Christopher wrote an awesome review of Thomas Patrick Levy’s new book, I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone. I did an erasure of that review, creating this Single Sentence Review or whatever.

This week’s story is by the wonderful Ben Marcus, and it’s called “Watching Mysteries with My Mother.” As someone who’s growing older, watching my parents grow older still, this fearful and loving meditation on a parent’s eventual imagined demise struck a deep and painful chord of recognition with me.  Like so:

I did it to her as a child, too. I said good-bye and went to school. I said good-bye and went to camp. I said good-bye on a Saturday morning and who knows when I came home. When I did this, I left my mother dying. In doorways, in kitchens, in living rooms, on lawns. Sometimes even when she was sick with a cold in bed, I said good-bye from the bottom of the stairs, just as her chances of dying had crested to an all-time high. I said good-bye and went to college, when she was even more likely to die. And when I came home to visit, it wasn’t long before I departed again, leaving her to die. Just as tonight, after watching a mystery on PBS, I said goodnight to my mother and left her at home to die.

We speak of having one foot in the grave, but we do not speak of having both feet and both legs and then one’s entire torso, arms, and head in the grave, inside a coffin, which is covered in dirt, upon which is planted a pretty little stone.

Go here to read the whole thing. And check out the beautiful single sentence animation, too.

Robb Todd wants us to remember that we need to be comfortable in our loneliness, that we need to remember every day is made of 1,440 moments and we never know which ones will be the loveliest, yes, Robb Todd wants us to remember these things and while he may not stick with you immediately, you will find yourself wanting to keep returning to his pieces to remember to discover them again.

Here’s a super part:

LA Looks hair gel and stolen eyeliner
pancake makeup fists full of Cover Girl
and Aussie Stiff Spray works well
with Zack’s summer job
at the Sands Country Club

AC Slater’s nips were visible in that
tight green and white striped polo
Da Boss short fat dago Mr. Carossi
of course from New York City,
specifically Brooklyn, NYC
Such a bummer, he was
last name like so Italian and grossi !

The first half of “Circle of Salt – November 11″–

If the gray bone of the beach did not tease the sea. If salt did not form crystals. If a body was not made of water. If it had not left behind traces of itself, a white web through the house. If a storm. If a staircase. If plants could twist their feet between the cracks in my sidewalk. If the wave had not salted the earth. If water contained only itself.

STEAMPUNK

How does the term “steampunk” apply to typical story elements like plot, character, setting — particularly in relation to your book?

Oh, man. Steampunk is kind of a weird animal to describe, but it generally combines an anti-establishment tone (hence the “punk” part), optimism about human potential, and speculation about how modern conveniences would have been achieved by Victorian/Edwardian technology. The plots and characters of steampunk literature tend to be as grandiose as their surroundings, which has led people like Charles Stross to accuse it of whitewashing the nastier parts of that era and focusing on rich guys in airships.

Would you describe stone a pig as steampunk?

My book, which I do consider to be steampunk, was meant to oppose that criticism by focusing on the grittier, darker stuff going on during that time, with the tech functioning as a surreal but familiar element of setting (a technique I borrowed from Philip K. Dick). My characters are at odds with their culture, but not out of a no-gods-no-masters sense of rebellion – rather, the people in my stories are very alienated, and they’re trying to overcome that sense of alienation to act in a more communal way, for good or ill.

One of my professors prefers to call my work “Dickensian futurism,” which is an awesome term that I can’t use because I sound like a tool whenever I apply it to my own work.

THE BOOK: DESIGN AND WRITING

Do you have a favorite part of the book, something you’re most proud of, something that you think you really nailed? Can you say what it is?

I think the design of the book – the cover, the page layouts, the visual elements – looks great, better than I’d expected or hoped. Some people see mixing graphic elements with prose as an artful dodge around bad writing, but creating those images helps me put the words together because I’m seeing what my characters see.

Yes, I love the small touches, like the illustrations that go along with the titles. Did you draw them? What about the other images — where’d they come from?

The title images were picked out from my school’s graphics library, but the larger pictures are heavily manipulated photos and/or illustrations from the public domain, mixed with some grunge textures and smaller, hand-drawn elements. The only immediately noticeable thing I drew was Dr. Cornelius’ head, which is affixed to a Victorian man’s photo portrait. I can’t really draw well enough to illustrate the kinds of stories I write, so that kind of trickery was necessary.

