Exactly, Martin! The Angostura worked like magic! (even though I gave it
up for Lent)
Thanks for all the encouragement to return, friends.
I've been trying to follow the "contains" discussion. My first reaction is
the thought that great poetry reshapes the boundaries & meanings of
meaning. You enter the orbit of a kinship that can change your life. In
that sense the reader is "contained" by the poem. I think of this as an
impulse or communicative gesture or field of energy which surrounds the
verbal crystallization of the language per se. The verbal crystallization,
the poem itself, is a kind of telos - a magnetic or hypnotic stasis which
"stops" time or draws it into another dimension.
Have been re-reading Montale's "La bufera e altro" (The Storm & Other
Things), with the Arrowsmith translation & notes, which inspires these
comments.
Henry
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