Cid Corman: the poetics

(for Ed Baker)


I'll give Cid Corman the number two spot after T.S. Eliot as the greatest English-speaking literary critic of the contemporary world. I can say my familiarity with the great editor from Utano grows apace, soon to overshadow even my own reverence for Eliot. It's a question of time. Corman's At Their Word: Essays on the Arts of Language Volume II (Black Sparrow Press, 1978)*, among his other books of criticism, is as finely crafted a book of poetry, translation and literary appreciation as you're likely to find in any period. It's a good place to find the always companionable and erudite, the generous-hearted and congenially uncompromising founder of Origin: a quarterly for the creative. But as Eliot's is always an unimpugnable authority, "cut in alabaster", Corman lives and works in "locales" ( 9), averse temperamentally to anything/anyone that wasn't always exactly where they just happened to be. It's a criticism not to be read solely but (as Ed Baker would say) "breathed".

In criticism, Corman has a way of harrying poetries that wont' live in this breathed space; with poets who write them he's usually even-handed but always curt. Judging by the correspondences I've read, I'd say he's reserved his harshest censures for the growing 80s "lang gang" movement of Bernstein and Silliman, and with good reason. Their crime was to "feed language into machined games", not lived spaces: and what ensued from this was a "rubble of brains" that Corman had no time for. Even in regards to the wildly complex and tragical Hart Crane Corman could find enough jeu d'esprit to say of him, "He is Hart Crane and hard up. He is near the long hiatus, quietus." (64) Poetry could never be too much a world apart without suffering consequences. Corman never hesitated, where justified, to upbraid even highly touted academic critics, like R.P. Warren, for sloppy readings: claiming to see what isn't there (again, note the sanctity of the real in Corman's poetics) is strictly anathema to sound poetical procedure. "...Warren in his eagerness to score points and sell his detour to us overlooks details that are pertinent and injects details that are just not there, nor implied." (35)

It was to the credit of Dr. Williams, on the other hand, that his eyes were "full each day",(50) the subject of the poem always expertly fitted to "the inescapably human element." (50) Again, the human and the permanent sanctity of the place where the poem, in its fullness, comes into being. Cormanian criticism is a reiterated statement of life, the human element never at war with creativity and the "concentrated presence" of the poem emanating from that life. The poem is in a master's hand nothing if not miraculous: "How simple! And how movingly concentratedly profound!" (82) There was a predilection for the sacred that made him Frank Samperi's only coeval in spirit. And criticism follows rightfully after the poem --never the other way around--in its own elegant compactness and brevity, never missing a beat. For the near perfect adaptation of the critic's language to poetry, there is the oration to Dylan Thomas,

He wanted his words like a bell to break backwards. He wanted to scatter sound, as it sounded, over a country-side like milkweed or rain. He wanted to tell fortune by the buttercupful. He wanted to roll forever in the grass of first love. Love always first thirst for him. He wanted to be the child that he will for us, or for me anyhow, always be. (69)

 Repetition is never a conceit: it rather unfurls (like great lyricism) the real sound, sight and touch of a poetical world always in its nascency. Corman makes you feel a Welsh childhood itself. And an even more eloquent summing up of a small Creeley poem, "felt" as much as it's read, gives a sense of Corman's reverence for poetical objects trying to "locate ground", Corman's favourite angle-shot. The style is spare, direct (parataxis comes to mind) but the effect is of a luxuriantly extended definition:

Here we have the horizon as distance, as what there is to be seen, objective, what one sees, more firmly, via distance, to be grasped, realized, a fix: a past a future present, but how things grow vaguer growing closer, impinge, enter, and one leans outward to/at something, anything, solid, to make and make hold.To add one's own make and take, a little, to what is there. The placement, the weave, of "there" and "here" is felt, pointed and carried. and the increasing uncertainty, as against the fixed "line" first (immediately) established, finds a quiet pathos at the close. A poem trying to locate ground. (76)

 The only way for the poet (as in the case of Wallace Stevens) to reach the extraordinary is oftentimes to cultivate smallness and intimacy with his simple surroundings: even if it's a matter of going from home to office, office to home. (92) It's perhaps for this reason that voice and music are tightly associated with place: the verse sounds as if it were at home the moment it's spoken and couldn't have been enunciated anywhere but there. As Corman said in "The Feeling in the Make of Poetry" (Origin 5, October 1978), "Ordinary speech does suffice: any word will do. But only when we fully enter it can it fully enter us what it is utterance is -- is song...One knows one is no longer at home in oneself--but rather dwelling in complete abode." What better example of a poetry that dwelt "in complete abode" is there than that of Larry Eigner. Citing the "hospital poems" (145) Corman speaks of Eigner "in his wheelchair" as the poet attuned to essential fixity and straightness, a "directness of vision" (147) that to all but the disabled must seem "grotesque".

