“O Need, beloved Adversary to Love’s settlements …”
— Robert Duncan, from the poem “Preface to the Suite”
Early on I described the source of the name of this blog:
I title the notebooks in which I write poems. One I titled "Love", the subsequent I titled "Settlement"; when time came to set up the site I already had these two nice titles, and, heck, don't they go great together?
When I came across Robert Duncan’s line recently it caught my attention, of course. Duncan does seem to be using my preferred definition for “settlement” — that is, a dwelling-place — rather than the less friendly sense of resolving a dispute, usually through unsatisfying compromise, a divorce settlement, say; settling for the best you can get, rather than holding out for the win.
I am considering starting a Substack newsletter and titling it using the same method I used when setting up LoveSettlement. My latest poetry notebooks are called “Heart” and “Demons”.
source:
Practising Angels: a contemporary anthology of San Francisco Bay Area poetry
edited by Michael Mayo
1986. Seismograph Publications, San Francisco
