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[...] something Rilke says about poetry in his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). Poems are not, he explains, “feelings—those one has early enough—they are experiences.” And from experience, he slips into memories, and launches into a page-long litany of them, and then he says (tra…

A frisson of euphoria and disgust

The premise is that in order to tell the best, richest, fullest stories, or (what amounts to the same thing) in order to offer the best possible interpretations, you have to lay the object you are interpreting next to human history as a whole, or as much of it as you can manage, and stretch it to s…

what it must be like to stand on this promontory of years, looking out. Promontory or proscenium, maybe: it is a subset of course of the dramatic monologue

The awake, all straight-backed
and well-groomed, wait at a table
made of sharp sunlight. I’m late
as usual, but this is the morning

I give in, sign over everything:
pillow-gluttony, sheet-sickness,
the blanket’s wrapper like skin
on my skin, clock meaningless.

This solo has gone on far …