‘No one can imagine – simply – merely; one must imagine within words or paint or metal, communicating genes or multiplying numbers. Imagination is its medium realized.
You are your body – you do not choose the feet you walk in – and the poet is his language. He sees his world, and words form in his eyes just like the streams and trees there. He feels everything verbally. Objects, passions, actions..
I am only a string of noises, after all – nothing more really – an arrangement, a column of air moving up and down, a queer of growth like a gall on a tree, a mimic of movement in silent readers maybe, a brief beating of wings and cooing of a peaceful kind, an empty swing still warm from your bloomers … ummm … imagine the imagination imagining … and surely neither male or female – there’s nothing female about a column of air, a gall on a tree – surely both, like bloomers on the swing’s seat… so I’m a spiky bush at least, I like to think, knotty and low growing, scratchy though flowering, a hawthorne would suit me.’

– William H. Gass, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, 1968