Martin J. Walker wrote:
>
> The monument of the dead is a wall,
> he thought. That of the living
> is a pyramid,
> absurdly balanced on its point.
>
> I've just been idly reviewing the Bio-5 contributions ~ I found myself
> gravitating to Fred's poems. I'm overwhelmed by them because they come on at
> you without any special lyrical poeticisms or word-play, *just a Mehrwert of
> experience alembically transformed into a form of epic narrative that can
> die, for example, into disturbing & beautifully balanced epiphanies like the
> above. "Neighbour's blues" is an absorbing & rewarding poem as has been
> noted by Richard et al., but so is "La Bohème 2" (if my memory serves me
> well) & "The Stranger", perhaps my favourite. I find that your poems sort of
> explode slowly in the mind, sometimes very slowly, though they move without
> ceremony to their appointed end. I can never quite grasp those narratives,
> though each character & event is so precisely rendered. They come from a
> world & a mindset that couldn't be more different from mine ~ your poems
> tell me, inter alia, that I can share the former without identification with
> the latter, Fred, though maybe they also tell me I needn't identify with
> mine either. I'm really looking forward to _Light in Daylight_.
> Best
> Martin
Deep thanks, Martin. You've described PRECISELY the effect I want my
poems to have. I was influenced by the Eastern Europeans, Zbigniew
Herbert, Rozewicz, Holub, Milosz, with their moral fervor against
wasting words. And by Brecht and Enzensberger, with their icy clarity,
and then by Charles Reznikoff, w/ his quiet humanism and "Doric music."
And then of course for most of my writing life I focused on narrative,
where I found that flights, pirouettes that make sense in lyric utterly
destroy flow and are always beside the point - witness (what I consider)
the failure of Walcott's Omeros.
I'm very curious - leaving mindset aside, what is it about the world of
my poems that you find so alien? Thanks again, Fred
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