The poetry of quietude is intimately related to the vague intuition that the poet's mission is to relive and revive the great and very old and very intricate language of the poems found in books.

This intuition has dual roots : first, in the encounter with the Bible (the book), experienced as a moment of personal destiny and rebirth; second, in the realization that every reading experience is an echo of the best moments of a lost childhood (when you were reading a story).

Thus the poetry of quietude is involved in a project of conquering or redeeming time.

The Now, the Eternal. A moment of awareness in the past, perhaps in childhood. Something in the present triggers a recollection of that prior awareness. This present puts that moment in a new context of perception. The twinning or overlapping of two moments in time creates a sense of liberation or adds a new dimension to the simple unidirectional passage of time. Theme of Proust, Nabokov, Four Quartets. Dante spoke about the denizens of Inferno being separated forever from the ben del intelletto, the "good of the intellect"; maybe this experience represents an analogous (aesthetic) "good of perception". Prose (or poetry) designed with such hidden overlapping patterns creates a reading experience which re-enacts the same process. We read along in a forward motion but are given pause by these "time-rhymes". Perhaps all art encourages these moments of contemplative stillness.

Thinking of my own long poems : the re-enactment (through writing) of a reading experience - reading Hart Crane or Mandelstam or the Cantos or Finnegans Wake - which in part is what Stubborn Grew is (since the plot of a "search for the lost cat Pushkin" is a kind of thematizing of the Mandelstam-mimicry process) - triggered my own memory-poiesis in its sequels : the spooky coming-forth of cousin Juliet (the "Forth of July").

Hybrid form. The plot of Proust's supreme prose work is riveted to a poetic notion: the return of past time (via an unaccountable, involuntary impulse) to a receptive, responsive Now.

I guess the metaform of this blog is similar: the re-emergence of old poems in a retrospective context. Recapitulation. Mandelstam's "incarnational" take on biology (quoting Darwin or Lamarck, I suppose): "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny".

Recapitulation, ontology, teleology. Acmeism's "nostalgia for world culture", the "gold coins of the global humanism of the future": founded on the notion of the Person as microcosm, telos.