Lack of sympathy from our assassins

I find myself over­awed by the lack of sym­pa­thy from our assas­sins. Couldn’t they do it with style or panache? Is there no sol­i­dar­ity among liars and poets! Must their knives be so blunt, as when, Kent, they go after you for strate­gies of fic­tive dia­logues that I thought the Greeks had called golden… the lost dia­logues of Aris­to­tle. Hic sunt lacu­nae. Would they be angry if we tried to write the lost speech of Agave over every part of her son’s body? And if we signed it falsely, is poetry a check­book? Anony­mous, port­man­teau, Lewis Car­roll, Mark Twain ― should all our par­adises be true or found, and wasted? Made up. I thought they must be lost. Are all masks to be thrown away before the dance? Is there a syn­onym for syn­onym? I tried. I heard the ques­tion before I loved the form of a question. -- David Shapiro, interview w/Kent Johnson (click here for the full interview)

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An organized school of art, like an academy or a university, tends to disintegrate into pedantry and sterile rules. The great exponent of these modes of art usually stands outside the officially titular school... In fact, the greatest artists have been claimed by both the romantics and the classicists, and now, since the advent of surrealism, are claimed by the surrealists. -- Wallace Fowlie, Age of Surrealism