Orson Welles, that magnificent, ruined cathedral of a man, declared the homage the most detestable habit in modern cinema—and he was right, as he was about almost everything he could not make happen. But Welles was diagnosing a symptom, not the disease. The disease is older, and its name is cowardice dressed as reverence.

Trace the word back and you find not sentiment but subordination. Homage arrives in English from the French hommage, and behind that from homme—man—and behind that from the Latin homo. But homo in the medieval juridical sense was not generic humanity; it was a body made contractually legible. The vassal knelt, placed his hands between his lord’s, and declared fealty. This was not ceremony but the legal transfer of will. The man surrendered autonomous motion in exchange for protection and standing. Homage was the price of existing within the structure. That is the original transaction—and notice what it contains: humiliation, obligation, and a kind of love that cannot be disentangled from submission. The feudal system understood something that our therapeutic culture has spent centuries trying to forget: that genuine admiration costs something. That to honor a force greater than oneself requires acknowledging the asymmetry. The vassal does not pretend to be the lord’s equal because he kneels. And in the kneeling, paradoxically, his own dignity is legible—for only a man of substance can meaningfully submit.

By the eighteenth century the term had softened into public tribute, ceremonial deference, the vocabulary of literary dedications and civic addresses. By the twentieth it had migrated into art—the symmetrical dolly shot that whispers Kubrick, the epigrammatic cruelty that genuflects toward Parker—and something of the original charge still clung to it. Artistic homage at its best retained the feudal structure: the artist acknowledges a superior force that shaped the conditions of their own work. This is genealogy made visible rather than rote imitation. What happened next was predictable: the lawyers arrived (but did they ever leave?). Homage became the magic word in copyright disputes, the incantation that transmutes plagiarism into tribute and fan fiction into protected expression: the pornographic Wizard of Oz, the Banksy pastiches on walls the world over. The word that once named a man on his knees before a lord now names a corporation deploying its legal team. Homage became a shield—and in that transformation, it lost the very element that made it worth anything: the acknowledgment of genuine subordination.

This page restores the word to its original weight. What follows is not citation or influence-mapping. It is the record of a formation—specifically, my formation under a man whose mind was the primary intellectual landscape of my early life, and whose voice runs through this collection the way water runs through limestone: invisibly, structurally, carving the shape of everything from below. Robert Lee Francoeur was a Green Beret, a commune builder, a student of D.T. Suzuki, an ABD academic, a man who could orbit a subject through jurisprudence, etymology, and Jungian psychology only to arrive—apparently by sleight of hand—at the thesis he had been building from the first sentence. His mind was not wide; it was deep, and depth that wide looks like width until you fall into it. He read Freud beside Dewey, Campbell beside the Bhagavad Gita, Blake beside the Zen masters, and he did not experience these as contradictions requiring reconciliation—he experienced them as instruments tuned to different registers of the same catastrophe. The catastrophe being: consciousness, and what to do with it.

His juvenilia, much of it written in fugue states on Lear Jet stationery, arrived unrevised and immediate, as though the poem had been waiting behind the language and he simply opened a door. This is not to say he did not burn his early work. In a move I still rank alongside the ransacking of the House of Wisdom and the torching of the Library of Alexandria—acts of cultural violence whose perpetrators always believed they were performing hygiene—he incinerated his first and only rejected manuscript in a wheelbarrow in the garage. The gesture was characteristic: he did not archive failure; he returned it to ash. I burned my own early work too, but for more prosaic reasons: it was simply bad, and I didn’t need editorial rejection to confirm what I already suspected. He burned his because he was proud, and pride in a man of that caliber is not vanity—it is proportion. He knew what he was capable of and would not leave inferior evidence lying around. Between his conflagration and mine lies the full distance between us—his an act of sovereign destruction, mine a quiet disposal.

I cobbled together the surviving work like an archaeologist at Nag Hammadi, rescuing the texts he forgot to consign to the heap—poems written on whatever surface was available, commentaries folded into envelopes and mailed without context, lines that arrived as weather arrives: unannounced, total, already past by the time you turned to look. What survives is partial and asymmetric. It is also, in its way, perfect—because a complete archive would have suggested a man who understood himself as monument. Robert moved through language the way he moved through everything: with force and without luggage. He died in 2019; this homage is therefore also a debt acknowledgment—the vassal’s hands placed between the lord’s—except that the lord is gone and the gesture must be made into air. Fealty offered posthumously is the purest kind: there is no protection it can buy, no standing it can secure. It is obligation stripped of transaction. Which is, I suspect, what he would have wanted. He had no patience for sentiment that required an audience.

Francoeur opens this section because he must—because the collection cannot be honestly accounted for without him. But he is not its only creditor: what follows will expand to include other voices to whom this writer owes a debt that can be named, if not repaid—Lowell, Creeley, Cohen, Dickey, Plath, and others whose work shaped the conditions under which these poems became possible. Homage, in the sense this page reclaims, is structural, and every serious poet is a palimpsest. Of all the arts, poetry is the one that most thoroughly defeats time—not by transcending it, but by collapsing it. Reading Gilgamesh, the existential pain arrives without attenuation, as if the five-thousand-year interval were not distance but proximity. The writer of that epic is not historical; he is immediate. This is what the continuum means in practice: not influence as a polite academic category, but contact across the full span of recorded human anguish. The dead are not behind us; they are calling from inside the house.

I have never worked in a vacuum, and no serious artist has, whatever they claim. I began, as most do, in sheer mimicry—Cohen above all, who remains something close to a patron saint: the proof that the lyric could carry theology without losing eroticism, that grief could be weaponized without becoming maudlin, that a man could wear his damage as a three-piece suit and walk into any room in the world. In Colloquies I don many of those masks—not in theft, but in the spirit of fealty the feudal word demands. And perhaps—the honesty of this page requires admitting it—in something that is not entirely distinguishable from jealousy. Jealousy is, after all, homage that has not yet made its peace with the asymmetry.