![]() ![]() He regarded this vocation, as he records in the notebooks, as some "mission from G-d." (The hyphen indicated his reverence to the deity his reluctance to write out the divine name, even in English, is an old Jewish custom and is further evidence of the fidelity that he mixed with his freedom.) "Religion, teachers, women, drugs, the road, fame, money. My father, before he was anything else, was a poet. He often remarked to me that, through all the strategies of art and living that he had employed during his rich and complicated life, he wished that he had more completely stayed steadfast to the recognition that writing was his only solace, his truest purpose. He renewed his commitment to rigorous meditation so as to focus his mind through the acute pain of multiple compression fractures and the weakening of his body. In the difficult period in which he was composing it, he would send "do not disturb" e-mails to the few of us who would regularly drop by. I wish he had seen it to completion-not because it would have been a better book in his hands, more realized and more generous and more shapely, or because it would have more closely resembled him and the form he had in mind for this offering to his readers, but because it was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end. ![]() This volume contains my father's final efforts as a poet. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |