“You
know, when you use these arbitrary things it's amazing how what you
come up with may have the consistency of something that doesn't have
that much arbitrariness and that's what the beauty of the arbitrary
was. John Ashbery was very effective 35 years ago in his use of the
arbitrary. He could make something just come out of infinity into
this place that seemed to have had some kind of finiteness about it,
something concrete about it. He just pulled in this thing that
didn't belong there and made it fit. I mean your mind would make it
fit and it would bounce you into this place that just had nothing to
do with our conventions of thinking, of logic.” 'An Interview with
John Godfrey,' by Lisa Jarnot, Poetry Project Newsletter
April/May 1997, #165, reprinted in What Is Poetry? (Just
Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from thePoetry Project
Newsletter (1983-2009), ed,
Anselm Berrigan, Seattle/New York: Wave Books, 2017 ,
p. 99.
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