Henry Gould

Ravenna Diagram Henry Gould

Poetry. RAVENNA DIAGRAM is a long poem which follows in the vein of 'Leaves of Grass, ' 'The Bridge, ' 'Paterson, ' 'The Cantos, ' 'A, ' and 'The Maximus Poems.' It is an attempt to come to new terms with old epic and visionary traditions, epitomized by Dante and Milton, and carried on by Hart Crane, H. D., Louis Zukofsky, Jay Wright and others. The poet aims to take up the primordial challenge of bridging heaven and earth, the spiritual and temporal, in a new voice. There is a special affinity with the Acmeist movement of Russian poetry and Osip Mandelstam--tracing to Dante, toward the end of his life, in Ravenna, completing his Divina Commedia under the clear shadows of Eastern Orthodox mosaics. But this is an American poem, and a work-in-progress--juxtaposing Dante's spiritual vertical with the vast horizontal of colloquial, pilgrim American time and space.--Henry