I always wanted to write a novel with
palindromic dialogue. [There's a character
in Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist who speaks
only in palindromes.]

Maybe the Dems needed to be
completely humiliated in order to rediscover
their deepest gumption--but the harm caused
by this belatedness will last for, literally,
generations.

The movies are less like our literature, than our
equivalent of the old oral-epic cycles: where
certain fixed epithets & tropes & the same
handful of characters are endlessly recycled.
The only originality is in the accent in
which these familiar things are newly presented.

We went to a hidden-away concrete burnt-out
shell of a neo-classical small mansion in South
dallas. Turn of the century; sometime crash-pad;
i found a broken piece of plastic that said "Promise"
--a broken promise.
   I answered a Serbo-Croatian
mail art with another of the same: "Srpskohrvatski
je tvrdjezik." ('Serbo-Croatian is a hard language.')

"Around our cars graze leisurely the fawns."
--Monier-Williams's tr. of Sakoontala

I can't stand to read poems that are nothing
but a display of sensibility--it gives me
the same feeling as a blank message left on
my answering machine.

"Modern Russians are constantly amazed that
so few Westerners have heard of E. L. Voynich,
the great English novelist." --Gridgeman in
Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games

A poet who writes like his speaking is like
a chess player who only plays against a home
computer.

Fast reading & slow reading is how i solve the
problem of defining prose & poetry. In an
ideal world the former would not exist. If
you wanted to find out something you would go
to a person who knew about it, & stay till you
really understood. And if you wanted words
you would go to poetry.
   To be a poet & to be a word-
(& phrase; & book-) hound, is not necessarily
the same thing. And poets who are poets because
they love language may actually be in the
minority at all times, & have more in common
with crossword puzzlers & collectors of old books,
than with people who want to stand up in front
of a crowd & be heard, or who want their name in
histories after they're dead.