the Gloria, Et in terra pax. Frank let it play for a moment, the Renaissance polyphony that always sounds to me like petals opening, a rose blooming in time-lapse photography;

I had read and taught it so often it felt internal to me, like a bit of my consciousness that had somehow stumbled into the world, a prosthetic consciousness—which is something poems can be, they can create new spaces in our interiors sometimes, not just giving language to something that was mute before but generating something new.

Kathleen Ferrier, whose recordings I had listened to endlessly; one of the first CDs I bought as a teenager, just after I discovered music, classical music I mean, was a recording of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and three of the Rückert lieder,

The point was to perceive reality, I wanted to

John Taverner, a Renaissance composer

so that when Oppen uses the word he activates a whole tradition, which makes up much of the resonance of a poem and also much of its pleasure, the palming off of words from poet to poet, little touches across time.

Westron Wynde,

But that’s the power of a frame, I would tell them, to take a bit of the world, a person or a sparrow, to make a boundary within which we can establish that relation that is the only acceptable relation, in which we can see all that there is to see and feel all that there is to feel, which is what makes me think that the disciplined attention of

I tried to think of poems, the poems I had memorized; for years I had been memorizing poems and then reciting them at night, as I tried to sleep, as a way of calming my mind,