raven letdown

(via, via)

"Months later, when I was back home teaching Greek and Roman classics again, it occurred to me that the difficulties we have with Aeneas and his epic cease to be difficulties once you think of him not as a hero but as a type we’re all too familiar with: a survivor, a person so fractured by the horrors of the past that he can hold himself together only by an unnatural effort of will, someone who has so little of his history left that the only thing that gets him through the present is a numbed sense of duty to a barely discernible future that can justify every kind of deprivation. It would be hard to think of a more modern figure."

A nice little bit about Trilce, & here is an obit for the remarkable David Smith, whose 1973 version is quite good poetry, if (according to Eshleman) "a work that is, for the wrong reasons, more obscure than Vallejo's."

"XVI

I have faith in being strong.
Let me, crippled air, let me go
lacing myself with zeroes to the left.
And you, dream, give me your implacable diamond,
your timeless time.

I have faith in being strong.
Concave woman goes by over there,
a colorless quantity whose
grace closes where I open.

Praise the air, friar past! Thieves, idiots!v Glimpse the green presidential banner,
striking the six other flags
and everything that's hanging in back.

I have faith that I am,
and that I've been less.

Hey, big man!"

(via)

The Lost Words.