“If I'm very drunk, I can improvise. But generally speaking, no. Generally speaking, almost all of my work is material that was first done on the printed page. And the shorter ones that you might call poems, I had a stretch from '79, '80, for five or six years, where I wrote a lot of poetry as such. Simply because I was asked to.” IfsYearsFirstsI CanDoneMightFiveMaterialsSixPagesDrunkPrinted Author:Richard Meltzer
“A lot of things appearing under my byline were written in one draft. But when I started to write poetry, I started getting fussy about every syllable. I wouldn't allow the work to be seen unless it felt perfect. Not clunky at all, no clunky syllables. So, really, for the printed page, it had to have a feeling of rhythmic and syntactic verisimilitude or something.” WritingFeelingsFeltPerfectWrittenPagesPrintedAppearingSyllablesFussy Author:Richard Meltzer
“If I looked at some of these pieces as if this project was not spoken-word but just short anthology, I probably would have fussed with some of the sentences, you know? Syllabication and prosody and such crap. Because the printed word is etched in stone. But for reading purposes I accepted this book of texts in the manner in which I wrote them, no need to fuss. Most of the shorter stuff was written as poetry. Meaning lots of white space on the page.” IfsKnowsNeedsBookPurposeReadingStuffSpaceWhitePiecesWrittenProjectsPagesStonesSentencesAcceptedCrapPrintedSpoken WordAnthologyPrinted WordWhite SpaceProsody Author:Richard Meltzer
“I mean, what's thematic? How to put it? Going back to, like, 1980, when I started writing poetry. Language itself became an issue. I'd even think about font as an aspect of text, you know, how something looks on a page. A lot of this is the product of a very solitary existence, it's like, language, I mean, you know. A lot of time spent alone in the creation of all of this stuff.” ThinkingKnowsWritingLooksMeanLanguageStuffExistenceKnow HowIssuesCreationProductsPagesAspectSolitaryWriting PoetryTime SpentFontsThematic Author:Richard Meltzer
