Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
State of the Art: Video of 1990 lecture
from ThinAir video and Mitch Corber
"State of the Art" was presented at the 1990 Poetry Project Symposium, as a keynote along with lectures by Amiri Baraka and others. The essay was collected in A Poetics, which was published by Harvard University Press in 1992.
YouTube direct link
This is the opening of the essay: