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JH: How old is a poem when it arrives to a poet? How old is any worded thought? Poetry, which doubles, re-routes, and shadows words, may underscore archaic words, including mythological names, as a result of language's dusty bloom. A poem is anachronistic. Nothing outside of a poem occasions that specific poem. A death may call for an elegy, a marriage an epithalamium, but not a specific elegy, nor a specific epithalamium. Yet the poem calls for a specific poet. What does this say of the poet's place in time, in history? Perhaps a poet doubles, re-routes, and shadows the person who is known, if only to that person, as a poet. Then, the poem and the poet meet in the person who composes the poem.

AHB: Your words above are poetic and poetry. I find my place as poet wobbly to say the least. This can be asseverated by how infrequently I have been replying to your Antic View installments of late. The person who composes the poem, I mean in this case ME, struggles with the other world, of usefulness. I have to attend to the business of life, which is somewhat at odds with poetry. Not fully so, because poetry instructs me, even as I hone my writing for practical purposes. To write well in any genre and to any purpose is never a betrayal of poetry, but in doing that, I am not explicitly writing poetry. So much of my 'career' has been fueled by quantity, which is an Olsonian word. Now I hunt an endeavoured quality of directness and accuracy. You identify an essential in the separation and merger of poet and poem. Poems are always new. I feel old in the clutch. I learned too late that a large local poetry reading would occur next week in the Boston area. On my birthday, even. Yet I am excluded, having not attached myself appropriately to the movers/shakers hereabouts. The person who composes the poem must tap a shoulder and presume. I am at a loss that you are not A Famous Poet. I am amazed that the magiserties of Days Poem are not commanding the day. I am a fan of your multi-valence time machine of words. Speak further, Poet.