E.P.

My son selects books for me to read as a way of telling me that the bookshelf is too messy. I have a few stacks that have piled up horizontally in front of the books that are properly at home on the shelves and he will try to reorganize them so that it doesn't look so spring-smidge. The other day he pulled down an introduction to Ezra Pound written by a Franciscan sister and literature professor - I didn't even know I had such as book. It begins with a biographical sketch following the advice of St. Augustine, "Love so that you may understand." Needless to say, a number of events in E.P.'s life were glossed over - little mention was made of his support for Mussolini while his imprisonment at St. Elizabeth's was discussed. However, its efforts to flesh out an intellectual biography for the man that illuminates his attitudes and tropes were relatively unhindered by such omissions. Reading about the lives of poets makes me all the more eager to write and publish, even when the poems are far between.

Two entries went out last week for the Milwaukee Irish Fest poetry contests. Filling manila envelopes with freshly printed manuscripts fills me with an absurd pleasure. Perhaps I should have been a bureaucrat somewhere? Four more poems will be making their way into the post to join the pool of poems considered for the Wisconsin Regional Writer's Association's Jade Ring Contest.