... but it's not about dusty pedantry, but play, play - rambling around the old themes, riddles & heartaches.

Some intellectual rigor, some recognition that (some) poetry has a part in that too, can help free us from the stale air of immediate predecessors, contemporaries, their (unintentionally, perhaps) overbearing drone.

I think ever since I got over the French polio (Guillain-Barre), when I was 4 or 5 yrs old - after spending about a month paralyzed & in a respirator - I've been unconsciously greedy for wind & air. Clean sharp mountain air is what I would stumble toward, blundering & mumbling.