I was struck by the DeKooning on the cover of Kenneth Koch's "One Train." What was I doing in 1994 that was so important that I did not buy and read this book then? Oh, I remember, getting tenure at the Ohio State University! I faced so much hostility in that department that I had to write two books rather than just one to get through the process. I guess one train CAN hide another. I need to feel a certain amount of resistance, hostility even, to do my best work. Yet the mid-western code of niceness dooms me.

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A dream early this morning: I was evaluating art-works for a show. All were quite dull, colorless cubical sculptures, so indistinguishable from one another that I could hardly say one was better or worse than another. Except that there was one by "Lisa Jarnot" that was quite striking, even though in outward form it did not markedly differ from the others. It was a dream I felt obligated to finish, even though I knew that I should get up to go to work. I woke up repeatedly, looked at the clock, and fell asleep again so I could finish this process of judging the works.

Now I do like Lisa Jarnot's poetry very much. I think the cubical sculptures represent poetries that I feel clamoring for my attention, but that I feel somehow incapable of judging. I am always grateful when I like something unambivalently, although feeling ambivalent toward a writer can me equally interesting over the long haul.

I like "crispness." (I never liked cartoonists who drew fuzzy looking characters: why draw 50 little dots when you can draw one crisp line?) I like to understand why a poet writes in a particular way, which is different from understanding what the poem actually means. I find this particular quality in Kenneth Koch, Joseph Ceravolo, Jordan Davis, James Schuyler, Clark Coolidge (sometimes). Why don't I yet understand what Michael Palmer is all about? Is his work crisp in this sense? I'll have to read it again to see, but I fear not.