Corman's saved his best praise of the poem's "complete abode" for a Lorine Niedecker memorial.  If "The devotion to poetry is the devotion to whatever human community" (91), perhaps his happiest hours were spent with her (With Lorine), at least in letter-writing. The reminiscences here are told in a medium in which Corman flourished: his piece comprising of "characteristic passages" from letters exchanged between them over a ten-year period (183). Corman's correspondences alone could easily run into volumes. They're full of  poetry submissions and spring floods, church-spires and good cheer and even offers of financial help ("if a bit of my pay check at some time in the near future will help you") (184): Corman even recalls how grateful a certain Scottish poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, was to Corman for introducing him to Niedecker. Another volume alone on poets Corman had established, introduced in the making here. She alone, however, had worked up enough nerve in 1931 to write to the Objectivist author of Poetry. Interesting, though, that she'd feared her "own folk impulse" (186) would have gotten lost in that Zukofsky "ice". Interesting the things poets had said to Corman in confidence.

Corman saved Niedecker for last because she was his best example of poetry that was nowhere but where she happened to be:  Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin near Rock River "that empties just beyond into Lake Koshkonong"; a small but tidy home with her own wellstocked library, "brown little stove" (211) & one-armed husband who could be "frightening" to kids; the library, printing press and hospital where she worked; the Black Hawk hotel where Cid and Shizumi stayed on their visit to the Niedecker's; the grave her husband was too "busted up" to ever see. Her poetry sang each place as assuredly as Samperi's sang his own East Side, Stevens's the Connecticut office he daily walked to or even Corman's the Kyoto pastry shop he'd lived and worked in. As is the life so the poetry. And as Niedecker was kind, gentle so were the poems and the "breathed" rhythms of "lake water" and "wing-bone" (208), her little "granite pail" and "clothesline post" (209).

Corman's right to follow the poem (as well as poet) always "along a given still vital line" (73). Nothing short of this very eventful presence is worthy of the critic's attention. Language can work as long as life does and the poem, honestly wrought, can never celebrate life more joyously than this. Life is its limit, Corman seems always to be saying, and at the same time the portal to infinitely more imagined communities. A poet's inward life is heir to the relations, loves and correspondences of the outside world. As he's reminded Samperi in letter after letter, it's in "livingdying" that we live and write the poem.
________________
*I will give page numbers only without specifying title of essay from which sources derive. I consider Corman's book of essay a work in its own right, the texture of commentary always smooth, always of a piece with everything else.

From Husserl to martyrdom

Edith Stein, Husserlian & saint

I'm oftentimes amazed at the types of intersections to be encountered between culture and divinity.

What's in phenomenology that two spiritual masters, Frank Samperi and Edith Stein and perhaps many more, have recoiled from it and named it inimical to the spiritual itself? After all, it was touted in its day as a doctrine of empathy with the world or a sane procedural suspension (epoché) of belief in the face of the absurd and problematical. The reduction of life-experience to radically lived (ego-centric) sensations seemed to offer intuitive certainty in regards to human knowledge. Some have seen in it a sort of "spell of the sensuous" (David Abram) from which the most sublime world-knowledge can derive still.

Samperi had, however, derived his distaste for phenomenology from what he thought was its wildly processual and reductivist nature: resulting in  a sort of metaphysical pagan nation-worship or, as he puts it in a letter to Cid Corman, "the Pretense that there's One Nation" to which everything can be traced and in which there's no room for his venerated "Tradition of forms". Stein herself must have seen in her own collegial relations with both Husserl and Heidegger similar allegiances of any sort of Weltanshauungen to essentially tribal notions of gender and ideology particularly and their always deleterious effects on intellectually gifted women like Stein. Her doctoral dissertation on "empathy", inspired and guided by Husserl himself, provided a way out of this intellectual hegemony: as she says, "Husserl...named this experience "empathy", but did not explain what it consisted of. Here was a gap which was worthwhile filling". She could also have said the same thing about the fashionable atheism she'd embraced in her Freiburg years. A gap is a gap.

