You Are Just Spare Parts, Aren’t Ya, Bud?

By in bread and circuses, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, race, the cult of multi No Comments

Elisabeth Donnelly:

Those slang examples betray some of the show’s bad habits: Like a lot of dirtbag comedies, Letterkenny can too often over-rely on immature jokes about sexuality, particularly with pastor Glen (who’s played by the show’s director, Jacob Tierney, and I’m not sure what that says).

It also has something of an inconsistent track record on gender stereotypes: While much of the show’s comedy is rooted in finding the softness in overblown masculinity, it tends to draw women broadly, especially as sexpots. Gail, the local bartender and one of Letterkenny’s few characters of color, basically has only one characteristic — that she’s horny. To the show’s credit, later seasons make a point to calm down some of the yowling caricatures, showing the live-and-let-live tolerance that exists in this small town.

Oh, boy. It seems the brain trust at Vox has discovered the Canadian indie comedy series Letterkenny and decided to issue one of their customary explainers. I would say the point escapes her, but that would imply it was at risk of being captured in the first place, and I fear that notion won’t bear scrutiny. Let me interrupt with a little ‘splaining of my own: The show is set in rural Ontario, in the fictional town of Letterkenny, population 5,000. We here at the hermitage enjoy it for its absurd, rapid-fire dialogue, and, as one of us also hails from rural Canuckistan, we appreciate the little details for being a true-to-life representation of small-town life there. It’s not what I would call hilarious, but it’s clever and notably quotable.

Now, to be fair (to be faihrrr) to Ms. Donnelly, the show’s often-raunchy humor is largely by, and for, twenty-somethings. Lots of drinking, fighting, swearing and fornicating. Gail is indeed the most tedious character. But experienced Voxspotters could have probably already guessed the source of this excerpt because of that telltale tic—there. Did you catch it? It’s as predictable as a knee jerking under a doctor’s reflex hammer. Progressives just can’t let their gaze rest on any scene populated by more than three people without doing a quick diversity head-count and pronouncing something to be problematic. I find it especially amusing to see her fume about Glen, the barely-closeted gay pastor (and probably my favorite character). She knows he’s somehow problematic, even if she can’t quite prove it, but oh, when she does, you better believe charges will be brought. Yuk it up while you can, Glen. You can only hide behind the writer/director shield for so long.

But yes, Gail is one of the show’s few “characters of color,” though I expect Donnelly to soon be seen in public with a placard around her neck denouncing her for the wokecrime of “erasing” the substantial native population who feature in the show, led by Wayne’s sometime-girlfriend Tanis. But again, to be fair (to be faihrrr) to our intersectionality inspectors, they might not have recognized the actors as natives (or First Nations inhabitants, as they say up there), since the closest they’ve ever gotten to one is that time they scribbled Racist!!! on a Washington Redskins decal on the bumper of a truck in the parking garage. But I digress. My point is, as an American of pallor who just so happens to have spent several days in rural Canada just a couple weeks ago, I can say that one of the first things you notice when out in public is, well, the lack of black people. It’s like suddenly becoming aware of a background hum that isn’t there anymore. You walk through a big-box store and think, what seems so different here? Oh, right, it’s very, very white. There are no African-Americans, or, I suppose, African-Canadians. The ones you do meet are mostly medical students directly from Africa. What are the writers supposed to do about this? Is the show supposed to be “representative” of rural Ontario or Brooklyn? How typically Ameri-centric for our Voxling to project her country’s myopic obsession with perfectly-proportioned racial pie charts onto foreign communities, irrespective of their unique histories! Shall we add colonialism to the epithets on her placard?

Actually, wait, hold on a minute. We’ve already seen how racial separatism has become acceptable again under a progressive aegis — segregated university graduation ceremonies, “cultural appropriation” (separatism rebranded under a new name), etc. Is it time for forced resettlement to make a comeback? No, no, hear me out. If progressives march people out of the inner cities in order to repopulate and diversify rural communities, would that be for the greater good? We could call it “reverse gentrification,” which would actually make it doubleplusgood. As we know, when you change the word (or the branding), you change the reality. (I can’t believe I give away such good advice for free.)

