These twenty-six poems are an expression of my search for a symbol that simultaneously unites being and becoming. In content and form they are an exploration, conscious and unconscious, of the motion and form of intersecting subjective and objective cones, which are similar to Yeats's gyres. In content they center around images suggesting the cones. Subjectively, such imagery occurs in the poems about dreams and fantasies; objectively, it appears in the poems about nature and people, and in the occasional use of mathematical symbols. In form they range from traditional patterns, through free verse, to concrete shapes. In the earlier poems, mostly traditional, the material has been adapted to the form. In the more recent things I have been working towards a sound and shape more related to the symbol, a kind of free but structured pattern with accelerating and decelerating stresses. In a world which seems to be accelerating and decelerating at the same time, the extremes are disturbingly close, while the still-moving shape that unites opposites moves ever farther away; but I feel, with Theodore Raethke, that poems are "always towards."
