Nick, I just want to say that reading Theoretical Objects absolutely laid the groundwork for some of the thinking I'm now doing about poetry and careerism. I hope you'll recognize that the fundamental ambivalence that I spoke of then is still present, is still being worked through, in the most recent post; I think there's a lot of continuity between that post and yesterday's. I'm sorry you feel that I didn't give your book the breadth of consideration or the "permission" that it deserves. But I did and do take Theoretical Objects both seriously and lightly, as I think you intended, and I'm not done thinking about the questions it raises about writing and being a writer. It's a book I'll go back to. But this is a blog, not any paper of record—it's not paper at all, nor is it a literary magazine, nor am I in the business of writing reviews here. On the blog, I reserve the right to evolution, errancy, and self-contradiction, albeit within "certain bounds... against chaos" that are not always clear to me.

Robert Duncan
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.