In Picture of the Picture of the Image in the Glass, “what happens without you… isn’t in you (understood).” The “person” as “subject” is incommensurable with the sum of its personae, and its unrepresentability therefore defines the impossibility within which the subject is constructed. In “the silence between thought and / the sound of things undone” there is a rigorous calculus at work which occludes any possible rendering of the discourse on the figure of the reflection of the always already unattainable “other.” —Ted Pearson
Craig Watson
Praise for Picture of the Picture of the Image in the Glass
Craig Watson is a thoughtful poet. Reading him, we become thoughtful, too. This has little to do with right thinking (rectitude) or with the striking of poses (Rodin’s constipated statue). It does have to do with our thought becoming more rigorous and more witty and more passionate. It does have to do with our becoming more alive as language animals and as epistemologists who can dance (if only at night in our own rooms). Praise to Craig Wilson, then, for the enabling example of his poetry.
— John Taggart
It’s certainly true that I can’t disassemble my “self” or, more importantly, the act of writing, into a single, unified idea, whether that idea is participant or observer. This tautology is central to all my work, and my life, and is probably most completely explored in Picture of the Picture of the Image in the Glass which, as the title suggests, goes to some length in its interrogation of the notion of the perceived, the real and the subjective apparatus connecting the two.
— Craig Watson, interview at Rain Taxi