Tuesday, July 01, 2008


from poet James Liddy's
Autobiography

"I am an exile, I am not an exile. "Exile" has enough alienation in it to be a real condition yet it can be read as part of the flashy itinerant supernaturalism of the voyageur. The spirit wandereth whence it is employed or patroned. The artist type is outside the first social force of Mammy and friends; distance beckons new interruptions, and maybe memory spins into backlash.

Writing can seem the activity of alcoholic and
workaholic ghosts; the famous never tired ones, Wilde, Auden, Isherwood used
new domicile and flirtatious cafe in a more exuberant mode than they would at home. Do not dismiss the soldiering in far foreign fields where the battle cry is: do not tire.

The books on the table are piled-up differently: if I had stayed would my life have been changed by John Wieners, Lorine Niedecker,
and above all Jack Spicer? Sitting by a great lake stung by the idea: your
Ireland is dead, clarify your mind..."


via Ron