Leaving the Atocha Station

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you: Ariana, Mom, Dad, Matt, Aaron, Brecht, C. D., Chris, Colin, Cyrus, Forrest, Geoffrey, Jacqueline, Jeff, Joanna, Jo-Lynne, Justin, Kyle, Skoog, Stephen, Tao, and Tom.

I have stolen language and ideas from Michael Clune’s essay, “Theory of Prose,” which appeared in No: a journal of the arts, #7. Like Clune, I am indebted to Allen Grossman’s essays in The Long Schoolroom. I first encountered the phrase “life’s white machine” in Jeff Clark and Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s collaboration, 2A. John Ashbery used the phrase as an epigraph to the poem “Longing of the Accords” (Planisphere). An excerpt of this book was published as a pamphlet by Physiocrats Press. The novel includes, albeit in altered form, a reading of Ashbery’s poetry that first appeared in my essay “The Future Continuous: Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy,” published by boundary 2. “Leaving the Atocha Station” is the title of a poem in Ashbery’s 1962 volume The Tennis Court Oath.