Blogging along for the past three months, I've been able to reflect back along the trail that began around 1965. I'm writing this from a place other blogriders will probably recognize, a tiny dusty cluttered corner room, with a big bulletin board, a 2-drawer file cabinet with a postcard of Ezra Pound's "Poet out of a Job" want-ad, ceiling-high books. I cleaned out the file cabinet a little this morning, a task which provides a special perspective on the tip-of-the-iceberg nature of a writer's public (me, public?) persona : all those old half-baked derivative sleepy weak poems, rejection notes, news clippings, records of little forays projects & endeavors, charming old letters, children's art work. . . the sweet derelicta of others' gestures, which I never acknowledged or loved enough, mixed in with my own.

It's been nice to mingle poems & precepts & so on, kind of a correlation of unrealized efforts; things I haven't mentioned, but might sometime, like what it meant to edit a micro-magazine (Nedge), or work on the Poetry Mission; the effervescence of the Green Tea project, with Susan & Tom (a high point : my son the 12-yr old composer, setting a poem of Edwin's to music, & then being able to perform it with the Grace Church children's choir at the book party, & publish the score); the abiding presence of Edwin Honig, and in a very different way my children's grandfather, John Tagliabue.

Shem the Penman makes a fuzzy, feeble scratch, a Hen-scratch in the spring mud-midden. I'd like to bury him in the midst of his fritterations, the proven dunce in his local Providence, between the cluttered study & the job at the library: 1132, 132, 11 Fisher. . . following

the signs that mock me as I go