"Suicide, after all, is the opposite of a poem." --Anne Sexton

Recently some amazing photos were making the rounds, by an Anamorphic Screever--that is, a sidewalk chalk artist whose photorealistic renditions were designed to make sense to the eye, only from one point of view. --Isn't this the meaning of writers donning a pseudonymic identity? That there are things he has to say which can only make sense if given a peculiarly constructed context, in which to read them? At least, this is how i can view the projects of people like Thomas Chatterton or Kent Johnson.
  And if you understand this, doesn't it make the simple self-presentations of the rest of us, seem a little naive?

"Sometimes, and most in winter,--on its crest
A grey baboon sits statue-like alone
Watching the sunrise; while on lower boughs
His puny offspring leap about and play..."

--Toru Dutt

"...except in very rare cases, by the time he is twenty-one, the only nonliterary job for which a poet-to-be is qualified is unskilled manual labor." --W H Auden, The Dyer's Hand

"There are other cultures, like our own, in which the distinction between the sacred and the profane is not socially recognized. ...In such cultures, the poet has an amateur status and his poetry is neither public nor esoteric but intimate." --ibid

All politics aside, i cannot believe in a humanitarian civilization that has such furniture.

"Quotations are Attempts to Bolster Flagging Wit." --Bacon

"Brains are good fish food." --Mel Brooks

In the midst of hostility, the choice is not between perfection of the life or of the works, but between making your art ugly and grounding it out, or passing on the negative energy to spare your art, which makes your life ugly.

"Most poets have finished by the age of twenty-three." --Graves