Lit

If you start out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking, then….you wrote a poem about two dogs fucking.

Now that that organism has, for good or ill, its own self-sufficient equilibrium, why should I entrust myself to the media? Why continue to mix its breath with mine? I have a well-founded fear that the media, which, because of its current nature, that is, lacking a true vocation for "public interest," would be inclined, carelessly, to restore a private quality to an object that originated precisely to give a less circumscribed meaning to individual experience.

The most important thing is to write in your own blood. I bare intimate feelings because people should know how other people feel.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.

Anybody with a normal IQ can manage that. But saying anybody can be a writer is kind of like saying anybody can compose a sonata. Oh, forget it! In any art, there is an initial gift that had to be there. I don’t know how big it has to be, but it’s got to be there.

I have this theory that what distinguishes decent writing from good writing and good writing from great writing is just how rigorous the writer was in his or her curiosity, just how authentic and sincere they were. In the A-plus books, the writer went to the bottom of the experience and what did he or she find? More bottomlessness. There are no answers, there are only questions.

The reader is always faced with the question of what a particular gesture, a particular detail means. It is not enough to say that it need not mean anything because it simply is. The meaningless accumulation of accurately observed detail cannot satisfy us for long; only if the details are made to tell, only if they are weighted with a significance for the lives shown, will they be tolerable.

Matt Caprioli

Matt Caprioli

Lit