^* Lest the term “poet” prejudicially exclude a writer like Paul Metcalf, it is meant honorifically. Metcalf is usually regarded as a prose writer, but as Guy Davenport insists in his Introduction to the Collected Works, “Paul Metcalf is a great reader …. Metcalf’s reading is to find things which he puts together in patterns. Such was the working method of Plutarch, Montaigne, Burton, all of whose books are new contexts for other voices” (ii). This ostensibly prose lineage is a filtration system for the compost library. Because of Metcalf’s close association with Charles Olson, his projects offer resonant intrications of geophysical strata with historical events : see especially Patagoni, The Middle Passage, Apalache, and Waters of Potowmack.