Uneducated

In suffering through the random literary education of the Texas public school system augmented by my parents' library and the public library I have never come across the poems of Clark Ashton Smith nor those of Robert E. Howard. Why are such modern examples of joy in language neglected as we try to conform our understanding to societies that bear little resemblance to our own and thus must fight both language and culture in our understanding?

I did well enough in school, though I don't recall many stories that lodged in my self the way the stories read outside of the classroom did. Much that was good I missed.

Coming late to these poems, I sink into them like into the soil in the back garden. The words root in my imagination and the ideas behind them curl and crawl through the lines and stanzas. Given back to me is the pounce of discovery and the willingness to work again at my own relationship to language, which has become somewhat strained of late.