The Hours Rear Up Like Flames

In the 1980s, a young American student named George B. Moore sent an extensive telegram to José Emilio Pacheco, one of Mexico’s premier poets, hoping to interview him. Telegrams were expensive—typically priced per word—but Moore sent question after question anyway. Pacheco later claimed the message ran to about 10 pages, which might have cost thousands of dollars to transmit. Instead of answering directly, Pacheco responded with the now-classic “Letter to George B. Moore in defense of anonymity,” a poem that doubles as an ars poetica. In it he writes, “I don’t know why we write, dear George . . . Strange, this world of ours: it’s interested more in poets / and less in poetry.”