I can never sleep nights after driving between North Carolina and Maryland in either direction — the next day is always a loss unless there's some mindless, preferably physical work to do or, even better, kisses. Of course there's none of the latter in Maryland, and so it takes longer to recover. Plans those days are worse than useless, as they only serve to remind of what I should have done.
This week, just as I retrieve my brain from the back seat of the car where it's been hiding, I'm off to Yuma, Arizona, and won't be back till late Saturday. I'm flying, at least, and there's a WiFi network at he hotel, so maybe I'll be able to work on Sonnetarium (or even better, sonnets). But in case it's next Tuesday before I'm moderately functional again and can actually write about Creeley, Paglia, Williams, and accessibility, here are two quotes and some brief disorderly propositions:
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"His interest in religion … resulted in a feeling for the mystery of the universe that surrounded him almost like a fog. He saw physics clearly … but at the border he tended to feel that there was much more of the mysterious and the novel than there actually was. He was insufficiently confident of the power of the intellectual tools he already possessed and did not drive his thought to the very end." ( I.I. Rabi on J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted by James Gleick from American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin).
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"The position of an evolutionist in the literary theory establishment today is rather like that of a Copernican speaking to medieval astronomer-theologians, whose wheels-within-wheels arguments about the nature of the cosmos have become ever more convoluted and specious." (Ellen Dissanayake in Philosophy and Literature 20.1 [1996], reviewing John Carroll's Evolution and Literary Theory— access through Project Muse)
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The world is given to us, in the sense that it is the ground of all our action.
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Language, in exactly the same way as seeing and bipedal walking, is an evolved trait of our species which embodies and serves to develop our relationship to that given world.
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Our principle understanding of the world is through narrative and metaphor. Far from being problems, they are the tools we have evolved to navigate the most complicated and pertinent parts of that given world: other people. If they were not very good tools we'd not be here.
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I write poems in the hope that I can fruitfully participate in a conversation which began long before my birth and will, if the creek don't rise, continue long after I am dead.
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The great theme of that conversation is how we should live with one another in the world.
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Meter and rhyme are neither constraints on that conversation nor aids to invention, but rather tools to make our words more memorable and affective, and therefore more effective.
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Surface difficulty is an issue only if there is too little beneath the surface to justify the effort of discovering what's there.
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If you've got nothing to say about the world and how we live with one another in it, no one will listen or read for very long.
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There's a lot to say.
8:04:49 PM 
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