What?!!! Erminia not real!!! As soon dispute that the moon is green, as that
Erminia enjoys her rich Dasein on this planet of perdition. I've just been
reading her/your mystic contributions (still catching up on last week's
mail) and savouring the bees penetrating cabbages which turn up (rather than
ip) in closest proximity to concubines in the next efflorescence of your/her
luminous verdure. (I've still got Beatrice Alighieri in an encrypted file,
divina poetessa!) Nobody's realer than her/you, apart from our revered list
managers (I bow to no one in my reverence for authorities; their existence
is, as it were, ontologically necessary...) But I'm glad to hear that one
among us at least has beheld the Presence.
Otherwise, I'm quite in agreement about exactness in poetry: if one sets up
expectations, s/he should fulfil them ~ a C-major scale's no simpler than
another, though he could have been talking about the whole-tone scale, I
suppose, which is however hardly associated with simplicity... The best
thing is either to set up an impression of irremediable nuttiness, then you
can say anything, even the truth, or just versify passages from the best
authorities, like MacDiarmid (see _In Memoriam James Joyce_, passim. I have
such a lovely edition, 2nd Impression 1956, bought it in 1967 for a guinea,
that is the price remained stable for 11 years!)
Is anyone interested in an interim report from Genoa? My partner's daughter
and her partner, two lurkers on this list, are holed up in the media centre
there to report on the conference happenings, as it were, and the degree of
furious police state activity seems to be unparalleled for a (wait for it)
Western democracy (though I'm willing to be corrected on that. Nothing like
knowing where you slip.)
Martin
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