[just to clarify : I meant my mother was communicating *with people* through clay, while letting the clay say its own thing too]

Your remarks certainly remind me of my mother, a relentlessly prolific maker of ceramics. She was communicating with clay, and simultaneously letting the clay communicate everything stored up in itself.

There's a serious irony in the idea of me floating this suggestion. Because my own longtime delving into poetry has brought me to the opposite conclusion. Reality, for me, is suffused with spiritual persons & personhood - it is a matter of I & Thou, of *relating* - in ways we don't really comprehend

Yes, I completely agree, & acknowledge the almost dangerous absurdity of what seems like willful solipsism. But the process of artistic expression in any medium is very obscure & mysterious. & You have the archaic shamanic examples of going off alone to fast & suffer, in order to find your path.

What if writing, esp. poetry, is a technique for disconnecting - renouncing the world, entirely - in order to describe it as a disinterested witness? Quixotic enterprise. So then what does reception have to do with that - besides entrapment & misrepresentation? Sounds absurd I know. Just rambling

Reminds me of Kurt Gődel for some reason. Interferons

lesson : don't make waves

To me Wallace Stevens' poem "Man Carrying Thing" gets at this problem pretty clearly.

It's always interested me that some pivotal poets – Homer, Milton – are characterized (by culture) as blind. The problem facing the poet is to express something, in words, that he or she can't quite see very well. A struggle to see, to understand, to realize.

"your year, your ear," sez Eeyore

Animals have cunning. Machines have assignments given them by halls of mirrors.

Okay. But in my view planners themselves often make mis-steps through facile generalizations and categorical pigeonholes.

I'm sorry for your loss as well. But I wasn't talking about MY personal loss. I was indicating one example of life along that avenue, which your overblown, blanket condemnation of the area entirely missed.

People live and work there too, Mr. Judge. In many many places. And die there. Both my parents died at a senior home right there, beside that road. It was well-run, caring, and kind.