'i’m not sure it was ethics – politics, really – psychological – therefore everything to do with orientation, including a special sense of facing in the right direction, which, over time, i’ve attached to H Corbin’s interpretation of Sufism’s ta’wil – via Olson, Kelly & co – ‘the inevitable connection resulting from the double emphasis on the ‘visionary’ and the ‘processual’ that has been the heartland of our poetry from Blake and Whitman to Pound, Williams and Olson et al’ (G Quasha & C Stein, the Robert Kelly issue of Vort Magazine, edited by B Alpert, New York, 1974) – gloriously remembered from one’s 1970s Melbourne reading & discussion – hah! the Rushall Crescent Avant-Garde! – world wide web of the New Poetry – American, English, Australian – so, four or five years ago it was, hearing out another sentence from my familiar repertoire of negation, J Kinsella challenged ‘and what about the ethics of withholding?’ – ‘i’ll have to think about that,’ i said – buying time, postponing performance – till now, i guess, when a year-long conversation with prospective publisher K MacCarter about singularity, locality, expatriation, eased by occasional tots of the Japanese good stuff – during which i sometimes recast him as a Jonathan Williams, dual squire of Dentdale, Cumbria & Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, notwithstanding the Minnesota Lutheran he owned up to be – this between-ourselves correspondence ultimately delivers – and in leasttroubled unsureness for yonks – these English sweets – that is to say, all palate & tongue – my just desserts.
–Kris Hemensley' (Publication summary)
