For were there not whole centuries devoid of creative writing, or rather when it took the form of collages of quotations from the classics? (even if not--it's the idea). Perhaps in dismissing the form we miss the subtleties they conveyed (i think of my cut-up book [MFFW])--Pound's third kind of poetry logopoeia, which he looked in the wrong times for (seeking Golden Ancestors) and before him was a lost concept... I read that Walter Benjamin wanted to make a book entirely of quotations, interlocking in some arcane design [& hasn't Markson carried it out, of late??]...and this points to a preponderance of what we call Irony, over what we call Meaning. (Irony extorts meaning from banalities--by twisting them.) I think this is also a characteristic of our lives. --Byzantium!