Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.

Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.

I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.

Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability" thing.

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.

Maybe now if you're not an exhibitionist you're private. Or maybe it's just that for a lot of people - sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways - there's no division between the art object and what surrounds it.

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.