Such as it is, this is my poetics. It’s nothing too fancy—a person in a satirical mood might say it’s just a little Russian Formalist defamiliarization with a bit of mainline Protestant uplift thrown in. It’s also my politics and my ethics, such as those are. I try not to understand my students too quickly; I try not to thrust limiting assumptions on other people; I try to let people surprise me. I mostly fail at these things, and sometimes they feel irrelevant in a historical moment when so much of the evil around us is unsubtle and simple. But by that same token, if there is any hope for those who live in such a moment, it is precisely where, to my mind, literature and beauty have always resided: in the part that isn’t obvious, in the part you can’t see though it is right in front of you, in the calm mystery of what is.