the world ends with this it's true...

     It's possible that I may, over the next few days, draw up a reading plan for the next few months. I've never had one of those before, preferring instead to mercurially read whatever I damn well pleased at any moment. Lately, though, my time is ever more constrained, and I find myself more and more distracted. Clearly some discipline is in order.
     You may return to your mundane lives now. 

from the commonplace book...

     'Of the three books of the Commedia, the Purgatorio is, for English readers, the least known, the least quoted - and the most beloved. It forms, as it were, a test case. Persons who pontificate about Dante without making mention of his Purgatory may reasonably be suspected of knowing him only at second hand, or of having at most skimmed through the circles of his Hell in the hope of finding something to be shocked at. Let no one, therefore, get away with a condemnation - or for that matter a eulogy - of Dante on the mere strength of broiled Popes, disembowelled (sic) Schismatics, grotesque Demons, Count Ugolino, Francesca da Rimini, and the Voyage of Ulysses, even if backed up by an erotic mysticism borrowed from the Pre-Raphaelites, and the line "His will is our peace", recollected from somebody's sermon. Press him, rather, for an intelligent opinion on the Ship of Souls and Peter's Gate; on Buonconte, Sapìa, and Arnaut Daniel; on the Prayer of the Proud, the theology of Free Judgment, Dante's three Dreams, the Sacred Forest, and the symbolism of the Beatrician Pageant. If he cannot satisfy the examiners on these points, let him be to you as a heathen man and a publican. But if he can walk at ease in death's second kingdom, then he is a true citizen of the Dantean Empire; and though he may still feel something of a stranger in Paradise, yet the odds are he will come to it in the end. For the Inferno may fill one with only an appalled fascination, and the Paradiso may daunt one at first by its intellectual severity; but if one is drawn to the Purgatorio at all, it is by the cords of love, which will not cease drawing till they have drawn the whole poem into the same embrace,' Dorothy Sayers.

just a few thoughts on poetry and discipleship, or is it poetry as discipleship...

I find no virtue in moderation. Love knows nothing of moderation, sobriety, prudence. As necessary as those are for the preservation of life in this intertwining of times, they will pass away. 

As for imitation, the apprentice must, at first, be slavish in imitating the master. At some point, it goes from imitating the particulars and the manner, to seeking what the master seeks. All must be moved by love for both the master and the work itself. In the end, you will no longer resemble the master at all, but will work with the same skill, the same love for the new work never seen, that you learned from the master. 

As a poet there is a kind of elective affinity with those poets who are my masters. Everything I learn from them is in service to the practice of the art of poetry itself. So there is a unifying discipline to these studies. Indeed, at any given moment it is not so much Poetry in the abstract that I serve, as the particular poem at hand. It is more important than me, and my job is to find out what it is meant to be. 

An artist will have many masters on the way, and will always have something to learn, some new form or style that sets him on a different path. That's the curious mixture of ambition and humility required of an artist - humility in recognition of all there is yet to learn, all that he will never know, and the ambition to be great that spurs him on to learn and grow and change in service of the work made. Yet it remains true that those first masters, the ones that inspired the desire to make works in the first place, remain especially beloved. I hope that I will, before I die, make at least one poem worthy of those whose works moved me to take up the art.

Certain poets spend their lives trying to write poems like a particular poet whom they have anointed as The Greatest Of All Time. They don't see that in fact they have subordinated the poet they claim to revere to their own cramped needs. They never discover the joy of making something properly their own, and they sadly never understand the work of the poet they claim as their inspiration. They spend so much energy and time trying to strike that vein they imagine the Poet owns, it exhausts their abilities and their intelligence.