Today, Friday the 24 of January, I treated myself to the exhibitions of Max Ernst's Collages at the Kasmin Gallery and also to Specific Forms at Loretta Howard Gallery, and these were treats of a real type, that I get to write about for the Brooklyn Rail, right now.  And on the way, since reading in the bus is the true delight, I have been reading Lydia Davis in her Essays, and loving not just . how she writes but the whole manner of looking and relooking at things. We will be talking about the latter in my forthcoming mini-seminar on "Maximal/Minimal: from the epic to the aphorism," and this coming week we will be looking at details in larger pictures, and reading Thom Gunn and then Robert Hass and on and on. It feels like an equivalent of "the man who is tired of London is tired of life" and that is the way I feel about poetry.