Introduction to the Poet:
Duane Locke, a celebrated US poet, is a retired university don who used to teach literature, renaissance literature to be specific. He is a doctor of philosophy and a traditional poet forging his way with all agility in the modern days of computers and laptops. He has written so many poems and has published so many of them and in so many magazines all over the world. In the following interview, Duane Locke tells Alok Mishra so much about himself as well as his poetry.
Alok Mishra: You have been composing poems for many decades now, Duane. How has this journey been? What changes do you find in your writing as well the writings around yourself?
Duane Locke: My starting to write poetry was belated. When I commenced the activity I was already too old to submit a manuscript to the Yale Younger Poet’s series. A person with a Master of Fine Arts degree, something new at this time, came to temporarily teach at the university. I had been teaching at this less-than-mediocre university in my home town for two years. Already had a Ph. D. in Metaphysical poetry, Donne to Marvell. At this time, I had studied Prosody under the Oxford Professor, Ants Oras, who was considered the world’s authority on sound in poetry. I had scanned thousands of sonnets. I gave intense attention to near-alliteration, the music made by repetition of kindred sounds—rl, dt, pb, gk, etc. This aspirant poet who encouraged me to start writing poetry was named David Wade, and I will be forever grateful to him.
The first poem I ever wrote was entitled “Kissing a Mechanical Ape.” It was accepted for publication on my first send-out, and then it was republished in the Louisiana Press anthology of Southern Poetry. I dedicated to devote the major part of my life to poetry along with the visual arts. I was always hedonistic inclined and thought the purpose of living was to have pleasure. I despised such concepts as included in “The Work Ethic.” In fact, I disdained almost all popular values and beliefs, and my hedonism was truncated and diminished by what society celebrated and worshipped as pleasure. I found popular and widespread sanctioned pleasures jejune, boring, and dull . People lived and worked hard to experience triviality, but in writing poetry, I found an ease in expression and a super-rapture.
As strange it might seem, I find as an intense rapture in writing a poem that fails as much as I do when writing one that succeeds. The very activity of writing a poem is to me a supreme joy. When writing I am not concerned with an audience. As Pablo Salinas has said that a poet does not know who his audience is. My poetry writing is like playing Solitaire. I write with no regard to cater to or please any reader. I am not a stooge of an audience, as most aspirant poets are. Although my poetry writing is like a game of Solitaire, it is a special and unique type of solitude. The solitude of the endeavor opens the participant into a cosmic, global miraculous state of being that can be designated as universal and absolute.
My poems are not written by an activity that can be classified by our current methods of poetry criticism. The process I undergo when writing a poem is a process not yet understood. It is mystic and mysterious—and far beyond current academic and popular knowledge. Since my mode of writing is unknown, felt, although unknown by me, I do not have the analytic mental set to note changes. Everything changes, as Heraclitus once said, but due to my tranced condition of writing, I have never been conscious of my changes. I find the currently practiced mode of poetic analysis false and useless, Whether it the antique Joel Spingarn-diluted Goethe intentional method, the defunct New Criticism, or what has more recently been a fad, deconstructionism. Deconstruction failed not on account of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy, but because it was practiced by so many who did not understand Jacques Derrida’s philosophy.
The one change I noticed in the “poetry” around me was that after the change in the Sixties with The Donald Allen anthology there are less sestinas. Also, poets became more fixated on writing a dull language, using the few words most used by people.
Alok Mishra: According to one of your biographies, you have composed over 5,000 poems and many more keep coming. As a poet ascribed to many titles, how do you see poetry as poetry as a poet—is the spur of the moment of a well-thought idea?
Duane Locke: Pay no attention to any of those biographies. It is impossible for a human being with all human beings having limited intelligence and limited perception to comprehend another’s life. One biography has me being born in Austria. I was born in Georgia, the one in the United States, not a neighbor of Russia. On April 16, Easter, 2017, I have had published 7068 different poems. Many have been reprinted, but I do not count reprints. I think I have had 34 books of poem published, but I did not keep an exact count of the books.
I never conceived of my poems as having well-thought out ideas. Since most ideas of the human race are fictions, lies, mistakes, fantasies, I hope ideas are absent from my poems. My poems convey experiences, rare, privileged experiences—not commonplace and everyday experiences. My poems are non-thematic. All statements of poetic themes are excrescences, and reduce a complexity and profundity of something that is a progression to static surrogate.
