thinking a lot lately about artists who take hairpin aesthetic turns over the course of their body of work. i can't think of that many. gerhard richter is the only one coming to mind right now, and my impression is that he frustrates many a curator and collector with this "idiosyncratic" habit over never wedding himself to any one style, form or subject matter for very long. but what about others? rothko painted like rothko, sure the palette and take on form evolved, but he retained a signature style his whole career. what would people have done if he decided to paint like Grandma Moses for while? isn't the creative process supposed to take artists unexpected places, aren't we like, kinda keyed into a thing called intuition that may desire, on occasion, to overrule ideas like Consistency, Continuity and (I've always hated this one) Voice? i say this because just in the last year i finally deconditioned my grad school self, that is, running my own workshop in my head whenever any poor word saw the light of day on a piece of paper (or screen). every defenseless "and" and "she" had to answer to the giant manifesto of k that accumulated ever since i strutted the halls as an undergrad as an "a poetics" acolyte, saying things to a similarly dogmatic peer like, "autobiography is a crutch," and meaning it as an ethical dictum. so, exit my inner grad school and enter the revelatory, "why don't i just write A poem?" and another one. and look, they don't even go together. are part of precisely no series. have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. like many elements of my wardrobe. discrete pleasures. and then i'm thinking about something j read which i'm about to paraphrase and oversimplify terribly, that all pop music is one continuous song, as represented by the fade out. johnny cash, britney spears, ja rule: all part of the same stream and this technical innovation unique to the form belies this implicit unity. yep, that doesn't sound like much without the source. look that up. for whatever seachange in one's work- formal to non, personal to non -I run out of adjectives to represent entire poetics, and NY Schooly and L=A=NGUAGEy seem only partial descriptors too... shouldn't there BE seachanges, shouldn't we welcome them as explorations beyond what we already know we're capable of? maybe i'll keep thinking about this into some smarttalk instead of sounding like an annie lamont 12 step program.