Leaving the Atocha station

Why was I born between mirrors?

In retrospect, I would find this beautiful

— p.123

To experience your experience

I put down the book and began to think: this strange experience of reading, the sense of harmony between the rhythms of a reproduc tion and the real, their structural identity, so that the subject of the sentence was precisely the time of its being furthered–this was what I valued in one of the only people I described as a “major poet” without irony, John Ashbery. I fished his Selected Poems from my bag, careful not to disturb Isabel, and opened it at random and read a little.

— p.90

Reading an Ashbery sentence, an elaborate sentence stretched over many lines, one felt the arc and feel of thinking in the absence of thoughts

— p.90

Related reading: https://www.dennisjunk.com/readingsubtly/2012/03/lifes-white-machine-james-wood-and-what.html

Michael Clune - Theory of prose (no: a journal of the arts, #7) Allan Grossman’s essays in The Long Schoolroom Jeff Clark, Geoffrey G. O’Brien - 2A John Ashbery