R is for Rilke, whose poems I read for inspiration of a peculiar sort, since what I get mainly when I read him is a sense of uplift, some lavish and ornate attempt to locate being, certain moments of ecstatic insight close to the truth, or what I believe to be true. I feel the unutterable has found a place in what has been uttered. I am thinking of Part I of The Spanish Trilogy, and the ninth of The Duino Elegies, and "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes," and "Lament," and "Evening." S is for something that supplies a vacancy, which I might fill. It has a verbal presence that my own immediate appetite or ambition subverts, misreads, or makes into an appealing void, a space only I can elaborate on. I begin with something as if it were nothing (or nothing as if it were something) because, often, what I have chosen as my starting point makes no sense to others, as when, say, I open up my Wallace Stevens and my eye alights upon "shaken sleep" or "pearled" or "later reason." S is also for Stevens. I have always turned to his poems, reading parts of them, skipping on to others, finding them congenial despite my fickleness, my impatience. I admire Stevens and Frost equally among American poets, but I read them differently. Stevens influences me, but I do not think that Frost does. Frost's diction is given over to voice, a continuous sound that tempers verbal color. In a Frost poem, it is its spokenness that counts, that overrides even those periodic passages of vatic emphasis. Words are submerged into clusters of sense, so that some tonal character can assert itself -- an argument, an extended gesture that relies on the order and direction of what is said. In Stevens, argument tends to be discontinuous, hidden, mysterious, or simply not there. More often, what we experience is the power of the word or the phrase to enchant. The rhetorical design of his poems points to explanation or annunciation. But there is no urgency that constructs "nextness" -- what comes next is a possibility, a choice, another invitation to imagine. T s for tedium, and by tedium I do not mean the heartsickness of Leopardi's noia, or the deadening emptiness of Baudelaire's ennui. I do not mean those encounters with the void that leave the sufferer in despair or, as we are more likely to say, in a deep depression. by tedium I mean no more than the household variety of boredom, the sweet monotony of daily life. My tedium is a luxury. In its arms, I am passive. I sit around and peruse a book, or check the fridge, or do a puzzle. Pretty soon my laziness palls. I try to extricate myself. I drink some coffee. This gets me working. and I say to myself that it couldn't be done without tedium, most benign of pressures. -- 「你下流贱格，露出半个龟头。」 --

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