I might mention that as a child I was influenced by John Dewey’s Art as Experience. Although I admired passionately John Keats’ “Give me a life of sensations rather than thought, “I also admired thought. In fact, philosophy ranks as one of my greatest pleasures among my many pleasures. Every night before bedtime I read from a philosophy book.
I am especially enamored of post-modern philosophy with its Nietzschean transvaluation and discrediting of all the old idols. I might add that my favorite philosopher is Martin Heidegger.
I especially admired his discarding the old approaches to poetry and approaching poetry in a new way. I also admire Derrida, Lyotard, DeLeuze, Lacan, etc.
Alok Mishra: A seasoned poet as you are, you have witnessed the transition from paper to screen. How do you see this transition? Has it made poetry indeed global, or do you have other ideas?
Duane Locke: The transition in presenting what is called “poetry” from the page to the screen has resulted in an overpopulation of an of accumulation words being presented as “poetry.” The situation is that so many write what their self-deception informs them to be poetry, and so few read authentic poetry. So few, so very few, understand authentic poetry. Among those who do not understand are our editors, critics, professors of English, as well the celebrated and honored poets.
So many false poems are being published and praised by slave mentalities that one has to read about 500 poems before he discovers a mediocre imitation of a poem, and he has to read a few thousand—perhaps a million, before finally finding an authentic poem.
I remember when I was a child and read the Partisan Review that it had in its contents some article in every issue comparing poetry to Gresham’ economic law that bad money crowds good money off the market.
Alok Mishra: What kind of poetry do you read the most, and what kind of poetry do you like to write the most?
Duane Locke: In the past, a long time ago, I reread, often reread Chaucer in Middle English (beautiful sounds), Andrew Marvell. William Blake and John Keats. Walt Whitman. T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. Also, Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Karl Krolow, and Yves Bonnefoy.
In my more recent years, I don’t read as much poetry, for my reading time is devoted to philosophy. I find books such as Deleuze and Guaratri’s Thoudsand Plateaus, Maurice Merleau Ponty’s Visible and Invisible, and Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology more imaginative, much more profound, and supremely more exciting than 99% of poetry being written today. There is one current contemporary American poet I admire and ardently seek out his work, Felino Soriano.
Lately, I have been expending my energy on creation of visual arts. I invented a new mode of visual arts expression that I call “Sur-Objects” (Influence: Graham Harman). I compose my compositions on a photo processor, although the origin is not from the product of a camera. Most viewers say the end result resembles a painting. In fact, one obtuse editor of a magazine rejecting a submission, saying that his magazine only published photographs and did not publish paintings. I did not reply and correct his ignorance. Of course, my compositions have never seen a tube or can of paint. I seriously started “Sur-Objects” on June 2016, and since then already have 118 accepted for publication. Volume 23, No 1 of the excellent magazine The Bitter Oleander has one for its cover. Also, in this issue of the magazine are poems by two of my former students, Alan Britt and Silvia Scheibli. Someone, although I am not sure of his accuracy someone has claimed that former students of mine have published over 50 books .A recent one is Kronos: All-Devouring Federal Reserve by Amelia Arcamone-Makinano. Former student Charles Hayes (Christopher Tara) has now a work-in-progress on Pete Seeger and the Hudson River.
As previously stated, my poetry writing is not telos-directed, but alletorially situated, thus my conscious motivation for writing is the pleasure that the action engenders. But since human insight is limited and rarely accurate, there are many properties and accidents probably in the poetic endeavor of which I am not aware, or only vaguely aware. Why speculate? Self-knowledge, as most all knowledge, is usually a fantasy or lie. Of course, there is always the extremely rare exception. So rare, scarce, authentic knowledge is not even recognized when it is obviously present. Most people are slave mentalities and passionately believe what is spoken into them by our false social reality. They or the speaker most of the time do not even understand what they are believing or trying to persuade others to believe.
