(... & inevitably, when I look back at my own development in poetry over 30 years, I witness the acting-out of these principles: from early attraction to & imitation of the NY School poets, to absorption (to the point of psychological breakdown) with Shakespeare's sonnets, to complete immersion in the language of the Bible, to a return to poetry-making through the unpredictable influence of Mandelstam (leading, after a long time, to the "literary encounter" with Elena Shvarts), to the long-drawn-out exploration of modernist poetry & the long poem, to the recurrent return to Mandelstam as to a first principle of inspiration. Glazov-Corrigan [p. 146]:

"We can now begin to see why Mandelshtam speaks about Dante's writing as a 'bird's mating call', a fife. 'The fife is nearly always sent forth to scout ahead.' Dante's poetry does not transmit a message: it awakens, stretches out, and develops a response. It is a generative principle of literature.... the poem awakens into writing a generation of writers to come. It precontains, as it were, its subsequent history: 'The miracle-ship left the shipyard with barnacles adhering to its hull.'")