Böcker av Richard Fenton Sederstrom

I admit to having had thoughts in the past about a volume of Selected Poems. Such a volume should stand as a statement that the poet has made it, has established a reputation worthy of posterity. It is a sign of the poet's stature and maturity. However, I have seen a bit of what "it" is, and I can live otherwise.I have no reputation worth the altitude, and posterity will so far outlive me that I can't think to recognize the shade of it. And "stature" is a situation fit for good gray poets. I am, I admit, gray, where I have hair at all.So the notion of a Selected Poems is not appropriate. On the other hand, I have long entertained issues and motifs that I thought might illustrate themselves if I invited some poems into this book that would volunteer to help, poems that have allowed themselves to keep me company for periods from a couple of years to a more than a few decades. Most of them are here in pretty much their original form, not without changes they could agree to, but recognizable from their original publications. Others, however, found themselves so entwined in the new text that they are no longer recognizable from their original places. We all agree that they prefer their new arrangements, and they are not willing to be newly identified. Those that are identifiable I have marked with an asterisk in the table of contents. Because they have agreed to this arrangement and to their new context, they need not be identified further. A poem can live in as many contexts of myth as it cares to. To consider the mysteries of existence for Sappho's wonders, for one of many examples, might be to consider the nature of Being as art. To the end of that meditation we hope that we have, all of us in our various flights, flutters and stammers, offered something of the human condition: our ways into confusion and the possibility that a door out exists, probably too near to see.

I had not thought much about doing another book. Nothing against a new book, I just hadn't thought about it. After my oldest and dearest friend died, though, I took stock, as one will do when he reconciles with loss. Among the stock was a cache of many more published poems that I had remembered writing. Because many of the poems are elegiac, much of the book is a view from below, but that is to be regarded, I hope, as uplifting-any direction one takes being a direction. And taken. Besides, the water is clear.

I admit to having had thoughts in the past about a volume of Selected Poems. Such a volume should stand as a statement that the poet has made it, has established a reputation worthy of posterity. It is a sign of the poet's stature and maturity. However, I have seen a bit of what "it" is, and I can live otherwise.I have no reputation worth the altitude, and posterity will so far outlive me that I can't think to recognize the shade of it. And "stature" is a situation fit for good gray poets. I am, I admit, gray, where I have hair at all.So the notion of a Selected Poems is not appropriate. On the other hand, I have long entertained issues and motifs that I thought might illustrate themselves if I invited some poems into this book that would volunteer to help, poems that have allowed themselves to keep me company for periods from a couple of years to a more than a few decades. Most of them are here in pretty much their original form, not without changes they could agree to, but recognizable from their original publications. Others, however, found themselves so entwined in the new text that they are no longer recognizable from their original places. We all agree that they prefer their new arrangements, and they are not willing to be newly identified. Those that are identifiable I have marked with an asterisk in the table of contents. Because they have agreed to this arrangement and to their new context, they need not be identified further. A poem can live in as many contexts of myth as it cares to. To consider the mysteries of existence for Sappho's wonders, for one of many examples, might be to consider the nature of Being as art. To the end of that meditation we hope that we have, all of us in our various flights, flutters and stammers, offered something of the human condition: our ways into confusion and the possibility that a door out exists, probably too near to see.

When I grow up I do not want to be a professional poet. So far as I am a poet at all, I write for members of the Codex, about which I have written before-"We represent the anonymous practitioners who spend their lives quietly transforming and transferring the culture to the next and the next generations" one by one and all at once. Like Transtromer's Adam Ileborgh, like you perhaps, we are those who are never missed-and who refuse to be missing.Lately, I've been reading The Magic Mountain again after close to fifty years. I am thinking of the book as a sort of ascent into the underworld, and I doubt that Mann, with his pattern of descents in his work, would argue much. This book seems to have been composed with a similar attention to space and time, the probability added that those concepts lie in such political and technical jeopardy as might be a shock even to Jeremiah. And so do we.

"Why Eumaeus? The fate of Achaea is shrouded, hinted at through the woeful fate of non-returning veterans of the Mycenaean grand folly. Telemachus and his Ithaca are statistics for archeology. Nor do we know what happened to Eumaeus, but Eumaeus is only a swineherd and a slave, not even a peasant. We don't need to know what happens to Eumaeus, save that we know him to be a man who understands the skills of abiding. Eumaeus is the us of non-history. We are the us who have survived, so far, as Eumaeus could tell us, in order to keep the tales alive and moving."