Anyway, enough of that foolishness. Back to chorin’.

That Vacuity of Soul

By in foolosophy, identity, psychology 2 Comments

In societies such as modern Britain we have means and comforts that our forebears could never have dreamed of. But having achieved them, we don’t know what to do with them, and some people are bored. Bored with their jobs, bored with the lack of struggle, bored with the lack of heroism and purpose that security brings.

So, unsure what to build next, or how else to gain purpose, a certain number of people are finding meaning in self-denial and self-blame. They’re finding ultimate meaning in the call to repent before the imminent, partly longed for, apocalypse.

— Douglas Murray, “The Empty Lives of Extinction Rebellion Fanatics”

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The most general survey shows us that the two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom. We may go further, and say that in the degree in which we are fortunate enough to get away from the one, we approach the other. Life presents, in fact, a more or less violent oscillation between the two. The reason of this is that each of these two poles stands in a double antagonism to the other, external or objective, and inner or subjective. Needy surroundings and poverty produce pain; while, if a man is more than well off, he is bored. Accordingly, while the lower classes are engaged in a ceaseless struggle with need, in other words, with pain, the upper carry on a constant and often desperate battle with boredom… Now, intellectual dullness is at the bottom of that vacuity of soul which is stamped on so many faces, a state of mind which betrays itself by a constant and lively attention to all the trivial circumstances in the external world. This is the true source of boredom—a continual panting after excitement, in order to have a pretext for giving the mind and spirits something to occupy them. The kind of things people choose for this purpose shows that they are not very particular, as witness the miserable pastimes they have recourse to, and their ideas of social pleasure and conversation: or again, the number of people who gossip on the doorstep or gape out of the window. It is mainly because of this inner vacuity of soul that people go in quest of society, diversion, amusement, luxury of every sort, which lead many to extravagance and misery.

— Schopenhauer, “The Wisdom of Life”

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Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.

— George Orwell, “Review of Mein Kampf”

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published May 17, 2013.]

Jessica Grose:

Which is all to say, it’s seen as socially admirable and masculine for a man to be on diaper duty or to sous-vide a steak, but there are no closet organizing tips in the pages of Esquire, no dishwasher detergent ads in the pages of GQ. Considering the strides that have been made in getting men to share the labor in other traditionally female domestic areas, why has cleaning remained the final frontier?

At its most basic, a reason why a lot of men don’t want to clean is obvious: it’s not fun. The rewards of the other two traditionally female household tasks—childcare and cooking—are palpable. Your kid’s smile, a delicious meal. But not so with cleaning. Drew Magary, a Deadspin columnist and the author of the forthcoming parenting memoir Someone Could Get Hurt, says that men will never take the initiative and clean without being asked “because it sucks.”

…With all these obstacles to real gender parity of chores, what’s a working woman to do? Philosophy professor Alexandra Bradner suggests on the Atlantic’s website that couples sit down with a list of questions like, “Do I do half of the laundry and half of the dishes every day?” to figure out where they’re slacking off in comparison to their mate. This sounds exhausting and impractical. If I do one load of laundry, it’s easier for me to do the second rather than wait for my husband to mosey over. (Bradner also says that when men do traditionally female chores, they’re enacting “‘small instances of gender heroism,’ or ‘SIGH’s”—which, barf.)

Cooking meals and taking care of the crotchfruit are necessities; mopping and scrubbing are more like bonus options. Eating out all the time would be expensive, and society tends to frown on child neglect, but it’ll take a while for the accumulation of filth and vermin to actually become hazardous, and my experience suggests that most people, regardless of gender, lean more toward being lazy slobs than neat freaks.

I had to share a room with my brother until I was twelve. My parents used to jokingly call us Felix and Oscar over our diametrically opposed personalities. Once I finally convinced my mom that he was capable of having his own room without needing supervision (she’s always been an overprotective worrier), I started doing my own vacuuming, laundry, dusting, etc. and never looked back, while he turned every living space he inhabited into a landfill.

