this is a synopsis from journal notes throughout the week. I spent about 4 hours a day on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and 2 hours on Saturday sifting through my massive new book, “The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake.” There’s a lot in there and it was hard to decide where to start and how to go about studying him. I guess what’s most striking to me is his flow of illumination–I don’t know what it is yet, but from the way he writes, I can tell he was in a state of reverie, or a shamanic trance state (all really the same) and that (important part) the words that come out in his poetry follow from that state; in other words, the material element of his poetry is secondary to the mode of consciousness through which they derived. This, I believe, is a crucial axiom of shamanic poetry and therefore, the Bardic tradition.

Staples: that was easy!