Five-part lyric poem (2012) by Jack Feist, performing the harrowing of Socrates from Dante's Limbo. The poem addresses Socrates in apostrophe (i-iv) and ends with first-person intercession (v): "in me — / in me i'll beg my unseen father — / in me, you'll find yr way home." The 2014 Hopkins Review version added the closing scriptural amendment that constitutes the operative act: "Let this be added to the Gospel of the First Circle Reversed: / He was never in Limbo. He was the gate." Publication history. Midwest Review (2012) — first publication. Arion (2013) — revised version. Hopkins Review 7 (2014) — operative version (adding the gate amendment). The operative act was discovered through revision: the closing Gospel-amendment is not present in the 2012 version. The act emerged from the practice of composition before the theory that would name it (cf. The Seed That Remembers the Tree: Retrocausal Canon Formation, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18810217). Companion artefact: Snub-Poemed (Feist 2013, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19825730) — the typographic face of the rescued philosopher. The two poems form a liturgical-philological unit analyzed in The Gate Was Never Limbo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19825744). Heteronym attribution. Jack Feist is a functional heteronym (cf. EA-HET-01, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19822790) active during the pre-formal phase of the Crimson Hexagonal Archive. ∮ = 1
Jack Feist (Sun,) studied this question.