Poetry, the "fontegaia", is always happily burbling up from some hidden place at the heart of the person... & if you want to get at the proper & pleasant context of my obscure productions, you will have to follow up the clues hidden in homophonics & puns... there is this "Henry cosmos" (where, as Nicolas of Cusa put it, "the universe giulianizes in you, Giuliano") just as there is a "Maximus" for Olson... & probably the easiest way to approach it is by wearing Dante/Beatrice spectacles... thus the thread of the "J" or the "little tree" which runs from the Island Road sonnets all the way (by way of Bluejay & Juliet) through Forth of July... when (as Guy Raffa put it in his book about Dante, Divine Dialectic) the poet transmutes an "object of desire" into a "spiritual guide"...

so In RI is not only "in Rhode Island", but also a pun for "Henry" and for "in our eye" and a glance at the inscription over the crucifixion... and "Forth of July" is not just the "Fourth of July" holiday but the "(coming-)forth of jewel-eye" or Julie or J... (p.s Providence was once the "jewelry capital of the world" at the center of the lil "isle of roses")... & this "incarnational" muse-music displays a faint echo of Dante, from the bilingual (Eng-Ital) edition of In RI (which opens with a scene of a loved woman "walking to Italian class") all the way to Fontegaia fountain, & the Bonaventure-Joachimist themes which are also to be found in the Paradiso... while it also subsumes (draws into its circle), in its stubborn comical "Henryesque" way, Milton-Shakespeare-Joyce-Crane-Mandelstam-Berryman-Melville-Twain-Montale-Poe-Whitman-Dickinson etc....

& despite the fact that Henry World and Poetry World seem to be alternate realities, which never coincide, time may prove otherwise... happy 4th, everyone...