I just read a book on the Crusades, a history of pleasant, reasonable people acting pleasant and reasonable, and got a hankering to read more of the Knights Templar. I walked over to the library in the rain yestreen in search of a simple history. I came home with a motley crew. one is the book that Dan Brown was accused of plagiarizing for Da Vinci Code, one is about the secret society at Yale, Skull and Bones, and one seems to connect the Trilateral Commission, Freemasons, and pyramids. nothing overly scholarly here, one might infer. well inferred. truth up, I'm not into conspiracy. I think of the JFK conspiracy connoisseurs in Slacker (could Linklater make another movie half as good?). connections turn into torrents of implacable force, without the supple initiative of Guy Davenport's linkages. I feel no satisfaction in grassy knoll, whate'er the truth. it just doesn't seem to matter. the book from which D-Code was bestsellerized came out in 1982. what gets me is how utterly new all this stuff became under the force of Brown's book. presumably millions of living humans had already been titillated by the possibility of J Christ, family man, and all the rest of it. yet D-Code hit like a revelation, didn't it? curious. I don't even want to read the one in which freemasons and pyramids unite in some totalitarian death match. so long as I know who poisoned the wells, blah blah blah. the Skull and Bones book may actually be reasonable reportage, in a New Yorker sort of way. it's no stretch to think that networking occurs. what the hell is "information"? isn't that a prime consideration, writer-wise? things "happen", then language "interprets". and poetry is a working within the concepts of language, yet is not "informative". try on a conspiracy, in which vital force presses drastic distinctions. language becomes unified idea, a political dreariness of import. LANGPO is disappointing in its academic view of politics, as if political motives were only for the overly educated. so they tripped about with language... I'm not attacking LANGUAGE poetry, which greatly influenced my own understanding of poetry, but the political veneer in which some of it has been wrapped has proven pale, classroom activism. which is to say, point blank, that political activism is active language. not activating language, which is what we call bad poetry anyway, but language in its active life. poetry is not the same as hype, tho even poets need publicists.