It is the role of Anima to bring the value of our ‘tragic grace’ up to a level of
knowledge and understanding in order to become an opening into poetry-making. Not
everyone can do it; not everyone will make it. There are many strategies and
postures that have gained popularity in recent times, but they are usually self-destructive,
having succumbed to forms of knowing which live off of an industrious ‘nothingness.’

There is a kind of last-ditch effort involving the re- emergence of myth alongside history.
Mythic resonance, within the poetic, shakes off the remaining vestiges of exoticism, and
Thilleman shows this thru his approach to the idea or conceit of ‘autopoeisis,’ by virtue of
his knowledge of serial and/or chronological progressions of ‘power.’ What emerges is an
initiation into our psyche-logo-graphical convergence: the dismissal of an individual’s stamp;
removal of ‘thematic’ knowledge from its dictatorial, modernist theatric.

To leave the stage, once and for all time, must prepare itself thru an understanding which
stands within a world bereft of script, and, finally, a world which has no employment for
any script. All around us principles of light and dark are fobbed off as totems of good and
evil; the way into our poetic domain has been shuttered and closed thru the willing participation of
thousands of practitioners of this very same art, of poetry and the poetic. Coming back to
a shuttered theater to perform one’s solo audition seems absurd, and, in the extreme, deranged.
Taking an environmental aberration as his starting point and poem, Thilleman attempts an
appraisal of our reception to these ‘natural anomalies’ in Three Sea Monsters.

What the poet attempts is not a derangement of the senses, nor a haptic response to their
contemporary malaise, rather, he takes the idea of firstness, the entrance of the Image, and pushes
it back into its Modernist poetic posture, bringing that stage back to life thru a mini-séance of self-importance.
What he uncovers by way of this process—from poetic composition out toward more elaborate
prosodies and articulations—is the profound connection American life has performed upon the art
by way of paleo-ontologies.

This was initiated around the time of Fenollosa. Then it was continued into the American Poetic
lexicon, but was (and still is) trapped by a small group of academics who have tried to elucidate
a profound moment which happened between America and the rest of the world. They have
been, by and large, infatuated and enthralled by a hero-worship all arts propagate and glamorize.
Yet this academic persuasion is very far removed from any real or imagined heroic age; their view toward
this 'special' and 'exceptionalist' moment, which swept a fallen theater into the business of cinematic
history-making, then into the cold visitations of war and its successive justifications, has remained ignorant
of the actual profundity of all forms of power which were allied with the moment.  Thilleman shows, thru the
sectional and serial and a-periodic poetry of Three Sea Monsters—as well as his conjuration of history in the
succeeding notes—that modernist themes provide the source-ground for our present disengaged appearance.
It is into this fissure all acts, real or imagined, have fallen.