Vardaman on Golgonooza

Golgonooza is R.Virgil Ellis and The Chamber Rock Ensemble’s latest venture into multi-media publication, following their recent CD, The Story of Andro (reviewed in Free Verse 91). A relatively short (25 min.), three-part DVD, Golgonooza pairs Ellis’s computer-altered photos of William Blake’s engravings from The Complete Illuminated Books with music from the Ensemble and Ellis’s characteristically tongue-in-cheek reading of his poem, “Golgonooza,” an adaptation of “Canto 7 The program of the scatter’d poem” from his unpublished work, The Tenting Cantos. The DVD also includes the Prologue to The Tenting Cantos, a long collage-epic in the tradition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. In the DVD’s “Introduction” to Golgonooza Ellis explains his over-arching program for The Tenting Cantos and talks about his use of Blake, from whose long poems Milton and Jerusalem Ellis borrows words and phrases, including the mysterious title: “Guide thou my hand which trembles exceedingly upon the rock of ages,/ While I write of the building of Golgonooza, & of the terrors of Entuthon”

(Jerusalem 5.23-24).

Blake, artist and writer, visionary and social critic, is himself the subject of “Golgonooza,” and just as the poem takes small, but recognizable bits of his text and spins out from there, so the DVD incorporates his paintings, first as recognizable pages, then as increasingly broken fragments that give way to scientific images, such as the solar system, the brain and cells; geometric forms like spheres, cylinders, and, significant to modern physics and cosmology, the torus; and geometric patterns that machines generate—e.g., frequencies and waves. Like Blake, Ellis sees the poet’s role as part prophet, part social critic:

Yet we’re all consciousness-bound

to flawed paradigms, limited models dictated admittedly

by the parameters of instrumented sense perceptions, but as defined by who?

As with Andro, the most compelling aspect of Golgonooza is Ellis’s musical poetry and his delivery of it. The beginning of “Golgonooza” strongly echoes Blake, but rearranges him, too—note especially the pun on ministry (as ministering or an administrative department):

The Eternal Great Humanity Divine

plants Paradise vegetating in Blake’s brain by the ministry of the Muses

who flow down the nerves of his right arm

and come into the Web of Life of his hand

Contrast this passage with similar but less ironic lines from Blake’s Invocation to the Muses at the beginning of Milton:

Come into my hand,

By your mild power descending down the nerves of my right arm

From out the portals of my Brain, where by your ministry

The Eternal Great Humanity Divine planted His Paradise,

Ellis’s playfully self-conscious sound structure is also a strength of the poem:

into the Hammer of Los, lofting at it with elation and cursing it

with bruises of lawful self-consciousness

and failure, cheap lapses into the soft sexual delusions of mournful

comic-ironic-fashionable-palatable-hip-lip-service

The “Hammer of Los” comes from Blake’s Milton; Ellis’s title The Tenting Cantos refers to this line: “The sky is an immortal tent built by the Sons of Los.” Los suggests loss, and sounds a note that builds through the passage with the words loft and law and lapse; note the similar transformation of the word plain into plane, plaint and pliant in line that follows: “breaking into the flood-plain odd-plane God-plain song-plain and plaint, pliant in ecstasy.”

A copy of the text is included with the DVD’s liner notes and is essential to appreciating the poem; you can also read the full Canto 7 on Ellis’s website. As always, Ellis’s impulse to synthesize difference is on display in Golgonooza: visual art/music/text; traditional/contemporary; east/west; science/art; academic/playful; ironic/serious; or as Golgonooza puts it, “the verbal non-verbal.”