Honestly, I enjoy doing chores. It’s very satisfying to make messy things clean. Clutter affects my soul like being forced to listen to the strumming of a hundred guitars, each out of tune in a unique way. I can accept that life itself is chaotic and unruly and prone to make a mockery of all our best-laid plans, but I nonetheless have a deep-rooted psychological need to create simple, streamlined tidiness out of disorder within my living space. Without the opportunity to channel it like this, who knows how that control-freakishness might otherwise express itself?

This led to an amusing culture-shock moment with my girlfriend, who comes from a family where resentfully-performed chores serve as passive-aggressive pawns to be skillfully deployed for Machiavellian advantage on a psychological chessboard. In short, it took some convincing for her to accept that things here were exactly what they appeared to be, that I washed dishes, scrubbed toilets, emptied trashcans and hauled firewood because I had long ago accepted them as basic, inevitable aspects of my routine, aspects that I didn’t particularly feel strongly about one way or another. As I’ve said before, I consider myself mostly honest, not because of any burning devotion to abstract moral principles, but because I simply don’t have the patience or love of intrigue to bother weaving tangled webs of deceit. Way too much trouble. Same principle applies here. I’m a simple fellow, baby, I said. I see something that needs doing, and I do it. It’ll just gnaw at me if I try to ignore it. Besides, I did all this for years when I lived by myself, I’m in the habit of it, why should that change now? But why not ask or demand that the other members of the household do it? she asked. I stared at her like she was a madwoman.

Because, one, I’m a firm believer in the adage about doing things yourself if you want them done right. And two, I get far, far more satisfaction from getting something done when and how I want it done than I would from asking someone else to do it, waiting impatiently for them to get to it, which would no doubt be too late for my liking, and then being forced to restrain the urge to kibitz their efforts or brush them aside and do it my own damned self. A perfectly-divided pie chart of chore distribution doesn’t mean shit to me. I laugh at your weak, puny notions of dialogue and parity. I am the motherfucking tyrant of my domicile, the love-child of Alexander the Great and Mr. Clean, and the linoleum will run with the blood of any who dare oppose or hinder me (not for long, though, because that stuff’s hard to get up once it’s dried).

Gender heroism? What a laugh. Could that previous paragraph sound any more patriarchal?

Epispurious

By in books, nietzsche, philosophy No Comments

James Romm:

A similar bid for relevance gives rise to contemporary discussions of policy or politics, in some of which Ms. Wilson inserts her own views or “reconstructs” what Epicurus might have said. In a chapter called “What Is Real?,” she adduces the idea of “racial inferiority” as an example of an “Unthing,” an illusion without atomic substance. This leads her into a critique of housing and zoning laws that, in her view, perpetuate urban poverty in nonwhite neighborhoods. Abortion, pollution and climate change are also addressed, in ways that feel opportunistic or forced. Ms. Wilson can be an insightful philosophic guide—and Epicurus is a thinker who deserves an insightful rediscovery—but her attempt to address a wide range of modern problems feels inauthentic. From many of these, Epicurus himself would have simply sought to escape.

I assume most authors don’t get to choose their titles, so I didn’t think this would be an actual how-to guide, but I have to agree — I came away from How to Be an Epicurean with the impression that Epicureanism was more or less indistinguishable from progressive liberalism. This would have come as a surprise to the very un-progressive Nietzsche, for one, who generally had only positive things to say about Epicurus — his aphorism from which this very site takes its name is presumed to be in reference to the Epicurean ideal (the “coarser brother” is presumably Stoicism). And my own Epicurean theories about the meaning of life and nonexistence after death certainly haven’t led me to progressive political conclusions. Not that I wanted to see Epicurus viewed through a “conservative” lens, of course, which would have been equally tendentious. I would have just preferred for him to be allowed more opportunity to speak for himself with Wilson providing additional clarifying context, rather than having him sit on her lap like a ventriloquist’s dummy, offering up “his” opinion on climate change.

But if Wilson overshares her personal political views, she under-delivers when it comes to making Epicurus sound insightful enough to read for oneself. Epicurean wisdom here sounds a lot like unhelpful platitudes and truisms. When faced with the intractable problems of the human condition, we apparently should review the evidence calmly and dispassionately. Well, thanks for that. “The answers to many such questions are available to anyone who makes a search for them,” she says after raising hypothetical questions about the costs and benefits of welfare-state programs. Good to know that’s settled! Neil deGrasse Tyson would no doubt agree. Unfortunately, this kind of relevance-seeking will only make Epicurus irrelevant once modern progressive doctrine morphs into its next phase, and he deserves better than that.

