Mustn’t, though, forget this astonishing bit of Denbyesque brilliance. One of his earliest poems, out of In Public, In Private (1948).

Perhaps my favorite Denby line: ”A blue mallard drums the stream’s reach.”

Somehow reminding me of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s adage: “Superior gardens are composed of Glooms and Solitudes and not of plants and trees.” Out of the wonderfully-titled “Unconnected Sentences on Gardening.”

writing itself: “the mere presence / changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper / and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement / I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing”.

once under the title “Poem,” once as epigraph to a 1953 poem called “Two Variations” (canceled earlier title = “To Edwin”). The tangible, the now, presence. Some O’Hara lines I’ve long loved—out of the poem beginning “Light clarity avocado salad in the morning”—suddenly seem to be about

I detect, too, an echo avant la lettre of Ted Berrigan’s brilliant accidental misappropriation of O’Hara’s “Biotherm” line “I am guarding it from mess and measure” (Berrigan’s = “mess and message”). And I recall O’Hara’s own marvelously spooky lines printed twice in the Collected Poems,

That made me laugh.

I remember seeing The Up c. 1970 at one of the Sunday free concerts at Gallup Park doing their biggest “hit,” “Just Like an Aborigine.” Other songs: “Free John Now!,” “Free John Now! Pt. 2,” “Never Say Die,” and “Free Marijuana.” The titular refrain of the latter punctuated by cries of “Smoke dope!”

A somewhat related oddity: Allen Ginsberg chanting “Prayer for John Sinclair.” Undoubtedly recorded at the Freedom Rally. I was looking for music by The Up, four of the tallest skinniest longhairs ever, and house band for the White Panthers.

Oui et non. Who knows how long Wieners’s butterfly remained egg, or larva, or pupa before (astonishingly) acceding to the imago? And that cranial work ain’t exactly measurable. I do love that poem, and its delicate fullblown feeling.

“. . . he invented nothing; he transmuted into the loveliest vision the world as he knew it.” The obituary was phoned in and recorded on a Dictaphone. What a New Yorker’s ear heard a South Carolina voice say was not “cynical” but “semicolon.” 2/2

And: “My method of serial collage is not all that different from Homer’s inserting family histories, myths, and long lists of ships into descriptions of battles.” (Out of the “Circumspectus” to Guy Davenport’s novella “Wo es war, soll ich werden,” printed in a limited edition by the Finial Press.)

That's a fine gathering, Kim. And I love the photographs!