Investigativeness in Stubborn Grew:

you could argue it's not there.

the poem relates quite a lot of local history. it moves from "lyric I" notations at the beginning, to a third-person fiction about "Henry & Bluejay", to a mock-epic disintegration of Poundian poetics (the latter half of the book narrating an epic journey over the space of about 10 blocks in Providence as taking place in the mind of the narrator at a coffee shop in Fox Point).

But the "investigative" or reportorial is wrapped in layers of the "literary" and shaped by a geometry of person-as-microcosm, stumbling & falling (from Wm Blackstone, the 1st settler, to Henry; from Christmas to Good Friday).

Layers of literary, like "Shakespeare's Head" (the building in Prov. where the history begins - but also Shakespeare's microcosmic globe, thematized in the 2nd chapter's trip to London - "I think he will carry this island home in his pocket & give it to his son for an apple"). Or like the Orpheus myth & Dante's Inferno retold through a NW Coast Indian journey-to-the-dead tale ("Bluejay"). Or the fact that the 2nd half of Stubborn is bracketed by parodies of Pound & Joyce respectively (in the Pound section, American & RI history are viewed through the lens of Ignatius Donnelly - populist politician, Shakespeare cryptographer, Atlantis theorist - Pound-Donnelly's "Atlantis" tying back into another literary frame for the poem's overall style, Hart Crane).

But few in the "post-avant" community seem interested in my literary strategies, or a perspective on history which colors it with fiction and local context, rather than with irony-via-juxtaposition, the prevalent collage technique. This technique is what I parodied in the Ig. Donnelly section of Stubborn - historico-political snippets & fragments, framed through the bifocals of a populist Shakespeare/Atlantis crackpot, set into rhymed quatrains.