I really like illustrations in general, and I think they add to the reading experience. They’ve added to mine over the years, that’s for sure. Sometimes they’re impossible to separate from the text – I can’t think of John Bellairs without thinking of Edward Gorey, for example, or Hunter S. Thompson without Ralph Steadman. Claudia Rankine has some interesting text/graphic pairings as well.

Do you have a favorite story in the collection?

I think the title story is my best one. It has the best character arc out of all of them, I think, and the most complicated protagonist. It was also the hardest one to write; I basically rewrote it from the ground up and kept very little of the first draft.

Yes, “Stone a Pig” fits nicely into what you said about how you try to approach the more humanist elements of steampunk. How concerned were you with saying something about racism in that story? Your treatment is subtle, but I think it goes beyond just the Marxism of what I imagine would be prevalent in “Dickensian futurism.”

That story was very influenced by contemporary media, actually. The Occupy movement had become suddenly relevant when I was rewriting that story, and they were getting beaten up by cops for no real reason and asking some very uncomfortable questions about race and institutional racism and privilege, and the way crony capitalists force everyone else to fight over their table scraps, and how all that stuff spurred the corruption that sent our economy into the crapper. The Tea Party had also introduced an uncomfortable racial dialogue of their own, and had exposed a throbbing vein of discontentment and spite in the national character by doing so. It reached a point where I felt like I had to channel what I was seeing into something, even if it was in a way that didn’t make sense to anyone but me. I didn’t want to be didactic, but I also didn’t want to ignore it. And to a certain extent, I couldn’t.

And to be fair, Victorian/Edwardian America was dealing with similar problems; the advanced mechanization of steampunk probably would have only heightened those tensions and divisions.

The story certainly doesn’t come off as didactic. I don’t think I would have recognized the Occupy movement as a starting point, but now that you mention it, I see it clearly. The story as a whole, though, is subtle and pitch perfect. You never give away too much. There’s a lot of depth to it that seems to come simply from well-written sentences. I mean, you never even say explicitly what happens between Pickett and the slasher, but it’s very easy for the reader to sense what happened. Can you talk more about how you “rewrote it from the ground up”? What was it like at first?

Returning to the influence of media, some weirdo in Fairfax, VA really was running around slashing women on the backside, and he was dubbed “the Fairfax Butt Slasher” for his efforts. The story started there. It’s a very Victorian crime, in a way – it reads like something born from repression.

The first draft just didn’t have enough tension – Pickett was too much of an observer and didn’t have enough agency, and there was an actual robot policeman who just clonked around uselessly because his programming was too basic to be trusted with a gun or any actual police responsibilities. Cool idea, but it didn’t do enough. The story needed a lot more tension, and Pickett needed something resembling a character arc. Both of those things required scrapping the first draft entirely, save a paragraph or two, and starting all over again.

So I started thinking about why he was the only cop with any serious ambitions towards catching the slasher. Why don’t the other policemen care? What else is occupying their time? What role should robots play in this story? You know, the same questions every writer asks in a second draft.

Pickett’s journey is admittedly a shallow one, but he’s the kind of guy who sees himself as a problem-solver, and the brutality of his fellow officers opposes that. Pickett also spends more time interacting with the immigrant populations local to him, specifically through their food, which further disinclines him from abusing them.

PUBLICATION

So you made this book as a requirement for your MFA thesis. Would stone a pig be different if it weren’t made to fulfill a requirement? I mean, would you have changed the content or had more of it, or taken more time, or tried to go a more traditional path to publication?

It absolutely would have taken longer to write, and it probably wouldn’t be as good because I wouldn’t have had my thesis professors and classmates guiding me and cheering me on. When it’s done right, taking on that kind of project as part of an MFA is a privilege, because you have an automatic support network of people who think what you’re doing is worthwhile and really, really want you to succeed. Out in the real world, those resources aren’t nearly as secure.

I would have certainly sent the manuscript out to publishers, and would have only considered self- publishing if no one was interested, which also means that the collection would look and feel different than it does now. How it looks and feels is a huge part of its identity, and I’m not saying that someone else would have done a better or worse job than me, but it’s hard to imagine what someone else would have done with it. That whole book design process was a really personal one.

So you consider it to be self-published?

The book is self-published, yes.

What are your plans for it?

Right now I’m just focused on selling copies and getting it reviewed, and I may use it as a launching pad to get some fellowships. If it goes into a second printing, which has a decent chance of happening, I’d like to take it on the road and do a mini-book tour. I do love readings, after all, and it’d be a fun way to see what other literary scenes are up to and sell my own work at the same time.

