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Prefatory Note

Most of these essays were delivered as lectures at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, N.C, the University of Cincinnati, and the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Several appeared in the American Poetry Review, and “A Genuine Article” appeared in ZYZZYVA. I'm grateful to Cornell Capa and Magnum Photos for the chance to reprint the Robert Capa diptych here. Ulli Beier's work was my first and best resource for the Yoruba piece. Indeed at every turn I relied on good works already done: Ed Snow's translations of Rilke, the editions of Valéry in the Bollingen Series, the sensitive translations of Celan available to us through Michael Hamburger and Katharine Washburn, Guy Davenport's Archilochus, Stanley Lom-bardo's Parmenides and Empedocles, and more. Tom Phillips's treated texts deserve especially warm mention.

I thank the Creative Writing Program and English Department of the University of Washington in Seattle, for ungrudging grants of leave, during which some of these essays were written and revised; the Guggenheim Foundation, for support during one year of the writing of these essays; and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund for a writer's award that bought me some revising time.

From the encouraging response of people who heard these lectures, or who read the essays in advance, came my determination to collect and finish them. But to my hardest critic and best friend, I owe most of all: Nikolai B. Popov, whose erudition kept me honest, and whose constancy kept me whole. It is to his high standards and intellectual integrity that I owe any refinement this book possesses; its immoderacies are mine.