Plato’s Closet

Poetry. Dear Lawrence, Reading yr psychotic book, I swear I feel ting’d with a resplendent glow, which is what Keats wrote of Byron’s verse when he compared it to a moon- soaked cloud. The whole point is that the militarization of our life world is already the realization of the market’s aestheticization, which makes your lines totally redundant. I mean, the autonomy of yr poem is adjunct to that of a Kalashnikov. Did you write this poem in a cave or a closet? I’ll no longer look for utopia in a piece of military hardware.–Rob Halpern, from the Afterword