ponder

“It could be that I choose painful subjects because such sterility, human sterility, and loneliness, is part of so many modern landscapes. By this I mean the shopping mall, the suburbs, the business loops, the freeways and boutiques with cute names. They are all part of a modern reality that I would prefer to forget, or ignore. To most people I suppose such landscapes are slight, and unmenacing. To me they are the death of the landscape, and the eye’s starvation. Therefore, the asylum, the steel mill, the cemetery, the ghost on the riverbank, the dying resort beside the unfading Pacific are locations, for me of a human fertility within time.”
~Larry Levis, from “Some Notes on the Gazer Within,” The Gazer Within