I don't know if those of you I cannot see reading this obsess as I do about books but for years I've been wanting to read a translation of Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation by Gilles Deleuze. Finally it's out in a readable translation by Daniel W. Smith (University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
Please, allow me to quote a little of the opening paragraph of Chapter 11 (said chapter entitled "The Painting Before Painting"):
"It's a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface. The figurative belief follows from this mistake. If the painter were before a white surface, he could reproduce on it an external object functioning as a model, but such is not the case. The painter has many things in his head, or around him, or in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it. He does not paint in order to reproduce on the canvas an object functioning as a model; he paints on images that are already there, in order to produce a canvas whose functioning will reverse the relations between model and copy."
Isn't this also applicable to the poet and the blank screen or page?
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