I Love Life’s Surprises So Much, I Don’t Want to Know What’s Ahead

By in free speech, fresh hell, moralizing, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Kevin Williamson:

The “x might plausibly encourage y” argument against free speech has been with us for a very long time. It was the basis for the persecution of heretics in the Christian world, the censorship that John Milton criticized in the 17th century, the suppression of war protesters in the United States (the legal justification of which is the origin of the ubiquitous “fire in a crowded theater” trope), and the effort to censor and marginalize rap music in the 1980s, a project that brought to public prominence a woman called Tipper Gore, at the time Mrs. Al. Mrs. Gore’s name became, for a generation, the national shorthand for prudish blue-rinsed tight-assery allied to scheming political opportunism. She was a figure of fun, loathed by all right-thinking people. But Tipper Gore–ism, like the poor, syphilis, and usury, we shall always have with us.

One of the genuine pleasures of middle-age is seeing stupid intellectual trends come around again. I mean that sincerely. I’m not one of those who wear a veneer of hard-bitten cynicism to cover a core of progressive idealism. I’m not crying inside as I watch former defenders of free speech turn into moralistic censors. I’m honestly chuckling at the absurdity of this cultural game of musical chairs. When I was an adolescent, it was Christian conservatives (and opportunistic liberals like the Gores) who wanted to bowdlerize popular culture and stop the lovable kids in Footloose from dancing at their prom. Now it’s po-faced progressives who find everything fun to be “problematic” and life-threatening. No one is immune to this conceit, and no one is “progressing” toward anything. Human souls may not reincarnate, but ideas and impulses surely do. Leaves will bud, flourish, blaze and fall; notions formerly dismissed as passé will be refurbished and reintroduced. It’s simultaneously amusing and reassuring to understand that there’s nothing to do but enjoy the spectacle in all its ridiculous glory. Mencken! Thou shouldst be living now. Your country has need of thee.

Romantic Friendship

By in books, identity, montaigne, sex-you-all 2 Comments

Not erotic life, but the pleasure of the mind filling like the lower chamber of an hourglass with the slow-moving grains of a perfect day — sky, carnations, walking, reading, writing, Toasted Cheese, the presence of another who wishes to be so still, so silent too.

— Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

This beautiful image is describing the relationship of Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the Ladies of Llangollen. Hampl describes this type of relationship as a “romantic friendship,” a species of relationship which has gone extinct, as we, still living under Freud’s climate of opinion, have been trained to see sexual subtext anywhere and everywhere. She rightly has little patience with what she calls “the arrogance of assuming that integrity is a matter of being more and more open.” (One might say “exhibitionist.”) Modern biographers who insist on projecting our “enlightened” modern values backwards with a smirk and a wink raise her ire — two women who ran off to live together for the rest of their lives, who referred to each other in journals and letters as “my Beloved”? Clearly, they must have been lesbians. They explicitly denied it? Well, that only indicates the extent to which patriarchy limited their imaginative horizon. The romantic friendship between Montaigne (another of Hampl’s subjects) and Étienne de La Boétie comes in for the same sort of condescending reinterpretation from cynical moderns who know better. “Why can they not be believed? Why must our age out them? They wanted to live the life of the mind, the life of perfection. Don’t they get to say what they were up to?”

Worthless Words

By in books, technology, the geist of the zeit, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Claire Berlinski:

Western populations have suffered a profound degradation of reason, intellect, and moral integrity. The symptoms of this are many and flagrant. Among the most telling: Americans are rapidly losing both passive and active vocabulary. Both declined at a fairly steady pace postwar until the advent of e-mail and the text message; vocabulary loss then accelerated.

