Very happy about this. And the information is free! Jess

We’re reading through this text slowly and find it very very rich with allusions. I’m especially struck by Quasha’s verbal energy and inventiveness on the edge of chaos. This energy is signaled in several ways, but two in particular strike me: “of the word”–as in assonance, alliteration, echo and response, and learned pun–and “of the page”–the Olsonesque composition by field. Yet there is another aspect to all of this and that is the personal voice we encounter in Blake’s Milton or earlier in Smart, Trahern and Vaughn: a kind of testifying that takes place in the voice of the author who tells (as in Blake) of an energy descending into his foot as he writes his epic (sketching his inspiration as a star falling from the Felpham sky and a tightrope-walking angel), and juxtaposing the drab particulars of day-to-day life with his vision and thereby lifting those particulars to a higher order of being. Blake is careful to mention his brother Robert in the midst of his vision and both memorialize and celebrate this transfiguration. Similarly George Quasha is careful to do just this with friends and his lady love whom he presents to us under various guises throughout the text. This is quite different from the flat diction of the New York School, and more akin to the neo-Romanticism of Duncan, but I would say that the “I” in Quasha’s poetic sequence is more extreme, albeit just as veiled.

“I’m it! I’m it! I’m it!
I cried it seemed all night until
at last I set foot on earlier land
than ever remembered in me…”

This is the assumption of the divine cap and bells of the visionary; the “mad” face and madder voice of Smart in Bedlam writing and reciting his Jibilate Agno.” There’s something risky in this business of traveling back to an imagined purity

On the eve of the great disaster here in Japan, I had the great good fortune to have met up with George Quasha in New York City to talk about poetry for his “What is Poetry?” project. Among some great old titles that Mr. Quasha so generously gave me–I’d like to mention several that stand out:

First, for sheer beauty and force of idea, his Axial Stones; An Art Of Precarious Balance–with its wonderful photgraphs of balanced stones–one on the other– (Quasha practices this Zen-like art), and poetic–philosophic text, warrents continuing study and attention. As Mr. Quasha noted in a hand-wriiten message: “In the stones is vision too.” Highly recommended.

Quasha’s Giving the Back Her Hands is a long poem–mono-mythic in the sense of a Blake text. Still reading this rich exploration/ explosion of energy and form.

Another gift was Charles Stein’s The Hat Rack Tree; Selected poems. Reading, reading.