Diego, was close at hand (I was then teaching at the University of Southern
California), and we must have had literally hundreds of phone conversations
that I now wish I had recorded. David is a kind of quiz kid, a voluble genius
who can talk impromptu about Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew or Mark Rothko
in such detail that every conversation was like a lesson. It was David who ¤rst
introduced me to the work of Wittgenstein, the subject of my later book
Wittgenstein’s Ladder (1996), which, in turn, produced a long and fascinating
review-essay on his part published in Modernism/Modernity (1998). Through
David, moreover, I came to know Jerome Rothenberg (the two poets have
been friends ever since their City College days), whose wide-ranging work
in ethnopoetics and Dada helped me to see beyond the canonical poets I had
studied thus far.
The Poetics of Indeterminacy also led to a friendship with John Cage, a
friendship that I can safely say changed my life. Not that I saw John often,
but he remains my role model for what an artist can be. For John and his
partner, Merce Cunningham, there was no real separation between art and
life, which meant, in practice, that art had to take on the arena of everyday
life and respond to it. At the same time—and this is the paradox that still
fascinates me—John was nothing if not an aesthete: he would work for hours
to get a particular word or musical phrase just right, and art, for him, was
always work. Then, too, I admired the way John went his own way; he never
did any thing in order to be “popular,” which is not to say that he was not a
shrewd career builder. He knew how to seize an opportunity—like compos-
ing music for a synchronized swimming event at UCLA—but he never be-
trayed his own aesthetic in order to go up the ladder. He did not read reviews
of his work, holding that such reading would only distract him. I had occa-
sion, several times when John stayed with us, to witness his typical day. In
the morning he would ¤x himself his macrobiotic breakfast and act as if he
had nothing whatever to do except chat with me and cook. But within ¤ve
minutes after breakfast, he’d be seated at the dining table, wholly at work. He
never wasted a minute—just pure concentration and attention.
From the early eighties on, in any case, I have had a dual allegiance and
dual af¤liation. My essays and books have remained “academic” in that they
are written in straightforward expository prose (I don’t know how to write
what I would consider effective freeform “alternate” prose) and have lots
of footnotes. But the subjects I write about have more and more been con-
temporary poets like Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian and
Johanna Drucker, Steve McCaffery and Rosmarie Waldrop, as well as artists
and photographers. And a number of these I have come to count among my
closest friends. Without them, I don’t know what I would have done in an
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