Unable to write for the past couple of weeks, after an enthusiastic spell before that. Maybe, at my advanced age, I'm starting to become slightly conscious of my own creative patterns(?). Early enthusiasm, followed by spate of disillusionment & boredom with my plainness, obviousness, my prosaic style. Some of the more formalist poems in Way Stations came out of similar periods of enthusiasm (technical tours-de-force).

The strong interest in Mandelstam & Montale, especially, for their hermetic qualities: the inward curve of the imagery, the self-sustaining roundedness, the indirection.

The strong interest in long poems for their "learned" qualities: the way an arcane or highly-involved subject-matter folds the poetry into its own sphere of indirections.

So maybe these two interests arose partly out of desire to compensate for my own ordinariness. (I guess I'll just have to quit being ordinary!)

OK, enough confession. "Unable to write," I'm going back to writing...