A real myth solves an unanswerable problem with a string of images, that together create a story which implies its answerability. A world mythologized is not a world with infinite anxieties, though its meaningfulness gives no satisfaction to the inquiring intellect. Science is an attempt to create a myth that is also an explanation. To the extent that it succeeds as one, it inevitably fails as the other. But our popular arts are almost totally devoid of myths; they are deliberate lies made to foster certain sensations or else, more or less candid self-exposure. The real myths of our time (not: its cant or its prevalent misunderstandings) are more like pre-myths, the ritualized feelings of certain habits & recurrent practices, which tend to sustain a set of familiar images, but which never (or seldom ever) attain the clarity of a single complex mythic-core, on account of the fact that no artist has yet bothered to contemplate that context, without bringing in everything else he knows & feels & especially, his desire to be stylish.

Pity the poet who isn't ahead of the science of his time; pity the scientist who is.

The desire for an eclectic style & the desire for a homogeneous style: both nilpertain the necessity of textural relief which form (perceived as insight) imposes. These idols come from a blindness in the mind's eye. It's a glaring indictment that modern art history eems to be about them.

"School is teachers who don't know teaching facts that aren't true to kids who don't care." --Matt Groening

"In this country, only the executioner may indulge his perversities." --Angela Carter

After complaining about the way things are run, Americans invariably add "but it's still the freest country in the world" --to which i want to respond: "Two dozen others have lower infant mortality rates".

A new blog for visual-verbal poetry, from Geof Huth of mail art & "dbqp press" fame.