At the RWU event, along with listening to Anny Ballardini's italian, & reading the In RI english, I talked a little about Roger Williams & the epic poem. & how it interested me that RW, epic hero, was a friend of John Milton, last poet of ancient epic. & how the Gould genealogical elements helped me displace the Romantic/Modern obsession with the poet (the poet's consciousness) as the hero of the poem. That is, unlike Whitman's ongoing song of himself, or Pound's cumulative/accumulative "rag-bag", or WC Williams' self-conscious poet-experimentalist (in Paterson), the "Gould ancestors" in Salem & RI fit both more seamlessly & more peripherally into the narrative history of the founding of the RI "counter-state". In RI is not an open-ended series or personal epic, but a rough-hewn story - with beginning, middle & end - focused on RW's basic mission. So I used some techniques of these other long poems, but turned them in a different direction.

& lots of other stuff.