Charles Jensen | Writer

Why is he not more widely discussed now? It’s a curiosity to me. I remember my classmate in grad school who, breath a fog of whiskey, insisted he was the greatest poet of the last century. I remembered this book, that it had encouraged me to write when I was younger, I remembered reading “Buffalo Bill’s defunct” in high school, thinking “What the F is this??” and then reading it again, and then reading more, reading “l(a”
and thinking it was brilliant and oversimplified–ostentatious and docile.

Why isn’t he more widely read? Or is he read in secret? Those secret sonnets of his, all broken to pieces and decapitalized. I love form. I love to receive form. I love to explore form. This was his lesson to me, that form is both apparent (external) and inherent (internal). But form is always. If you do not establish the form, the form creates itself. Often poorly.