To wield a conceptual brush is to terrorize, even if your motivating injunctions steer clear of violence or unregulated emotion. Terror here is poetry’s swift, certain, nontrivial insertion through a crucial hole and/or through self-negation versus certitude and flatulent controversy, such as with Basho’s proving human sound able to transform animal to mineral, or with Duchamp’s counter-ploy to the rule, toilets are never foreground.



Controversy, like injunction, comes to us commonly or frequently as back-formation, a provisional ethos after the conceptual stroke. We were constrained by the profound assumption, for example, that a play requires a tone and the stage set in more than five words. We were tacitly sure of this, marginalized more from other minimalist affects until we read Beckett’s new direction: A country road. A tree.