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JH: Yes, I find psychological territory very interesting - home of a creator that sometimes creates, and sometimes writes alongside, the poet (or indeed, anyone). I consistently think of myself as a poet, no doubt because it is an honorific! Speaking of poets, I really admire your latest poem "chump change directory":


dear logical popcorn,

what's up with turning the tooth over the free bast mundane? did you clear the evergreen from the highway? and what's up with stone bob, when you are fraught with ocean? what's up with saying, hey, camera, the breaks of owning? what's up with tidal glop on my seasonal diorama? puh-lease! what's up with sped when you could've loped? what's the matter with Cambridge that what's up seems like a carousal? what's up when the dental freeing stoops over lambasted tendencies? whose fortresses exactly seem glum when the document includes 'what's up'? go for detergent while you still have time, my dearest logical popcorn. I'm caught in framework.


Could you say a few words about this poem? It strikes me as being anaphoric strictly y coincidence, like a cloud looking like a camel. The words "logical popcorn" made me think of "logical positivism". The concluding line is great - the answer to "what's up" lying outside the framework the narrator occupies, with the penultimate line suggesting that logical popcorn is possibly able to get the answers while going going outside the framework?) for detergent.

AHB: the poem is an epistle, a form I use periodically. I find such an address easy, so I try not to use it too often. I like the curious direction of such a poem. I can't recall the poem's initial impetus, but the what's up line rang in my head. these poems are always written quickly, with the perspective of discovery. the idea that something exists outside the framework of the narrator, and the reader perhaps, seems to be a condition of these poems. But enough about me. Perhaps yoiu recognize this poem (exhibit A). It was posited ot Wryting-L on the evening of October 31 (EST), Halloween.

Hears Wasted on the Hears You Smoothened

long phantoms on short nights, thine prayers have mine as full heirs your destined woe shaken-out unveiled portions your destiner must've ordered http://www.ncf.ca/~ek867/annaakhmatova.jpg
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve: the break of day severs limbs and portions that were caught inside the daylight minute when spectres vanish at break of day these limbs and portions become people (you & me) alive in the daylight there have been no true births in many years I, the author of this portion (words), am working on naming the portion of time when no true births first started happening (circa U.S. Civil War, 1861 - 65)

* * * * *

the last 3 lines are thunderous to me. I'm currently involved in a study of the active imagination, and the idea of an era when no true births started happening makes me think of the modernist era. By modernism I mean from the effing Industrial Revolution (Blake's World) to the present day. I'm rereading HD's Tribute to Freud, which reveals her energy in rediscovering a more elemental world. Your poem seems of that nature. You often cite artists and their work in your work. To be honest, I have never read Sainte-Beuve, don't even have much of an impression of him. How does he effect the poem? And the image you include, I don't know that work from nuthin', either. Which is not to say I can't get something from the poem. How do these tributaries serve the poem, if tributaries they be? Was the poem built on something Sainte-Beuve wrote or on the visual image?