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10 January 2005: Yesterday I got my latest column for Small Press Review done (except for the polishing it probably needs). It's the one on Richard Kostelanetz's 35 Years of Visible Writing: a Memoir (published by Koja Press, which has several books worth getting that you can find out about here) I think I mentioned several entries back. Excellent book, but I'm bringing it up again to quarrel with a remark of its author at its very end. There he says that he favors "black and white as the sole colors indigenous to art, believing that all other hues belong primarily to 'illustration?'" What an ascetic opinion! It made me recognize, again, that Richard is almost entirely a conceptual rather than a lyrical poet. His poems lead to new understandings of the language much more than to new experiences of the sensual world. To, "Yes, that's the way it is!" rather than to "Yes, that's the way it feels!" Which isn't to belittle them, just classify them. The intense sudden charge of the best of them would be spoiled by any sensuality. (Not that one's experience of that charge is not, finally, sensual, but the sensuality is reducticeptual, to put it in terms of my psychology, not fundaceptual--or cognitive, not perceptual.)
Some think my poetry is much more conceptual than anything else, but to me it is almost all a mode of getting to some final sensual image. Unlike so many conventional poets, however, I don't care whether the journey to that image is by feel or thought. Well, except that I hope, usually, that it is both.
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