After looking at some Joseph Cornell images on the internet, I suddenly remembered the image on the cover of Ashbery's "Hotel Lautréamont," a haunting collage by Cornell. I took it off my shelf to look at it again. I don't remember when I actually found out who Cornell was. I read New York school poetry quite a bit when I was very young and had no visual references for most of the painters whose names appear in poems and essays. I think of myself as someone of quite limited visual culture. Is this really true? I can't draw. I have been to museums and the like, of course, and am familiar with visual styles of many modern and contemporary painters. Yet I have some seroius gaps in my knowledge as well. Aside from an article on Tàpies (and Valente) I have not written on visual art either.