Great Upheaval & Other Legends A Collection Of Longpoems

Description

From the Afterword: In Hotchkiss's brief "Author's Notes," the poet indicates that his purpose "is neither to preach the grim gospel of realistic ecology nor to indict humanity yet one more time…" (147). Nevertheless, a message is conveyed in the best way possible, through the spirit in the works themselves, … Hotchkiss's daemon. Percy Shelley's Preface to "Prometheus Unbound" contains the same sort of disclaimer but with an amplification I suspect applies to Hotchkiss's work as well: Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse. My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness. In unrestrained diversity, Hotchkiss's poems nurture this excellent purpose. As root, trunk, and waving tree top are one, so are the diverse forms of the actions of visionary existence in these poems. They have a common shape, and their roots are intertwined in a universal psyche. Looking to a diversity of what has been, Hotchkiss, like the "lone figure" at the conclusion of "Great Upheaval," walks through the pages of this book at the ocean's edge" of our existence, seeming to whistle "a tuneless composition that he is apparently inventing as he strolls" (24). Like the seed sown by poetic predecessors, He that sows seed, words He sows: and the words Are clean and sweet In the wind, in sunlight And ocean and earth…. (21-22) Bill Hotchkiss is a child of Nature and of books, and the blossoms of their seed reside everywhere in the garden of his poetry. Now again they seed the wind, which to the casual reader at first may seem a tuneless composition. But with time and being listened to, his words in the wind will be heard as the songs of important vision they are, songs that "Are clean and sweet …" of yesterdays, today, and todays to come—but as they are and as they *ought* to be.

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