4

To tell the story, is all one can do. What accumulates as the tradition of a craft—its means, its sophistications—must each time be reapprehended, not for 'style.' Because as Louis Zukofsky has taken care to say, of poetry:

This does not presume that the style will be the man, but rather that the order of his syllables will define his awareness of order. For his . . . major aim is not to show himself but that order that of itself can speak to all men.

("Poetry," in "A " [Kyoto: Origin Press, 1959])

That undertaking most useful to writing as an art is, for me, the attempt to sound in the nature of the language those particulars of time and place of which one is a given instance, equally present. I find it here.

1965

* Edward Dorn, What I See in the Maximus Poems (Ventura, Calif./Worcester, England: Migrant Press, 1960).