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"Russian Formalist theory of the early 20th century made an important (and now familiar) distinction between plot and story. The story of anything is its strictly chronological unfolding, what happened in precisely the order in which it happened. The plot is the order in which those happenings are arranged artistically—the order in which they are offered for experience—liberated from their chronology, retimed, and given over to a different logic or logics. But there’s more to the plot than that."
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"3. A poem should be more than one thing. The more things a poem is at once, the better. A poem should be useful on as many different levels of scale as possible (individual level, pair level, group level, city level, world level. . . and down the other way, too, the level of organs, the level of electrical pulses)."
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"Can a writer’s letters—occasional and ephemeral as these tend to be—really qualify as great literature? In Beckett’s case, yes."
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Japanese photographer Hiroshi Watanabe:
