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“I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.”
― Leaving the Atocha Station
― Leaving the Atocha Station
“I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.”
― Leaving the Atocha Station
― Leaving the Atocha Station
Arthur’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Arthur’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
2,052 books
|
299 friends
271 books
|
28 friends
10 books
|
200 friends
123 books
|
8 friends
496 books
|
95 friends
128 books
|
98 friends
180 books
|
122 friends
901 books
|
50 friends
More friends…
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