Based on the riveting insights in those first two paragraphs, I'm not sure I have to read Wilbur anymore to be awash in reverence. ~,:^)

Well, let's agree, Rory, that with this stuff from Goldsmith and Wilbur, along with the gibberish on Ahkmatova by Forche (see "The Discerning Eye"), Poetry has mastered the 21st century art of coaxing the bullshit out of otherwise very interesting people. How our heroes fall for it I'll never understand, but they nonetheless leave us are marked by their witness for eternity.

Thanks, Poetry. Thanks for nuthin.

I shall also be publishing subtly altered versions of Ricks poetry. Finally, a career.

Good for you! My concept is that I'm enjoying, actually luxuriating, splashing about in fact, with not reading him.

A deeper concept than that even is that my things unsaid map exactly onto his things said, and vice versa, so that the interested public can get two for the price of one, and free at that. He is a assertive vacuole.

Dan....A career? For you or for me?

But, seriously, I'll take what I can get.

Conceptually we can become a single entity and publish a volume of Dan Mullin (or Rick Breene) mumbling to himself for a week. In IP of course.

Rick, I'll make no great claims for the interview with Richard Wilbur; it's not the best one he's done (there's a whole book of them, and they're well worth reading), and there are many little things he's said elsewhere, but I guess at 88 that's forgivable. However, if you're interested in his poetry it does throw some interesting little sidelights on it - particularly the influence of Frost and Bishop. It is undeniably a low-pressure interview and it's not going to mean much to anyone who's never read Wilbur and who has no wish to do so.

Maybe that's also true of Goldsmith's interview - but then he says himself that he's unreadable, and so...

Oh, dear. I thought it was a spoof and I laughed like a drain.

After not reading this, my delk is an ick.

I know conceptual visual artists, and their egos are monumental. They take themselves and their art so seriously, because there is little or nothing to the art itself, the art IS the artist and his/her ego. But in visual art you do have to see the line or dot on the canvas or the pile of bricks on the floor.

The interview is brilliant: Not only don't you have to read it, you don't have to write it, you just have to BE a conceptual poet, take yourself absolutely seriously and have no sense of humor or of the absurd.

There is a small but growing herd of delk, Andrew, and I am one of them.

Ed


PS - A few questions I wish the interviewer had asked Mr. Goldsmith: (1) You do realize how appallingly silly and narcissistic that sounds, don't you? (2) I gather that you are completely stuck on yourself, but what's in it for us to be stuck on yourself? (3) Your thoughts, please, on the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes.