It’s not about the furtherance of the art.

It’s not about positioning with or against.

It’s not about “good” or “bad” or even “indifferent.”

It’s about the corkscrew twisting into space.

And if you don’t agree with that, well, no one is MAKING you hang around in this hothouse.

A metaphor for a poem or a book might be a hothouse.

Enclosed, fecund, allergenic, exotic, artificed, arranged, out of control, otherworldly, dimly lit, musky, inhabitable for a period of time, protected, preserved, gathering together things that would not appear in nature together, organic but formal and deliberate, stuffy, hazy.

Speaking of “flate,” why must people conflate irony with harshness?

If you can’t be ironic, you can’t swing.

Irony is necessary to the potency of a cadence because it is backed up by a furious unreleased laughter.

Talking on the phone with a friend about the “pride” word.

He said he’d experienced a kind of working-class pride when considering the dubious successes of some more privileged peers. I said that he was feeling proud of his own accomplishments despite not being so privileged. And that what he had been feeling in terms of being working class was resentment.

Now, no matter what semantic difficulties I may have with “pride,” I am totally down with resentment, whether it be ethnic, national, or just plain quotidian. Long live resentment!