I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

I didn't want to write another book about fraudulence.

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.

When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that "eye black" stuff sometimes - that kind of grease you put under your eyes to reduce glare or something. We only used it, of course, to look cool; it's not like we were any better prepubescent athletes for reducing glare.

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.