here ya go, guys....

I am finally willing to let y'all see my much-improved version of the series of poems that, I have known all along, badly need glossing in terms of the references to various people who have found things that are indisputably something real and rather extraordinary. The discoveries, however, can't possibly be the things that they sincerely believe them to be. Leaving us with my preferred topic of illusion and reality, filtered through...well, I tend to turn into my own explicator, as did various mystics of the Abrahamic revelation who sometimes seem to have written their poems primarily for the opportunity to expound on their deeper meaning. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.) I explicate because no one can reasonably be expected to identify, say, the Carlos Museum's "Cradle of Christianity" exhibition who has not been following the joculum blog all along. And I have never got round to writing about a couple of the remarkable men who make cameo appearances in these poems.

The modernist poems embedded in the titles and text, however, can be found quickly by pretty much anyone who can navigate the Internet sufficiently to have been reading the poems in the first place. One or two of the misleading partial quotations are startling when the surrounding poem puts them in context, and this was, of course, by design. (The one case that was not only not by design, but by embarrassing accident because I was remembering the wrong poem, I pass over in silence. Not.)

I have agreed with Giles Gunn that Robert Frost's "Directive" is one of the great poems of our time, ever since he introduced us to it in his survey literature class for sophomores. The difference being that now I can follow the thread of its deliberately elusive narrative.