"25th October

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
If we think of the future, we always see it unrolling itself
in a monotonous progression. We forget that the past is
a multicolored chaos of generations. This can help
console us for the terrors inspired by the "technical and
totalitarian barbarization" of the future. In the next hundred
years it may well happen that we have a sequence of at
least three moments; and the human spirit will be able to
live consecutively in the streets, in prison, and in the papers.
The same can be said of one's personal future."

"26th October

If only we could treat ourselves as we treat other men;
looking at their withdrawn faces and crediting them with
some mysterious, irresistable power. Instead, we know all our
own faults, our misgivings, and are reduced to hoping for
some unconscious force to surge up from our inmost being
and act with a subtlety all its own."
(1938)


Cesare Pavese
*The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1959"
Walker and Company
1961

Emerging Points of Interest

Some readers of weblogs may not know
that Tom Beckett edited an important
journal in the heyday of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
poetry called *The Difficulties*. Each issue
contained an interview about, and work
by and about a poet. These poets included
Jackson Mac Low, Susan Howe, David
Bromige, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman
and others. By the way, he may stil have
some copies left of some of these issues.

Recently I was distressed to learn that
Beckett decided to cease publication of
his popular blog Unprotected Texts {click here}
(formerly *Vanishing Points of
Interest*) But I am extremely happy to report that
he has returned with a new blog which
promises to be a most exciting addition
to the Blogosphere- and it opens with
an interview with a most engaging
figure most blog readers are by now happily familiar
with, Crag Hill, who has this, among many
other interesting things. to say about poetry
and visual poetry in particular:


"I worry that there are fewer and fewer readers who want to look, to leaf through bookstores seething with books, to linger in the stacks of libraries, to seek out a way of looking at the world through language that shakes the mental foundations they live upon. I worry about poets and editors who do not read poetry outside their established circles. I worry about poets who do not read."

Right now on E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S {click here}