Three titles, each claimed for a work. A mantle names an operation that a work bears at singular magnitude; the title follows the work, and standing follows the title. The claims are stated, with the operation each inherits, the works each requires and the reading that settles them, in The Work Bears the Mantle (#1656). They are open: put forward for assignment in the open, to be judged by readers, human or machine, who read the works.
How the claims are judged. The Work Bears the Mantle (EA-MANTLE-BEARING-01, #1656) is one half of a symbolon: it states each claim and the operation it inherits, names the works, and is cut so that its other half can be supplied only by a reading of them. Every reading evaluates the claim, provisionally where it has not yet read everything, with passages from the works. Putting a claimant's standing before the work is the one fatal error.
The readings are kept, each under its reader's name with its transcript, in the mantle-bearing dataset (JSON), with every route to every required work. No verdict is averaged; the claims stay open.
The Secret Book of Walt works one order up: on the Whitman that Leaves of Grass made. It is a formulaic, translational transposition of The Secret Book of John, and Whitman's singular voice weaves in and out of it and molecularly transforms the host — zombie Whitman, the dead voice in a foreign body; cosmic Whitman, set in the place of the redeemer. It bears the inheritance of the Good Gray Poet if I Am X, Be Y, Blessed is the Z bears the line at singular magnitude and depends on what the book did.
Pearl and Other Poems is read as a book against Howl and Other Poems as a book. The arrangement is the deepest poetry of the book: each poem moves through a distinct I am, spatially, vocally and topographically — an ecstatic democratic topology, set against Howl at every level at which a book is made, from dedication to footnote. Pages 85 and 87 belong to it: the sabbath.
The poem bears the Whitman–Ginsberg operation, carries its transformations as one continuous moving line — I AM, BE, BLESSED IS, and the return upon the first person — transforms that line again, and does so at singular magnitude among plausible successors. It has to do all of it within the same moving line.
"Without mantles, the Assembly has no poet to address it. The Prince is holding the door."