Barry Alpert
Dear Jerry, "A little puzzled" is certainly within the range of responses I invite. "Where they come from": a consistent practice as far back as age 16 of driving into DC or Baltimore to view films & plays, eventually evolving into a desire to have a tangible document of my intersection with selected instances. At this point I set myself the writing performance of carving out of the informal talk of artists in other medias a twice formal first "take", but four years ago I hadn't settled on the acrostic/diastic double sonnet as what I wanted to "get out" of attending each "likely event". I openly cite Jackson as the direct source for the acrostic & diastic aspect, but depart from him in trying to simulate the argumentative turns of the sonnet via "strong" punctuation, syntax, cutting, & splicing of the largely chance-generated words. I'd rather these texts seem to make some sense of each particular artist to an art world audience than that they over-validate chance. Still uncertain whether the chance element necessitates occasionally MacLowesque syntax. Believe I detect objectively a trace of Schwerner in the ellipses I use to mark incomplete procedures, but am not sure about my derivation from Berrigan's sonnets, which I haven't reread in many years. Barry