I’ve also considered sending the collection to writers whose work I admire, even if I have no connection to them, just to see if they’ll read it, and make more connections that way. Hell, why not try and get it on Penguin’s doorstep? A friend of mine used his short story collection, which is up for an award, to drum up interest in a novel he was working on. Since I also have a novel to work on, and other novels I’d like to write, maybe his approach could work for me. It’s a lot to think about, but I’m glad I came away from my MFA with a collection of stories that leaves me with so many options.

How did you feel when the books arrived and you opened the box and saw what you had made?

I felt two things. The first was relief, because I’d been worrying about what the final book was going to look like for at least a week and a half. I hadn’t expected that, having never sent anything to a printer before this point, but having someone else making your book outside your supervision is maddening. What if the cover’s too small, I kept thinking. What if the pages are out of order? What if this box they sent is full of dead mice and not books? And so on.

But really, what I felt was pride. The book looks even better than I’d hoped. One of my classmates said it was weird to have years of grad school boiled down into 100ish pages of words, but my book has the exact 100ish pages (106, counting front and end matters) I want to represent my pursuit of an MFA, and myself as a writer. Plus, now I know I can do it. Put out a real book, I mean. And I can keep doing it for as long as I want to. That’s huge.

1. Daniel Bailey’s long poem “Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf,” from his new book of the same title, is this dude at his finest, thirteen pages of his stare snapped on those Big Things, religion and existence, belief and human relations, and in true Bailey form, he has created this hunk of confession and feeling, one long blip that doesn’t worry about rests (won’t find any periods here), or where it moves, only that it is moving and never stopping until he’s expended all his self can muster.

2. The stepping stone into this poem has God’s name on it, that’s where he’s going, he’s stepping up, reaching up, jumping up. He says it: “I am fighting god again.”

3. Reminds me of that Modest Mouse song, from that scrappy lovely disc The Lonesome Crowded West, about “Cowboy Dan” (this Dan a little meaner, a little greedier perhaps than our friend Mr. Bailey, but definitely the running towards the fight with God similarity is evident here): “Goes to the desert, fires his rifle in the sky and yells ‘God if I have to die, you will have to die.”

4. But what’s really incredible about this poem is the emotion and how it explodes out uncontrollably and scurries around but it never feels like Bailey is giving us too much to handle at once or that its for any purpose besides expelling his true innards:  “I have about a thousand emotions/and love is the spine of them all.”

5. Take this huge chunk, the second half of page one, where Bailey gets ramped up, where he challenges himself and us to rethink what we see as ourselves and possibilities and the earth and good things, a something he whittles away at for the whole twelve pages:

Jesus God,

let us flood the earth with laughter tonight

let there be more juice about the earth tonight

let tonight be the earth’s rebirthday and let it be born

as something new and let it not remember its old life

let it be a fly

once when I was born I looked at the earth like a fly

at the bottom of the ski-lift of ceaseless miracles

when I am young and getting younger I could be

a maggot that loves the entire earth, that can only love

and look at the earth with its love and say “I love you”

in a small fly voice

tourists of the future, where are you

we are breaking bread over the volcano

do you sleep through the world’s disasters?

uh huh, I sleep through the good things too

6. And he goes from there, ruminations of what it means to exist and belief and not belief and die. Battles with Jesus, this Giant Space Wolf, a “you” that seems to change but hold a cup with some valuable juice to quench what. And the best way I can describe it is attacking, bursting, busting, these extreme words basically meaning “to leak” but where at the end it is major huff and puff tired. What I’m saying is, this poem shreds itself, its man, until exhaustion in its many forms.

7. What is it about graduating college, or even just being in college, that makes young adults tackle their beliefs majorly, shouting into the sky, walking around for hours looking/thinking/turning their hands over, crying why? At least a dozen of my friends went through some spiritual switch battling their Christianity and plopping into some sort of Agnosticism/Atheism during college and I see their stories in this long poem, see their inner spirits slapping for a heavenly one:

mine eyes have seen the glory, as they say

and it always rides away in the form of some disappointed child

Or

 on earth, before all of this, I remember staying up late

walking to the bathroom, brushing my teeth

washing a line of ants down the basin of the sink

and then going to sleep and not thinking about it

I feel like a vulture who does not wait for death to prepare his meal

8. This poem is a collection of those moments of untrapping oneself from the snare of blind faith, unpacking the feelings and actions and thoughts of those days, dictating the what ahead.

