11 April 2004. Hey, why isn't today double April Fools' Day?

Geof Huth is now in town and today he paid my house a visit--which has nothing to do with my opening sentence, I assure you. As is his custom, he went through my library and borrowed ten or fifteen books, then went through the complete stock of The Runaway Spoon Press, and stole thirty or forty titles. He claims they are ones I didn't send him, but I find that hard to believe. I think he's found a collector of esoterica with a lot of money. . . .

We long ago agreed to send each other our press's books gratis. I have similar agreements with many of my poet friends who also have publishing enterprises, which includes just about all of them except Guy Beining.

My cat Shirley finally made friends with Geof, so I suppose he's not all bad, in spite of his lexicographical opinions.

So much for the gossip part of this entry. Now for the meat--by which I mean not the image, "Keep Going," that follows but the comments about it that I will soon be making.

Meanwhile, with my work on almost every one of these exercises, two thoughts recur: (1) that I now have trouble being satisfied with any work that says one thing only, or mainly; I strain to figure out what I can use it for--generally, what kind of mathemaku could I put it in; and (2) that I have something in common with the greatest artists that I think few mediocre artists do: a tendency to be able just about always to see several ways to improve every work I do, and so fiddle with it forever, even an infra-minor one like "Keep Going."Br>

Okay, exaggeration. I did stop fiddling with "Keep Going." But only after changing where the red was at least ten times. And wanting to change other things but not being sure exactly how to. Conclusion: the better practitioners of all the arts usually see a lot more details in their drafts, and have a lot more criteria, however sometimes unconscious, to meet than lesser practitioners. Weekend artists tend to relatively soon either approve a work as a final version or give up on it entirely. (They also tend not to be able to tell the difference between good and bad non-representational work, and would have trouble imagining anyone taking pains with it, firm in their delusion that anyone can do it at the level of Pollock or Francis. Not a very new observation but viscerally newish to me.

I realize that one can be an obsessive painstaker and still be a mediocre. One can also constantly want to splice one's apparently secondary efforts into something much greater--to get back to my first observation--and still be mediocre, except in ambition, which I tend to think I have more of than many of my fellow poets.