So, the festival is completed. Ernie Dorling had some nice grit and a strong messages about truth in non-fiction. Colin McEnroe gave a splendid talk on memoir with engaging and sincere discussion, and Professors Hamilton, Brown, and Abbot gave each excellent presentations on query letters, newspaper writing, and poetry. I left Abbot with considerations of my own work in the form and am considering returning to certain works, which have to be built as poetry–the images don’t work in the language of fiction. In that particular compressed language some things go, other things don’t. But I also left the poetry discussion thinking about poetic language as a “found” language, that the language of poetry works at this level. To impress the image we must find a language with which to express it. Thus is a poem a “return” or a “departure” or a “following”?

For a poem like The Wasteland, we must read the poem “in” its “language” and find it, as might archaeologists. Hmm.