HG Poetics turned 5 years old last Wednesday. He's learned to read the Dick & Jane books all by himself! What a good boy am he.

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Turned a corner last night; back on track with Fontegaia poem. Maybe I was aligned somehow with the fresh air coming out of Iowa (where my maternal grandmother grew up, in West Branch).

When I start making obscure design calculations based on parts & line-counts etc., I know something is crystallizing.

Fontegaia is really the culmination of all my quatrain-hoboing of the last 10 yrs. Nobody knows about it yet. Look out, Poetryland!

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Some constructive metaphors are also rambling into place. I don't want to explain too much at this point, though...

(The seal of the State of Minnesota shows a farmer at his plow watching a Sioux warrior riding by on his horse. I'm finding a way to think about the georgic plow of poetry and the Odyssean Trojan Pegasus of the muses and the ship of state and the Palio of Siena and the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse and Mandelstam's "Egyptian bark of the dead" and the ribs of the lungs around the heart.)



(I see MN will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of its statehood this year. "The Star of the North.")

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The georgic plow of verses has something to do with the georgic labor, in an Iron Age, of serving the common good, the commonwealth : since rising (by way of Aristotelian "virtue") beyond pure selfishness and egotism, toward the equity and fairness of justice - justice, which is an absolute necessity for global survival - requires labor and sacrifice. Perhaps even more, it requires tolerance and mercy (always difficult for the doctrinaire and self-righteous) - since we all come up short when it comes to loving our neighbor as ourself (the foundation of equity).