When poet Jack Gilbert, some time in the 1970's in San Francisco,
asked his poetry class, "Who here aspires to write a masterpiece?,"
not one hand was raised. I, on the other hand, wanted to do just
that; after reading Blake's Prophetic Books for the first time, as
a naive youth, I said to myself: "Wow I'd like to write one of
those " So I tried my best; it took me thirty-three years.The idol
of "street language" that entered my art in the 1970's was of no
interest to me; I wanted to write in a dense, heightened, magical,
poetic language such as ear of cabbie or bar-fly had never heard. I
respect those poets who, like my mentor Lew Welch, can bring high
poetic diction and "the common speech of the Tribe" seamlessly
together; in many ways I like that kind of poetry better than I do
my own. But I was given to write in a certain style, to fill in a
certain blank square on the map of the English language, and so I
complied. The Muse assigns styles as God assigns fates, and thus -
to paraphrase the Hindu scriptures - "it is better to write one's
own poetry, no matter how poorly, than to try and write somebody
else's, no matter how well."Much of the poetry in this book hails
from a collective psychic era of great and chaotic imaginative
force, whose ruins we are in many ways still poking around in
today, looking for shards, coins, and old photographs. It was
written over a period of around 40 years; it's all the verse (apart
from what appears in my books Panic Grass, Time Raid, and
Doorkeeper of the Heart, and the few scattered poems in Hammering
Hot Iron: A Spiritual Critique of Bly's Iron John; Findings in the
Arts of Metaphysics, Cosmology and the Spiritual Path, and Shadow
of the Rose: The Esoterism of the Romantic Tradition) that is
really worth preserving. Not much of a harvest for a 40-year crop,
a dearth which I believe is explained by the fact that I am
basically not a poet but a metaphysician. And although it is rather
short on "personal history," in reality it is my only
autobiographical work - the story of the soul known as Charles
Upton, or at least some of the more darkly idealistic aspects of
it, which is one of the many, many souls God always knew He was
going to create, with all its strengths, weaknesses, imbalances,
and challenges. This book is the story of that soul's entry into
and emergence from an essentially Neo-Pagan worldview, derived from
the American counterculture, and its debarkation on the shores of a
traditional sacred worldview and a living spiritual Path.
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