So to a Dante-inspired poet and Discalced Carmelite nun something meant to be a privileged look into the world's own "hidden meaning and teleology" (The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 18) was strictly anathema. To Samperi and Stein phenomenology was a pretense and a sham (though Stein had been asked even as a Carmelite to contribute to phenomenological discussions). Samperi called it "the great Usurper [who] taketh away the Kingdom of the Divine Intelligential Poet" (In Samperi's mind, poet Bill Bronk happened to be the Usurper in person). To both it amounted to the irreligious claim that the arts and sciences in general end in doctrine and perhaps a kind of rapacious will to be to which can be traced all the vilest human instincts. Saints and poets alike are bound to register the dangers first.

This bill of indictment against philosophers and the fruits of cognitive labour was no pose. And the denunciations were more than figurative. In the absence of Greek dichotomies between intellect and the world (which Husserl thought he'd disposed of with his handy notion of experience,"Ehrfarung") the Christian hoped for real bodily transfiguration, real earthly paradise: a radical type of "depersonalization" strictly incompatible with the "Material Ideal" (as Samperi describes it in his 1969 notes on Dante) of process philosophies. After the conversion there's no leftover "matter" anywhere. Again, Samperi:

         no poetry has been written in this century -- propaganda yes!
         verse yes! but a poetry not an end in itself no!
         unless , of course, I exclude
         myself -- and I am not being
         egotistical...
         Therefore: to withdraw from
         the literary world is a must.
         This proves than our style no
         style is Ars imitatur naturam in sua operatione.

For Stein the only real "depersonalization" was to be found within the "narrow space" of her monastery: an even more enforced type was, of course, to be reenacted in her own extinction at Auschwitz. As she says just weeks before her deportation,  "To erect the structure of holiness in it, one must dig deep and build high, must descend into the depths of the dark night of one’s own nothingness in order to be raised up high into the sunlight of divine love and compassion." Instead of Husserlian "empathy" there were "depths of the dark night" into which the convert eagerly burrows.

What drove them both from enlightened rationalities  to this credo of withdrawal must lie somewhere in that vacuous knowledge metaphor always more terrifying in its results than in its methodology: or perhaps, more specifically, in just that Husserlian equation of 'being' to the way things actually appear to be. Something in that must have seemed a gross usurpation of the mystic's way: something terribly inimical to the creative spirit that Samperi (encouraged by Corman) termed "bureaucratic". Presumably, no one but the saint or poet-pilgrim could lay claim to a sort of 'mystic's' love of terminal understanding along such lines as Stein's own:       

         Are you the ray
         That flashes down from the eternal Judge's throne
         And breaks into the night of the soul
         That had never known itself?

But mystics and poets presume to know nothing, after all. Knowledge for them is agoraphobic. The vessel fills with "ray" only and understanding abetted by grace alone becomes "divine intelligential". And what is "grace" but the suppression of "difference" (as between the street and hermitage, the university office and the ovens) and embrace of the celestial journey "sanza mezzo" ("without intermediaries"). There's nothing here for phenomenologists to gnaw on, not a single shred of sense, judgement or life-world. There's prayer and the abyss.

Perhaps it's not too incredible to suggest that significant poetries have always purposely courted "the dark night" and looked indifferently on the ashes.

Welcome, Penn!

How delighted I am to see that Penn Kemp will be following my humble "Word-Dreamer" blog. Poet laureate for the city of London, Ontario, in 2010, she is Canada's foremost sound-and performance-poet. I consider her a poetry institution and among the most respected literary figures in Canada. I've published an article in Ascent Aspirations on Penn's sound poetry. A few blog posts on Penn can be accessed through "Labels" sidebar.

Welcome, Penn!

Connection between pot and poetry? Why, yes...

"I'm high as fuck on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, man!"

 Now that the Duke University study on how Cannabis use affects the developing brain has proven that the stuff is inherently "toxic" and messes with intelligence, permanently, I wonder if this just might be the reason why all the really "bad" poetry arose out of a single 60s New American Poetry era. I've always suspected that this rather sudden turn for the wildly experimental was a matter of brain receptor overload.

