Past Futures. Collected Poems

<p>Back forty years ago I wrote of <em>The Gist of Origin</em>: 'In such a bare age as ours the truth though terrible is clean. The worlds of Chaucer Homer and Tolstoy were conventionally realized ones-even if the men in them shifted between realizations incorrigibly. We now are in the same ferry as these chaotic Americans: we have no fixities to shift among. The only order they bring with them-and it is not nothing-is an economy of means. </p><p>   Ultimately the variety-of place of instance of event of impression is deceptive. Also the enormous amount to be learnt from them deceptive-because it is all the one thing. And the one thing is terrible because it is unclear whether it is not ourselves.'</p><p>   I think this era of thought/feeling is now obsolete in the culture which is now based upon a sort of decorative wit-adapted for the computerex machinery but on the way to being mechanically replicated by it.</p><p>   Incidentally the prosody of this perhaps outdated poetry is based at its best upon simply the taste of words the pleasure of utterance as a physical act in the words of Cid Corman.</p><p> -Clive Faust</p>