Poetry is a resurrection game, an art of giving life to dead letters & blank pages. And of bringing the "mana" of past poetry and a past time back to life in the present. I was impressed by Philip Guston's assertion, at the height of abstract expressionism, that painting is an "impure art", that we live in images and are "ridden" by them. & also by the ways he continually re-worked & re-encountered both his Old Masters (Uccello, Piero della Francesca), and his own early imagery, & that of his contemporaries (Max Beckmann, Krazy Kat...).

The question of an innate American "disruptiveness" (opposition, resistance), which Gary & Josh have been discussing, should maybe be looked at in the context of a more fundamental dialogic principle, rooted in this encounter with the creative emblems of another, earlier time & place. When a poet brings artistic "resolution" to his or her own time - within their poetry - this achievement sets up a dynamic of echo/response in the present, for poets now.