Both Maximus & Paterson interpellate the narrator/poet with the image of "poet" generally & with the nexus of the "local history". There is some of this in In RI (the poem notes, for example, the coincidence of the poet's birthday and RI Statehood Day) - but it's more diffuse, less dramatized. In both Olson & Williams, you get this "here I am doing this now" work-in-progress scene-setting. In RI is a little bit more impersonal, maybe. Working in a loose genre already set up by Olson & WCW. I was only doing warm-ups, anyway, for the more intense poet-dramatization of Forth of July.

This vague "figure in a landscape" situation of poet-speaking-from-the-local-nook : has some interesting connotations. I mean in terms of the special relation between writing & person, "word & flesh", "letter & spirit". In an "incarnational poetry" (as Guy Raffa points out in his book Divine dialectic), poetry represents the fusion of letter and spirit, the collapse of the opposition between the two.