9.  Sure, here here here is a complaint I hear about Bailey’s style, some of that unpacking can get messy and a little wild. But that’s fucking life, man. And poetically, there’s so much goodness here, too, where the emotion bends into this poem shape. Form is function highly highly here. It wanders because it is the wandering (also the wondering).

10.  Reading this poem reminded me of my favorite of Bailey’s Drunk Sonnets, Number 14, which begins “IF ANYONE KNOWS WHAT IS GOING ON EVER THEN HEY/I AM HERE IT WOULD BE NICE TO TALK SOMETIME” and ends “GOD IS LIKE BONO—SOME DICKWAD NO ONE WILL EVER MEET OR LIKE.” That poem as it moved between those two fences trying to know what the fuck is up (i.e. be happy) and dealing with this umbrella called God that is supposed to help meet that goal. And this long poem seems to be Bailey going after that same help in knowing what is going on, or at least figuring out what to do with the fact that it might not be possible/God might really be a dickwad.

11. I love the booming spirit of this poem, even when covered in worry and maybe fear, the nerve to accuse, assume, wonder: “don’t think of life in terms of right and wrong/because what is the second coming if not a terrorist attack.” Yeah, this is contradicting, where much of the rest of the poem seeks loving and human compassion (doing right?) to battle this big opponent. Point is, admirable is Bailey’s willingness to speak through all the ugliness of doubt, through the bitter feelings, and have that blasting glimmer of hope.

12. It’s not always about just fighting God though. The loving and the compassion, it’s a true concern here. Sad drops of that we’re-all-connected idea, like “for every baby that’s born/there are two people who want a baby/but will never have one” and “the best compliment you can give anyone is/‘I hope you don’t die today’/because you are with them/and that should not be taken away,” are the bits of that control I was talking about, where another weapon of human nature, that downward gaze to the other living heads around us, gets revealed and the poem shines a little brighter, maybe in hope, but most certainly in sincerity.

13. At the top of the last page, for all the pondering and wondering and talking, Bailey has seemed to come to terms with moving beyond higher thinking to this self-decision of going with the feeling, as how to dictate one’s own life:

you will die eventually anyway

you will

if I am unhappy

I am

if I am happy

then I am that too

I cannot possibly understand this thought that is life

which is why I am done thinking

it is all feeling from now on

the loving

the hating

the fearing

the crying, etc.

the loving

14.  Seen that happen so much, good or bad, people wanting to know why loving, pursuing happiness, being a feeling being is not enough. And as Bailey makes clear earlier in the poem, that way you’ll die to, like all other ways of thinking/being, but you’ve moved (beyond?) and at least you’ve been this flailing ball of realness when you’ve reached the other end of life (heaven, hell, nothing, giant space wolf), in life or in long poem.

*

Buy this book from Mammoth Editions. It’s good, really good, big bold and booming.

One of my methods in refuting the ineluctable fuckstorm of reading a book is to love the index. Thou Index, batter mine heart! Skeletons reside within the index; or, at least, the bony, knobby base of the book rests itself on order there. Or there wrests itself to order. Either way, I say “fuckstorm of reading” because—as I’ve written here elsewhere in the past—my feeble mind cannot cage each bit and tid of a book, never will, and reading has become in these last years a desperate foraging for brain tinsel. The process looking similar to the small magpie-gleaned sundries that will illuminate the going-glimmer nest within.

A fuckstorm isn’t wholly negative, by the way. I mean, it’s a raging swirl of fuck, which can be quite pleasant AND brow-furrowed, to put it delicately. But overall, I use the word because of the chaos and capaciousness of “fuck” and “storm,” and because an index is the clarion call of Order, capital-O. Alphabetization, double columns, italics, numbers, logic, sequence.

And I so need Order, folks. Fashioning one’s self an Indexer reins that baggage in with bungee cords. This is my alternate method of reading when the going gets stale. Believe me: staleness creeps like death on tender feline paws.

As a hopeful reader, I’ll die ignorant, to be sure. But for some reason I think the index will save me. When I despair too much, I flip to the back-end and see what’s choice, what’s chosen, what’s important enough to be listed. Lists are a habit of mine. I like marking them in inked phalanxes on the endpaper or flyleaf. My admiration for structure and dissection is depthless. I feel like there would be nothing more suitable for me than to index book after book.