I've always thought the Cannabis-creativity link made by the 60s poet hippies was consequently both meretricious and absurdly self-serving: and in the end just another excuse for lack of talent. Nothing feeds the imagination more vitally than the plain simple realities that filter in daily through the senses. This unglamorous and plodding life will always give our truest & deepest insights.

I can't help but see just that same aversion to reality in most contemporary poetry. It's for this reason that the worst poetries also always seem to spring from the campuses, always high on theory, always prone to 'guru' worship: the very 60s qualities that have taken on particularly virulent and destructive urges in our own age (I think of people like Kenneth Goldsmith, for instance, and his poetry of wilful plagiarism). A return to 'sobriety' may just cure what's been ailing poetry since the Donald Allen anthology.

It's true, after all: pot makes you stupid and nowhere is this more evident than in all the bad poetry still flourishing out there. The connection is no longer fanciful. The drug culture is so pervasive still that even if poets are not as chemically dependent as their 60s forebears, they do continue to write as if they were. The damage done.

Will the real Dante translator please stand up!

Translators of Dante have the unenviable job of adapting to a contemporary sensibility not just a celebrated  religious-allegorical method but all or any combination of the following as well: a hendecasyllabic verse line; a 33-syllable terza rima verse paragraph (with interlocking rhymes) serving as the nucleus of a larger pattern of 33 canti per 3 cantiche; a very condensed syntax with generous sprinklings of latinisms and neologisms, brachylogies and rhetorical topoi;  rich chronicles of history and mythology; and a tendency, prevalent everywhere, to alternate between scholasticism and a more recognizable Florentine vernacular, always skilfully combined in the interests of conversion narrative. And, of course, the whole must be tempered by a gnawing sense of the injustice of the poet-pilgrim forced into involuntary exile. It is a text of poetry and theology rendered in an exquisitely beautiful lyricism. Dante's great because he's managed to do all of this.

The translator's task is no less than to give a sense of the greatness of a poet and a whole poem composed of these its constitutive parts. I think the translator who comes closest to the original in spirit and design ought quite rightfully to wear the poet's laurels, too. Who is then qualified to walk in the great poet-pilgrim's shoes? The academic (Dantisti), the educated reader whose first language is Italian, the autodidact poring tirelessly over every line, or the poet with a side interest in translation? I suppose the same could be asked of the Dante reader. I suppose I could even ask (as a forced deference to the postmodernist era), Is Dante translation even worth doing anymore? It's certainly hard to imagine any writing class instructors today touting the inherent advantages of familiarity with the Commedia (preferably in its original form), both as a model of imitation and great classical text. It seems a politics of art, premised on the virtues of 'non-meaning', may have done in the great Florentine bard after all.

I do, however, stubbornly persist in the belief that the classics have value and that poetical works, up to the present age, inspired and informed by them have always borne the best fruit: going even so far as to state categorically that familiarity with the best poetry specimens is a necessary (but never sufficient) condition of significant poetry. Translations have always seemed to give off varying degrees of scintillations of the lighted jewel held in the great master's hand. And since Dante is the poet de l'alta luce che da sé è vera, the Dante translation can be nothing but approximation, as if in the estimation we needed to determine a verse's nearness to the celestial vision as well. Identifying the lineaments of the splendid poetical jewel is always in Dante a type of devotion, whether we like it or not. It's something for which most of us are probably temperamentally unready.

 I have randomly listed 3 candidates for the distinction of being the 'best' rendition of lines 118-129 from Paradiso, Canto VI (of course, among the possible hundreds already in existence). But how we define the 'best' translation is precisely what is at stake here. The Paradiso excerpt is by no means atypical. Perhaps we'd do better to look at translation just as the sort of homage-bearing exercise it always seems to be, looking in each for intimations only of a Dantean ideal given to us almost whole over the centuries, an ideal that's worth pursuing for the reason John Henry Cardinal Newman said spiritual truths are worth pursuing, namely, because they are "implicitly true". Perhaps all the translator and reader of Dante can do is follow Cardinal Newman's injunction to regard any "skill" as "a sort of instinct or inspiration, not an obedience to external rules of criticism or of science" (from An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent). Guided by hopefully just this "instinct", I'd like to comment on three versions of the Paradiso passage and try making comparisons to something that's still strangely (and uncompromisingly) a literary ideal.

