Circles (A BOOK OF OURS Commentary, Jeffrey Robinson)

Circles

“Circularity, a figure for wholeness, also connotes boundedness.  Recursiveness can mark a sense of deprivation fostered by failed advance, a sense of alarm and insufficiency pacing a dark, even desperate measure, but this dark accent or inflection issues from a large appetite or even a utopic appetite” (Nathaniel Mackey).

The calendrical origin of A Book of Ours draws us back to the archetype of circle and cycle; positively and negatively intertwined, signifying hopeless repetition and also renewal, or repetition as transformation:

And the CIRCLE

Of homelessness itself (March)

Rough sleep. SHELTER. Outside once more (April)

Pregnant, homeless, skeletal, autumn. Reunited

Don’t get yourself lost in circles

Wheels on fire, rolling down the road (October)

At the same time, the poet sings: “We are satellites stars surround us,” as do the seasons that give comfort, excitement, rest, and renewal, all marked in the book itself.  A great act of imagination and artistic imagination bring the makers from circles of despair caused by the circle of homelessness itself to at least a vision of belonging to the cosmic cycle; note the mysterious juxtapositions in “Pregnant, homeless, skeletal, autumn. Reunited” that propose one’s belonging to both versions of the circle at once.

When the sun coming up

The golden cogs of the clock.

Usually representing the most mechanical, intractable of circularities, here the cogs belong to the generative source of the sun.  The second line has been snatched from Lawrence’s poem and song, being made to live again in a new context.  “Round”ness becomes support and even transformation: “the seasons bring us round again.”  In the midst of the cycle of an expression of malign and indifferent forces controlling one’s subsistence emerges the will and the vision: “you can TURN things around better.  The following calendrical lines from October, each line composed by a different person, are heart-rending; they convert private pain into a vision of cosmic coherence:

You broke it all. Start again

Please don’t punish me again, God.

My being belongs to the elements.

The first line re-evaluates brokenness because after the full stop is a petition for new beginning.  In the fatalistic imagery of circles, “broke” layers personal failure with a consciousness of the interruption of failure’s grim cycle.  To start again is to renew a cycle but now on one’s own terms.  The “again” in the second line, addressed imploringly to God, is a brief prayer against resignation and helplessness and pain, but invoking the divinity, it at least reaches beyond the immediacy of one’s material existence as perhaps a point of self-recognition.  The centrality of the cosmos in A Book of Ours indicates the TURN towards that realignment: “we are satellites. Stars surround us.”  Or, as it is declared here: “My being belongs to the elements,” recalling Wordsworth’s “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees.”  The vulnerability of the homeless to death, its constant intrusion, its immediacy, in their daily consciousness (“Death rushes into the church”), now becomes part of a larger natural and spiritual cycle.

Go through the rigmarole

Mess it up, repeat your role

Break it up and start again

We are satellites, stars surround us

We are satellites, we’ll find a new course.

(“Satellites”, from A Book of Ours song cycle)

In the tradition of annotating illuminated manuscripts, a trusted scholar was invited to write the Commentary for A Book of Ours. Professor Jeffrey C. Robinson's recent work includes: Wordsworth Day by Day: Reading His Work into Poetry Now (2005); a paperback edition of The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image (2006); Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism (2006), co-edited with Jerome Rothenberg Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three; The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry (2009); Untam'd Wing: Riffs on Romantic Poetry (poems) (2010); Active Romanticism: The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice, ed. with Julie Carr (2015); Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825-1833: Fibres of These Thoughts (2019). He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow.

THE MAKING: A BOOK OF OURS

HEAR:  songs, recitations and chants

ABOVE:

From Book of Changes chapter, A BOOK OF OURS

Photograph Lois Blackburn

Detail of December, Calendar, A BOOK OF OURS

Photograph Philip Davenport

A BOOK OF OURS was exhibited at Bury Art Museum May-July 2021, then Manchester Cathedral Oct 2021-March 2022, after which it went permanently into the collection at John Rylands Library, where it can now be viewed. It is the final project by arthur+martha CIC.