Self-evident

Self-evident is a hopscotch through history, a display of valences: Jean de La Fontaine, the German art historian Johann Winckelmann, John Keat s belle (sans Merci), the lothario Casanova, Benjamin Franklin, Antoine and Marie-Anne Lavoisier, the Sabine Women, a Luccino Visconti film, Federico Garcia-Lorca, the Spanish poet Aurora de Albornoz, the Nobel prize-winning scientist Severo Ochoa, the American photographer F. Holland Day, and the controversial Soviet-Armenian filmmaker and artist Sergei Parajanov artists and scientists; characters from operas, poems, and novels; revolutionaries, radicals and exiles. All find their way through self-possessions out of the garden and into our past...and into Hightower s poetry. Self-evident is a collection of echoes of contemporary self-discovery. Hightower departs from a notion: that the practice of writing is at the elemental core of democracy. More specifically, he reminds us from a gleaned text that poetry by definition seeks a foundation for the commonwealth in the truth of the individual, guaranteed and restored through the integrity of language.