By this time, [Max] Jacob had initiated his walking discipline: in rambles throughout the city, he forced himself, in each interval between lamp posts, to come up with a new image or poetic idea or “relationship to a subject, whether a person, an object, a poster, a billboard, a postcard.” If no idea appeared, he halted at the lamp post until something occurred to him and he jotted it down (sometimes on telegraph blanks filched from a post office). These exercises contributed to the concentrated form of the poems.
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