I have been called “A Nature Poet,” but I find all current poetic classifications as well as most poetic knowledge are prevarications promulgated by self-deceived slave mentalities. Things (dings), other than the man-made or man-believed, are prevalent in my poetry. I immensely enjoy having words that approximate what is publicly called “nature.” Such imagery always surmounts into symbolism of friendship that surpasses all friendships without being related to human friendship. When I reread this imagery, the imagery has an extra eudemonic value. I experience again, although altered and enlarged—transformed into ecstasy, similar to a Wordsworthian “Spot of Time.” Return is the grandeur I originally felt when watching a turtle lay her eggs, of the red spots on top of the head of black baby gallinules swimming back of their mother.
Alok Mishra: Duane, what is your motivation behind writing a poem? A poet who has written so many poem as you must be in a kind of habit of writing poems.
Duane Locke: To use a commonplace remark: writing is as natural to me as breathing. Perhaps, more natural, since in my early forced-to-go to school age I was afflicted with severe and chronic asthma. Having always to drop out of the schoolroom that I considered a type of prison where one is enticed to diminish their humanity and be a lickspittle to the shallowness, ignorance, and brutality of popular culture to honor triviality and lies, I did not attend a full year until the fifth grade. Even in high school, I was absent over the legal time, but my crime was overlooked since I could pass all their “make-up” tests. Asthma saved me from becoming a slave mentality and believing the lies and values of the current social reality. I was taught at home. I consider myself an auto-didact.
As I have previously stated my prime motivation in writing is hedonism. But there are probably many other motivations of which I am not consciously aware. Self-knowledge is impossible, but most believe they are well versed in self-knowledge, and thus spend their entire lives living by lies. Most psychologist and ordinary people are gullible, and believe their current opinions correspond to realities and not to lies that they really worship and believe.
Recently, I have been motivated by Ned Block’s views of the Heideggean phenomenal consciousness in that there is a segment of what is given in consciousness that is experienced but overlooked by consciousness. This is counter to the view that segment is not experienced at all. This segment of what is given in perceptions is dominant in our lives and motivates without our conscious knowledge. The view replaces the old outmoded, inadequate, and erroneous views of the unconscious and subconscious that are so prevalent in our au courant knowledge, and even have been postulated as the basis of poetry. I remember all the nonsense that happened so profusely not too long ago about “the deep image.”
Alok Mishra: Please tell me something about your personal life, Duane. You live alone, you like to live as recluse and you have been doing so. I am curious to know this side of your life.
Duane Locke: As a short summary, I was tossed (Heidegger) onto this earth on a farm in Georgia during the Depression and Boo-weevil. At age of four I was situated in Tampa, Florida. My surroundings were proletariat (Marx) and prol (Fussell). I perceived life from living in a quasi-slum. It was during Prohibition, and some of my memories were of fake restaurants with a back room where home brew was sold. Oddly, they had swinging doors. Living in poverty, many times we moved. Finally my youth ended up in what a socio-economists would call “lower middle-class neighborhood.”
After my wife’s death, now about 20 years ago, the Tampa Gestapo condemned my house, and I moved to Lakeland for ten years—spending much time in the weedy vacant lots where I found joy and companionship with walking sticks (the insect), leafhoppers, the golden and turquoise one, a darling golden snake, and arrow-shaped Micrathena spiders.
Before my move to Lakeland and my return to Tampa, I lived on what was classified by police as the second most dangerous street in Tampa. I was surrounded by mugging and murders. A man who lived across, a Native American, was murdered in a drug deal. In fact, the street was the Wall Street of illegal drug trade. There were many block parties where the businessmen met and made bids on the latest drug shipment.
For the past seven years, I have lived alone in a Tampa apartment. It is across the street from a park where the sacred, wild life, is abundant. I had one friend in Tampa. We had met each other in the seventh grade of the shabby school we attended. He died from heart attack this February. Now I know no one In Tampa. When asked whom to call in case of emergency, I write “No One.” I have outlived all blood relatives, and thus I am now completely and fully isolated and alone. I do not have a large email correspondence, mainly from my ex-students who are in many states and many countries. Also, many of my poetry and visual arts fans write. Once when speaking to club, I stated, “My problem is being internationally famous and totally locally unknown.” I have been published in 34 different countries.
Alok Mishra: How do you see the world of poetry today? Are poets and poetry the same as it used to be when you began to write. What changes do you notice and are these changes beneficial for poetry writing fraternity?
