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Now I'd like to read the title
poem from my forthcoming book,

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Points on the Grid.

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And I imagine there's
a possibility that it

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might be somewhat confusing.

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This confusion is somewhat
erased in the book

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because it is after a series
of poems which are concerned

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about the poet working
with particulars

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and in this way
reaching the universal.

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And so there are references
here to Odysseus,

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who I see as a universal but
because you pay so much close

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attention to his particulars
and it goes on and on,

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I wrote an essay about it.

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Points on the Grid.

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It is a graph, then, with
axis of the man cutting

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across axis of the phenomenon
of nature's next wave.

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The meeting making a point,
a place to put the finger

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and pin the poem, any
kind of statement.

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The man's life, a
series of points

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strung into a wavering line on
the graph, his grid of action.

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His limitations hem
him inside the boundary

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stringing webs to cut, to
make a way, a path, a surging

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across met by
nature's next wave,

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a wonderful dive
under the breaker.

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Takes us to Odysseus,
bouncing through waves

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on the Aegean, the next
likely larger than the last,

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particular in its strength
as the man meeting,

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pinning it there, the poem.

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But it goes on.

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Makes shore and
recedes for another.

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As Odysseus, with
unstopped ears straining

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at the axis of the mast,
unmindful of that sought-for

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a point at the end.

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That Penelope, a point on
the grid presently unraveling

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her own pattern.

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Her knitted rows
inexorable as the waves,

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her needles making
points in the graph

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till they meet at
that late bisection,

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place to pin the poem.

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The adventure, a casting
back at all points,

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places of divergence swing
to left or right, split

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seconds on the grid.

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Locus or footprint where
man meets the front edge

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of nature's next wave.

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