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Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Personae
  4. I: Early Days
  5. One. Control
  6. Two. Doubt
  7. Three. Fate
  8. Four. Same
  9. Five. Fine Arts
  10. Six. In Loco Parentis
  11. Seven. Settling
  12. Eight. Neighbors
  13. Nine. Prospects
  14. Ten. The Lucky
  15. Eleven. Instruction
  16. Twelve. Same
  17. Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
  18. Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
  19. Fifteen. The Reason
  20. Sixteen. That Person
  21. Seventeen. Predictably
  22. II: Writing Teacher
  23. Eighteen. Early Poems
  24. Nineteen. Motivation
  25. Twenty. Allegory
  26. Twenty-One. Grief
  27. Twenty-Two. A Portrait
  28. Twenty-Three. Veils
  29. Twenty-Four. Soft Power
  30. Twenty-Five. Lists
  31. Twenty-Six. A Break
  32. Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
  33. Twenty-Eight. Custom
  34. Twenty-Nine. Parity
  35. Thirty. Fortune
  36. III: Volta
  37. Thirty-One. Images
  38. Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
  39. Thirty-Three. Letters
  40. Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
  41. Thirty-Five. Love
  42. Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
  43. IV: Your Best Reader
  44. Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
  45. Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
  46. Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
  47. Forty. Détente
  48. Forty-One. Worlds
  49. Forty-Two. Recognition
  50. Forty-Three. Persistence
  51. Forty-Four. And Then
  52. Forty-Five. Mingling
  53. Forty-Six. You
  54. Forty-Seven. Persona
  55. Forty-Eight. Est et Non
  56. Forty-Nine. The Author
  57. Epilogue
  58. Afterword: The Libertine
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. About the Authors

There’s this feeling he’s been having, like the feeling of wanting to tell a story, but that’s not the word for it. The thing about stories is, you do need quite a lot of confidence about the way things come to pass in the actual world to write one. You need to be pretty sure that the world contains humans, along with these other discrete entities, aka, events.

Harry thinks about going into an imaginary grocery store and peeling all the labels off everything, prices and names and bar codes, images of kittens and blond children and delicately sweating grapes. It is late—in the human project, but additionally the store would probably need to be closed—and perhaps all the signs will have fallen off the walls, too.

Yes: Harry wades to a display window and begins culling from the linguistic, numerical, symbolical heap. Truth be told, the torn paper is so copious it comes up over his ankles.

After the deluge, he thinks, me. He wets his fingers in his mouth, turns the page of the tabloid. He turns the radio back on, picks up a pen.

But it isn’t, he thinks, me.

Seventeen. Predictably

Seventeen

Predictably

Anton Beans is not having the best of all possible semesters. Tuesday’s introductory workshop was trash, and for the past four days he’s barely been able to squeeze out a single coherent line, not to speak of a full-on poem. Beans has put pen to paper but the energies are in no way flowing. He’s tried cutting up and collaging a few paragraphs from the Patriot Act but to no effect. His chakras are hermetically sealed, his mojo pathetically quiescent, his lower intestine acting up again. He has reorganized his bookshelves and updated his wall chart of outstanding poetry journal submissions: one acceptance, four rejections; five down and one hundred sixteen more to go.