Peter Greenaway: Why should we allow surrealism to have tyranny over the imagination?
George Oppen: Yeah, yeah. I don’t know. But I have this point to make about consciousness.
Greenaway: You can't do that with a video tube, in the same way.
Oppen: I can sympathize with you. People are full with systems of notations, of course.
Greenaway: There's every evidence that other people, too, are concerned about that.
•••
Oppen: Oh, indeed, it does. Laboriously.
Greenaway: We examine the sexual implications of the image of the horse in the Western world, et cetera, et cetera.
Oppen: It’s not just a line-ending, and the current—what I guess we’d generally call California poetry, treating it as the breath; well, not always in practice on both sides of the line.
Greenaway: Content atrophies so very rapidly, and all we're left with is the language--but that's more than enough.
Oppen: The typewriter simply disturbs me.
•••
Greenaway: We've got to be careful here.
Oppen: The end of one’s own life is by no means equivalent to the end of the world.
Greenaway: For the technology, we had to turn to Japan, and most of the technology there is high definition.
Oppen: I think of it as space rather than time.
Greenaway: Of course some people feel that I'm stuck in the seventeenth century.