1.31.2003

There is a "Biblical" way of thinking about this poetic notion: fulfillment of the Scriptures. "Before Abraham was, I am." One theory about why Jesus was said to be from Nazareth or a "Nazarene", holds that he was a "nazir", or nasr - which could mean both a member of a special sect set aside for holiness (called the nazirites), or a poet, a singer. "The Kingdom of Heaven is in your midst"; "the Kingdom of Heaven has come upon you" - what a Blakean-poetic way of speaking! The Now. I don't want to reduce or exalt Jesus to poet-status though - that would be a big mistake. Only to say perhaps that there is a teleology inherent in poetic language use, tending toward immediacy, the event now, the living presence, the embodied word.

I have played around with this in my poetry, both in Stubborn Grew and its sequels, & in the sonnet sequence Island Road: the notion of "making" the literary name of "Henry," in various places (Shakespeare, Dante, & esp. John Berryman). The notion of embodying, fulfilling the "Henry" scriptures.

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