From byt —
With my back turned it surrounds me like a text, that feral grove, this hurry home. From its territorial egg the One steps out. The high widening fanes hold their tops against the snow. The same complex again and again shuffles in the cry, directed here, at the slip-screen, at the body where this other body plays, pliably distant, critically formed at arms length to its axis.
Weathered enclosure caked with rind. The drop-date drifts past. The shadows have moved on.
The risen day wanders in any direction to undulate. Its object crusts up perception, sprung lost to use or sack of air.
William Fuller
Praise for byt
Some future could take hope from the precision jump-started by these dismatlings, refusals & reconvenings. Racked up, the misnomer hists the nail on the head while its body takes heart from taking the heat. “But words flicker against.” Fuller up—don’t touch that dial—blowing up in the cash of your face.
— Bruce Andrews
Fuller’s writing has a lucid and at the same time hallucinatory quality as if pressing one’s / his reciprocal relations to the world so closely that “they” appear spectrally but exactly: “That this act distorts me is a function, precisely, of your putative silence. Lifted above your head, thought discloses three of us. The street is rutted with life, spectrally washing hand and hand.”
— Leslie Scalapino
My sense of what I try to do in my own poems […] is put language and experience under a kind of pressure that forces them to yield up a tenuous continuity, or roughly drawn site—unsteady though its boundaries may be—that feels authentic to me.
— William Fuller interview at Flood Editions
William Fuller reads from byt at The Ear Inn, November 7, 1987. Archived on PennSound.