From the Notebooks: January

Lovely picture, isn't it?

So anyway, I'm putting another little notebook into the box. Goodbye little winter notebook. Mostly it was notes toward an Ashbery paper I'm trying to write, but I found a few odds and sods that I don't know what to do with. Perfect material for a blog, I'm guessing.

That the poem has a center is not something that should please a poet.

A center is a reduction of possible centers.

How does one push back against the reductiveness of having a center?

The poet and the artist are most alive on the open field of possibility.

If possibility is excluded, we have only reductions.

Description of the age: Great at form and technique, but missing a rising idea.
Description of the age: Some with bad notions, some just with bad haircuts.

The broken sentence is not the difference. The sentence is not broken. The words are not erased. The voiceless are not speaking. Fragment is only an agreed-upon definition.

The idea that things always come back as parody no longer holds.

Description of the age: Is there any way to know? No. There is no way to know.
Description of the age: It would be a particular sort of tragedy for one to prepare one’s last words, and then to be dying and to deliver them, and then to recover.

And what of the other poem? The one behind the one you’re writing? the mystery of the poem beneath the poem. The catacomb poem.

The irrational nature of assertions in art. About art. And to assert they’re something other than that, or that some assertions are somehow more defensible than others. To know this on one level, but then to say no, in the face of the real, some assertions regarding art do hold where others do not. The irrational nature of assertions about art. In art.