He is missed. So I opened my copy of Culley’s The Climax Forest (1995) and read, with random’s perfect cohesion, the ending of “A Distinguished Provincial at Paris,” with its prose gamut and title borrowed off Balzac:

Robert Hass again—whose prose therein pretty consistently holds my attention, and sometimes allows for an unraucous chuckle or two—out of _A Third Commonness: Essays on Poetry, Poetics, and the Natural World_ (2026):

And Snyder’s nigh flawless ear for the demotic, the various lingoes of work (“the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation”):

The pleasures of rereading. Gary Snyder, out of the “Logging” section of Myths & Texts (1960), working up a world out of a few “luminous details” à la Ezra Pound. “All America hung on a hook / & burned by men, in their own praise.”

Robert Hass, out of a 2021 piece on Barry Lopez, reprinted in A Third Commonness: Essays on Poetry, Poetics, and the Natural World (2026). He’s talking about Lopez’s way of defining the “fairly boring term ‘acre-foot’” in the Lopez-edited Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (2006).

Long avoided: Breton’s Nadja (1928), believing its author something of a blowhard, and probably a charlatan. Now reading the new Mark Polizzotti translation, I must admit I readily succumb to such brut literary chatter as this:

That tall hollyhock reminded me of Blake’s ‘I Want! I Want!’

Somewhere William Gass (b. 30 July 1924) says “and” is a “sunderer”: any conjunct a wedge keeping distinct the objects it attempts to join. William Gass, painted (with no ands, ifs, or buts) by Philip Guston:

Newish work in the latest Denver Quarterly (v.60 no.3), thanks to Jane Huffman, Ian Cappelli, et al. Here’s the opening three entries (of thirty-one) out of “Notes Written in October.” Part of a manuscript called “Notes for General Circulation.”

Lisa Robertson, out of Riverwork, part of a lovely paean to dust (“I am a dust artist . . . displacing cosmic matter temporarily from its solid support to make a negative image of time.”) A way of talking about quotation, circulation, infinite reuse, and how language is ever-borrowed, ever-impure.

The late Cees Nooteboom, out of the Laura Watkinson-translated _533 Days_ (2021), talking about Mallarmé’s search for la poésie pure—“a poetry that would express the absolute . . . a poetry stripped of all that was superfluous”—rather in the way, in painting, of “Malevich or Mondrian”:

I’m reminded of the art in a book called Zoom by the Hungarian illustrator Istvan Banyai. I think there was a sequel called Re-Zoom. Partly the line, partly the colors. Lovely.

Surface, and everything. Wondering now at how buoyantly Porter’s “take” sits “high and dry” in tandem with Frank O’Hara’s. Out of “[Notes on Second Avenue]”:

Two late paintings by Fairfield Porter: “Evening Gale,” 1973 and “Surf on a Windy Day,” 1974.

David Shapiro, talking about Fairfield Porter (1907-1975), in an interview with Yasmine Shamma. Out of Conversations with New York School Poets (2025), a book of some few terrific moments notwithstanding the clumsiness of its premises and executions:

At the approach, teeth bared, of the semiquincentennial in this land of rampant berserker-y, I wonder at the impossibility of reading a thing I wrote “for” the bicentennial now fifty years ago. Neiges d’antan and all that. Out of Rubbing Torsos (1979).

Godfrey again, on late Ashbery, cannily enough:

Out of an interview with John Godfrey, in Yasmine Shamma’s _Conversations with New York School Poets_ (2025), two debatable things to ponder: New York School style and the individual word, and the fastidious Mr. Ashbery:

Weinberger’s talk is found in _New Weathers: Poetics From the Naropa Archive_, edited by Anne Waldman and Emma Gomis (Nightboat, 2022). A large part of it traces “one small word in a few poems” (the word “fasa” in poems by Pound, Duncan, Olson, Mackey). As for a suggestion: lineage & boundlessness:

Out of Eliot Weinberger’s 2015 talk “Ancestors” (concluding: “Literature has traditionally been a way to hear the dead speak, to learn of what they’ve seen, to hear their stories. . . . The ancestors you choose will determine the writer you become.”), a gentle rebuke of (much of) American poetry:

Jack Spicer, out of a draft of the famous 1957 letter to Robin Blaser that includes the lines “Halfway through _After Lorca_ I discovered that I was writing a book instead of a series of poems…” and “Poems should echo and reecho against each other… They cannot live alone any more than we can”:

Elsewhere he spoke of painting as ”the curious mystery of a fix, like a momentary fix, or a record, an evidence of a man observing something with such intensity.” One thing I love: how, for Guston, a city resembles a book, a book a city. (See, for example, “City” and “Tall Book,” two 1968 works.)

Thinking of the ever-restless Philip Guston (b. 27 June 1913) who admitted, in a 1978 “Talk at ‘Art / Not Art?’ Conference”:

J. M. W. Turner’s “A Boat and Red Buoy in a Rough Sea” (c. 1835-40). Out of _Impressions in Watercolour: Turner and his Contemporaries_ (The Holburne Museum, Bath, 2025). Barely a splash of red paint, buoy like an afterthought. I love the title: how it reduces the immediate world to its essence.

“Pinning here and there a supplementary sheet, I’ll build my book I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but quite simply as a dress.” I think of a small bright untitled Anne Ryan collage of cut and sewn fabrics and paper I saw hanging in the Morgan Library, part of John Ashbery’s collection.

put up against a narrower, more concentrated focus, might pertain, too, to the making of a poem.

Wondering again idly—possibly an autochthonic hazard of too much reading of the New York School—if James Schuyler noted, in the opening lines of “The Morning of the Poem,” the tiny ambient structural echoes of Frank O’Hara’s “St. Paul and All That”:

Struck, always, by B.’s huge sympathy for the young, & those ineffably-stuck-with-the-writerly-curse, those moronic-beatific enough not to covey up, nor suck up to any bigger, sunnier cloudlets, those remaining behind, darkly amassing a terrible, explosive rain. Out of “Meeting with Enrique Lihn”:

Oh, I’d never say that. Go. I think, for me, a combination of being rather art-crawled out, and thinking how much of what I find valuable in Duchamp is found in the writings and interviews—put me akilter. I did like, too, a few photographic miniatures of Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy.

One bright spot: a 1920 Suzanne Duchamp painting, “Le ready-made malheureux de Marcel”—documenting a lost ready-made, a geometry textbook hung outside for a lengthy period, exposed to the elements. Duchamp: “The wind had to go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages.”