HGpoetics was begun last January. Life somewhat in transition (for me) means in 2004 I may not be babbling on here so much. May be leaving the library, at least temporarily, to work on a different project.

So I am already focused on those changes, & have not been writing much poetry either. & Poe-tree is something that has to be fed & watered (though I think sometimes, for some people, it's good to let it go for a while).

Me 51 years old. I've gabbed at length here about my poems & opinions, but it struck me today how I haven't actually been able to relate or describe the essential oddity of it all (or maybe I have). or conveyed what may be called the meanings of that oddness & outness.

There once was a poem I wrote called "Chant Royal", which included these lines:

         Now wholly lost, feet wandered where they would
 on past imperial esplanades and palaces
 down alleyways into the poorest neighborhood
 where whitened maps and broken compasses
 lay scattered through immeasurable garbage heaps.
 There a translucent, anonymous rabbi sleeps.
 Almost invisible, a shadow form.
 He sleeps (eternally turning in his dream).
 I enter there.  In costume – as a clown.
 He frowns. . . as though enduring a minor storm.
 And that shell of a man was wearing a golden crown.

"I enter there. In costume - as a clown."

That line pretty much says it all.

If I try to think in the 3rd person about HG & his interaction with the world of "literature", the first thing I think of is my crisis in 1973, when somehow manicness & the ghost of Shakespeare & the Sonnets & the Bible & violence & dying & rebirth altogether took me by the scruff of the neck & practically shook the life out of me.

That was the gate, the pivot of everything. I was already well on my way to being a Young Literatus when it happened : had been writing poems since age 14 or so. But that experience changed my orientation completely, and its reverberations are with me continually. Since then I've always had the sense of coming at it (poetry, literature) from a somewhat different region or state of mind. It can be given a psychoanalytic spin, for sure; but I am guessing its "meaning" is mostly literary (what I mean, it's "explanation" might be drawn directly from a "theory" of what literature, writing, is in the world).

The Clown who juggles tradition through the hoop of a charismatic-liminal event - throwing "the Bible & Shakespeare" onto a somewhat uncanny anachronistic comic (absurd) stage, & thereby oddly working up another rendition of "tradition" - that's the literary Person you see/hear before you through these harangues, salvos, poems immense & minute, jags & dronings of the last year.