Duane Locke: One aspect of poetry today that demonstrates its degeneracy is the rapid growth of charging reading fees. I would never send to a magazine that charges a reading fee. This commercial activity has converted the once respected endeavor into a farce. Poetry has been reduced from being sacred to the profane. Social reality and its emphasis on exploitation of the other, animal life, the earth and its ardent faith in most of the mendacities has dehumanized and desensitized people, and poetry, due to it being attempted by so many slave mentalities, the poetry power structure lickspittles, contributes to the Decline of the West. Our Sixties introduced poetic improvements plus new form of poetic trash into poetry, the trash won. As John Dos Passos said, “We have two nations,” but I appropriate to restate: “We have two nations, the many obtuse and a few rarities, the sensitive.” Unfortunately, most of those who now attempt to write poems are passionate citizens of the obtuse.
Alok Mishra: I am passing a question to you which many get-today-live-today persons often ask me-what is the use of poetry in life? I try to answer them but I would like your answer for all those because your credentials make you much more authoritative to talk on this topic than anyone else I know today. Please have your view.
Duane Locke: Auden said poetry does nothing. This assertion implies doing something is worthwhile. I would say the opposite. I would say the Nothing that authentic poetry does is the summum bonum of our being tossed onto this earth. Nothingness as a state of corporeality is the highest of all wonders. No thought Is authentic thought, and conscious thought is usually self-adulation based on self-deception. Patanjali senses the value of Nothing in Yogin one-pointness. Zen with Zoans and Satori. No thought is one of our most valuable and highest faculty, but our savants seem to have no understanding of this No thought. No thought is a greater experience than the cogitations of our reason and thinking. No Thought is a presently unknown faculty of our corporeality. The concept of No Thought replaces the outmoded concepts of the unconscious and sub-conscious. No Thought is best described by using the language of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite of the middle ages: “No Thought is Thought, is not Thought, is hyper-Thought.”
I add: I consider my poetry language to operate in the manner of Dionysius semiology. “A skink is a skink, is not a skink, is a hyper-skink.” If language is read in this way it eliminates the falsehood of the subject-object perceptive mode that popular knowledge has imposed on the reality of corporeal perception.
Poetry is created when the faculty of no thought is active, and thought, logic, reason, perception is cleansed from corporeality. When one has learned to unlearned all the popular knowledge, popular values, popular beliefs, popular culture that he’s had spoken into him, he is prepared to become an authentic poet.
Most people are cowards, afraid to live the higher life, the supreme life, and thus these weaklings
wallow in trivial and useless actions and false thought, and to these cowards poetry, if authentic, means nothing to their lives. Was it e. e. cummings who said, “In a society of cowards, the brave man runs away.”
So many of our slave mentalities who adhere to the sartorial popular culture attire of torn-knee, faded blue jeans seek to find the mystic life in LSD rather than Pascal’s Pensees or Lucretius’ On Nature of Things. All the fast mystic seekers, equivalent to fast foods, have found only triteness belly fat.
Very few have the courage and capacity to seek to burn as a Walter Pater’s gem-like flame. So they play the Lottery and Bingo.
Alok Mishra: We all know that novels have overtaken poetry (As much was the case since the rise of the novel in the Victorian period), with a limited readership today. Duane, what challenges do you think the contemporary poets should take up to push poetry up?
Duane Locke: If poetry was pushed up to become authentic poetry, it would be less read and less of an influence, for the masses despise the elite, the excellent, the genuine and prefer their petty escapisms from realities. The only way to improve the spread of poetry is to improve human beings. The improvement of human being is definitely possible, but at present is being overlooked in order to produce the conventional dehumanized robot whose joy is imitating a machine and becoming respected for his dehumanization, ignorance, and grandchildren.
Andre Breton hated the novelists, but some of our novelists like Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett approach a kinship with poetry. Four of my favorite literary works are in prose, Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” Joyce’s “Araby,” Faulker’s “The Bear,” and Hawthrone’s “The Artist of the Beautiful.”
In Lakeland while living in the home of ignorant literary poseurs and aesthetic failures, I read many novels—most all of the works of Murakami and Rushdie, but gave up. I found the time spent deficient in providing the exalted excitement of affective returns.
