Fishing a Watershed

Eight years ago I quit teaching forever. My swan song at the State University of New York at Stony Brook was the administering of a twenty-five-grand international poetry festival with over one hundred poets in attendance for a number of days. As might be expected, it was the sort of bombazine booze gala that tends to wound and petrify, mixed in with camaraderie, adulteries, fistfights, and general good spirits; the aftermath produced a kind of terrifying cultural exhaustion in me that I’m not sure I’m over yet.