Ma nel commensurar d’i nostri gaggi
col merto è parte di nostra letizia,
perché non li vedem minor né maggi.

Quindi addolcisce la viva giustizia
in noi l’affetto sì, che non si puote
torcer già mai ad alcuna nequizia.

Diverse voci fanno dolci note;
così diversi scanni in nostra vita
rendon dolce armonia tra queste rote.
                                     (PD, VI, 118-129)
_____________________

Instinctively, I like least the translation (Sisson's) that looks too smooth (almost glib), too relatively untroubled by all the usual challenges in the original. The poet, translator and critic glosses too confidently over the difficult and technical intersections purposely to be found between a state of fallenness and redemption: happiness that results, for example, from a correspondence of rewards to desert is almost a cliche as coming nowhere near the agony of moral ambivalence rooted in that one word "merto" (properly defined as "merit" only by Samperi). Sisson fails to strike the proper polyphonic tone. There are no affinities between 'music' and 'salvation'.Nor are there places in Sisson for pause and reflection as there ought to be : certainly none of the challenge of unearthing tough syntax for the "gem" concealed within. How can he see when he can't hear? "Gaggi" is unsurprisingly given (except in Samperi) as "rewards", as if a thing to be held by right, and the road ahead always skips too merrily.  The problem is that harmonies ("Diverse voci") too sweet and enticing are barely distinguishable from sin. The final Tenth heaven looks too bland and uniform here for anyone's bother.

But in the appropriateness of our rewards
To our desert is part of our happiness,
Not to see them either more or less.

By this means the living justice so softens
Our affections that they may not be
Ever twisted by any iniquity.

Different voices make notes sound sweet;
And so different stations in our life
Make a sweet harmony among these spheres.
                               (C. H. Sisson)

Does poet and America's first translator of Dante fare any better? Here the poet in Longfellow works too much against him: trying to fan a spark into bonfires (sparks fly everywhere in Paradiso) draws attention only to itself. Beginning every line with a capital (and a capitalized "Justice" above all) is a silly affectation, and "herein" and "evermore" look as much out of place here as they do even in nineteenth-century poetry: didn't Longfellow know that Dante studiously avoided archaisms (except for rhetorical effect) and preferred to invent his own words wherever even the vernacular failed? The "instinct" for the original Dante is so errant in Longfellow that even rhymes, had the great versifier attempted them, would have all but obliterated the "terza rima". Translation here is pure dictionary work. "Portion", for example, only portions out as in a children's story whereas the more judicious "part" can at least make the reader feel the true edginess of  incomplete joy (as every step in the climb to heaven is necessarily designed to show). In Longfellow, souls, not the true bodies in which souls always chafe, sit too sweetly awaiting their turn on the dance floor. A poet whose idea of "dolce armonia" is "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls" hasn't really budged an inch.

But in commensuration of our wages
With our desert is portion of our joy,
Because we see them neither less nor greater.

Herein doth living Justice sweeten so
Affection in us, that for evermore
It cannot warp to any iniquity.

Voices diverse make up sweet melodies;
So in this life of ours the seats diverse
Render sweet harmony among these spheres

                           (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

About three words separate Samperi from the others. He sings with a true Dantean heaviness in his heart: a kind of plodding literalness always pervades the true poet-pilgrim's chronicle (Perhaps only some of that is felt in this short passage). And against the greyness of exertion, physical and spiritual,  angels in Dante as in life, and their fulgurating movements, appear without the intermediaries of  technique ("sanza mezzo"): always studded with their own painful brilliances  (as in Celan), always grainy and sharp as their speech. That's the best that can be said for them: the rest is a matter of images and endless analogies and commentary. Because Samperi is he who walks also the twisting to"iniquity" (and the difference here is not slight) must be felt precisely in that "to". Samper says in Habitudinem that "To in Truth shows/the Imprint".It's not directional so much as torsional effort. The path to the light always runs obliquely to competing spheres and that requires "twisting". Furthermore, "pledges" are cold and insensate things and they don't always pay (as Sisson and Longfellow stupidly thought). The contractarian burden from which the journey to the Empyrean meant to free him could only have weighed him down the more: terrestrial life (especially in the eastside) is hard to shed even in flight. Best to make a virtue out of necessity. So Aquinas enjoins Dante in the Fourth heaven to walk with leaden feet, like someone worn out with reflection on invisible things: "E questo ti sia sempre piombo a' piedi,/per farti mover lento com' uom lasso/ e al sì e al no che tu non vedi". Redemption works rather like the endless turn of "wheels" that is all there is of heaven's own too distantly "sweet harmony". Again, Celan comes to mind.

