i never knew what time it was

talking at blérancourt

talking at blérancourt someone asked me once a simple question an absurdly simple question and i gave an absurdly simple answer whats an artist he asked and i said somebody who does the best he can by now ive said this so many times ive begun to believe it because when you think about it there are very few people in this world that do the best they can you know if general motors makes a lemon of a car its your problem but if an artist makes a lousy artwork its his problem or her problem so it turns out that artists are the last people in this world who have to do the best they can because their life is at stake you say you know a plumber who does the best he can i say hes an artist you know lots of artists who dont do the best they can? its very simple theyre not artists anyhow thats how i answer the question because up to now thats the best i can do for an answer now as a poet thats the term i get stuck with i actually choose it fairly aggressively i choose it in spite of the fact that i tend to feel a little uncomfortable with it because if im going to be a poet i want to be a poet who explores mind as the medium of his poetry not mind as a static thing but the act of thinking and the closest i can come to the act of thinking is the act of talking and thinking at the same time 49 the closest i can come to my thinking is by talking myself through it talking my way through my thinking thinking my way through my talking a little while ago jacques asked do we have the right material here and maybe he was talking about the tape recorder but thinking about it in general i suppose theres no such thing as the wrong material were in a museum here a small museum of french american friendship and museums have a strange effect on me and this museum like any museum but in this museum even more so because its a small museum looking at the pictures on the walls theres something arbitrary about a museums relation to artists its a little like looking at driftwood on a beach the artists are cast up on the shore after the ship has gone down and theyre carried some distance by the current and stranded on this particular beach where they get found and hung on the wall trophies of a random rescue museums do the best they can and i suppose i repeat myself but my sense is that museums are to artists as anthologies are to poets as zoos are to animals and its hard to think about animals in a zoo where the animals are sleeping while the people are buying ice cream and t-shirts and toys its even hard to look at artworks in some galleries but i got used to it because i had to act as an art critic which ive done for a large part of my life and i had to find a way to do that and live with being an artist a poet at the same time now the way that i managed to do it was to speak as one artist to another and anyone else who cared to listen so if anyone wanted to eavesdrop they could but i wasnt writing for them and if they didnt want to listen it was all right with me but what i had to say talking at blérancourt 50 seemed to amuse a lot of people and the magazines printed it even though i was lousy about deadlines and at one point i was told by donald droll a friend of mine who ran the fischback gallery that a german magazine with a remarkable name das kunstwerk wanted to talk with me about becoming their american correspondent and writing about the art scene in new york id already been writing a new york chronicle for a danish magazine called billedkunst so i said okay donald what are they interested in donald said the editors are coming to town next week theyll take you to an expensive restaurant and youll find out when you see them the next week...