I want to read more novels that make me feel like the end of The Copenhagen Trilogy—which is not a novel—did: shaking, sputtering, like I had just (barely) survived a car accident. I want to be physically stunned, physically immobilized by language. There is no formula for that, nothing in particular that one should risk but it probably involves risking everything, courting humiliation, being open to being misunderstood, and telling the truth. We should write only what has to be written and what can be written only now that is about life as we live it now, and we should write novels that have

ROBERT WALSER WAS A SWISS WRITER of the early twentieth century who wanted very much to be a German writer. He walked and walked more than he wrote and wrote, covering thousands of miles in his lifetime, albeit within limited territory. In the beginning his garb was clownish—“a wretched bright yellow midsummer suit, light dancing shoes, an intentionally vulgar, insolent, foolish hat”—near the end a motley of patched rags, and at the very end a shabby but proper suit and overcoat, his death duds when he collapsed in 1956 in the snow near the mental asylum where he had resided for twenty-three

When I used to write about my relationship to anorexia, I tended to retreat to metaphor. It was a worm. It left me hollow, scoured, cleaned of mucous contents. It was a fire. It was a book set aflame, and I was both the fire and the paper. Because I believed it didn’t have anything to do with how my body looked, I felt, at times, like there was something more regal, more holy about my condition, as though its removal from my body reduced the amount by which I was abased.

I regret this, and I regret writing about it that way—with poetry. It was a way to make sense of a thing I found lived inside

Letter to the Local Police

Dear Sirs:

I have been enjoying the law and order of our

community throughout the past three months since

my wife and I, our two cats, and miscellaneous

photographs of the six grandchildren belonging to

our previous neighbors (with whom we were very

close) arrived in Saratoga Springs which is clearly

prospering under your custody

Indeed, until yesterday afternoon and despite my

vigilant casting about, I have been unable to discover

a single instance of reasons for public-spirited concern,

much less complaint

You may easily appreciate, then, how it is that

I write