This is wonderful stuff! It was said of Ezra Pound that he was a one-man university. But you are even more than that. You are a complete education! I always look forward to reading you with pleasure.
The secret lives that people live in order to make enough money to do the thing they love really amaze me. It is my belief that poets who have a calling - perhaps a specific calling from the Muse - must find a way of doing what they came here to do, or else they will be incarnated again in orderto do exactly that, but with even more difficulty the next time.
When I was in college I worked four to midnight at a state mental hospital. My patients were not society belles addicted to barbiturates and amphetamines. They came from one of the poorest, most crime laden parts of the city, and they made their way through the system with an irreducible residue of violence. Treatment was high doses of psychological drugs supplemented by an abundance of physical and sexual abuse. A psychiatrist visited the ward once a month to write new medication orders.
Since those nights among dislodged and displaced souls I've ofren thought about poets, poetry and the divine madness.
St. Jerome tells us that Lucretius went mad and died from an overdose of an aphrodisiac. Tennyson wrote a poem about it, although his In Memoriam strikes me as a trove of psychic disturbance. I am fond of a nineteenth century Greek teacher. Sonneteer and transendentalist named Jones Very, who was forced to step down from his position at Harvard because of his close communications with Jesus Christ.
Of course Mr. Very was in the company of similar minded writers: Coleridge, a drug addict, John Clare, Gerard de Nerval, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Dowson, Ivor Gurney, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roerhke, Dylan Thomas, etc. The ancient conflicts between poets and their gods seem to have been modernized into drug addiction, syphilitic insanity, alcoholism, and the cultivation of alienation and derangement.
Not guilty on any of these counts. I was just exceptionally sane.
Some of the nicest and sanest people I have ever met were the other patients. One of them, with whom I was particularly close, later committed suicide. I have recently written a sonnet commemorating his death.
When I saw this poem first I thought it was quite special, so I put it aside in order to read it properly. Now that I've done so, I think it's outstanding. You are right to value it so highly.
This is wonderful stuff! It was said of Ezra Pound that he was a one-man university. But you are even more than that. You are a complete education! I always look forward to reading you with pleasure.
Yes, if I were younger I'd be eminently qualified to drive a taxi in NYC.
The secret lives that people live in order to make enough money to do the thing they love really amaze me. It is my belief that poets who have a calling - perhaps a specific calling from the Muse - must find a way of doing what they came here to do, or else they will be incarnated again in orderto do exactly that, but with even more difficulty the next time.
I got so desperate I was prepared to go to prison. Instead they put me in a looney bin. For the first sane act in my life!
I only feel authentic when I'm writing or when I'm arguing. And I wasn't prepared to carry on living a totally false life.
When I was in college I worked four to midnight at a state mental hospital. My patients were not society belles addicted to barbiturates and amphetamines. They came from one of the poorest, most crime laden parts of the city, and they made their way through the system with an irreducible residue of violence. Treatment was high doses of psychological drugs supplemented by an abundance of physical and sexual abuse. A psychiatrist visited the ward once a month to write new medication orders.
Since those nights among dislodged and displaced souls I've ofren thought about poets, poetry and the divine madness.
St. Jerome tells us that Lucretius went mad and died from an overdose of an aphrodisiac. Tennyson wrote a poem about it, although his In Memoriam strikes me as a trove of psychic disturbance. I am fond of a nineteenth century Greek teacher. Sonneteer and transendentalist named Jones Very, who was forced to step down from his position at Harvard because of his close communications with Jesus Christ.
Of course Mr. Very was in the company of similar minded writers: Coleridge, a drug addict, John Clare, Gerard de Nerval, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Dowson, Ivor Gurney, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roerhke, Dylan Thomas, etc. The ancient conflicts between poets and their gods seem to have been modernized into drug addiction, syphilitic insanity, alcoholism, and the cultivation of alienation and derangement.
Not guilty on any of these counts. I was just exceptionally sane.
Some of the nicest and sanest people I have ever met were the other patients. One of them, with whom I was particularly close, later committed suicide. I have recently written a sonnet commemorating his death.
Yes, I agree, John. Reading this masterpiece was a great pleasure indeed.
When I saw this poem first I thought it was quite special, so I put it aside in order to read it properly. Now that I've done so, I think it's outstanding. You are right to value it so highly.