there came fourty knyghtes to sire Darras […] and they wold haue slayne sire Tristram and his two felawes but sire Darras wold not suffre that but kepte them in pryson […] So sire Tristram endured there grete payne for sekenesse had vndertake hym and that is the grettest payne a prysoner maye haue

junk trees

Here is love poetry as I want it written, wish it to be written—love expressed haltingly, unafraidly, body and soul, love as sacrament and curse, a touching of pain’s raw nerves, each poem a homespun net of pain, love breathless, soundless, words withering inside the mouth, textural feel all over, sheer fluid texture, the joys however of unbodied love, bursting in all colors and details, the secret ecstasies of physical need and release, love overwhelming in whatever guise, contrasts finely juxtaposed and resolved: prayer and profanity, pardon and obloquy, predator and penitent…

[I]t seems this Method is of late grown out of Practice, and so like the melting of Marble and the painting of Glass, ’tis laid aside among the various useful Arts which History tells us are lost to the World.