The Exile’s Papers: The Duplicity of Autobiography

The Exile’s Papers, Part One , considers the implications of duplicity in autobiography as they appear in the first two hundred or so sonnets of a four-volume sonnet cycle completed over the past twenty years by the Lost Poet of the 1960s, confronted at the end of the middle game by anonymity on the one hand, and by opportunity the mass of a black hole on the other, in which Rilke, in his guise as Witness to the Angel, speculates on raw, necessary existence. Disney’s Jiminy Cricket remains, of course, unconvinced.