Why desecrate the gospel equating creativity and freedom of expression, which has endured from wall-painting in the cave to finger-painting in the crib, whether in elk offal or diaper swag, scored and cognate with the earnest emotings of the poetry workshop, where groomed with a secret patrician mix of calisthenics and molly-coddle, Muggleton students would serenely ignore Jumbo's exotic derision: Ephebe, indeed! And which invented idea was supposed to rocket them into the exalted realm of this fictive supremacy, the sun's idea of the world, or the cosmic idea of the sun itself?

Nevertheless, radiant intellectual, dialectical, evangelical, generational, intestinal, and copulative uncertainty, in my view, constitute the dynamics of human and cosmic freedom, and serve cultivation of poetic production that one wishes would triumphantly fructify in the poetry search committee efforts to award Francis Throckmorton Oates '07 Chair in Poetry at Muggleton College.

On still another page of the NYRB, Stevens was resurrected to endorse the U. of California's conspicuously moribund poetry list, 'A poem should be part of one's sense of life.' Poetry's promoters, sensing themselves beleaguered, if not endangered species, don't want to scare anyone away, rather want to plead the importance of the poem's role in life's wholeness, just as Harvard and Mt. Holyoke would extol the poem's capacities for healing, rescue and consolation, such magical nurturing and hygienic mid-wifery via clean language and honorable ideas comprising a dense veil of decorum which obscure and preserve the brutal, highly un-magical arrangements of privilege and power, whose repressions and injustices the synagogues of culture and devotees of heartfelt, studiously disoriented sincerity, protect from being properly exposed and flogged.

But is poetry the captive of decorum? Is it served or taught with deceptively harmless, defanged or toothless, unexamined bromides? Prof. Benfey's ostentatious adulation of Prof. Vendler, his emphasis on poetical "consolation" and the genteel exercise of paraphrase, Prof. Vendler's decision, for this collection, to "rule out poets who seem especially 'philosophic' (Donne, Eliot, Stevens)," advance a poetry of domestic if not epicene anti-intellectualism, an aesthetics of deliberate vacuity and the endless deferral of any biological obbligato. Likewise the militantly convex subjectivities of the contemporary poets Prof. Vendler champions, namely Graham and Ashbury. Vendler's other preferences, Dove and Heaney, are rewarded for being intelligently kindly and benign, safely witty in the case of Muldoon. Meanwhile, she has strenuously misunderstood and misrepresented Steven' slyly misleading sonorities and Yeats' eloquent crankiness.

Poetry is served and taught, in the genuine avatar of its ectoplasm — death-in-life and life-in-death — by understanding and advancing its abstract status in the spectrum of understanding, and by struggling with its engagement in the divinity of tactile pleasure and physical change, that hammer of images which in turn fresh images incessantly beget, the hammer whereby the Emperor's crafty goldsmiths break the marble dancing floor and liberate the en-christened and glistening dolphins from their gong-tormented sea, that hammer which has its equivalent in the dong of the bell and the body.

For more on Muggleton College, I commend the reader to E.P. Thompson's WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST: William Blake and the Moral Law. The dynamics of protective convexity, the triumph of concave subjectivity and the vertiginous poetry of the broken wing, are exhaustively explored in Ashbury's heraldic "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," surely our era's defining poetic text, and throughout the lyric monologue which constitutes his imaginary project, its properties are sustained by his incessantly confessed, spectral and howling, weakness for women.

Kenneth Rosen is the author of seven collections of poems, beginning with Whole Horse (Braziller Poetry Series, 1970), and most recently The Origins of Tragedy (CavanKerry, 2002). Rosen hiked the length of the Presidential Range of the White Mountains over thirty years ago, and was particularly charmed to discover Crag Camp at timberline on the edge of King Ravine, after hiking in a dark hallucinatory rain over black rocks intermittently marked with yellow blazes from Monroe Hut past Thunderhole Junction and down Mt. Adams to Crag Camp's lone gaslight twinkling ambiguously from beyond the gathering shoulder-high pines. Rosen and his wife returned to Randolph, NH on July 31st, 2004, night of the blue moon and a downpour extrordinaire — the northern summits rip the stomachs from slow-moving, low-lying clouds — so that he could review the logbooks maintained at Crag Camp, now in the custody of the Randolph Mountain Club archivist, particularly the entrees made in behalf of G.A.S. (Goddard Alpine Society), by the pseudonymous Grey Dellwood and friends, gnomic meditations on the cultural alternatives represented by military service in Viet Nam and psychedelic self-indulgence in the mountains. This was the era when a song such as "Coming Down Again" (from GOATS HEAD SOUP) magically refracted one's most private erotic, psychic, and geo-physical exigencies, the communion of chaos and ataraxia made popular, in an old-fashioned sense, by substances known variously as Orange Sunshine, Purple Windowpane, ad infinitum. Rosen and his wife endeavored to sojourn at the cabin described in the poem — checking it twice, to see if there'd been some mistake — but eventually Rosen's wife seized the bull, as it were, by the horns, and explained to its sturdy country proprietors, how the cabin would not be meeting their needs—Rosen, at that point, in the passenger seat, judiciously slouched below windshield level, his wife, of course, returning to their car to do the driving.

When your head is in the highlands
All other hearts are desert islands, etc.