(no subject)

Snagged one of those advance copies of Endless Things online for $20 + shipping, from some guy on 8th St in New York. He'd better send it, too, because he's real easy to find. My sister's fiancee's still on St. Marks last I checked. Also David is there, whose fighting skills I can't even tell you about.

(no subject)

The old one said,
You will take to boat and sail for the island of dromedaries, which you will tame and sell and build a larger boat.
You will sail unto the island of cats and learn the great mewing, your plaints will earn you a fleet.
You will make with your fleet for the cities of the coasts of the tropical empires, and burn them and loot them their idols and learn of these art.
You will paint that impossible boat that goes under the ground, with intensity wedding your mind to your own conception, and fall to the heart.
You will walk the four circles and enter the inside and hear there that word that to hear is to say it.
You they will bear to the valley and there you will live on a stone in the stream and they will feed you of their fields and each third child shall be yours and your eyes will never close but on the sky.

So I shot him and lived in his villa that that might not be so, as 'twas hectic.

And paying his bills, gardening his garden, striving to settle disputes in his household of women, thoughts would come to me, pleasant, of what I was not doing.

I loved me how breezeful the miles were between me and there, all those seas and their islands.

Those things that I might have done made a nice line at the limits of washes of afternap thought.

(no subject)

"all the play, the insight, and the stretch"

Tempting to try to assign poets to Browning's Leonard and Roman and Agnolo, as with Dickinson's died-fors and Tennyson's knights. Was written within a year or so of his Shelley essay, wasn't it? And Michelangelo and Raphael are the two he's particularly concerned with...so, M=Shakespeare, R=Shelley? But Da Vinci's the deadest, so maybe that could be Shakespeare, and Wordsworth Michelangelo. I wonder if Browning heard some rumor that Wordsworth had praised his work (though not, of course, to Shelley). Who did Browning love? The Lost Leader, Caliban Upon Setebos, Pauline & Cenciaja (first and last) explicitly testify to those three's presence in him...Keats and Byron get mentions. And Smart and Euripides, of course. Byron and Shelley and Keats maybe. Or was Tennyson the praiser? And Shelley was of course married...to a woman with a mind; as was, some would protest, Browning. Total analogy failure? Probably for the best. And Browning played, stretched and insought all along his way.

And, of course, was not Andrea. Strange how the poem feels like nothing else Browning wrote, frequently doesn't even feel like Browning. Where are the knots and noise? The smooth and quiet make it seem confession, the speaking of a voice he never lets us hear again.

But this approaches gossip.

What did he think (--might he have thought--) he would have written? What improved infantine Iliad? What sensibler Sordello? And what is the verse like here? Nothing? Toward the end, in places, "Ulysses".