Rama Ohnedaruth mighty mystic known as Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane." If these don't buzz, hey, there’s no need for the faery, no need for Zarg, we have Bilbo’s Smaug and the dragon of Revelation.
Zarg
What is the collective unconscious living entity that personal consciousness is to lose itself within like cells in a body? Face to face with this alien entity billions of soul-stolen minds entered Old Testament times, but not as a united nation at war with another ethnic, as Israel at Jericho. No angel goes before to drive out the Canaanite scientist, the Amorite artificial intelligence, the Hittite invoked alien ET demons, the Perizzite government manufactured super soldiers, the Hivite DNA revived hybrids and the Jebusite systems of GMO, chemtrail, HAARP technolgies, but not a people to "put off the ornaments" of the world we wear, and expect "the cloudy pillar" to descend (33.9).
Alters for altars, EMR for images, NLP for groves. The collective unconscious is insane.
But as for temptation of riches, absorption in the drugged over mind, oblivion
and acceptance by the masses, to whore their deities. No molten (34.17)
refers to "all that opens the matrix" (19). The law given again as we go up to this new
Jericho is the first battle of a war that ends at the opening of the seventh
seal. Ai and Jericho controlled the ascent. Had Joshua asked his advisors they
would have said don’t go. No one would have come up with this. Government
undergrounds, HAArps, chemtrails, genetic modification, disinformation, it
helps immensely to have a target of all these in one head subsuming
individuals, freedoms, lives, Zarg in short, the slogan under many flags. KILL
ZARG!
When tracking the opposite of reality the probabilities of improbabilities is
100%.
Raymond Chandler saw it, "Her teeth parted and a faint hissing noise came out of her mouth...she hadn't move when I got back with the glasses. The hissing had stopped...I looked away. Then I was aware of the hissing noise very sudden and sharp...the hissing noise came tearing out of her mouth as if she had nothing to do with it...she called me a filthy name...her teeth chattered and the hissing noise was sharp and animal...the imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her small corrupt body still on the sheets. I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely." Big Sleep.
Grendel’s Mother
You can mine this ground if you mine it yourself. Knowing the strata is like knowing the generations that descend, if you don't know them and deem yourself a unique version. Like a modernism puerile to recognize that the thing founded upon the thing it considers out of date is just ignorantly past, it doesn't make a genius not to know how in the history of families one came into being, not hatched full blown from the head. Grendel's mother slobbering in her cave is still Grendel's mother. You cannot escape it even if you put it to death. Toss the coin again, write on top of old precepts, maxims, resonant with the past. Scrape it off and see what's underneath. This is a form of classicism, to retell the telling of a thing over again and again through centuries.
The permutations of this, the transmutations are interesting themselves. The Welsh poet Taliesin was told and retold and retold, accreting and growing all the time. The corpus I want to retell might be Aeschylus, or Grimm, or the Mabinogian, but changed from the first likeness like a memory not from the original but from the last recollection. Sometimes I don't know what the tale is I'm retelling until later. Sometimes, consumed with the technique or speaker of the tale I want to hear mules talk and get up in the middle of the night to hear Kafka's dog or ape who becomes a man. In "The Burrow" the animal speaks of itself so that we at all points consider him a man, in the third person along with Josephine the mouse singer. Jonathan Swift figures big in retelling some concrete version of a myth about humanity but without referring exactly to it. The myth underlies and surrounds all he says about his giants. The same is true but ever in a more ethereal sense with Blake's fairies and giant forms. I rode these torrents to wrestle parables and allegories while singing, "oh who is an ocean to bathe the world's sores in?" To retell the telling once more is paragory. Reuchlin in the renaissance coined "the wonder-working word” to change the structure of reality, the word spoken, not arcanely in secret, but openly, what you hear in the ear from the roof.
Cited. The New Criterion June 1994. William Arrowsmith: a recollection. By James Tuttleton.
Calendars portray the passage of times and seasons. This is an American calender and portrays the passage of the times and seasons of America from its first mythic discovery to the end of the 20 th century, what is felt to be a round number, a millennium or two.
The title of this volume comes from a work by Sir Robert Gordon of l625 by a mostly similar name. That was an inducement to colonization, this is a celebration of selected "colonizers" if by that we were allowed to include such as St. Branden , Eirik the Red, Columbus, and Sir Walter Raleigh, who comprise the first four "months." Thus in a series of dramatic musings the lyrics attempt to portray what they might have felt or thought in that most essential part of their voyages, the dream, the sacrifice, the betrayal. .July and August, by mystical custom, are exempted from historical narrative and purport to celebrate the new world creation itself. It is hoped that the reader will also mystically discern what spiders, flys, sun, orphans and snakes all have in common.
Nowhere is there precedent for breaking the year in half, opposing spring and summer with fall and winter, but that is what occurs. The first six months occur more or less in the time frame of centuries and moral innocence while the last six months occupy the final decades of the 20th century and the millenium which we thought would never end. These auger from decadence toward deliverance, and bespeak a moral experience.
