My toy model choo-choo quatraining all these years has become what amounts to a literary habitus. It feels natural, it flows. But it could be just a bad habitus. The slippery, shifty rhyming & repetitions... the over-musicality... the cloudy indications... I'm seeing it in the light of Gumilevian Acmeism now.
Gumilev's emphasis on the word itself - not "music" - as the basic building block of poetry : the word, with its meanings - "Romance" (Mediterranean) clarity & irony, as opposed to "Germanic" northern gloomy-serious mysticism... might be seen as a criticism of the way I write, maybe. Maybe, I don't know.
The pull to keep doin' what I'm doin', only make it stronger - as opposed to really breaking out - is very, very strong... because I'm afraid of losing my knack, forgetting how to play. & I'm in the middle of another long ambitious poem (Lanthanum). If I could do both - keep doin' and branch out - I would. It's a question of mental fortitude, flexibility, inspiration, time & strength... God, soon I'll be doin' "old man's poetry", if I'm not already.
Maybe I'm just good at building birdcages for myself. Or just plain cages.... where I sit & yowl & yodel to myself....
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