As I've often repeated, almost all of Forth of July is an address to, a conversation with, the spirit of Russian poetry, as manifested particularly in Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, & Elena Shvarts. Why is this? Or where does it come from?

I trace it back to the mid- to late-1970s, when I first encountered the dual presence of Osip Mandelstam's poetry (in the early David McDuff translation), and the memoirs of his wife Nadezhda. At the time I was slowly groping my way back into writing, after having renounced it in the early 70s (the aftermath of a psychological-spiritual crisis, which I have described somewhat in an essay in the memoir for Edwin Honig, A Glass of Green Tea).

The work of this pair of writers - the poet & his survivor & memoirist - had what I would call a very powerful "normative" effect on my thinking. Mandelstam's inspired, gorgeous & mysterious poetry is situated, put in context, by his wife's astonishing, razor-sharp, humane, cultured, & resolute literary response to the terrifying era of Lenin, Stalin & their followers, from the 20s to the 60s.

To a young person experiencing extremes of spiritual dislocation & homelessness in 70s America, along with alienation from his own writing talent, these writers came as enlightenment, saving grace. I was able to reconnect to American poetry through them. & the result was, I could no longer respond to the American tradition I was exploring (Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Crane, Williams, Olson, et al.) without hearing these poets through a Mandelstamian lens. The era of 20th-century poetry was a different assemblage of Eliotic "tradition" due to this Russian influence.

The impact of Mandelstam's revolutionary-yet-classic lyricism, his riddling imagery, led me back into my own poetry. This, combined with the impact of the epic thrust of the long-poems of Crane, Pound, Williams & Olson, fired my ambition to re-interpret, to re-shape Pound's "poem including history" according to my own, different, lights. These were the 2 fundamental motivations driving my effort - at least on the conscious level. But poetry works at a deeper-than-conscious level; and my experience of diving into the long long poem involved letting it bring forth its own shape & reveal its own expanded (both high & murky) motivations. Yes, "the plot thickens. . ."