Glen Baxter: “I prefer the fantasy where everyday objects can suddenly become more interesting. I really like that aspect of it. I am in agreement with Breton’s definition of ‘marvelous’: ‘The marvelous has never been better defined than as being in complete contrast to the fantastic.’ In my work I present the impossible happening in a world where impossibility is the rule (as opposed to works of fantasy, where we see the impossible happening in a world where impossibility is outlawed).”
Interview’d by Bill Zavatsky in 1976 (Out of Sun, Vol. V. No. 1, 1983)
A category in Justin O’Brien’s Journals of André Gide: “Detached Pages.” Insert’d at the end of each year. Being, presumably, undated, stray, bereft. And not, unstain’d, unspotted, gouache’d up. Unchain’d melodies. My detached pages.
Gide is so completely wrong about most things it’s a grutch-pother to read him. The New Sincerity crowd could make him a mascot:
When one has begun to write, the hardest thing is to be sincere. Essential to mull over that idea and to define artistic sincerity. Meanwhile, I hit upon this: the word must never precede the idea. Or else: the word must always be necessitated by the idea. It must be irresistible and inevitable: and the same is true of the sentence, of the whole work of art. And for the artist’s whole life, since his vocation must be irresistible. He must be incapable of not writing (I should prefer him to resist himself in the beginning and to suffer therefore).[On rappellera l’anecdote qui met en scène le peintre Degas et le poète Mallarmé, telle que la rapporte Paul Valéry in Degas danse dessin. Degas déplore : « Je ne parviens pas à écrire. Ce ne sont pourtant pas les idées qui me manquent ». Mallarmé réplique : « Mais, Degas, ce n’est pas avec des idées que l’on écrit, c’est avec des mots ».]
Edgar “No Shortage of Ideas” Degas versus Stéphane “Word’ry” Mallarmé.
A poet needs flee ideas.
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Olivier Cadiot in “Invented Lives”:
“The incessant sound of waves breaking against iron”
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Fog-stymied catalpas.
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To work.
