“Alibi and alias: everyone generates their own, is their own. We have names and some sort of permanence and halos left behind like salt rings in a sauna.”

—Ander Monson, "Index for X and the Origin of Fires"

If you enlarge a detail in a picture, you produce another painting.

This is what Roland Barthes told students in a lecture session dated April 20, 1977, adding that “the whole of Nicolas de Stael springs from 5 centimeters squared of Cezanne.” The prior month, Barthes had focused his lectures on the pictorial space and the role of the line, telling his students that “the horizon is the line that marks the boundaries of my territory," and locating the line in this labor of creating boundaries as well as pictorial perspective. But on this day in late April, Barthes' attention circulated around the frame, and the rectangle – which he suggested as “the basic shape of power".

Barthes’ ‘basic of shape of power ‘surprised me. When I visualize power, it has the aura of symmetry, completion, complete enclosure, self-sufficiency. Why not the cube or the square as power’s shape?

But thinking about what the horizon does rather than how it looks got me closer to Barthes. A horizon creates a space where action can exceed itself, can mark the page with the possibility of futurity, whether by enlarging detail or by calling the subject into the imaginary.

Near the end of his too-short life, Barthes was emphatic about “the right to digress” in text and thought, a right he defended on the basis of how much is happened upon in a digression, how much is accidentally discovered on a discursive path that isn’t entirely sure what it wishes to prove—- a path that doesn’t know its end, a way that doesn’t seek to demonstrate.

The digression, like the road or the trail less traveled, doesn’t appeal to simply because it promises a destination. The appeal of the digression lies in what it may suggest. In taking it, we might see things that we have not yet seen, or things that we did not plan to see. The unexpected. These unplanned things ask us to approach them in a different spirit. A spirit that is curious or perhaps more generous than the spirit that wants to get somewhere.

We forget that the poet’s job is to taste the world. We forsake our duty of stumbling, fumbling, rolling around in the dirt trying to find words for it.

RB Kitaj, *Land of Lakes*, 1975. oil on canvas. 152.4 x 152.4 cm. private collection

RB Kitaj’s “Land of Lakes” (1975 to 1977) is a landscape painting of sorts. The artist, RB (Rowland Brooks) Kitaj was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932. Although born in the US, Kitaj has lived in England for a long time and played a role in the British Pop Art movement, but what fascinates me about him is that he quotes from high art more than pop-culture in his work. There are pieces of various popular symbols—-from religious crosses to the eye on the whitewashed wall—-yet each is perfectly detailed and delicately rendered.

Although Kitaj called this piece an “optimistic one” that envisions “better time to come," I offer it as a prompt because it is inspired by a detail from Ambrosio Lorenzetti’s 14th century fresco, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, a fresco located in Sienna, Italy.

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Now a prompt. Pick a detail from this piece, inspired by a detail and write a poem titled after Kay’s piece on Lorenzetti’s. Use the colors and objects to describe a scene that is being recollected by a speaker in the future. Nothing has to happen, but things must be felt or wished for.

(If you need an additional spirit to move you, take this fragment I cut from a paper and use it as a “message in a bottle” that gives you the following words, as spoken by Debord and Lukacs, to use at some point in your poem. Or just three words. Or the syllable count. Spin the bottle until it tells you how to play a secret game.)

As for titling, Chris Hitchens and Martin Amis had a game they played where you replace the word “love” with “hysterical sex” in a song or book title or poem titles or movies. They had another game that played with existing titles called “titles that didn’t quite make it.” Use these games to generate a few titles — or a list poem.