Richard Fenton Sederstrom

Icarus Rising Richard Fenton Sederstrom

I admit to having had thoughts in the past about a volume of Selected Poems. Such a volume should stand as a statement that the poet has made it, has established a reputation worthy of posterity. It is a sign of the poet's stature and maturity. However, I have seen a bit of what "it" is, and I can live otherwise. I have no reputation worth the altitude, and posterity will so far outlive me that I can't think to recognize the shade of it. And "stature" is a situation fit for good gray poets. I am, I admit, gray, where I have hair at all. So the notion of a Selected Poems is not appropriate. On the other hand, I have long entertained issues and motifs that I thought might illustrate themselves if I invited some poems into this book that would volunteer to help, poems that have allowed themselves to keep me company for periods from a couple of years to a more than a few decades. Most of them are here in pretty much their original form, not without changes they could agree to, but recognizable from their original publications. Others, however, found themselves so entwined in the new text that they are no longer recognizable from their original places. We all agree that they prefer their new arrangements, and they are not willing to be newly identified. Those that are identifiable I have marked with an asterisk in the table of contents. Because they have agreed to this arrangement and to their new context, they need not be identified further. A poem can live in as many contexts of myth as it cares to. To consider the mysteries of existence for Sappho's wonders, for one of many examples, might be to consider the nature of Being as art. To the end of that meditation we hope that we have, all of us in our various flights, flutters and stammers, offered something of the human condition: our ways into confusion and the possibility that a door out exists, probably too near to see.