Second thought about epic judgements of previous day. Pound's "failing" method still let in more texture of reality, its violence & alienation, the feel of a speechless powerless person, anonymous. In the interstices between his arrogance & bigotry. In this Olson was history repeating itself with even less (more) success, perhaps.

Still. . . what does form provide? The mistake of the 20th cent. poets was to think that it is functional, in an obvious way. What form provides is distance. Form humbles the poet, or should.

Too many poets trust words & themselves too much - the blather & overreaching comes across as complacency, shallow. Words, words, words. Form provides distance & silence. The song does more with what it doesn't say. We are moved by the mortality & closure of the song, its limits. It's finished. We identify deeply with that.

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One of my favorite writers is Alfred Schwaid, whom I would never have discovered on my own: he sent some stories to Nedge. I published everything he sent. He writes very short stories. They remind me of Kafka & Beckett but are also completely unique. His only collection, that I know of, is a chapbook called "Everything Else is Everything Else", published in Austin Texas in 1994 by Experimental Chapbook Press.