Often these blogs give the illusion (or the reality?) of the blogger's constant, steady, cultured attention to poetry and the sister arts. My own relation to it over the last 40 years is best characterized as intermittent, hesitant, borderline, tentative, & most of all, varied. I've gone for years doing other things (such as the time I floated a raft down the Yangtzee River while reciting Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, in Mandarin, while shooting carp with a Colt revolver in my sleep & polishing off 600 lbs of yogurt - while simultaneously completing my Phd. in Civil Engineering at Left Overbie Univ.(correspondence course). Those were the good years.). I've experienced awkward stages, slowly returning to poetry by obscure indirections.

I do think the creative effort is part of a search for wholeness, of singleness of purpose & vision. The stereotype of the casual, cool artist, absorbing experience through subconscious osmosis, simplifies a more complex situation, in which the creative person is stimulated or maybe I should say guided by paradoxical or unaccountable events.

When, in the mid-70s, I picked up an early translation of selected poems by Osip Mandelstam in College Hill Bookstore & decided to buy it & take it home & read it, I did something which had huge consequences for my own future (in poetry). But the emphasis should not be on the accidental or fortuitous aspect; rather it was a lucky find of a writer who offered me a sense of kinship on a purely literary plane (since it felt absolutely free: as a reader of Mandelstam at that time, I was under no necessity or exterior compulsion whatsoever).

& I still think that the really important aspect of my interest in Russian poets of a few generations ago is that it has no "logic" whatsoever in terms of literary history, or in terms of developing a reasonable historico-politico-literary perspective, or in terms of anyone's notion of "relevance", etc. . . its unreasonableness is the most valuable and authentic thing about it. I am sure fellow bloggists can recall analogous episodes in their own experience, which do not fit easily into any persuasive narrative or bildungsroman. (Not easily, anyway - but maybe, with diligence, such private, wayward (off-the-beaten) paths can be teased out.)