Ugh, 54.

One of @dseuss.bsky.social 's poems that have a soundtrack. My 1st time listening to Ravel's String Quartet. Realizing how at least frank 13-16 present a world behind, before, between our own, like the infinitely divisible numbers within any interval of ordinary numbers.

So much buried in this, just beginning to suss it out after a crowded page of notes, half of which probably go in the wrong direction, but my inkling, again spirit/flesh, Romantic/Decadent, truth/lies... what it is to be human ... @dseuss.bsky.social frank "To return from Paradise"

This one is dense. Call it a spiritual manifesto? So much more to unpack. "How to mother that peace, to wean/ it, is a terrible career." To separate, cast into the world, make one find its way back/forward to "love's other shore"...So much here, I've hardly begun...frank 14 @dseuss.bsky.social

Not sure how thia works into my interpretation of the piece. One can adhere to an agenda or hide behind it, perhaps it represents a removal from direct experience the way language separates us from direct experience. But language provides a key to recover (multiple meanings) from it.

I think the greatest disservice that could be done to frank: sonnets by @dseuss.bsky.social is to focus on the autobiographical aspects. Too often, especially with women in poetry, criticism latches on to the facts of the poet's life as key, when all the real secrets are buried in the text.

This is such a gorgeous poem. Love the last 2 1/2 lines, so Baudelairian, the urgency of Decadent Nature. Look at the volta, tree balanced perfectly "in the middle of everything"...bloody Christ consoled by (here they are again) barn swallows (not in text but can't unsee it). @dseuss.bsky.social

@dseuss.bsky.social 's frank 11 "The best is when you respond only to the absolute present" The intrusion of the intolerable present on the search for peace in the now. But I'm convinced the barn swallow is central here.

frank 10 ("Press a foot into this beach and blood") leads me into all sorts of rabbit holes, all sorts of bizarre images to explore further. But do I really need to know that the sap of the southern African bloodwood tree has magical healing properties? That's irrelevant to this poem.

It's at frank 9 that I begin to put the pieces together, to notice the motifs, the narrative structure. I don't want to make too much of it, to impose structure where it doesn't exist, but it is exciting to discover a door that might be unlocked, that might lead somewhere. @dseuss.bsky.social

@dseuss.bsky.social if you get a moment, please tell me, is there an interview or essay where you discuss the structure of frank: sonnets? Or could you grant me an interview at some point? Re: my in-progress broad categorization of each and my in-progress concordance and my ongoing anayses...

Prioritizing immersive/experiential feeling function over analytical/intellectual seeing function, @dseuss.bsky.social poem turns on elevation of the moon jelly before it returns to Ego/I... Drowning in the sea is not so much a suicidal impulse as a willing ego sacrifice to seek experience of beauty

The most fascinating "key" I've found to this one is quite by accident the "virgin queen." The only one I knew was Queen Elizabeth, but what about the honey bee, hiding from the patriarchal attention of the beekeeper as she zooms off to mate with random subjects? @dseuss.bsky.social

In the fairy tales, the hero is given a pair of seven-league boots by a wizard or steals them from a giant ... From whom is the speaker taking these boots? The patriarchy? The banjo player? The same, the euro-Am white man who appropriates/plunders other cultures, like the banjo from the Africans?

Who got Mike Johnson stoned?

Sometimes it snows in April

Ah, 19.

I would add that they both believe in sexual/gender essentialism, where the "essence of manhood and womanhood" connect the sex organs to separate sets of spiritual principles.

I have an article in Public Libraries Magazine! It's only available so far to members of the American Library Association, but you can read the first part in this image.