the world a letter

I think it's very important when writing poetry to write about those things people get enthusiastic about without giving into/relying on simple enthusiasm, to maintain a position of . . . sobriety maybe, but a sobriety Rimbaud or Keats would know perhaps by its antonym. It's taken me this long to see that's what Yeats meant when he said he wanted to write "one poem maybe as cold/and passionate as the dawn." Or Ashbery "accepting everything, taking nothing." Think for example of Dante in his "Vita Nova," that mixture of ardor and clinical observation of everything, including the experience of observing said ardor; an ardor for that experience which feeds on its own submission/unsubmission to itself.

Sidewise relevant (because finding it brought to mind unexpectedly Yeats, and then the above sequence of thought), the translation of verse 71 in my last post was on a piece of paper in my paper mountain, I think it was from ~ a year ago. On the back was this poem:

Craft

One rose, darker and redder than any,
from whose base night comes,
I break my minds
I cradle you by your hips,
your head hangs as if one questioning,
one hundred years has past.
Soil you need, I will be your soil,
you will be your soil.
Bloom from my chest.

I didn't know when I wrote it I had Yeats' rosicrucian poems in mind. Funny how that works. Anyway, that's the sort of poem I think, even as I'm writing it, no-one beyond my self would be interested in (not that it necessarily keeps to the qualities I advocated in the beginning of the post). I keep them around anyway.