Ange Mlinko: 03.06.06-03.10.06

“The lust for line trumps everything” says the brochure for “Obsessive Drawing” at the American Folk Art Museum. I’ve never been to the place, and it’s only $9 (a bargain compared to $20 MoMA right next door). The first gratifying thing about the museum is that it is quite sparsely attended for an early Thursday afternoon, raw and gray. There is none of the bustling and jostling of the Met and none of the preening of the MoMA crowd; the only nuisance is one woman’s ringtone, which emits the Brandenburg Concerto. . . .

I used to be fascinated by dreams. My dreams, of course—nothing is more boring than someone else’s dream. For a while I wrote them down; for a while I believed it was the special province of poets. It was at this time of year, late winter, that I dreamed most vividly: . . .

Whatever purpose the cafe has served for poets since the dawn of urbanism, it is now just another place to be alone among others. What’s the fun in being a voyeur in a roomful of laptop junkies? I’m trying to ignore the blaring music that forms an integument between nonspeaking patrons, not so much muffling the few conversations that exist but rather masking the greater silence. . . .

Stephen Burt has almost pre-empted one of my major questions of late. In his review of Jennifer Michael Hecht’s new book in The Believer, he asks what the difference is between a verse line and a punch line. . . .

Anxiety with literary lightness goes deep.

So I’m in one of my periodic James Schuyler manias (it’s seasonal: like William Carlos Williams, he wrote the very best poems about winter turning into spring) and I idly reread a couple of reviews of his Selected Letters. . . .