Whether innocence or experience, all the months are juxtaposed with seventeenth century contexts since the purpose is to recreate the thought and feeling of not only the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's but to view them from the point of view of the original naivete of those discoverer's times to see what betrayals, confirmations, prophecies were fulfilled.
There is a lot of sowing and reaping in these new worlds, grief and pathos in the sowing of the seed, Eirik the Red and Sir Walter Raleigh both losing their sons there, and grief and pathos too in the reaping, for all the sons lost in the planting.
And with it always occurs the promise of hope, new birth, the mediation of light and lights, sun and moon, red and gold that shine upon the plants, both seed and fruit.
Seed time is spring, the planting in the new world imagination of everything according to its kind, March through July, depending on climate and then comes the reaping, in September, the last decades of a millenium, fall and winter, our lot, fruit upon fruit.
Likewise in the dramatic musings of the harvest we try to tell what seed was sown, of presidents and empires, wars, commerce and self-infatuation, September and its citizens of October, fantasized optimists gone for the gold or is it property? Call it love and old hardened psychedelic and the revolution, followed by November and, in worse taste, the new vulgarity, who could do it justice? the destruction of life as we knew it.
These contradictions, offenses terminate in the new day, ha, that comes to its end or beginning in December, I mean the year as they sell it, and you find out, if, well, you're confused. It's a holiday to get away. The joke's on who? Chickens, roosters and pigs. That's right.
January, new year old, is the judgment and reason for the Virginian voyage all over again, but this time where to go? Old for the old-fashioned, new for the new, space-age time and go. How to escape? Read the next book. The context goes full circle in February with the old Anglo-Saxon verse, "The Husband's Message," but this voyage is of a heavenly visitation as if some new St. Branden were to begin a heavenly navigation.
Finally the 90's didn't end as we thought, they're still going.
I am of an anabaptist faith as it turns out., three occasions. first dedication as a Mennonite by Rev. Henert, then about 12 sprinkled by a rev. Ewalt at Crafton pres. church in order to join the church. My fathere and I met him in his study and i think i remember kneeling to receive a sprinkle of water from a canteen that he had taken from the Jordon River. this felt sacred and affected me some days, but not permanently, So I chose to be immersed at Grace Chapel one Sun night to fulfill what I thought right, which was performed in that season, but the baptism that counts I received in the back of a tent of Oliver B. Greene on both knees where I had knelt, duplicitously to quite smoking, but when i knelt , the electric began and has not ceased ever. There were anointings before this at 11 or so when the mantle of not to kill fell on me one morning on a Saturday when I was out walking early by the Thornburg school. just to be out walking early seems peculiar now, but no more so that making gunpowder and rockets, or any other acts, like serving while in college a coop period with the Latin American Mission. it is all these matters I account in these autobiographical texts.
Journal of Presbyterian History, 59:1 (Spring 1981)to modify his personal attitudes toward other Christians. He would be more "loving" and appreciative, less judgmental and
condemnatory than had been his custom. This in itself was
news—a fundamentalist with a changed attitude.
Thess. 4:17; Rev 12:5). Harpazo is translated “caught up” or “caught away” the five times (out of
thirteen) it appears in the Bible relating to rapture. The other eight times it is translated, “to
forcibly seize upon, snatch away, take to oneself or use force on someone.”3 In Acts 8:39, the
Holy Spirit “caught away” Philip after he ministered to the Ethiopian eunuch and placed him in
Azotus, some 20-30 miles away. In 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, Paul twice describes his experience of
being “caught up” to the Third Heaven. In Revelation 12:5, the man child of the Woman (usually
interpreted to mean, Jesus) was “caught up” to God and His throne. And in 1 Thessalonians 4:17,
the primary text for the Rapture of the Church, “we who are alive and remain shall be caught up
together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air . . .” (together with them refers to the
“dead in Christ,” who were resurrected immediately preceding the Rapture).
Germantown,birth row houses, orphanages, blood among the flowers harpazo
Chartiers, 5 coal town, polluted creek, two track Pennsy, open spaces, remnants of coal mining, strip mining
Merion 17 serior yr h.s. new school lower Merion overflow, a harpazo out of the coal geting saved.
Drexel,18 coop jobs, business to English, asst profs from Penn getting Ph.d.s
Latin American Mission 1963 san jose costa rica coincideent with peace corp, intro to theology, quest for the historical, continuing influence from drexel profs to first class minds and committed lifves.
Harpazo again, sudden death of oldest brother, fis born, midnight flight, last yr, college, tennis team, Poetry apprentice of forms, applic to Iow and workshop, marrriage, take off.
Iowa more fist class minds 2 yrs M.A. connect with HSBC stafing,
Phila, NE, travel transition,
190678 jan appt in fayettenam HSBC1. Sand Hills, teaching, Harpazo 3,firing
Phila, transition
Austin 68 Balcones fault linguistics Sagas poetry
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