Alok Mishra: Now is the time to talk about your favorite poets, Duane. Being an American, you inherit the pride of be in-line of the great ones, Whitman, Poe, Emerson, Longfellow and many others. Who are your favorite poets in the USA and outside the USA? And who among them you think to find to have the nearest impression upon your own writing.
Duane Locke: Living most of my youth in lower class and lower middle class neighborhoods, I was not fully aware that such a thing as poetry existed. My high school English teachers did not understand anything about poetry or how to present poetry, so I gave it little attention until college. I had a rarity, an English professor who understood poetry. His name was Douglas Angus. He introduced me to T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, Hart Crane. The two among them who made the greatest impression upon my future writing were Eliot and Stevens. I loved the Jules LaForgue element in Eliot, but not his acceptance of religion. Stevens’ Sunday Morning, yes. Later on, a stronger influence became Spanish, French, German, Chinese and Japanese poetry. My greatest compliment paid to me was by a Japanese critic wring in a Japanese magazine. He said, “I naturally had the mind of a Zenists” He might have been right. He might have been wrong. I personally do not know what kind of mind I have. My mind is unknowable, and all who think they know are self-deceiving themselves when they assert their analysis. No one really understands another, and only imposes his misconceptions upon them. Most people spend their entire lives living by lies in which they have unshakeable faith are truths.
I have already mentioned that the current poet’s work that most attract me is that of Felino Soriano.
Alok Mishra: Do you believe in the ’ good and bad poetry’ argument? When we talk about the quality of poetry, Duane, I would request you to tell me what are qualities which made poetry praiseworthy? And also, do these qualities vary from reader to reader?
Duane Locke: I certainly believe there is good and bad poetry, but I have never read any comments that can adequately describe why the goodness and badness. I find that most critics of poetry have little understanding of poetry and thus impose their own petty values derived from their narcissistic blindness, emotional insecurity, and literary ignorance. Our current poetry knowledge is inadequate to serve as a foundation for a reliable viewpoint. The above deficiency allows every obtuse individual to have the self-confidence that his foolish remarks have validity.
One of the qualities that I find praiseworthy in poetry is that the language discards mimesis and liberates from external representation to open inwardly and deeply to what is hitherto unknown and defies explanation due to the limitation and incorrectness of our sanctioned axiology—and this is felt corporeally as an inner reality.
What seems to have identity and sameness is an illusion. Everything differs. Heraclitus’ river always flows, although Lyotard said it better in a correction: “You cannot step twice into the same river because there is no river.” Our names do not correspond to what they are supposed to correspond. So, qualities can never be the same, and thus qualities will always differ from reader to reader. Most, if not all of our talk about universals, absolutes, and eternal verities are lies.
Alok Mishra: About the language of poetry, I have seen some poets who use quite simple language and some using quite difficult language along with deep-rooted metaphors. What do you think about the language used in poetry.
Duane Locke: Coleridge has a very intelligent discussion about this matter of language in his criticism of Wordworth’s simplicity, which in reality is rarely simple. Simplicity is the opium of the people.
Simple language truncates the real, reduces it to a meaningless sounds that each reader interprets according to his own efficiency or deficiency. The simple functions to persuade what is unreal is real, and reality can only be conveyed through a complex or obscure procedure. Reality is complex, a complexity beyond a complexity. Clarity, the clear and distinct, functions to displace what is said with what is not said. Simple language is a necessity in communicating fantasies and lies rather than reality and truth. So most people and many “poets” specialize in a language of simplicity. Obscurity is the only authentic clarity.
Alok Mishra: What’s overall view, Duane, on the contemporary poetry around the world? Where do you think it’s heading and where do you think it should be heading.
Duane Locke: Since I read so little poetry now, I am not qualified to estimate what the poetry is being written now in the 21st century is doing or where it is going. I noticed that during the last inauguration of an American president did not have a poet read. Poetry was absent from the ceremony. In the many past presidential inaugurations no poet appeared in the performance to read. I think the now-forgotten “poet” James Dickey read at the Carter ceremony. The popular Frost, snow covered, at the Kennedy. Now, if this new social reality of not having poets read at these presidential exhibitions become mandatory, it might predict that poetry is heading for extinction and will disappear as did the Ivory Bill Woodpecker. The abundance of obtuse and unqualified editors selecting inferior attempts at poetry predict “An Age of Stillborn Poetry.”