Frank Samperi wins the laurels...

 

But in the commensuration of our pledges
  with merit is part of our joy,
  because we see them neither less nor greater.
Hence the living justice so sweetens
  affection in us, that it can never
  be twisted to any iniquity.
Diverse voices make sweet notes;
  thus diverse seats in our life
  render sweet harmony among these wheels
                                   (Frank Samperi)

A few good blogs

I'd like very much to restrict my reading to only the very finest poetry blogs and towards that end I'd appreciate getting some feedback from my few (very few) loyal "Word-Dreamer: poetics" readers out there. I want only il miglior fabbro.

I'd like to add to the blogs already listed (in sidebar) under "A Few Good Blogs". Please, do make recommendations.

My criteria for an outstanding (because I will settle for nothing less than an outstanding) poetry blog are as follows. A poetry blog must be:

(a) averse to anything that is academic in background, outlook, or attitudes;

(b) accessible to an intelligent and sensitive readership;

(c) in no way self-absorbed;

(d) always respectful and generous;

(e) informative;

(f) suspicious of any blinkered affiliations to a single poetry style, viewpoint and methodology (usually to the exclusion of the rest);

(g) always eager to display original writing, translation work and commentary on vital poetical themes and issues; and

(h) active.

I thank you all in advance!

Happy 50th, Marilyn

"I so fell in love at that point
 That there had been nothing hitherto
  Which had so bound me with sweet chains"
                                         (Dante, Paradiso)


What could possibly be the inducement to write an anniversary post on an actress I was barely old enough to remember when she died and who'd always come to me filtered anyways through media & Hollywood legend? Is a  half-decade as great a feat in death as in life? Why always this chronic soft-headed veneration where Marilyn's concerned? A lot's happened since.

"...in her eyes there blazed such a smile"

I think it's rather remarkable that talk of her anniversary--exactly fifty years this Sunday, 5 August-- coincides with my rereading of Dante's Paradiso. If, in other words, I had a choice of any Beatrice, who better than Marilyn to lead the way to my personal Empyrean. Not to the promiscuous , hypocritical and treacherous hell she'd gone to her grave with (plenty of that to go around!) but the heaven of hell she'd made for aging poetical guys like me. I've never really stopped feeling that the "eternal feminine" in dark cat eye glasses is the thing. The wisdom in a woman's eyes is always a good place to begin the journey, too. Ah, Marilyn, what stroppy triune god wouldn't have reflected that back to me as essential light...

"You are not now on earth, as you think you are"

If you think about it, she really wasn't ever of this earth. So where's the journey with her going to lead, anyways? The only heaven Marilyn's ever likely to take the greying heart to is the indelectably mortal one of eyes, hair and chin or just perhaps the bewitching simulacra (between Marilyn and the rest) that end in two tombs: hers and the empty one above reserved for Hefner, her greatest boy-man devotee. And if it's true that vision precedes love, she attracts still with the thrumming excitatory star-pulse of every boy-man. Myself included. It becomes decidedly clearer as I proceed.

"And so my lady said: 'Show forth the heat
  Of your desire..."

I've done nothing but show it. Stupid ingratitude is all anyone'll get for this, of course. As the girl with orange-red hair used to pose in cemeteries and had left everything behind in a desert town, so goes the journey of the poet devotee where Marilyn's the fatally delectable object. I recall her saying once, The heart turns against you, down to its goodly pit. So what if my guide had died excommunicate, clutching her pillow, face to the phone. The soft light of her pillow...

"But none the less, all lying set aside"

So I can't turn back, not with that mirror and all the reflected eyes, smile and lips to spur me on, pointing to Hef's empty tomb. No saving Mary on earth could compare to that.


"The rest of the blessed who appeared content
  At first to form a lily on the 'M'"

Yes, 'M' for  Marilyn, fifty years later. Which is as far as I've gotten with my puny eagle song.