When I belatedly, reluctantly returned to the insignificant poetry world after a protracted silence, I wanted to know what the vangardistes were doing these days. And I found a new online PDF zine produced in Seoul (Erototplasty), and the very first poem in its first issue had a long poem called 'The A1' by RTA Parker. It was like reading my abandoned poem, with the same cadences and Romantic visions. I later met him and told him there was no point to completing my poem. He demurred, and somewhere in 2019 I found I wanted to revisit the dozen notebooks to piece it together. Richard Parker wrote a version of my poem, and then I wrote my poem.
Returning to recover the project after 35 years sees a rapprochement between the two poet-selves. I am writing into the fragments of the past and the notebooks are writing into my occluded present. I've kept the scribal trace of each by retaining orthographic styles: I spelled conventionally before 1990 or so, and afterward determined on the course of unconventionalized spelling that has become signature to my work; so contemporary sections have deformed spelling but the original notebook writing is undeformed.