sw00386a-interim

Autobio



 I am in a driftwood state.  Waves of concerns buffet me.
 Scenes of interests beckon me.  Yesterday a rainbow
 gathered itself in the cloudy east around pm 7:11.  Today
 the quavering air is mostly clear.  I have been reading
 Robin Blaser's The Collected Books of Jack Spicer and
 because of Blaser's "The Practice of Outside" and a 
 review by R. K. Meiners I am convinced I need to read
 Owen Barfield's What Coleridge Thought.  . . . natura
 naturans: the ongoing.  In May of 1970 I wrote a letter
 in which I said:  "Yet, ambiguous creatures of polarities 
 caught up in change, we are constant mysteries."  But I
 also, shortly thereafter, said this:  "Just keeping close to
 Balance, our one Utopia, takes all the awareness we
 can command."  In this I presently feel I was wrong;
 and if this feeling is correct, once I read Barfield's book
 I will know for sure: why, and where.  Concomitant with
 the above was a Rebecca Seiferle E-view of Marvin Bell 
 at www.thedrunkenboat.com wherein he noted he had
 encountered a need to move beyond free verse: to make
 the sentence central, no matter how lengthy.  Then I read
 online an article published in The Cortland Review Dec 2006:
 "A Manifesto On The Contemporary Sonnet: A Personal
 Aesthetics" by Tony Barnstone.  He presented examples of
 techniques for enlivening the traditional sonnet.  One of his
 examples used anaphora.  Does anyone sense a melding
 of traditions?  Does anyone sense a new openness?  I do.
 Though in the latter 1970's I experimented intensively, if
 not extensively, with sonnet-crafting, all I am becoming
 aware of/ of late/ is entering and changing me.  There is
 an online article at Rain Taxi I am being pushed toward.
 I am in a driftwood state, but I am not/ driftwood.



 §



 And what was at Rain Taxi?: a review of Arthur Sze's
 The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998  Copper Canyon Press
 by Tony Barnstone.



 §



 
review of What Coleridge Thought by R. K. Meiners
 -
 
Marvin Bell E-view by Rebecca Seiferle
 -
 
Rain Taxi 1998 fall   review by Tony Barnstone



Brian A. J. Salchert