Once you acknowledge the presence of past poetry, you are at the beginning of a different road, where your own poetry starts to reflect the poems of the past, in echo & revision & reversal & expansion. What is permanent in experience is refracted through new lenses, a new time, new faith or new disillusionment. What is made permanent in poetry through re-invention begins to reflect, as in the dual lenses of a telescope, what is permanent in experience & nature. The perennial return of poetic themes becomes the shadow of the perennial concerns of life itself.

Maybe an answer to the excessive familiarity, and the familiar excess, of poetry, is this kind of metapoetry, oriented by echo & response to the distant foci of deep time.