Perhaps in the future, poetry will be as rare as an authentic Saint today, or a Painted Bunting.
Alok Mishra: Duane, what do you think is your purpose behind being a poet. Why do you write poetry? Thinking generally, what do you think should be aim of a poet?
Duane Locke: I write poetry as a salvation. The writing of poetry is my Savior. It saves from being one of the living dead, the slave mentalities who established the hideous norms of how one should live. I did know that death had not only undone so many flowing over London bridge but turned our social reality, the popular way of living according to lies, into a monochromatic cemetery with each skeleton having a mask for a face with glass eyes that watch trash about the pointed ear logic of living in outer space, or the jejune antics of a non-virginal, Madonna.
The aim of a poet is to change his life from being a victim of popular beliefs and values, both traditional and alternative life style, and through this change of his life, the unlearning of all he has learned, he prepares him or herself to become a poet. Changing one’s life, as Rilke was changed by Apollo’s Torso, is more important than working hard to become master of technique. Poetic workshops are worthless unless they serve excellent wine as Brunello from Montalcino or Vin Nobil from Montepulciano.
To be an authentic poet, you must change your life from the way society has taught you to live.
and I don’t mean be a Hippie, the coward’s pretense, which was just an inversion of what was spoken by those under thirty five to be valuable. It was not a genuine, only a fake change. Some are still living by this fraud as counter to the prevalent and sanctioned fraud. Many who have no understanding of Duende and the Duende life is foreign to them are still writing about Duende. Some are still searching for what did not exist, Don Juan, who can not only walk on water, but can walk on air.
Alok Mishra: And towards the conclusion of this wonderful conversation, Duane, I would like to ask you what is poetry and what is not poetry. We have been through many definitions of poetry as of now. I would like to know your personal definition of poetry because you have read a lot and have been writing for many decades now.
Duane Locke: What is poetry? It is a question that with our current knowledge and learning that is impossible to answer. People struggle to have answers to such grand questions that are impossible to answer, but people are too naïve, unlearned, and simple-minded to recognize the intricacies that render no satisfactory conclusion can become a finality. Thus, as I keep repeating, the majority, the vast majority of people spend their entire lives living by lies. Truth must be extremely powerful to maintain its existence among all the liars. Truth is there, but is rarely found.
Knowing what poetry is similar to St. Augustine relationship to knowing what Time is. He said he knew what Time was, felt deeply what Time was, but he could not explain what Time is. A few, very few, know what Poetry is, but these rarities cannot explain what poetry is. Unfortunately, we have no machine or human being that or who can determine who the few are who know what Poetry is.
The problem with this basic uncertainty about poetry is that it causes quackery to flourish. Quackery always dominates the current poetic scene. There are trillions of lies that have power and influence to the one tiny truth that is usually unrecognized and overlooked.
Our age has been called “The Age of Information” which means we have the machinery that increases the ability of liars to spread their lies. Our age should be called “The Age of Mendacity.” For evidence, all one has to do is listen to our politicians on CNN.
Alok Mishra: And at last, what roles do you think that online magazines such as ours—Ashvamegh, are playing in spreading literature.
Duane Locke: A few of these type of magazines, the ones that seek the authentic excellence rather than the fashionable mediocre, seem to be our only hope in spreading and preserving literature. The Universities have failed. Too many of their professors are slave mentalities, stooges of what they think will give them tenure and possible popular recognition. Our moneyed magazines, cash gives them makes them prestigious rather the merit of what they publish, have failed in the spreading of literature. Their editors all seem to have such low-grade and obtuse taste. The online magazine can be the Savior of literature, but too many of online magazines are the opposite, their obtuse, ignorant, slave-mentality editors make them the enemies. The poetic trash published by the majority of online magazines is encouraging the extinction of poetry. We need more erudite and poetically sensitive editors, but most of our editors are inferior human beings whose lack of good taste and vast knowledge makes them the enemies of authentic poetry. But there are some great editors. These editors are the hope that poetry will be saved from extinction.
Alok Mishra: Many thanks for your precious time, Duane, and all the best for your writing! It was indeed much more than pleasure talking to you!
Duane Locke: It was a joy. But now I return to the creation of my visual arts which I call “Sur-Objects.”