Bumbling around some prose ideas lately, thinking about Borgesian relation between persons and books, re-reading wonderful book-length essay on Proust by Roger Shattuck (Proust's Binoculars) & discussion of dynamic between memory and forgetting (oubli), Rip Van Winkle etc.; walked to local public library branch to drop off some books, standing at the counter a voice says "Henry Gould", I turn and there stands poet Stuart Blazer (author of Ricochet) - whom I haven't seen for a long time, but I mentioned I had noticed him in the newspaper, where he was quoted at a special "Proust day" at the Athenaeum library (Poe's old hangout)... I said, "are you still living in Adamsville?", he said, "Henry, it's been longer than you think... I've been in Portugal for five years..."

(Stuart has some poems in this issue of Nedge:)

Spent weekend packing & moving books & files from a room we want to paint... cleaning out old papers... opportunity to look back, old correspondence & correspondents about poetry, in the pre-9/11 & pre-blog (even pre-internet!) era... Nedge, The Poetry Mission, old local & distant literary friends & allies, many of whom I've lost touch with, old family stuff, photos, letters...

- good thing to reflect on all this; fleeting ephemeral aspect of things... (I know I'm being vague). The feathery lightweight silliness of my track in life... dreamworld of books & words, & the endless/intermittent laboring to articulate, enunciate...

- probably without realizing it I've become much more impersonal, abstractly "ambitious" (ambition in an inverse proportion to time divided by nonentity)... I don't blame the internet, it's me, me. The weight & inertia of seemingly ineffectual literary activity. Would like to reconnect somehow, on a new plane.

Thinking about a kind of memoir-opus, but must keep plan under my hat for the moment.

busy busy busy here... & I will be away until Sunday.

Struck again last night by the realization of just how odd, distinct & elliptical has been my experience of making poems. Distinct from other kinds of thinking & doing, I mean.

It was the NY School poets back in the 60s who created, for me, an encouraging atmosphere for such activities (amid other kinds of encouragement, from teachers, etc.).

& some of the long poem projects have started out more or less consciously from such a slant. The mind going into new sensation, or memory of old sensations. Deliberate immersion, away from reasoning & pondering & discourse, into "imagination" or a kind of sensorium of feeling. Is this "negative capability"?

Stubborn started out this way. Deliberate babble & fragments. July - the analogy of "goin' into country", Huck Finn-like, sinking into the middle river. Poem as vagrancy.

Two faces, two aspects of literature - light & heavy. Pastime - and funeral rite for past time.

Literature, memory, nostalgia, time-travel, reincarnation. . . all efforts to ameliorate Time's irrevocable power, to soften the blow. "Humankind cannot bear very much reality" (or something like that). Who wrote that history is not simply the past, but the "pastness of the past" (more Eliot?)?

But what good is the present without memory & memories (personal & collective)? Question has a bearing on my "poetics", I guess. Memories (commitments) which we share - & in so doing "redeem the time".

After the Good Friday end-stop of Stubborn Grew, the "return" of Juliet-Eurydice, the Forth of July - an expansion/acceleration/attenuation in two directions: toward a remote (& secret) personal past, and a remote (& imaginary) collective future (Jubilee). By way of the Mississippi River ("upstream, down").