Pastan & Prosody

Since this whole “Boston Comment” affair erupted, I’ve been hyper-conscious about my own critical motives, worrying that my dismissals of certain tendencies in mainstream poetry might be no more rational or balanced or constructive or whatever than Joan Houlihan’s blanket dismissal of experimental poetry. So when I saw that Aimee was recommending Linda Pastan, I at first thought to myself, well, maybe I’ve had a closed mind, maybe I should go into this as much as possible without any prejudices and try to let the poem do what it does on its own terms and evaluate it from there. The poem Aimee reproduces is

love poem


I want to write you
a love poem as headlong
as our creek
after thaw
when we stand
on its dangerous
banks and watch it carry
with it every twig
every dry leaf and branch
in its path
every scruple
when we see it
so swollen
with runoff
that even as we watch
we must grab
each other
and step back
we must grab each
other or
get our shoes
soaked we must
grab each other

Upon reading this two or three times I thought: not bad, not great either, some effective phrasing (the repetition of “grab each other,” mostly), a nice sense of spontaneity but nothing really arresting or specific. So, I figured, maybe I should look at some more of Pastan’s work, and then I’ll have more of a context in which to appreciate this piece. I followed Aimee’s links and came across the following poem, among others:

Prosody 101


When they taught me that what mattered most
was not the strict iambic line goose-stepping
over the page but the variations
in that line and the tension produced
on the ear by the surprise of difference,
I understood yet didn’t understand
exactly, until just now, years later
in spring, with the trees already lacy
and camellias blowsy with middle age,
I looked out and saw what a cold front had done
to the garden, sweeping in like common language,
unexpected in the sensuous
extravagance of a Maryland spring.
There was a dark edge around each flower
as if it had been outlined in ink
instead of frost, and the tension I felt
between the expected and actual
was like that time I came to you, ready
to say goodbye for good, for you had been
a cold front yourself lately, and as I walked in
you laughed and lifted me up in your arms
as if I too were lacy with spring
instead of middle aged like the camellias,
and I thought: so this is Poetry!

I have problems with this poem on at least three levels: style, argument, and meter. (I guess that covers just about everything, doesn’t it?) My most immediate negative response is to the poem’s rhetorical style: I wince slightly at little anthropomorphisms like “the strict iambic line goose-stepping” and “camellias blowsy with middle age,” and slightly more still at their opposites, the phrases comparing people to weather and seasons. I’m not sure whether it helps or makes it worse when the speaker likens herself to the camellias, which, by virtue of being described as “middle-aged” in the first place, are already implicitly likened to her. I think by that point the poem is such a mess it doesn’t make any difference.

But I get ahead of myself: these stylistic objections must finally be considered subjective, and I haven’t yet fully addressed the other things that make the poem a mess in my opinion. Its “argument” would appear to be that the principle behind skillful iambic pentameter (and by extension, Poetry in general?) is one of surprise, of expectations that are either run aground as in a shipwreck or miraculously rescued. This “either” is crucial, since it’s not clear that the analogy the speaker offers really works: the frostbitten flowers are a cruel shock, whereas the suddenly affectionate lover is a happy relief. We might exercise the faculty of generosity and suppose that the transition from negative to positive is itself intended as an example of the kind of surprise in question, but my generosity is strained at that point. More importantly, the poem’s pivotal definition of what makes meter work, “the tension … between the expected and the actual,” is incomplete. This is part of what happens in good iambics, certainly; but it is inadequate as a summation, as it neglects rhythm, which this poem sorely lacks.

This brings us to the poem’s own meter, if one can call it that. Although three or four of the lines could be said to scan fairly smoothly, for the most part the only organizing structural feature is that most lines have somewhere between nine and eleven syllables—and some go over. There’s just enough regularity to suggest that the poem is trying to match form to content, but not anywhere near enough to demonstrate any “tension … between the expected and the actual.” It’s all just dully, shapelessly, actual. In fact, it’s much more shapeless than a well-crafted poem written in skillful open form, because one is constantly aware of the metrical architecture it tries to invoke but fails to inhabit. No expectations are ever raised, so none can be undermined.

