[Jim Ramsey]

Hi Carl,

There is an almost southern charm to this, a lingering gentility in the setting and the voice and yet also a stranger form of titillating kindness that captures both the attractive antipathy of gender, and its feral blending. (I am trying to be dramatic!) Glad to see you enjoying free verse!

My own discovery recently is John G. Neihardt, who I am hoping sends me in the opposite direction from your new path, to take me toward a better grasp of metric verse. He seems to be a cowboy poet of old who wrote a "Cycle of the West," as his life's work. I have no idea how posterity or modernism views him but his writing seems a better template for me than nursery rhymes for ingraining rhythms in my head.

Jim R