The downside of indices is that they often only appear in non-fiction books. Rare is the novel that contains one. Why so? Fiction deserves as much eggheaded attention as anything else in the index department. As I’m apportioning the voluminousness of Moby-Dick, I’d kill for an index. Which I’m kind of surprised Melville didn’t think of, all the other bells and whistles considered. Searching under the heading “Whale” would be worth the cost of entry.

What wouldn’t work so well with indexing? Haikus, for sure.

On my desk, a copy of Poetic Diction by Owen Barfield. Page 229, the entry “Poetry”:

Poetry:

‘two sorts of’, 12, 111-12
existence of depends on inner experience, 41-2, 49
and on Prosaic principles, 87, 103-4, 105
defined by Coleridge, 58
Great, 166, 170, 178 et seq. ; defined, 181
Modern, 33 et. seq., 148-9, 155-8, 170, 201
as a possession, 52, 55 et seq.
‘joint-stock’, 51
spoken and read, 98-9
fluid and architectural, 86 et seq.
fashionable contrast with science, 63, 138-40

What we have before us is itself a kind of poetry. As I read down the ladder here, I find myself enthralled with the contents before I devour them. The index, then, is poetic foreplay, if you will. Say I came to the index first and saw this entry. I’m immediately curious about our “two sorts” of poetry. Are they the Great and the Modern labeled below? And why is Great Poetry defined, but Modern Poetry isn’t? I’m now wondering what Owen Barfield has against defining the Moderns. Plenty of pages are devoted to both. The answer is within.

Move now to the “existence of depends on inner experience.” How metaphysical. But only three pages! Perhaps poetry isn’t as inner as I once thought. Barfield must not think it necessitates inner experience. Though he does require Coleridge’s thoughts on the matter. And I can say that a small part of my conscience is keen, more anticipatory,  to see proper names in indexes. As I mow the lawn of the index, moving systematically up and down the columns, I’m eyeballing names to latch onto, to compute. Easily recognizable names, or known names, creates a sense of knowingness, or familiarity–a feeling that, hey, I can trust this guy. But anyway…

Poetry then transforms into a possession, joint-stock, and a fashionable contrast with science. The index has distilled the book’s bulk into a potent liquor. Quaff deeply.  Here we can get drunk together on the accidental collision that Order ordains. The index, in my mind’s eye, is like having different groups of friends mingle for the first time. Confusing, awkward, serendipitous.

On page 228, Milton elbows Money, Muller, Music, Mystic, and Myth. The index allows this unusual juxtaposition, seeing as none of these subjects share page-space. And while the author can’t comment upon these relationships, it’s fascinating to see disparate words make even a meager connection.

I would never, of course, strongly recommend that one read a book strictly on this plan. But isn’t it sort of delicious to have the curtain pulled back and the author’s passions exposed? A book declares itself as a stricture on the Nature of Ideas, organizing words into a set design for the reader, their intentions and needs be damned. Life, whipped.

An index also lays out the complexity of the book into pristine statements, as if a yogi lived in the binding, dreaming up witty apercus. By a small transposition on the page, I come up with these sentences from Barfield’s book, under the index heading of Self-consciousness, 204-10.

Self-consciousness depends on abstract thought and vice versa.
Self-consciousness is necessary for metaphor-making.
Self-consciousness produces ‘poetry.’
Self-consciousness opposed to inspiration.
Self-consciousness opposed to cognition.
Self-consciousness opposed to thinking.
Self-consciousness creation out of full.
Self-consciousness unrelieved modern.
Self-consciousness and Kant.

But there’s mystery in numbers. And page numbers can occlude understanding and Order.

Ryhthm apparently shows up on pages 47, 98 et seq., 146 et seq., and 157-8. Why, in a book on poetic diction, does the subject of rhythm only appear on five pages? Lunacy. But, when I look up what the Latin abbreviation et seq. stands for, I find “et sequens,” or, “and that which follows.” In fact, now that I nose closer, the abbr. litters every index page like cigarette butts in a park glen.

Supposing I’m speaking out of school on the subject of reading. That my fuckstorms aren’t as fuckish as all that. They probably aren’t. I’m just trying to ford my way through a minor deluge in the creek. And if I constantly and doggedly read a book in the prescribed way, then I will lose my lust for reading and reading its luster. As an homage, I offer my own hypothetical index entry.

