Denial of the Minor Poet's Petition for a Change in Stature

Abstract

First of all, you sleep too much. You never suffer bouts of insomnia, waking aghast in the soundless dark in dread of your impending death. Furthermore, you hate to sit. To work you require pots of tea and slippers and a balance of heat and ventilation. Forget about writing in humid spells, before breakfast, after noon, on holidays, or during the winter months. Moderation is your mantra: hold the strong coffee, stiff drinks, more-than-modest extremes of feeling. If you strive for anything at all it is for happiness, but who wants to hear news from the land of the blissfully contented? No one wants to know of your waking in a nest of husband son and cat at eight this Monday morning, of your breakfasting on fruits from the garden then ambling to your desk to find a pink rose cheerfully adrift in a porcelain bowl, a gift from your lover the afore-mentioned spouse to whom you remain monotonously faithful. We want to hear of the secret monstrous desires of domesticity, of the face you glimpsed for an instant in the sphere of the melon before slicing, the ripe gutting sound of something being slaughtered, its intimate intoxicant aroma, its spice of incipient mold. We want you to tell us what happened last December, the garden buried in decay, the days curtailing -hunger, failure, rot, incessant rain. But you can't seem to stop delighting in the minimal: oh the gleam on the surfaces of things, oh the many kinds of white, from pearl to Corinthian to buttercream! I think it's fair to say you've lost your claim. An hour squandered staring into the mouth of a blossom and now you're abandoning your desk in pursuit of the perfect summer lunch: tomatoes ripened on the vine basil and a smattering of olive oil. Then you'll inevitably nap while the pink rose turns to brown and another day is permitted to expire quietly, without fervor or calamity.