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“When we know what happiness is,” he says, “we’ll have a word for it.”

I meet you still though never
fully formed like
a statue only a partially drawn
stream with one arm extended...

Fall, 1941
The child is proud
that her household
is dignified and sad...

Why do we write poetry? Many poets come to the podium accompanied by raisons d’être for particular poems. Can we believe what they say, or do they simply seek to enhance the poem by preceding it with a piquant explanation?

I, Onion, am not to be peeled like an orange or an egg. I don’t have skins. I am skins. Reveal me, tier after tier, hue after hue, from papery yellow through pearl-like, chalk-like white, down to an oval chamber that, once entered, vanishes...

There is no fête without regret, as the saying goes. Suppose the King is expected for dinner. Count M. has promised to serve him a filet of shad, but the delicacy doesn't arrive, and M.'s disgraced cook will lock himself in a pantry to....

My memory spoke loudly as I read Vladimir Nabokov’s 1942 letter to his wife from the campus of Coker College, in Hartsville, South Carolina (“The Russian Professor,” June 13th).