It’s an old, cheap trick, but I think it’s useful here—I’ve taken out the line breaks and turned it into prose in order to demonstrate a) the arbitrariness of the verse arrangement and b) the overall laxity of the language just as language, period:

When they taught me that what mattered most was not the strict iambic line goose-stepping over the page but the variations in that line and the tension produced on the ear by the surprise of difference, I understood yet didn’t understand exactly, until just now, years later in spring, with the trees already lacy and camellias blowsy with middle age, I looked out and saw what a cold front had done to the garden, sweeping in like common language, unexpected in the sensuous extravagance of a Maryland spring. There was a dark edge around each flower as if it had been outlined in ink instead of frost, and the tension I felt between the expected and actual was like that time I came to you, ready to say goodbye for good, for you had been a cold front yourself lately, and as I walked in you laughed and lifted me up in your arms as if I too were lacy with spring instead of middle aged like the camellias, and I thought: so this is Poetry!

Spread out this way, stripped of its poetry-disguise, this text even more clearly reveals all its unfinished surfaces and ill-fitting joints. The first ten or eleven words sound more like quacking than English; phrases such as “I understood yet didn’t understand / exactly” and “until just now, years later” are barely grammatical banalities; the vehicle of the cold front simile (“like common language”) too loudly broadcasts the tenor (prosody) for which the cold front itself—and really, the poem as a whole—is a vehicle; and the poem’s final epiphany (“so this is Poetry!”) is ambiguous in the most unmotivated way, making it unclear whether the revelation occurs at the moment of witnessing the dead flowers or at the moment of being embraced, and even more unclear that either possibility is interesting. Just to be fair, I’ll admit that I like the line “as if I too were lacy with spring”: it has a pretty, wistful sincerity.

Now, back to the problem I started with. How is what I’m doing here different, if it is different, from what Houlihan has been doing to experimental poems in “Boston Comment”? Or what she’s been doing to mainstream poems for that matter. I wouldn’t be surprised if she felt the same way about this piece that I do. We pretty much feel the same way about poets like Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, et al., and use many of the same kinds of arguments to make our case against them. So why do I find her attacks on poets like Christine Mengert so wrongheaded?

It’s not just, as some have suggested, that Mengert is a beginner and deserves to be cut some slack, whereas the veterans of the poetry world are grizzled enough to handle tough criticism. Houlihan fails to acknowledge a crucial distinction between two types of poems: those that carry with them a relatively intact formal apparatus for their own interpretation, and those that do not. It’s like tinned fish: some comes with its own key, and some requires a can opener. Some may just have to be bashed open on a sharp rock. Some may not be destined to be opened, like the can of pink salmon that sat ornamentally on the ledge of my bachelor apartment for months and months in 1985, and for all I know may still be rusting picturesquely somewhere. A large percentage of poems in the Anglo-American tradition have keys firmly glued to their lids, and when the keys work, and what’s inside is tasty, it can be a beautiful thing. Pastan’s is one of those keyed poems, but like too many others, its key breaks when you try to pry it off, or the lid itself chips under the key’s pressure before opening fully.

Houlihan assumes that when poems come with keys attached, it’s reasonable to expect the keys to work. I agree, especially when it’s reasonably clear that the key isn’t some kind of deliberately ineffectual meta-key or whatever. What she has no category for, and therefore cannot tolerate, are poems that are indifferent to interpretation as such, or at least interpretation as it is defined in certain dominant critical models. Pastan’s poem, on the other hand, loudly announces its compatibility with these models, but then fails when put to the test.

———

ADDENDUM:

My bashing of Pastan’s “Prosody 101" was (as a couple of people pointed out) a bit of a swerve from the poem Aimee originally posted, and so I want to try to redress that situation a bit. As I said before, I don’t think “love poem” is that bad. For what it is--a slight, offhanded bit of verbal cuddling--it has a considerable amount of integrity, in that it avoids obvious cliches, its language is direct and unaffected (the archaic sense of scruple as used here sent me to the dictionary, but I found this to be one of the most effective images in the poem, partly because of its etymological exoticness), and as pure sound it’s not unpleasant.

