Maximus (in the shadow of Maximus)

My poetry is rooted in Osip Mandelstam, & perhaps culminates in Maximus the Confessor.

Hans Urs von Balthasar (love the sound of that name), the Swiss Catholic theologian, wrote a groundbreaking study of Maximus about 50 yrs ago (Cosmic Liturgy).

Maximus shows up often in the poem Lanthanum.

Brooding on Michael Gizzi's sad-princely fate, perhaps... I had a (rare) moment of psychological introspection yesterday... it struck me that maybe I had been struggling for a long time - COMPLETELY subconsciously - with an inner image of my father. Not my real - gentle, infinitely patient, kindly - father... but the American father who hates poetry, all the arty (sissy, useless) stuff. It struck me that my belligerent/parasitic attitude & behavior toward all sorts of perceived "authorities" in Poetryland, over the last 2 decades, might have something to do with this inner anxiety/conflict about the poetic vocation itself (in the good ol' USA) - something rather Oedipal (Sigmund in the house?)...

Yet I'm sure, in fact I know, there is a dimension - let's call it divine Providence - where the useless freedom of art & poetry, and the active discipline of spiritual devotion, and the innate good will of ordinary people, and the philosophical light of a cosmic vision of reality - are all harmonized and redeemed. A hidden spiritual dimension of ordinary Providence...

& my shifty erratic trip - from Ashbery to the "Shakespeare event", from Jesus-hitchiker days to Mandelstam, from anti-poetry to the Borges-library, from Elena Shvarts & Joseph Brodsky to Hart Crane, all the rest... - finds meaning in this direction...