Struggling for his identity within the materials at hand, [they] show us, in the mere turning of a sentence this way or that, how to keep from being smothered by the inherited structuring of things.
—Richard Poirier on close reading, who died last weekend at 83

We ought to be grateful to language for making life messier than ever.
—Poirier

is not dirty silence/Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
—The Creations of Sound, Wallace Stevens