Just a quick response to Billy's message.
Billy's description of "process poets", who "create, but refuse to finish,
works that use the book as the unit of composition," is actually a very apt
way of describing Olson's _Maximus_ (though its lack of a determinate
conclusion, of course, can be ascribed to Olson's premature death).
_Maximus_ is written in "books" which are not composed of discrete lyrics,
but parts or "textual units" that open out onto one another. Billy remarks
that "Maximus itself only occasionally approaches the condition of process
poetry, weighed down as it is by its determination to be a 'long poem' and
by the rhetorical baggage of the Maximus figure." Hmm--maybe, just maybe,
you could say this of the first, perhaps the second, volume of _Maximus_:
but _Maximus III_, in which the titular figure has largely receded anyway,
would make very rewarding comparative reading beside Maurice's _Livelihood_
sequence. Both possess that processual quality Billy is talking about.
Would anyone else agree?
Alex
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