Quote of the Day

I don’t do any “editing” as such. I used to show poems to Kenneth Koch and he would invariably say, “Jimmy, I like it very much, but have you thought about leaving off the last line?” It got to where this was the one thing he always said. So frequently I would chop off the last few lines to a poem and end it that way.

—James Schuyler

Quote of the Day

A gag that’s probably gone unnoticed turns up in the last sentence of the novel I wrote with James Schuyler. Actually it’s my sentence. It reads: “So it was that the cliff dwellers, after bidding their cousins good night, moved off towards the parking area, while the latter bent their steps toward the partially rebuilt shopping plaza in the teeth of the freshening foehn.” Foehn is a kind of warm wind that blows in Bavaria that produces a fog. I would doubt that many people know that. I liked the idea that people, if they bothered to, would have to open the dictionary to find out what the last word in the novel meant. They’d be closing one book and opening another.

—John Ashbery, to The Paris Review