If this praise seems condescendingly littered with negatives and reservations, maybe I’m resisting something other than the language as such. Maybe it’s the overly familiar scenario of romanticized passion, in which the intimate address between two lovers assumes an importance that, in our late-capitalist age of global crisis, for readers who have long since surfeited on such pastoral idylls, must seem overblown and irresponsible. Or if this is too austere and Adorno-y an objection, maybe it’s that the poem could be argued to fail formally in achieving the speaker’s own stated ideal: it is hardly “headlong,” hardly “swollen with runoff,” but rather a gentle trickle of mildly cascading sentiments. The idea that its “banks” might be “dangerous” to stand on is ludicrous. OK, like, if we’re talking about a couple of really old people with weak hearts or whatever, sure. But you know. Come on. If the speaker had said “I want to write you a love poem as soft and furry as a baby raccoon,” that might be closer to the actual effect.

The poem appears to be attempting to simulate said headlong quality via its lineation, using short lines to create a skinny, stream-like column, and heavily enjambed line breaks to evoke a continual, over-lapping current, as of water in a creek. To some extent, this technique works, but only to some extent; ultimately, I don’t get the same feeling of necessity from the breaks that I get from those in a poem by Williams, or Creeley … or even O’Hara, whose breaks are ostensibly arbitrary, dictated by the margins of whatever cocktail napkin or memo pad he happened to be writing on. To me, Pastan’s breaks feel inert, “unjustified,” much of the time.

Just as I did with “Prosody 101,” I’ve reproduced the poem here minus its line breaks:

I want to write you a love poem as headlong as our creek after thaw when we stand on its dangerous banks and watch it carry with it every twig every dry leaf and branch in its path every scruple when we see it so swollen with runoff that even as we watch we must grab each other and step back we must grab each other or get our shoes soaked we must grab each other

Experiment: re-introduce line breaks, which I’ve removed, to this poem. No fair peeking at the original. Where do you think they work best? Do you have a rationale, or do you “just go on your nerve”? If the latter, can you still reconstruct some kind of logic to your choices after the fact? Are there several acceptable ways to break the lines, all of which are equally effective? Or is there a special vibration that you can reach, like hitting the right notes on a musical instrument, when you arrange the lines a certain way, and only that way? Or are the materials not worth the trouble?

Barrett Watten at UCB

I got to the English Department Lounge in Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley about halfway through last night’s “colloquium and crackers” with Barrett Watten, having missed the “informal book event” across the street entirely. Terrible traffic! Adding to my feeling of underpreparedness, I haven’t yet bought a copy of The Constructivist Moment, Watten’s new book.

Watten and a small group of the faithful were huddled around a table full of crackers and cheese and used donuts (left over from an “undergraduate tea”‚ as he held forth on the topic of negativity. Among those in attendance at this preliminary gathering were Lyn Hejinian, the organizer of the event; Nadia Nurhussein (the other reader); Carla, sitting at the back of the group, occasionally raising her hand and presenting an objection; Stephen Vincent; George Lakoff, Summi Kaipa, Jennifer Scappetone, Alli, James, and some other people I didn’t know (I’m guessing mostly Berkeley students). If you’ve ever seen Watten in action in one of these discussion situations, it’s fascinating: he always has an answer ready at least six words before the end of the question, and the answer almost always changes the question into another, more complex and elaborately contextualized question that in turn requires the asking of several more questions just to get to a point where the conversation is back somewhere near where the original questioner started. And then sometimes he’ll ask someone else what they think about something: good luck, someone!

This would all be frustrating if it didn’t contribute to what I see as the total theater of Watten’s work, a body of work that I consider as including not just poems and essays and books, but the carefully constructed, intensely intellectual persona that he projects. As he once put it, he “comes off kind of lab-coaty.” This is a silly reduction of his complex, sometimes confrontational demeanor, but it’s fairly evocative of at least the surface effect. “Theater” suggests a misleading or illusionistic artifice, which isn’t really what I want to convey; rather, I have in mind a sense of public staging, of involving oneself in an ongoing social interchange in which one’s own identity is conspicuously “fixed” in a way that invites certain responses and dissuades others. Such staging invites tension, uncertainty, sometimes even suspicion and distrust—this is perhaps one manifestation of the “negativity” which is the subject of part of The Constructivist Moment. I will have more to say on this, I hope, once I actually get the book.

