An almost too perfect Fall day. A soft wind down of a Sunday afternoon in Cafe Flore.

Incredible to think how storied a history there is in this once used car dealership turned cafe. Most recently I've found Cafe Flore mentioned along with many long gone landmarks in Steve Abbott's writing. I have been busy collecting and reading his writing and am now on his last book, The Lizard Club which is so delightful that I do not want it to end. Abbott is an essential New Narrative figure having named the movement and done a great deal to codify its tenets in his Soup magazine. Along with Robert Gluck and Bruce Boone, Abbott wrote poetry first and then came to prose as part of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical writing.

These poet's relationship to language is I think an important aspect of their New Narrative writing's relationship to language in their fiction. As important as the counter impulse to the dictates of LANGUAGE POETRY, I think.