Billy Sharplin

“After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines—well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads—that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco—the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“Well, it’s very much for each person to experience alone,” he said, and whatever truth he meant to get at, his eyes were the visible scars of it.”
― Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

“...they can make up their own mind. Kle loved that expression. "'Make up' as in fabricating as in creating your own mind. Pretty radical phrase if you give it a moment.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, Into the Forest

“Oh Shnorhk, how beautifully you speak Armenian, the third thing I miss most about you. The second thing I miss most about you: how beautifully you play."
Shnorhk not say anything. What trying to say only take away. Shnorhk just scald throat with more tea and eat cake after cake.
Grateful still, in the end, that Mnatsagan, always kind, is kind enough not to say the first thing he miss so much.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, One Rainy Day in May