I love metaphor and think a good one – a true metaphor, rather than just an analogy or a simile – is the most useful description you can have. In clamping together two components which have no right to share space, you create a third: that’s your new perception. Suddenly it’s all over your work, your life. You can’t be the same again. That’s how it is for me, anyway.
“ I don’t think the avant-garde applies in this country, anyhow. I think it’s a whole different kind of thing that goes on here. Because the continental avant-garde was, first of all, elitist. It depended on the existence of a literary class, which we don’t have here, not in the same sense as you have there. It implies a militant approach, it implies leaders and followers. What we have here is much more diffuse throughout the country at large. “
Ronald Sukenick