Literary Enclave:
Poetry Zone

I started this work in winter 1988 in my dorm room basement apartment on Buswell Street, at Boston University. I reached the first stage of completion in Emily Hiestand's Art of Poetry class, spring 1991. Over the years the piece has continued to evolve. Hiestand was important, nay essential, in helping me bring this vision to coherence. Bret Rohde gave me the subtitle "Sunrise." A visiting professor from Harvard University, Barbara Jackson, referred to my poem as "one of the most remarkable bodies of work I have ever encountered."

Hiestand commented: "Wonderful, rich, high-flown rhetoric, juxtaposed with lush profusion of detail gives your writing a real mythic resonance - all great strengths - But the danger of writing out of memory's fecundity is piling on of detail, onrush of imagery, lack of tonal discrimination, tendency for the grand diction to lead you into abstraction (like Hart Crane) - but Crane always drawing on the sinewy language and, rhythmically speaking, the dramatic energy of the Jacobean dramatists. Crane actually quite an effective dramatic writer (gets more so, especially in The Bridge, see "Cutty Sark"). You might try this -- present some of this material dramatically -- brief scenes or other's voices would be fascinating - or perhaps incorporate some very spare narrative passages. You have a fascinating story to tell - of mythic splendor and disillusionment and revelation, but it threatens to get engulfed -- a kind of entropy sets in from the piling on of descriptive images."

Renowned literary critic and scholar Professor Christopher Ricks wrote: "There are lots of moments, lines, cadences which I like in your long poem (for instance, the very last line is beautifully alive), but - my taste or sensibility or convictions being what they are - it mostly doesn't come home to me, and that is probably because I am too wedded to just those notions of form (by which I don't mean that you write formlessly, rather that we have different conceptions of form) which it is your enterprise not just to question but to overthrow. I want to say what I say to so many poets (since I enjoy the comfort and lesserness of not actually writing poems myself...), that they are underrating the price paid for their abandonment of pattern, prediction, regularity, decorum - all those good old things I was brought up on. C.S. Lewis, writing about rhythm and metre, compared it to the waves breaking differently upon the shore or strand, with the conviction that it was the unchangingness of the shore which allowed us to register the variety of uniqueness of the waves. But it must be said that you have Ginsberg on your side, and since I can delight in some of his poems (by no means all), what is withholding me from comparable pleasure in your writing. Answer: Dunno."

My friend and literary colleague Daniel Calabrese was more effusive, when he wrote me that the poem is "above criticism, a kind of cerebral massage."