Reading skills have been lost. Only a small minority of Americans now have the ability to read and understand a book—book-reading now is the purview of the personality type drawn to endurance sports—which means most of us are functionally illiterate for democratic purposes. Those who can’t read at book length cannot follow a sustained, linear argument. The brain is highly plastic, and we have changed ours in a way that makes it much harder for most of us to think beyond 140 characters—slogans, not arguments—even as we have created in the Internet such a riveting system of rival entertainment that reading a book now requires exceptional personal discipline whereas once it required only the desire to be relieved of boredom.

That last part gets to the heart of it, I think. The effect of the Internet on book-reading has been like the effect of European diseases upon isolated native populations. The few of us who still read at length, for pleasure, are like the fraction of American Indians who managed to survive smallpox, cholera and whiskey. Many of those who formerly thought of themselves as dedicated readers didn’t have mental immune systems capable of resisting exposure to the bacilli of social media and digital cameras. Articles like the one in yesterday’s post are a modern form of ghost dancing — a delusive, futile attempt to cope with the tragic loss of an entire way of life. But no matter how the English majors wail and beat their breasts, the ghosts of Henry James and Marcel Proust are not coming back to roll up the fiber optic cables and wash all the smartphones into the sea. It’s time to stop lamenting and get on with the hard work of preserving what remnants we can through an uncertain future.

And All You’re Gonna Do, But You Don’t

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr No Comments

The only thing the internet did was reveal that you’re not as dedicated a reader as you once thought you were. It presented you with temptation, and you gave in. This may be painful and embarrassing to admit, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Maybe you were a voracious reader when books were the most convenient means of entertainment you had, but now it turns out you’d rather watch videos and scroll through social media posts. You’re not willing to swim upstream against the currents of popular culture and peer pressure. Like many people, you want to have read books, you want to think of yourself as the kind of person who reads books, but you don’t actually want to devote time to reading them.

This isn’t necessarily a problem. You can of course still be an intelligent, interesting person even if you don’t read for pleasure. But you lack the confidence to withstand the negative judgment of some imagined literary snob who might think less of you. You lack the appetite for the possibly-uncomfortable introspection which might reveal cracks in your self-image. It’s easier to make aspirational gestures toward accepted standards of taste and intelligence than to forge your own. So you fall back on some absurd dualism in which the “real” you is being held hostage by your brain chemistry, or the manipulations of Silicon Valley, while your stupefied doppelgänger continues texting, instagramming and snapchatting. Honestly, I’m not sure how this excuse is more face-saving than the alternative. There’s always dignity in owning one’s agency, however humble the ends to which it’s directed. But there’s nothing dignified about pretending to be at the mercy of forces beyond your control.

To Be Like a Little Inn

By in nietzsche, Ω No Comments

Self-effacement is presented by standard dictionaries as the disposition of a withdrawn personality lacking self-assertion or social sensibility. To not take initiative and stake out one’s ego, even in an ephemeral situation, is seen as a character flaw, a lack of personality, or more serious on the spectrum of social disorders.

This notion of self-effacement is quickly refuted in the anecdotes of historical hermits.

Self-effacement was a virtue among historical hermits, not because it was a useful device for dropping out of situations but because it was a reflection of a deeper philosophy of living, wherein helping others was not to be taken as a credit or exception, and withdrawal not to be taken as a weakness but strength, transcending the momentary. The project of the historical hermit required a declining of the worldly, tacitly expressed in self-effacement.

— Meng-hu, “Self-Effacement”

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Ah! How reluctant I am to force my own ideas upon another! How I rejoice in any mood and secret transformation within myself which means that the ideas of another have prevailed over my own! Now and then, however, I enjoy an even higher festival: when one is for once permitted to give away one’s spiritual house and possessions, like a father confessor who sits in his corner anxious for one in need to come and tell of the distress of his mind, so that he may again fill his hands and his heart and make light his troubled soul! He is not merely not looking for fame; he would even like to escape gratitude, for gratitude is too importunate and lacks respect for solitude and silence. What he seeks is to live nameless and lightly mocked at, too humble to awaken envy or hostility, with a head free of fever, equipped with a handful of knowledge and a bagful of experience, as it were a poor-doctor of the spirit aiding those whose head is confused by opinions without their being really aware who has aided them! Not desiring to maintain his own opinion or celebrate a victory over them, but to address them in such a way that, after the slightest of imperceptible hints or contradictions, they themselves arrive at the truth and go away proud of the fact! To be like a little inn which rejects no one who is in need but which is afterwards forgotten or ridiculed! To possess no advantage, neither better food nor purer air nor a more joyful spirit — but to give away, to give back, to communicate, to grow poorer! To be able to be humble, so as to be accessible to many and humiliating to none! To have much injustice done him, and to have crept through the worm-holes of errors of every kind, so as to be able to reach many hidden souls on their secret paths! Forever in a kind of love and forever in a kind of selfishness and self-enjoyment! To be in possession of a dominion and at the same time concealed and renouncing! To lie continually in the sunshine and gentleness of grace, and yet to know that the oaths that rise up to the sublime are close by! That would be a life! That would be a reason for a long life!

