Many of his most famous compositions depict the poet hurrying through a list of tasks creative and banal; they hum with a frenetic intensity that is counterbalanced but not abnegated by their insistent sprezzatura.

This becomes obvious once, in lines 3 through 6, the poem begins justifying its comparative claims through anaphoric “partly because” clauses

For instance, in his prose poem “Meditations in an Emergency,” after submitting various lyric gestures and attitudes to his bathetic reconstructions

there was no need for the US state or the CIA to distort or falsely represent this art, since the abstract expressionists and their critical epigones

The reality principle is transformed into an excessive “performance principle” that orients humans toward continual self-denial in accord with the exigencies of capitalist accumulation

“Suffering” replaces “experience,” and “find” replaces “know.” This terminological displacement produces a verbal chiaroscuro effect of alternating light and dark, beauty and terror.