On to the reading itself. As we moved down the hall to the Maud Fife Room, other guests showed up, among them Stephen Ratcliffe, Kit Robinson, Sandy Berrigan, Aidan Thompson, Chris Chen. Nadia Nurhussein read first, and only for about fifteen minutes, if that. I wasn’t really able to get a firm sense of her work in such a short time, and she had such a pretty, melodious voice that it actually made it hard for me to concentrate: it was lulling. Admittedly, I’m easily lulled. Huh? Where was I?

Watten’s reading was a marvelous collage of various poetic and prose texts from recent years, including material from the new book, sections of Bad History, e-mail discussions from the Buffalo List (the “flag as transitional object” conversation initiated by Nick Piombino, and the “Grand Piano” project. Throughout the different phases of the reading, or “fits” as he called them, he had slides projected onto the wall behind him: photographs by Michal Rovner, typesetting diagrams, pictures of buildings in Detroit, and so on. The overall effect was very exciting. I couldn’t help but think that it was in some ways evocative of a stadium rock concert, with Barry as superstar medleyist, accompanied by laser light show. I don’t mean this dismissively at all; I find his negotiation of public personality in relation to the sometimes “clinical” concerns of his work stimulating and adventurous. Something he said at one point during the reading—I don’t recall which text it’s from—struck me as very interesting, particularly in light of Ron’s recent discussions of poetic community and the charges of “elitism” faced by experimental poets: Watten reported that when asked once if he wanted to be famous, he replied “I want to be known.” This is a helpful distinction, I think. To be known is to be understood, or at least, encountered on some vital communicative level, whereas to be famous is merely to be gazed at by absent faces. The presentation last night seemed to me to enact the tricky divide between such modes of self-disclosure, to test the limits between celebrity performance and participation in an artistic community.

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Original comment box content posted by Stephen Vincent:

Well put, Kasey. I, too, thought Barry gave us an excellent performance--kaleidoscopic in terms of the ranges of his work. "Lab coaty" is part right. He's got a wonderful kind of contest going on between the given frames (whether political, aesthetic, legal, graphic) and an almost scientific enthusiam for negating the given with a frame that will contest and reassemble the going goods. The Power Point representation of visuals either collude or contest or abridge the syntactical sway of the attack. Interestingly, similar to David Antin's forays into non-poetic realms, there's an occasional tightrope that is walked with a pretense to authority when one suspects the interest is more in making a gesture that will at least question the hierarchical authority of another genre's language.
But what one comes away with is Barry's genuine, if not heroic, conviction and enthusiasm for the way in which language and image--taking root in the act of negation--are tools to reconfigure the world in an aesthetically and ethically palpable way. Language and image as an act of negation and proposal. I was happy to witness this.

Ten Books That Turned Me on to Poetry

10. Oscar Williams, ed., An Anthology of British and American Verse (Mentor, 19[?])
Found this on the bookshelf at the Goodwill thrift store sometime in the late seventies. It had little pictures of the poets on the insides of the covers. I remember being fascinated by the idea of meter, and spending a long time trying to figure out which poems were iambic and which weren’t. The ones that looked like they were but actually weren’t frustrated me at first, then intrigued me further. I liked the idea that form could be merely hinted at and still be “formal.” I remember too spending a long time on those terrible, overwrought, clunky George Barker poems for some reason.

9. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (City Lights, 1956)
I can’t remember how I first found out about the Beats. I read On the Road, Naked Lunch, A Coney Island of the Mind, The Happy Birthday of Death, anything I could get my hands on. I had a hard time getting into Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, which later became a favorite; conversely, I can’t read Ferlinghetti at all now, and I loved Coney Island back then. Ginsberg has been a constant, though. When I finally got to see him read, in Larkspur in the early ’80s, it was like witnessing the Buddha on earth. I treasure my tattered old signed copy of Kaddish.

