With a buoyant heart . . .

I have dropped the workshop. Two missed classes due to my father’s death led both the prof and myself to the conclusion that I had missed too much and that I would be better off withdrawing and taking the class again at a later time. I can breathe again, as though miraculously restored. Why is [...]

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1. the two rivers: the Styx and the Spoon

From the beginning I was drawn equally to those two primary streams of early modern poetry, which I tend to think of as the Styx and the Spoon.  I cannot remember quite when or where I was when I encountered either of them for the first time.  The earliest memory of the Styx, river of death, dream and forgetfulness, was in some old book [...]

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. 5. Bohemia on the Mississippi

In later years: amid the bones of bohemia Once I began publishing poetry and some criticism in the 90s, I had hopes of finding the sort of bohemian literary community I had known a decade earlier when I had worked and rather starved in the Dinkytown neighborhood of Minneapolis for a number of years in [...]

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12. Submerged in the waters of Lethe

Sleep, dream, opiates, oblivion. Years in which I read Keats above all others, culminating finally in a visit to his home on the edge of Hampstead Heath. A life surrounded by dark colors, drawn curtains, bottles of cabernet and candlelight. Solitary hours in a moonlit garden, midnight excursions to graveyards, daylong pilgrimages to the Symbolist [...]

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