Description
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 Gould
Author Bio
Henry Gould, a Minneapolis native, returned to Minnesota in 2015 after 45 years in Rhode Island. His poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in journals such as DiVersos, Poetry, Rain Taxi, Jacket, Notre Dame Review, West Branch, Boston Review, Mudlark, and Critical Flame. Three books have been published: STONE (Copper Beech Press, 1979), Stubborn Grew (Spuyten Duyvil, 2000), and RAVENNA DIAGRAM I-III (Dos Madres, 2018-2020). For 10 years he co-edited (with Janet Sullivan) the Rhode Island literary magazine Nedge. He also edited and published the collected poems of poet and translator Edwin Honig (Time & Again: Poems 1940- 1997).
Author City: MINNEAPOLIS, MN USA