After some abortive attempts at painting uptown (doormen up there can be vicious), I did this piece. Even as a kid I'd always been fascinated by how things gets stuck in the asphalt in the summertime. Keys, bottle caps, shiny bits of colored glass, it reminded me of urban fossils or artifacts preserved in lava.

I hammered about 50 words into the asphalt, on Broadway, from 96th street to the Battery. At the time I was interested in DuChamp and the dadaists and William Burroughs and their experiments with allowing chance to decide the outcome of their work. My idea was that without keeping track, without critical intervention, I would inscribe a long poem down Broadway. Unfortunately the finished poem has been lost. But I do recall it being a lot less interesting to me than the single word pieces themselves, the relationship that developed between the word's object-ness and its actual meaning.