explanation

I felt, as of late, the strongest urge to run away from abstraction. One element in this was the chance purchase of a slim volume of poetry called "In What Disappears" by John Brandi. It's made with sheer and gorgeous imagery that is so ghostly it's barely on the page; as close as one gets to a poetry of pure experience. Another perhaps was my recent exposure to the anime Mushi-shi. Yet another was a moment when, driving through Chestnut Ridge state park at sunset, I saw, for an instant, a clearing in the trees and an avenue of perfect illumination. And still another has been my recent perusal of a book called "Era and Mode in English Poetry," which defines styles and eras through the empirically measurable mode, i.e. the relationships of substantives (nouns and adjectives) to prepositions, as well as the degree of abstraction in the terms involved. The poetry of Shakespeare, all skulls and flowers and apples, or of a Neruda, a Pound, or a Whitman, is very much in this vein. She opposes it with the metaphysics of poets like Dunne and the classicist movement which is exemplified by Dryden. There are all sorts of strange and twisting links in this scheme, with Lorca hearkening back to the old balladeers (something which to me is about as counterintuitive as it gets), and it forces one to reevaluate not just the poets that are ideals and influences, but also one's own poetry.

So, the last few days have been atmospheric and colored with strange light. I had almost forgot the pure sensation of Joy, of transport through and beyond the heart of visible things. My poetry had been getting too philosophical; even though I've always been married to symbol, image, and the particular, I had become too obsessed with my search to pin down and identify substance, being, and sensation; or in lieu of that, to render the terms 'being', 'substance', and 'sensation' meaningless. I had been falling over myself; I had been straining a gnat and swallowing a camel.

And so I suspended work on my poems dealing with Alexia and Kadir and my little nascent mythology, and also my sequence of bird poems, which were intended to explore meaning and consciousness while dressed in the mantle of homage to simple pastoral poetry, to Robbie Burns and Emerson and Keats. I stopped my work on these and started writing my previously posted autumn night poems, as well as a few others which have some of the same emotional texture, but which I haven't decided to post. I may not; although the one which conflates Christ imagery with a bloody, dusty sunrise I've taken a particular fancy to.

We'll see. We'll see.