SIMPLE HISTORY OF HENRY

In the 1960s I started writing poetry, & liked the NY School poets a lot.

In the 1970s I had religious experiences & long wild wanderings & played a lot of music.

In the late 70s & early 80s I did community organizing & started ever-so-slowly getting back into poetry. I wrote very short, cautious, spacy, inhibited, somewhat imitative poems. I was in love with Osip Mandelstam & his wife, his poetry, their story.

In the 1980s I got more involved with other poets, like Edwin Honig & others in the RI area, & John Tagliabue, my then-father-in-law, who was (& is) a very enthusiastic writer, reciter, & interpreter of poetry. I read more widely, working to try to expand my range. I got interested in the long poem as a way of bringing in more things. I got very interested in Eugenio Montale's & Hart Crane's poetry.

In the late 80s & early 90s I started writing longer poems - influenced by Montale, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Crane, Pound, Olson, Williams, & of course Mandelstam. I wrote several of these long extended poems, & also experimented with traditional forms.

In the late 80s & 90s I helped edit a literary magazine, Nedge, and was quite active in organizing readings at local galleries, coffee shops, etc. under the auspices of a nonprofit group called the Poetry Mission.

Also in the 90s I spent a ton of time co-editing a big anthology in honor of Edwin Honig, titled A Glass of Green Tea - With Honig, which came out very well (still available from Fordham Univ. Press). Also succeeded in getting Honig's Collected poems edited & published after years of work (Time & Again, available from XLibris). This is something I am proud of.

In the late 90s I wrote Island Road, a sonnet sequence, where for the first time I felt I was integrating something of my very early fascination with the NY School & my interest in Shakespeare's sonnets.

In the very late 90s I started writing my 3rd or 4th very long poem, which ended up being almost a 1000 pp long, called Forth of July. Some of it was published as Stubborn Grew; the sequels were self-published.

Also in the late 90s I got involved with discussions & controversies on the Buffalo Poetics internet list. I started turning my sense of dislocation with the prevailing modes of experimental poetry into a kind of polemic.

These polemics often drove me to a dialectical position-taking which was somewhat extreme, so that I began defending the notion of the poet's absolute independence from collectivities or social influences.

However, my deepest commitment goes to the notion that art is a means by which the imagination builds models of social relations and communities. I get the feeling that the source of my difficulties with the "experimental" community is twofold: first of all, I do not share the notion that avant-garde art and left-wing politics are simply 2 halves of a positive "progressive" phenomenon; secondly, I think perhaps I simply "hear" poetry - the poetry of the past & the near-present - in a different way; as something that has to be fully absorbed & appreciated before it can ever be tweaked, twisted, parodied or displaced. These two sources of my "difference" probably mean only one thing : I am simply more conservative than the poets whose milieu I attempt to invade.