It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things– a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring– with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader’s spine– the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That’s the kind of writing that most interests me.
It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things– a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring– with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader’s spine– the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That’s the kind of writing that most interests me.
