The group routinely receives calls, including more than a few from people wanting to report something seen decades ago. A woman named Gretchen, for example, reported seeing a devil-like creature while driving with her family through the Pine Barrens in 1966. It was the size of a man, she said, with small horns, a long tail and wings that were “not leathery bat wings but not big fluffy angel wings” either.

This year alone, there have been at least 10 possible encounters, including a horselike creature flying over Jackson and a shrieking, winged animal perched on a chicken coop in Eldora. Not long ago a woman reported seeing “a very large creature with red-orange eyes” flying out of the woods along the Garden State Parkway in Seaville.

Has language only that property, that it enables the poet to traffic in between his self and your self, trading his terms for yours, and getting no more power out of it than your acknowledgment that he speaks for you? But does he, even at his best? Can he, when you are your own involvement, and so engaged, willy-nilly, poems or no poems? You will speak in the next second by words which are, I propose, prior to all you are, and more necessary to you, if you are properly engaged with what it is to be human, than your toes, or your opposable thumb, that if you move as man has since either he or nature raised him to speech, to the capacity to speak, you move with or against yourself—you have more or less life—exactly to the degree that language empowers you.

Olson argues that the breath should be a poet’s central concern, rather than rhyme, meter, and sense. To listen closely to the breath, Olson states, “is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical.” The syllable and the line are the two units led by, respectively, the ear and the breath:

“the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”

Olson argues against a lazy reliance on simile and description, which can drain a poem of energy, and proposes that syntax be shaped by sound rather than sense, with nuances of breath and motion to be conveyed to the reader through typographical means.

Acknowledging the spiritual base linking “new” dance with radical politics helps to explain the somewhat incestuous relationship between “bourgeois” modern dance and revolutionary dance during this period. In 1934 dancers could march from the Workers Book Shop to the Martha Graham studio in no time, a fact that made it possible to fight the holy war of revolutionary politics and modern dance almost simultaneously. The powerful emotions that ignited dancers’ political efforts were in some way balanced by the intrinsic passion that infused the style of movement Graham was developing, an internal power allowing dancers to mobilize themselves instantaneously. One member of her company recalled:

“The technique was very passionate. It wasn’t cool, it was hot. And it was stripped of any ornamentation; it was like a knife cutting each time. It was stunning. It had an enormous use of space; just the body being flung into space. You had to have a certain amount of dedication because you were doing something nobody else had ever seen before… It takes a person who believes completely, who is totally dedicated, who is fanatical.”

Writers are defined, in large measure, by what they can’t do. The mass of things that lie beyond their abilities force them to concentrate on the things they can. … “I can do quasi-amusing phone dialogue. I do the careful ironies of daydreams. I do the marshy ideas upon which intimate life is built …” From the sum total of these apparent trivialities emerges a fiction which succeeds in doing precisely what it claims it can’t.

I have written novels even though I have absolutely no ability to think of – and no interest in – stories and plots.

…

The satisfactions of writing are indistinguishable from its challenges and difficulties. It is constantly testing all your faculties and skills (of expression, concentration, memory, imagination and empathy) on the smallest scale (sentences, words, commas) and the largest (the overall design, structure and purpose of the book) simultaneously. It brings you absolutely and always up against your limitations. That’s why people keep at it – and why it’s far easier to give advice about writing than it is to do it.

People say cities breed acceptance of diversity, but I didn’t learn that lesson there. It took a village to teach me tolerance and a measure of tact.