The Last Sonata Comments

I already wrote a comment that appears in my POSTINGS but not available for you to see. But I have had a chance to re-read your poem and come down from the fevered heights it took me to. I deal with a lot of Post-Modernists for whom the notion that great art derives from great suffering is an old-fashioned idea they have discarded. But I believe it, and if my belief has wavered, your poem has restored it. The cumulative effect of these stanzas is ecstatic, I lived intensely each passage and each one summoned me to a higher state of appreciation for the sacrifice of the Poet Seer in first living his art and then producing the art object - the LAST SONATA - which embodies it. At this moment I am hearing Mahler's Ninth Symphony in my head because it conveys the values of art and life your image of the LAST SONATA symbolizes.

This is a traumatic poem about the trauma of making art. I was transfixed from the first stanza straight through to the end. The intensity, the high stakes, the sacrifices, the deadline - all of these things make your poem a peak experience. The idea that art, at least great art is born out of suffering is a visionary Romantic view of Art - Beethoven's life and career certainly embodies it, and I immediately thought of him as I read the first stanzas and he stayed in my mind to the end. Ironically, his last three sonatas are luminous, ethereal, they seem to float above life's suffering. But his Grosse Fugue - that could be the music that expresses the essence of the last sonata of your poem. I was heartened to find the Poet Seer again despite the traumatic circumstances.