March 11, 2010
Dear Carolyn Mary Kleefeld,
How do I begin to thank you for Vagabond Dawns, this gift of self, this return of American poetry of “The Emotive Imagination,” my lost world of Big Sur, indeed the vice I first heard in Peter Thabit Jones, The Seventh Quarry Interview. You are the poet who sees clearly, even celebrates, life’s solemn evanescence. I love your profound simplicity: always the human voice, human yearning, need to wed inner/outer selves. I read the poems with breathless joy as you record both “the heartbreak at the heart of things,” and what my mentor – spiritual father, John Ciardi, there in my volume John Coardi: Measure of the Man, meant by, “The poem must always be, this prayer behind the prayer.”
Your poems are always “prayerful” before life’s Enigma. Of course, I have in mind a poem like, I’ll Meet You There,” its final quatrain: “Somehow I’ll meet you there,/beloved pagan companion,/where all lost lovers meet –/ in the arms of eternity.” And a poem like, “Behind Our Masks,” where you remind us, “All we are/ is a bag of bones,/blood and water.” Yet something always beyond that, as our Solemn evanescence, indeed becomes something holy other : transcendence and flight of the soul, bleached with the natural world: “And the seeds they collect/ will ultimately flower/ the emerald meadows/ of our hidden dreams.” Reading your poems, I am reminded of a line in Emerson, Yeat’s favorite line in all of poetry, as he told Robert Frost in 1912, Frost there at the Yeats home in London’s Woburn Place, how, “The stars, the stars are fugitives also.” I would one day – whenever I am “healthy” again – attempt a long essay about this remarkable volume…
… So pleased we are in touch, as Peter is my dearest friend, indeed my “younger Welsh brother.” I continue as this “Writer of Miscellany,” with “The Vince Clemente Papers,” secure, cared for at Rochester University’s Rush Rhees library, one indeed blessed.
Again, my gratitude is soul- deep, the volume, your kind words, this very gift of Self. Sp pleased Peter will be teaching your work, as his very life is this moral – aesthetic pursuit.
In abiding Friendship, Gratitude,
Vince Clemente