In writing "Lost Horizons" I achieved a landscape of imageless writing of which the line "this storm...this storm" is an ironic comment and indication of the mode's eventual and inevitable collapse. (If I am to continue writing). One is led to images despite any attempt to avoid or circumvent them. But why avoid them at all? First, because they are too accessible and inaccessible. There are no new images (Dadaism), there are only literary references to images (Eliot) and mundane reality (Warhol) exagerrated or understated. Such images may abound in the visual field but are they relevant to the landscape of language that composes the printed page? Variations in line, experiments with the printed line (Mallarme, ee cummings) are attempts, in this vein, to bring awarness to the page.itself on which the poem is being impressed, that this page is a landscape. Now, if there are images on the page, attention is drawn back to the visual imagination, and this ejection from an entanglement with language offers relief and sometimes elation. Employing images the poet also provides words that are not encoded within the poem's own logic and disctinctive habitat- he pauses with them and offers reference points to the "outer" world. My intention in writing "Lost Horizons" was to eliminate these concrete references and place the poem in a world uninhabited by nouns that desribe objects. If the face of poetic association images offer exit from obscurity and poems are interesting only when they extend past the boundaries of langugage and sign or indication of precept.
(8/15/74)