Literary phenomena & succession of time-periods. "Who shall have the succession?" (Cantos)

Trying to explain a worldview which emits Stubborn Grew & its sequels, so you might get into it more.

Having Maximus & "A" & Gunslinger before me, and Mandelstam & The Bridge & Ulysses & Finnegans Wake & Cantos & Paterson before me too, slightly further back, and Melville & Dickinson & Whitman a little further back, & Dante & Milton & Homer & Virgil & Ovid & Shakespeare & Bible further further back... not seeing them as "challenges" but simply as absorbing-authentic literary models of reality & totality.

seeing how each new work of necessity "blocks the view" of previous books & simultaneously stands in their shadows. Harold Bloom turns this into a psycho-melodrama-tragicomedy, but in my experience it's more a question of shades of taste... thus I feel what's missing from the style of Olson, say, when I sense the presence, still there, of something earlier & better (stronger, richer, deeper), & yet also see how Olson felt history differently than did some of his overweening or over-confident predecessors...

Anyway, the picture of people and the city & history that I try to present in Stubborn Grew, or the wild directions the poem takes after that, should be recognized as written in the light still emanating from these other books. So for example in the latter half of Stubborn you can recognize when the aegis of the Cantos shifts over to the aegis of Finnegans Wake, and why that might be happening, based on the recognitions undergone by the narrator-protagonist. & these "aegiae"[?] are forms of acknowledgement & also opposing arguments (theirs & my own) about "reality" as I feel it emanating from these writers - Crane & Mandelstam & Vallejo & Pushkin & Shvarts et al. coming forward as kinds of framing "style-testimonies" - some of these writers' influences more pervasive than others'. My own poem's capaciousness having certain architectonic nodes where its own arguments are marked & underlined, in its own strange way.

I still think I found a sort of unusual door through the long poem. It's been hard for me to write poetry at all since then, for the last 2-3 years, but I have hopes for Dove Street as a possibly authentic outgrowth, if I can keep focused (while other projects are underway).