Another special spiel over at Latta-day today. I do have a copy of Feathers to Iron; will have to go have a look at it again.

The homerish-homelessness of the poet, sneaking past the ziggurats of abstract systems, yet searching, puzzling along...

Aristotle & Dante, of course, is all system... here's Moev (The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy, pp. 54-55): "Here we see that various aspects of Aristotle's philosophy fit together, as they are wont to do. Aristotle's stress on the fact that the rational soul "comes from outside", is divine, in some respect immortal, and that it presupposes no organ or body, is all to say that it is not subject to generation, corruption, or any natural process. The intellective soul does not rely on body or the world because it is ontologically prior to it, which is to say that it is related to the ultimate reality (pure form or actuality) iin which all things consist. The Christians were to express the same point by saying that the rational soul depends on (is produced by) only God, and is thus immortal. Moreover, it no longer seems arbitrary for Aristotle to claim that the Unmoved Mover moves all things as final cause, as their goal or object of desire and love; or that all things have "something divine in them"... that consciously or unconsciously moves them toward happiness or fulfillment, an impulse that grounds the human notion of the good, and whose ultimate goal is the Unmoved Mover... The Prime Mover is pure form, the principle of intelligence-intelligibility-being through which every being is; it is the principle that becomes manifest, and conscious of itself, as form becomes immaterial. To aspire upward in the hierarchy of being is to aspire to a greater range of existence, and ultimately to be unbound by any particular mode of existence : to be the power to be anything. It is, ultimately, for things to aspire to be what gives them being : form itself, which is nous. This is the ultimate consequence of Aristotle's rejection of Platonic Forms and dualism : intelligence-intelligibility-being must then be intrinsic to things, the being of their being, which is why the world is knowable."

OK. "To aspire upward in the hierarchy of being..." Now think of all those loping obscure tricky illegible prickly-proud expansive derelict long life-poems, which Latta is talking about... those searching-wandering poems, trying to absorb and be everything, Olson, Jack Clarke, Pound, WCW, Zukofsky, & all... those material-local-historical jumble-bags...

Here's the fundamental axiom which might be the key to their "form" : the way upward is the way down. In order to aspire to the Empyrean the poet must descend compassionately to the most material, the most particular, the most obscure, local, abject, ignored... down among the abandoned ones, down into the rag-&-bone shop, down Desolation Row... in order to become everything the poet must become nothing...

(cf. Joseph Brodsky's moving poem "Nature Morte")

... thus I might want to argue that the locus classicus, the perfect exemplar of this modern poetic form-effort, is none other than David Jones's Anathemata and his other works... because, 1st of all, he united the most particular, the most abject, the most historical flotsam & jetsam with an intelligible aesthetic form : the old notion that the pagan myths and ancient histories were all types and prefigurings of the historical kenosis-descent-crucifixion of Christ is what gives shape to his mythos & his narratives. No one has so thoroughly rendered the actuality, the local feel & color of an excruciating place : whether it's the trenches of WW I or the battlements of an outpost of the Roman empire, he was there...

In this way history and the poem, in parallel, reflect the compassionate kenosis - the descent, the self-humbling - of the divine. In this way the history of the modern long poem reflects, unknowingly, the acts of the sacrificial lamb.

This is just one way of looking at it.