READING (see Education), 193, 193 n, 206-7

defined, i-xi, 2
indexes, 52, 103
by pale fire, 198
with friends, 40-1, 72, 74, 83-6
“accidental,” 1-50, 100-164
“purposeful,” 51-99
while driving, 100-10, 90-99
madness in absence of, 63-70
as a fashionable trait in society, 234
sexual attraction to, 234-260
moonlights as Valium, 261
as opposed to Facebook, 208, 210, 225
as a dying art, 1, 9
as a recuperative lifestyle and restorative, 13, 15 et seq. 

I can’t bear to leave this beautiful blog behind, so to keep me in the loop, I’m gonna meet up with a writer at each of my major stops. I wanna experience this strange city, learn more about the writer, and get a sense of how they live in this place.

And then, I’ll report back here with audio/video, a mini-interview, and a recap by me, plus anything else the writer might wanna feature.

So far, here’s the lineup:

Akron, Ohio: Nick Sturm, Mike Krutel, Sammy Snodgrass

Chicago, Illinois: James Tadd Adcox

Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Katy Gunn

Atlanta, Georgia: Jamie Iredell

I’m also looking to add a few more writers, if any of you have suggestions/requests for the series (MI, KY, TN, NC, and WV are other possible locations).

Also, to help raise money for the series (like buying the writers’ dinner, etc.), I’m doing a poem-postcard fundraiser for the trip. Here is more info on that if you’re interested.

THX FOR BEING SO NEAT

It nearly put me in crisis mode. I am 96% oriented toward books. It’s all I ever do, and it makes me feel pretty one-dimensional, even flawed. If you survey my email inbox, which I just did, you have to scroll past 30 emails to find one that isn’t about making or reviewing or reading books (that 31st one is about softball, my other obsession).

I hemmed and hawed a bit at the question of relevance, and not only because the novel I had just finished was Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (which I admit I enjoyed a lot). I have a gut-level conviction that art is an essential balancing element in a precariously-balanced world, and that, in a real way, it will “save us all.” Even books that befuddle people into not reading them are necessary. I understand that almost everybody in the universe isn’t going to read John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath — I didn’t, more or less — but that book makes many other books possible.

In the interview I said, “I see a grand metanarrative to life, one that is affected by everything that happens, and the most important element of this metanarrative are the small narratives that comprise it — sharing our own stories and listening to other people’s stories is the way to peace.”

I’m pretty pleased with myself, yes.

In his recent, long post at Inside Higher Ed, Virgil W. Brower explains his rationale for taking a Great Books approach in his philosophy classes at Chicago State University, which is a mostly minority school. “I don’t teach my students how to write, but rather try to teach them how to read,” he says and goes on to say that this has the happy effect of making them better writers. It’s a fascinating essay, one that thoroughly justifies and vouches for spending serious time with great, or nearly great books. It’s actually exciting when he recounts the logical fallacies that are uncovered through reading a Malcolm X speech. The idea of assigning Gravity’s Rainbow to illustrate the concepts of analytic philosophy is motivating — but the essay is most exciting when he talks about the way the students respond:

Once a student, who has not yet given her or himself over to a consistent practice of reading or, perhaps, was simply never encouraged to do so, knocks out Kurt Vonnegut’s Galàpagos in a week — and is a bit surprised to have done so, quite easily — he or she is likely to make it through Aristotle’s Parts of Animals in the following weeks, and within a month is working through Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man with a working set of intertextual concepts that feel quite close to home.

Which I think is the message I needed to hear, particularly with regard to the “set of intertextual concepts that feel quite close to home.” Sometimes I forget why I invest 96% of my energy in making books which — c’mon — are going to be unread quite a lot more than Ashbery even. But I do it for connections — intertextual concepts that create the web that feel close to home because they are home, life. Making these connections between books and experiences and people is what makes me feel like I am really here.

I never fret about the value of reading while I’m actually reading. And I never feel better about anything (even a well-struck softball) more than when I recognize some detail of a story or poem that resonates with who I am, who I think I am, who it is that is comprised of all these other stories and poems. Saying as much makes it seem so abstract that it’s meaningless. I recognize that, which is what I like about Brower’s essay. Taking pedagogy as a starting point allows him to voice what I’m thinking from a practical standpoint. He says, “If reaching an understanding is what they want to get out of a class … they are obliquely invited to consider that if they cannot use this understanding to understand something different or something more, then perhaps they (or we) have not understood it that well, at all.”