8. The Portable Whitman (Viking Penguin, 1977)
A friend loaned me this, figuring rightly that if I liked Ginsberg I’d dig it as well. He was right. I went overboard, reciting “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” drunk at a toga party. Yes, the friend was kind of a frat type. It was Modesto. There was nothing to do but drink and get stoned and seek elevation in anthologized verse. With another friend, I spent long nights tromping through orchards discussing The Waste Land. Neither of us understood the first thing about it. It was just another assortment of bitching eerie riffs. It could as well have been Pink Floyd.

7. Mark Strand, ed., The Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry since 1940 (Mentor, 1969)
I still have this! Another thrift-shop find. It was my first acquaintance with Ashbery, O’ Hara, Koch, Schuyler, Olson, Creeley, Le Roi Jones; it provided no context for them, however, and they were packed in right next to Wilbur, Jarrell, Roethke, Lowell, Hecht, Kinnell, Levine (lots of men mainly, on either side). One would never know from this collection that there were such things as a New York School or the New Criticism or Black Mountain or academic verse. And looking at it now, it still seems that Justice and Ashbery, Merrill and Schuyler, etc. have much in common. Some gems here: Denise Levertov’s “The Springtime”:

The red eyes of rabbits
aren’t sad. No one passes
the sad golden village in a barge
any more. The sunset
will leave it alone. If the
curtains hang askew
it is no one’s fault.
Around and around and around
everywhere the same sound
of wheels going, and things
growing older, growing
silent. If the dogs
bark to each other
all night, and their eyes
flash red, that’s
nobody’s business. They have
a great space of dark to
bark across. The rabbits
will bare their teeth at
the spring moon.

Weldon Kees’ “Round”:

“Wondrous life!” cried Marvell at Appleton House.
Renan admired Jesus Christ “wholeheartedly.”
But here dried ferns keep falling to the floor,
And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortissoz is dead,
A blow to the Herald-Tribune. A closet mouse
Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Renan
Admired Jesus Christ “wholeheartedly.”

Flaps like a worn-out blind. Cézanne
Would break out in the quiet streets of Aix
And shout, “Le monde, c’est terrible!” Royal
Cortissoz is dead. And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. The soil
In which the ferns are dying needs more Vigoro.
There is no twilight on the moon, no mist or rain,
No hail or snow, no life. Here in this house

Dried ferns keep falling to the floor, a mouse
Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Cézanne
Would break out in the quiet streets and scream. Renan
Admired Jesus Christ “wholeheartedly.” And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortissoz is dead.
There is no twilight on the moon, no hail or snow.
One notes fresh desecrations of the portico.
“Wondrous life!” cried Marvell at Appleton House.

Tom Clark’s “Sonnet”:

The orgasm completely
Takes the woman out of her
self in a wave of ecstasy
That spreads through all of her body.
Her nervous, vascular and muscular
Systems participate in the act.
The muscles of the pelvis contract
And discharge a plug of mucus from the cervix
While the muscular sucking motions of the cervix
Facilitate the incoming of the semen.
At the same time the constriction of the pelvic
Muscles prevents the loss of the semen. The discharge
Makes the acid vaginal lubricant
Alkaline, so as not to destroy the spermatazoa.

And, maybe the poem from the entire collection that I am least able to be rationally critical about, I love it so much, Paul Goodman’s “The Lordly Hudson”:

“Driver, what stream is it?” I asked, well knowing
it was our lordly Hudson hardly flowing,
“It is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing,”
he said, “under the green-grown cliffs.”

Be still, heart! no one needs your passionate
suffrage to select this glory,
this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs.

“Driver! has this a peer in Europe or the East?”
“No no!” he said. Home! home!
be quiet, heart! this is our lordly Hudson
and has no peer in Europe or the East,

this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs
and has no peer in Europe or the East.
Be quiet, heart! home! home!

