Mr. Williams is... a delightful contradiction. I've never encountered a poem like this before in my life, and I seriously hope that there's more poetry around like this because, despite how hard it can be to write my mind around some of the longer monologues, it's a very enjoyable, stimulating, thoughtful poem, containing several elements from different forms of poetry. The poem's shifts from flowing, dramatic, Mark Twain-length sentences, ("The fight is on: these men who have had the governing of the move through all the repetitious years resent the new order.") to short, jagged, broken lines reminiscent of William Shatner's acting (Petals radiant with the transpiercing light / contending / above") is jarring, but refreshing. It's refreshing, and keeps a reader wondering what happens next. Even stranger is that the sections seem to change within themselves every now and then, even changing its typeset. For example, the final line in the second paragraph in CHAPTER IV sudden switches to all capitals for the second half of the sentence: "Through the orderly sequences of unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING!"
And that rather eloquent, poignant sentence is immediately followed by a mere two word paragraph: "Good God!" which is followed by yet another long, eloquent, flowing monologue, saying "Every step once taken in the first advance of the human race, from the amoeba to the highest type of intelligence, has been duplicated, every step exactly paralleling the one that preceded in the dead ages gone by."
The best thing I can say about this poem is that it encompasses a little bit of everything and by doing so states that it doesn't need to conform to a single binary... it's more fun to have them all!
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