Rain Taxi had a review of a new edition of Cavafy's poems. put my nose into my copy of the old translations. the translations read well. obviously much gets lost or twisted but the poems read like poems. even with notes I know I miss allusions. the image of an older poet starkly enamoured of young bodies is somewhat disturbing. nympholept. it's a sort of brutal wistfulness that is certainly humanly familiar but nonetheless obsessive. no relief in it. but he's so keen and unflinching. and he doesn't drip with florid langauge really, his language is firm and edgy. which saves C from tiresomeness. I remember the bookstore at Franconia was tiny but well-stocked. I remember seeing Cavafy's book there. Durrell's Alexandrian Quartet and I am trying to think what else. all new to me, that is, and strange with possibility. in fact I didn't get a lot of those books then, but they tickled a fascination. I went to Franconia without having read much poetry at all, and I didn't even knw which way to turn. the Alexandrian Quartet has its moments but it also flops. the characters comprise a wearisome coterie. the milieu makes me think of opium dream. a gnostic art world full of mystery. Robert Duncan's work gives me that sensation sometimes. Duncan wrote of 'this' world, that is, the Vietnam War (for instance) was present, but there's a theosophical place in his work that seems like cloud and smoke. Rain Taxi reviews the Duncan/Levertov corresepondence, by the way (so did buddhist mag Shambhala), and I would love to read it. I had a tendency towards that sort of poetry but somehow no longer inhabit that place, or so I believe. I don't mean to question the merit of such a sense of poetry, but my work has gone elsewise. just as I willfully turned aside from a Whitman/Ginsberg path of het up drama of me. again, I don't mean to knock those poets with this, I just mean that such manner is bad for me. I fall too much into it. studying Language poetry helpe me lessen the presence of I. too often I, and others, write whether reports when we resort to 1st person.