If Anything, I Am A Poet Who Loves Plastic Poetry–Film, Photography, Sculpture, Drawing–as Much as I Love Verbal Poetry. There, I’ve Said It. Reading Marianne Moore’s poem, “Poetry,” helped Get Me There. Along with Calvin Tompkins biography of Marcel Duchamp, and All the Other Riches and Sadnesses of the Year. I Feel At Present Like the Two Parts of this Gilbert and George Postcard Sculpture Which Wrecked Me as A Boy When I First Saw It and the Postcard Said Something Like We Were Sitting By the Window and It Began to Snow and We Thank You for Sharing This Moment with Us Gilbert and George and I Longed to Be Gilbert or George and Find My George or Gilbert But Now I Know They Are Both Parts of Myself and Thank You for Letting Me Live Long Enough and With Some Amusement to Get There On My Own. Part of What Has Been Difficult and New During This Limited to New York for Now Book Tour is That I Have to Say “I” A Lot and People Want to Hear Me Say “I” and Afterwards I Would Be So Exhausted Because Poetry While It Lives in The “I” Is Removed From The Audience Wanting Your Body To Say “I,” and So After a Reading Or Whatever I Would Want to Be Obliterated, Have A Person Lay on Top of Me and Press Me into the Mattress So I Would Disappear Under Their Smell But Since This Wasn’t in the Offing, I Continued to Write About A Sculptor Who Obliterates Things And Wrestles with His “I” and That was Just As Well Because Even Though It Was At Times Difficult to be an “I” on a Stage and I Wanted to Give Up I Had to Speak Because That Is What Poetry Is: I Had to Speak.
Happy Christmas, Happy New Year:
I love your I