Into the Light

My scenario is not a happy one, because sometimes I am awash with unconfidence: all those years of scribbling, and all those stages in the itinerary thereof, but where on earth has one got, nowhere? It’s all very well to suppose that one has put into poems, now & then, the intensity, the truth to experience, to experience radically understood, that strikes into the light in, say, Manet, Courbet, Cézanne, Pisarro; but where are the people with eyes to decipher, detect, what it is one might actually have done? If they aren’t detecting it, has one even done it? The little details, too, I mean the inflections, nuances: does a “contemporary reader” respond to anything of that kind? Strange generations, yours and mine, only now waking up, that late, to the future in which our oddness, our variety of consciousness, cuts no ice, calls on practically no-one Seldom dare I think I could be mistaken. From Christopher Middleton’s 101 Letters just out from Carcanet. I’m fond of Middleton and many…