Have been reading Wallace Stevens lately, along with Leggett book previously mentioned (Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory). Also re-reading Hamlet's Mill (Santillana and Dechend), the terrific, crotchety essay on very ancient astronomy & archaic myth. Actually, the last 2 poems I've written (& posted here) reminded me of this book (rather than the other way around). (Some of the "deep-dive" adventures in the latter portion of Forth of July drew extensively on this material.)

Thinking a lot about some of Stevens' obsessions - the symbiosis of imagination & reality, the nature of the human myth-making capacity and its relation to religious belief. Pondering the "culture war" with fundamentalist Islam, & our own homegrown fundamentalisms.

Hamlet's Mill is fascinating by way of the window it opens on culture's deep past, exploring how star-reading was really the first form of literacy, and how myths are not merely projections of human relations, but attempts to comprehend real time measurements, and the meaning of time itself, through long & close observation of constellation/planetary movements. Of course now we understand that the ancient notion of movement was kind of an artificial planetarium (the earth as fixed plane around which stars revolved), but this doesn't diminish the incredible complexity & specificity with which ancient cultures tracked the stars.

I'm finding this archaic science of interest (as you can tell from those 2 poems), 1) because it was a global phenomenon, found in folklore of many many cultures, 2) it provides an interesting way to get behind or beneath mythological-imaginative projections & narratives, the rituals by means of which different cultures identify themselves, and 3) because star-gazing & myth-making were part of the traditional "serious" poet's vocation.

I used the sort of ballad-form refrain style in these 2 poems, not because I felt like imitating Yeats or Villon, but because, basically, it can be effective, I think.