PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

 those little flashes are of:  those little flashes are of your brilliance, that run deep in those of us who allow ourselves to feel, think, and remember. Nicely done Stephen. 

love it! this would be: love it! this would be awesome in any church!

While I do not like to think: While I do not like to think of the Muse every facing demise, I very much like the phrases in your poem, especially the sixth line.

Your excellence in this: Your excellence in this format, and the endless variety of the phrases you deploy, never fail to amaze me.

I wanted to revisit this poem: I wanted to revisit this poem because it is the first of your poems that I ever read---back on January 21 of 2020.  At that time, I was still in the convalescent facility, so unsure of the immediate present and the immediate future.  I knew, even at that earliest date of beginning to read your poetry, that there was a greatness to your work, a consistency as mathematically precise and elegant as planetary orbits---a greatness that, in its demonstration in your poems, allowed me to see something I had never expected in this life to see:  the assembling, poem by poem, of a body of work so full of life, as well as a cosmic grandeur.  I was reminded then, as now, of a compilation of essays and reviews of Wallace Srevens' poetry which, although it was brought out some years after his passing, it gathered up some of the earliest written responses to his work.  As one proceeded chronologically through the book, the essays became both longer and more detailed as Stevens' own greatness unfolded across the pssage of time.  As an awkward, callow, and highly inexperienced undergrad---with no more maturity than a kid in middle school---I was very frustrated that I could only read these as historical texts, rather than as new responses to the publications of the inidividual poems and collections across the range of Stevens' writing career.  I began reading him in autumn of 1978, but he had passed away in 1955.  I did not then realize that the processes I had studied in regard to deceased poets (Vergil, Eliot, and Pop Stevens) were like  practices in a laboratory in order to learn what to look for, what to appreciate, and how to link up the various poems.  (At the same time, I had also read an essay by Diane Wakoski---I forget which of her poetry books it prefaced---that suggested a knowledge of the internal links between poems was absolutely necessary to a full appreciation of those poems; and she used Stevens' work, also, as her example.)This waa the kind of reaiding that occupied my attention from the mid-seventies through the entire eighties.  It seemed random at time, inchoate and chaotic; some that, eventually, I indulged only as a comfortable and comforting habit (especially as my first marriage was collapsing).  I did not realize that I was being prepared for the early weeks of 2020, and my personal discovery of your magnificent work.     Like those early responses to Stevens' earliest poems, my comments were briefer than they have lately been because I was not yet as familiar with your Poetry as I wanted to be.  I had never encountered a Poet like you on PostPoems; either prior to 2020 or since.  The unique quality of your poems was already apparent, although I was not able to articulate it in the way that I wanted . . . yet.  But, as you continued to expand the significance of your poetic vision, my comments also began to expand---because, with each successive poem, there was more to see not just in the new poem, but in all the poems that had preceded it, because each new poem is a different perspective on all of the poems that have come before it.  Your customary line lenghts are slyly and very skillfully deceptive in a literary way:  they are brief, delicately contoured, and vivacious . . . they provide your poems with a brisk pace.  Yet, these delicate lines also, in their accumulation across all the poems, have formed a massive center of gravity that creates paradoxes:  slender in the individual poem, but massive in the accumulation of the entire collection; welcoming, but uncompromising in the presentation of your vision; inviting but always, always, accommodating but never subservient or subkissive.  Since early 2020, I have never waivered in my belief that your poems will someday be studied academically by persons far more scholarly than me (and, also, I will not likely be around to see that happen).  Because they will see more of your total poetic edifice, and eventually all of it, their interpretations will be far more profound than I can produce here.  And, following a pattern I saw so often in my collegiate reading, they will swerve away---sometimes radicsally---from early interpreters including me.  The French poet and diplomat, Paul Claudel, once compared himself and his poetry to a signpost that pointed readers to the right path---a signpost that, in his words, could easily be forgotten once the proper directions toward the goal were established.    In my comments here, I am very content to be a signpost that, later, some student, writing his or her term paper about your work, might fine useful, and might even give a footnote; but ultimately, the conclusions those readers will arrive at are---I admit, somewhat ruefully---not available to me now, because your work as a Poet is not done . . . nowhere near being done.  Now matter how accomplished your Poetry is right now, its task is not finished in any way,  And if I may close with an astronomical simile, most of us here are like backyward astronomers who stay up late on weekend  nights, or nights before holidays, with our telescope set up on the back lawn where we can get that very unusual glimpse of the moon.  But your Poetry is like the JWT---and the vastness of the gaxe it can accomplish means there will be a lot more forthcoming.  A whole lot more.

the everending cycle of human: the everending cycle of human repetition.  The more original we think we are, the less original we actually are.