Twenty years ago I was preoccupied by something called “the post-Modernist baroque” as pertaining to the work of a poet named Anselm Parlatore. I no longer believe in nor care much about postmodernism, but the baroque continues to fascinate. The grad-student language in this essay from my old blog is a bit ponderous, but the desire articulated for a synthesis of aesthetically saturated language with “social formalism” is still there.