16 November 2006

"This Passing World"

synchronicity is such a big part of my life I no longer become surprisd when it manifests itself.

on flights back from Miami a husband & wife were wearing t-shirts with this quotation from Philo of Alexandria: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." & then among the first e's that come thru upon my return is one from Don Cauble using the same quotation as part of his signature statement.

I've never met Cauble. back in the 60s Hugh Fox brought our poems together in his important but now-neglectd anthology The Living Underground. Cauble seemd to have disappeard. after I gave my copy of that book to Matthew Wascovich he really got into Cauble's work & "found" him in Portland. via Wasco I began corresponding with Cauble.

there are reasons we didn't hear from Cauble. altho he's writing poetry again he has just seen the publication of his first novel This Passing World. I won't say that the book provides some answers to his "disappearance." art is more than biography. however I suspect first novels tend to have roots in the biographies of their writers. I look forward to reading it.

1 comment:

richard lopez said...

yes, that's the word i was looking for a few days ago to describe how things tend to jibe, esp. when one is not looking for them.

i suspect, alex, that biography is not the only province of novelists, but that even the most experimental of writers' lives are in the work, too. it is fundamental, i think, of the condition called human.