Hillary, on this day, eclipses everyone else. The chemistry between him and Loudermilk is classic; they are a Western with slapstick overtones and a real possibility for serious gore, ketchup splashing, a violent situation tragedy. It’s a weird example of straight men in love and gives Harry a shot of vicarious joy: the passion, the histrionics. But Harry is simultaneously glad he didn’t have to be in the actual room for it, that he, personally, is protected by media.

“You think I’m scared of a preppy shit like you?” Hillary wails. “I’m the guy who spent the last decade and a half interpreting crayon cave paintings someone thinks is poetry! You think I haven’t been here twenty times before? You’re a goddamn cliché and your daddy paid for your last lap dance.”

Loudermilk opts for cruel whimsy. “I’ll have to go back and check my credit-card bill to see if that’s true. Like”—Loudermilk stage-whispers—“because I’m pretty sure I’m not the one who has to pay for ass.”

In the fourth session, Loudermilk is a bit slyer, biding his time. He’s silent, which means he essentially cedes Anton Beans the floor. He gives Beans just enough rope to hang himself with, in other words. Beans struts; he preens. He has a few notes to disseminate regarding the production of poetry in America today, its tired norms, its naïve credence in the transparent referential capacity of language. Up for workshop is a sentimental piece about someone’s grandmother’s attic. It’s a vision of middle-class nostalgia for the postwar era, when continuity and unionized employment were assured, and all of life could be reliably archived in one’s home. The attic is a place in which the smell and feel of the grandmother’s body, her crepey limbs, is transferred, in what even Harry comprehends is a poorly scaled metaphor, onto the storage space. Chelsea, the poet, reads out loud.