Afterword forward after words beware before ware wary guard watch be on your watch.

Look out:

This is 

thoughts and notes Behind some of 

the poems.

The thinking background

So you can skip this part if you want to.

[Like

When I read

Pale Fire at the beginning part.

My sappy-poem-alarm started to go off.

So I

Skipped the poem and went to the footnotes and it was delightfully confusing because there was a whole novel in the footnotes and eventually I went back and read the poem, of course, because the footnotes kept tying back to it. I was totally taken off guard. I loved that book. The surprise of the structure and frame was part of the charm and experience. And that could only happen on the first reading, and only if I had not been pre-advised.

It was Miltonic 

confusion, and

Delight in that 

confusion. Before I knew 

Milton]

•••••

Notes:

The author(/finder) of the poems is same person as the sketchy scribble sketcher.

Paradise refers to the root stock rose named Dr. Huey, which is considered an undesirable weed-rose by most.  We (the three members of the Corrales Rose Society) have gradually come to appreciate its prolific profuse beauty, harsh conditions hardiness, and plucky survivor grit.  We have christened Dr. Huey the Patron Rose of Corrales, and we galavant about Corrales each year (for the last 10 years and counting), around the end of May, touring our favorite exemplars of this rose and celebrating Spring, Corrales, Providence, and the beauty of creation’s under-appreciated gifts.

Flamboyant and extravagant: When we lived in Spain, my dad sent a clip of some article from the local newspaper back home, and on the back of that article was a photo of him in sunglasses with the quote, “I put these on in case you legislators get any bright ideas,” because they were trying to balance the state budget at that time. He was popular; there were calls to run for president; but he refused and climbed Mount Everest and had other such adventures.  Later (we were home from Spain) my dad got him to speak at the men’s breakfast one Saturday and he was his usual extravagant eccentric self: refused to talk about politics and would only relate the story of his Everest climb. A handful of years later he changed his mind again again and wanted to run for president, but by this time the political flame had gone cold; the wave had passed; the Republicans turned him down. He was miffed. I thought “Well dude what did you expect?”  He turned Libertarian. However, he gathered enough votes that some good form of recognition that now I forget came to the Libertarians, so there was some progress after all, although not the Marxist progressive progress.

The Saga Mind is the only entirely found poem. However, other poems have snippets and snatches of foundness: Cruising quotes a hymn; On the spectrum paraphrases and lifts phrases from the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; as does the very first poem Miltonic, with the line “I shall tell you all.”

The poem Work is a combination found poem from the Lord’s Prayer, and the famous Wesley quote about “do all the good you can…”

Plums, eaten refers to William Carlos Williams’ plums, and goes on to loosely quote the communion service liturgy, while also bringing in the tenets of our Milton Class zoom room social contract.

PL in Oh the Horror refers to none other than Paradise Lost.

In Cristo, muerto, sostenido por un ángel., Alberto Cano is the Spanish artist: https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/cristo-muerto-sostenido-por-un-angel/5339e422-9b8a-47fd-804c-32ddfd2fcde4