Days of hectic. Yet must I drone, drone I must.

Reading about Sienese painting, history. Sounds abstruse? Not really. Democracy, civic values, religion, art, Black Death.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescos of Good/Bad Government in Palazzo Pubblico. Probably influence on Bruegel. Exploratory, panoramic improvisation.

Providence I am reading your local papers. Same issues - gov't overburdened with inertia, selfish interests, bureaucracy. Various levels & types of apartheid longstanding ("suburban golf protection racket" as Stubborn puts it). But hopeful civic efforts underway everywhere - creative projects of betterments.

Lorenzetti read Divina Commedia and was one of first - maybe the first pictor of Dante.

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Walking about today with fleeting quarter-thoughts in between work. Mild, muggy.

Stevens' Adagia - the ones where he holds "poetry" and "poetry of life" in each hand. Maybe no other way to apprehend it??

Poetry is a sense. Not words, really. We have to feel our way into it again, blindly - into the sense of it we had in our youth, man' decades ago.

I mean poetry in its psychological/experiential context. . . what am I saying? When you ponder the vast variety of human capabilities, personality bents, individual experiences - such ground the vast differences in taste, apprehension, appreciation, valuation. & often I think we literary leeches are the most blind - through jaded appetite. We no longer respond as we did, to a new world speaking to us from the page.

But my own argument here excludes the word "we" to some extent (talkin about myself, I guess). Nothing is determined or set in stone in this regard. We may again find ourselves caught up in a new literary charm, a new discovery, a new love.

Poetry is a sense. A sense of reality-as-poetry. A premonition.

I have a literary reputation as odd, eccentric. Also boring, conventional, traditionalist. Actually I am Super-Normal Standard Poet. My literary memory is an echo chamber. I keep alive certain normal ways of speakin'.