John Ashberry

Most all of literature is self congratulatory, not unlike any other business where business means getting what is best for you. Though literature is practiced by other people too, people who want the best for everyone and understand that this attitude is the most humane because it's best for them too.

What Lydia Davis the writer is doing is acceptably different; she's doing what a man could and should be doing--she's using her own strength and courage as her way of being aware of the world.

Lydia Davis also embodies in her writing the possibility of living without language, or at least the idea of living with as little language as possible, of using as little language as possible if only to see what can happen.

This is why it's painful to read Lydia Davis so much of the time--she writes by trying not to use language! Lydia Davis feels, obviously, somewhat ambivalent about language, that language even exists, a tincture of guilt about the whole business of writing pervades her written atmospheres.

No one stands in front of a mirror to actually see oneself, one only stands in front of a mirror to confirm or deny what he already sees, and then mostly in order to see himself as others already see him.

And poems aren't based on true stories like the stories of Lydia Davis, some poems actually like to use more language than they need and that's ok too.