Service Economy
It was just about here, five pages in, that I began to feel a desire to write about this extraordinary book. Something about Kunin’s framing of the poem’s underlying aggression got to me. That’s the magic of Love Three. It sneaks up on you, then overpowers you. The relentless, titillating, intellectual pleasure of it. Of candor, of clear, unfashionable, insight, Kunin’s Love Three is a masterpiece.
That Obscure Object
Which leads me to wonder, how many other “clear images” have I written with nary more than a nod to some past sense-experience with an object now totally obscure?
The Poetics of Letters
A correspondence continued over many years with the same person allows for the slow development of aesthetic ideas in an environment of trust, trust built via subsequent confessions, the sharing of ideas, and yes, texts.
Author Function
The whole charade surrounding the “grandiosity of authors” just makes me embarrassed. I realize that the Miami Book Fair hopes to promote literary culture in part by treating authors as stars—but as Foucault articulated, the Author Function does not come about by an act of “spontaneous attribution”— such as hanging a tag with the word “author” around the neck of a poet.