Let?s Let That Are Not Yet : Inferno

"You've been thinking to yourself that it all feels very American." Ed Pavlic's tireless, resourceful speaker is American, of indeterminate race, implicated at every conceivable point of entry into the struggles that go on "here," which is everywhere, the Inferno of the title: "if an //analogy affects an enemy then let's let // inferno the enemy inferno the enemy."

In a "Daybook" of paper stapled together by George Oppen circa 1964, he wrote:

There is the area of Lyric—the area in which one i...