the world a letter

Many.

-JH
 

Really? I don't think I do.
 

of myself, I mean. Which is a start.
 

Ah, those kinds of questions.

Currently, the question I'm working through is how to find Robert Duncan's confidence. I mean, he's all over the place, with no concern for whether his book is unified or if the poems even appear to be by the same hand. His sources run the gamut from the highest brow to the lowest. And the poems are just so beautiful.

Ah, young love.
 

I'm not familiar with Duncan, beyond "often I am permitted" and the Pindaric Ode, but as far as 'how' to get his confidence, it seems to me (channeling Ron Silliman) that he took an esoteric upbringing and ran with it for all he was worth. Speculatively speaking: in general, people who are familiar with the idea that they are going to die, whatever form such acceptance/familiarity takes, have one less obstacle to obtaining confidence in matters of life.

At least, its when I'm free of death-anxiety that I find myself most myself, and consequently most productive. Not that I'm any type. But who else can I speak of from the inside out of?

So the personal part is the form a person's death-resistance takes. I guess. Without a clear line from one's birth to one's death, how can a true current of vitality run to trace the honest shapes we call beautiful?

I hope this nonanswer isn't hopelessly arrogant. Or asinine. Or at least that it's only one or the other.