Richard Blevins

Edward Dorn and an American scholar have agreed to meet in London on the 300th anniversary of Alexander Pope's birth. Due to the formal nature and current conditions of Poetry and Scholarship, the two miss connections-Dorn participating in ceremonies at Pope's Tomb; and our narrator the Gloomy Clerk arriving at the Grotto. Antonin Artaud engineers a conceptual Bridge between the oppositions of life or death.

Poetry didn't die It woke up during surgery To the lights the pain the doctors talking And remembers Everything

We can view Blevins as contemporary with Melville's Confidence Man. Or perhaps with Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. Kathy Acker? Or, my favorite: B. Traven's The Death Ship with its motto above the entry to the engine room: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." That quote was applied by Dante in The Inferno for Pope Celestine V whose cowardice "opened the door where evil entered the Church." For Blevins, it applies to the Maga Ship of State.

Every day, the old man enters the fallout shelter and works on the two manuscripts. He retypes the story of the cowboy hero beside the story of how the Negro boy really died.

Poetry. "At once unnervingly learned and boldly feelingful, Richard Blevins is a hero of the contemporary long-form poem, and CAPTIVITY NARRATIVES' driven reconsiderations of the disappeared careers of photographer Fred Holland Day and poet Adelaide Crapsey have a sweep and an intimacy that excite from line to alert line. With their heady synchronies and hyperlucid lyric fragments, their unearthings and upendings, their questing meditations and meditative narratives, their bursts of aphorism and doses of tonic fact, these are poems of an unusually welcoming intelligence and of an unassuming mastery. 'If you want to keep a secret, print it in a poem, ' Blevins writes, and fortunate is any reader privy to the confidences volunteered in these generous, essential pages"--Gary Lutz