Loitering: New and Collected Essays

by Charles D'Ambrosio

Quite possibly poetry salvages nothing except language itself, and even that project of reclamation is up against poor odds.

The poem’s not fragile. You can beat on it. It’s got good traction. Paraphrased, its four stanzas go like this: 1. You’re fucked. 2. We’re all fucked. 3. Why? 4. Let’s eat lunch.

The problem for the poet is one of expression; nothing is quite so false, in writing, as the heartfelt confession.

Whereas prison, well, what is it, really? A shortage of space compensated for by an excess of time.

The British psychologist Adam Phillips calls boredom “that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire,” and defined as such, boredom isn’t fixed by distraction, by bars or restaurants, but by the arrival of a feeling of anticipation. I know for myself boredom involves a spatialization of time; the forwardness goes out of life, and I wait, and in waiting time becomes a place—not a particularly good one, but a place nonetheless, with the minutes and hours, the days and months piling up indifferently.

Answers are as transient and foolish as we are, and poets generally aren’t in the solution business.

How can one write poetry after Auschwitz? —critic Theodor Adorno And how can one eat lunch? —poet Mark Strand

Still, ruin, nearly as much as a good poem, is strangely enduring.

That diversity is good is a slogan we’ve all heard, but it has expressive limits—it’s not OK to fly jets into office buildings—and so what does it really mean? For me, borrowing from Isaiah Berlin, another writer intimately aware of history, diversity (or plurality) is an answer to the central twentieth-century historical problem of radical subjectivity. Accumulating enough subjectivities—setting them against each other—is as close as we’re going to come to objectivity, and this is why agreement is problematic: What’s the point of being right if it’s only safety in numbers? The history of being right and how wrong it’s turned out to be is a long one. By this measure the terrorists were wrong—such empty holiness is almost too much to bear in mind—but when being right provides comfort, when the sensation of it is pleasant, when it allays anxiety or lends security, then it seems to be doing the job of ignorance. If we’re right, then the nature and quality and burden of being right is our issue.