Lanthanum Progress Report

As time goes by & the world turns & I find myself older, & more disconnected, & disaffected from Poetryland (as the rejection slips accumulate, & the silence is deafening...)...

more alone in my own world of failures, large & small, private & public...

yet strangely, very strangely, I become accustomed to it, without losing confidence too much... well, it comes & goes... but it grows, strangely... this confidence... very possibly a grand or not-so-grand illusion-delusion...

I feel neglected & ignored, dismissed & condescended to... yet all the while I feel I'm on the right track, even when it needs correction... doing something important in poetry...

I recognize some of my blocks & limitations... I want to speak to the present world & its complex debates, I want to clarify & sharpen what I have to say, so as to be of some use... yet I acknowledge my estrangement... & I like to think of myself (in vain, surely) as in the line of my ancient farming ancestors... from the cow-country of Hertfordshire to the cow-country of Minnesota... extremely slow, shy, ruminating & earth-bound... a gradual process of recovery...

Lanthanum is no. 57 in the table of atomic elements... its name means "hidden, ignored"... it's classified as a rare earth, which is actually not so rare... used in experimental road surfaces, it assists in drawing pollutants out of the atmosphere... clearing the air...

I am moving slowly in this direction...

Lanthanum (the poem) is superficially old-fashioned, & actually unusual... a true experiment, which began in a dream I had, a few months ago - about the Gateway Arch monument, built by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen, in St Louis, MO... a dream about a structure I have never seen, & had never thought about... in dreams begin reconstruction projects...

My aim in this poem is to synthesize contraries, by way of a building project... Medieval/Modern, Europe/America, TS Eliot/Hart Crane, Faith/Reason, Past/Future, Berryman/Henry...

Eliot from St. Louis, Crane from The Bridge... Eliot from Middle Ages & Four Quartets, Crane from New World & The Bridge... both of these works majestic & wonderful & incomplete without the other...

in dreams...