Prejudice against "abstractions" is usually against words of Latin origin vs. Anglo-Saxon--but their words were as real to them as ours to us.

To go to work regardless if you're sick--to write when uninspired. What can be the justification? If you get fired otherwise.

After a good poem i am a little more myself & a little less the pretender, by that exact degree of extra effort i have had to make to keep from lying in the presence of my fearfulness (not: my fears. they are nothing so discrete!).

The rites of a trade remain, through all high culture & decadence, inviolate. Until the actual technical secrets get lost. Then cultlike nontrades emerge: associations without any real knowledge, & invent a secrecy & hierarchy to justify their existence.

So many poets today hate words! they only love "being a Poet".

How can i sing the fate of an empire when my own life has no direction?

The time for critiques is past; now it's find a new form of life, or perish. [THIS IS NOT AN APHORISM IT'S A FIRE IN YOUR SHOE.]

Books to recreate the magic of first books...Finnegans Wake.

Maybe Art doesn't want to be saved; maybe all it wants is an easy death & we are torturing it with heroic measures of prolongation...[unwilling to believe in actual rebirth.]

The Novel rolled through poetry like a Panzer division & left every poem cluttered with irrelevant anecdotes, meaningless description, arbitrary allusion & obscure personal trivia. While novels succeeded in becoming flat, standardized, & fearsomely contemporary.

Art has a way of fomenting its own conspiracy. On the [shortwave] radio i am listening to something by Peter Maxwell Davies & after the Dick bio [by Paul Williams] it occurs to me, naturally, that P. M. Davies has already been invented as a fictional character, in Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus, as the composer Adrian Leverkuhn (if i remember aright) whose oeuvre consisted entirely of variously grotesque & somber parodies of earlir music. ...Davies is interrupted by a CB'er & for a fraction of a second i think it's part of the program. All that has to happen next is to hear the CB'er start talking as if to me... No wonder i don't get any work done.

Listening to: Odetta- It's a Mighty World