Ah! Back and with a new name; hope you like it. I’m kind of browsing through a number of books right now. My mood is so changeable, sticking to one or two just isn’t feasible. Rob Creeley’s Windows has got to be the biggest disappointment of them all though. I very much like the poem of his, Anger, anthologized in Poems for the Millennium 2, but I have read little else with a pulse. In fact, I started reading the book earlier this year and started actually ‘correcting’ whole stanzas. I’d never done this before (good exercise though) and eventually got frustrated.. So what’s the problem? His rhythms can be interesting at times, granted; it’s the content. Dedications, death, the small things in life, etc etc. He no longer has faith in other ways of seeing (as Anger most definitely did with anger compared to trucks smashing into a wall – this is from a faint memory), he just wants us to see as everybody assumes to see.. On the topic of Mr. Creeley, any idea why has received so much recognition from the experimental writers? Oppen wrote very similar, though less musical, poetry and even lived the ideal life of dropping out of poetry to exile himself in Mexico during the McCarthy years.. O.K. I’m not a big Objectivist fan, Oppen and to some extent Olsen are a little too frontiersman for me.. and WCW, who seems to be their predecessor, well, when I was at university, his step-shapes poems fascinated my eye but eluded my ear, but his verse always paled next to Pound’s, and froze next to Schwitters’ & Stein’s. Now, I was going to make the link with the above, but avoided it to prevent too much vitriol against Oppen, Creeley etc. One of the things that bugs me about many of the above is their trite Americanism; nationalism is a virus among poets even today. Hear Bernstein talk about American Poets, for example, college courses dedicated to American poetry. Goodness, you’d a thought that they’re still wearing Quaker hats! WCW wrote this stinker called “In the American Grain”, that arouses quite a lot of anger (there’s that truck crashing again) in me. It’s not that poetry isn’t local - it is always local and we can’t help composing in space (and time) – but such ideas are not just wrought in locality but in ideality (I only half intend these asinine assonances). Many of us would discount religion and God because it presupposes a force and resignation beyond the human and worldly, why make the exception for a country. Belief in a country is the same to me as belief in God… We’ll that’s the end of my vitriolic (sorry) lunch break. I promise something more positive tomorrow.