— Nietzsche, Daybreak

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Feb. 25, 2011.]

I was talking about poetry with a friend the other day, and she said she favored long narrative ballads, naming writers like Service, Kipling, Tolkien, and some Frost.

But you can see in the poems I’ve shown you, this driving, pounding beat, this rhythm that underlays the words and carries it strongly, til it almost echoes. That’s why I got disillusioned with free verse. Sure, once in a while you find one that still manages that rhythm, but they’re so far between, I just gave it up.

On the other hand, as evidenced by the Basho quotation up in the top corner, I consider Eastern poetry a cornerstone of my poetic worldview. Haiku was the first form that really enthralled me, especially for its connection to Zen Buddhism. When Buson says:

I go, you stay;
Two autumns.

The space in the poem is so vast, and with time being measured in “autumns,” you get the sense of his melancholy without having to hear him say in so many words, “I’m lonely. I miss you.” You feel his sadness without hearing the words that might numb you to it by dint of their familiarity. We hear those kinds of straightforward sentiments so often, we forget to really feel what they symbolize.

Robert Haas elaborated on this indirect way of expression:

The insistence on time and place was crucial for writers of haiku. The seasonal reference was called a kigo and a haiku was thought to be incomplete without it. In Basho’s poem quoted above, for example, the phrase aki fukaki, “deep autumn” or “autumn deepens” is traditional and had accumulated references from earlier poetry as well as from the Japanese way of thinking about time and change. So does the reference to snow—yuki, which can also mean “snowfall”—in Buson’s poems. It is always connected to a sense of exposure to the elements, for which there is also a traditional phrase, “winter bareness.” The practice was sufficiently codified and there was even a rule that the seasonal reference should always appear either in the first or third unit of the three phrase poem… These references were conventional and widely available. They were the first way readers of the poems had of locating themselves in the haiku. Its traditional themes—deep autumn, a sudden summer shower, the images of rice seedlings and plum blossoms, of spring and summer migrants like the mountain cuckoo and the bush warbler, of the cormorant-fisherman in summer, and the apprentices on holiday in the spring—gave a powerful sense of a human place in the ritual and cyclical movement of the world.

In a chapter devoted to the poet Issa, Sam Hamill pointed out the ubiquity in his poems of mono no aware (a sense of beauty intensified by recognition of temporality) and sabi (a kind of spiritual loneliness). Two of my favorites of his, both in honor of the deaths of his young children:

This world of dew
is only the world of dew—
and yet…oh, and yet…

A Buddhist equanimity tries to assert itself in the face of intense suffering, but the all-too-human emotions refuse to be pacified. Gets me every time.

Windy fall—
these are the scarlet flowers
she liked to pick.

Again, the indirect focus, not on his daughter, but on the memories attached to everyday objects. The pain of it seems to hit me harder this way.

The Eastern poets appealed to me because that’s how so many of my insights appeared to me — a sudden, intuitive flash, a widening of the eyes, a sharp intake of breath. The words came later, and sometimes just got in the way. I can appreciate a rhythmic story, but when it comes to getting at what seems to me to be the heart of the poetic experience, I tend to feel that the less words, the better. In this case, the poet’s job isn’t to lay it all out and say Here’s what happened, here’s how it happened, and here’s why it happened, it’s to place words sparingly around the experience without trying to land directly on it.

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