6. George Oppen, Of Being Numerous (New Directions, 1968)
Yet another thrift-store pick. I had no idea Oppen was an “Objectivist,” or a communist or a modernist or anything. This book simply felt like a briefcase full of plutonium in my hands. Dark, prophetic, intensely sad, like a remote satellite signal or a secret radio broadcast.

5. James Tate, The Lost Pilot (Yale UP, 1967)
This one I got in a used book store in Isla Vista in, oh, it must have been 1982? I memorized “Coming Down Cleveland Avenue,” the first poem in the book, and let me tell you in confidence, that one is great for impressing cute bohemians. The standard critical line is unfortunately true: Tate was never able to rise again to the heights he reached in this collection. He’s consistently written affecting poems here and there in the decades since, but nothing that has the strange elegiac power of The Lost Pilot’s title poem, with its bizarre opening lines:

Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot

like the others—it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,
read your face as Dallas,
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.
However frightening, I would
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make
you face your wife, or Dallas,
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy
orbiting, and I would not try
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know
is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger’s life,
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,
I cannot get off the ground,
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling
to tell me that you are doing
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune
placed these worlds in us.

Look, I know that Tate (or his imitators) and maybe this poem in particular (or its imitators) are partly responsible for a lot of what’s been wrong with American poetry for the past 35 years, but the qualities of this work that thrilled me when I first read it still work on me: the nutty conflation of casual discursiveness and lyric pomp, the chewy mock-eloquence, the mysterious syntactic discontinuties between parts of grammatical units (not “new sentences” exactly, but something drawing on a similar principle to achieve almost the inverse effect: whereas the new sentence draws one’s attention to the joints of constructed discourse within the units of the prose paragraph, thereby de-constructing its “reality effect,” Tate’s sentences demonstrate how even the most erratically sorted sememes can be made to perform a simulacrum of sense), the sly tweaking of conventional emotive rhetoric. I don’t even mind the textbook “lyrical close” of the poem’s ending, because it’s just like all the rest of the poem, and the book as a whole: under the surface tone of Hallmark friendliness, its indeterminacy is unsettlingly nihilistic.

4. Paul Carroll, ed., The Young American Poets (Big Table, 1968)
Stanislaus County Free Library. I didn’t encounter Allen’s New American Poetry until much later, so other than the Beats, this was my first inkling that there were concentrated communities of writers who had different objectives from each other and so on. Here, as in Strand’s anthology, New York School poets were neighbors with writers like Charles Simic, but I don’t know if it could have been clear to anyone at that point how incompatible some of these writers’ projects would later seem. There were full page pictures of each poet. I remember thinking Coolidge looked really weird and cool. His poetry, along with poets like Padgett’s and Berrigan’s, was some of the most exciting I had ever seen. It was like punk, pure anarchy! There were no full books of most of their work at the library, so I didn’t rediscover them till I went to college at UC Santa Cruz in 1988.

3. Ron Padgett & David Shapiro, eds., An Anthology of New York Poets (Random House, 1970)
That’s where I came across this, and the next book on the list:

2. Ron Silliman, ed., In the American Tree (National Poetry Foundation, 1986)
These two collections gave me a second awakening. At the time, I didn’t even know there was a difference between NYS and Language; it was all part of a big blast of oxygen after several years of getting more and more mired in the kind of poetry that I was reading in journals like Poetry and Antaeus, which were the only kinds of journals I knew existed at the time. During the quarter I found these books, I was taking a poetry workshop from a writer of very conventional narrative/lyric/slice-of-life verse, who discouraged me promptly and energetically when I read work I had written under the influence of Coolidge and Silliman and Melnick and others. I bagged writing poetry for about the next five years at least.

1. Harryette Mullen, S*PeRM**K*T (Singing Horse, 1992)
One of the books Michael Golston had on his shelf in our shared office at Stanford during my postdoc year (1999). Everything started up again for me. I had taken a class on the lyric from Marjorie Perloff a couple years before that, and this had rekindled a little of my interest, but for some reason it didn’t “take” the way having all those hours in which I was supposed to be converting my dissertation into a book to read poetry instead did. That was barely a sentence, if at all, so it’s time to stop.