[undated -- notes after having read Everson interview]

[When I first read this post I was so embarrassed, but hey, it's anthropology I'll just leave it in. I was taking on the voice of folks I'd been reading, taking them out for trial-runs. The voice here is... embarrassing. But Everson himself rocks.]

I've just finished reading "The Presence of the Poet," a lecture given by William Everson -- an "informal discourse" before the University of Oklahoma philosophy club, October 26, 1962. Printed in the collection Earth Poetry, Oyez press, edited by Lee Bartlett.

This interview will have a lasting effect on my way of being. I am an artist, that I find over and over again. An artist afraid, to be sure, but an artist nonetheless. That what I do would be prophetic makes sense to me. That the society is both intrigued and assailed by it has proven itself to me. A salve to my wounds.

I would go over the revelations brought to me by this interview, but the stuff is newly interred to my gut, and would come up acrid with bile. I'll give it time to digest. A salve it was and is. It's importance resonates distantly in my own future like a well-cast bell. I can hear it from here. It will guide me, consciously or unconsciously; it already has.