If I find time & energy, I'll write an essay on Donald Justice's poetry.

Yet one more example of my backward-looking, reactionary, anachronistic, out of touch, obsolete "poetics".

Justice : melancholy, nostalgia, aestheticism - almost fatalism. A very old issue - running back to ancient times - regarding the dangers, the seductive temptations, of aesthetic fatalism. The beauty is a crystallization, a register of stoic passivity, a... a... I'm forgetting the word I'm trying to think of.

Nevertheless... I'm finding many other, different, things in this poetry. Don't want to ramble on about it here.

He's a wonderful craftsperson. Inspiring, exciting in that way. Manifold.

I'm drawn to the understatement. & the music, piano themes. (He started piano lessons when he was 5. I started about that age too.)

p.s. & I like the "balance" he achieves. These are very much "poem-song-artifacts", and yet, at the same time, they have a humane, documentary, down-to-earth quality - feeling, emotion, sensibility. Southern I guess. Wry, funny, mournful, sweet, bitter, etc.

There's always a person there : yet he avoided Confessionalism of any kind! A major victory for that time.