I had just gotten my hair cut and in reapplying lipstick in the dressing room afterward found that the only color I happened to have in my purse was slightly too bright, and a little bit orange--not harmonious at all. So I put on lots, blotted it, and put on more, figuring that one might as well be brazen.

Then I went to the Gotham Book Mart to look at literary magazines; the Gotham is a bastion of culture in the diamond district ("a crumbling islet," as Conrad put it about Patusan, where Lord Jim ended up, "between the two branches of a mighty, devouring stream"). I rarely go there: it requires a special strength of character for me to withstand the dusty silence of bookstores, and my usual set of responses to them, especially the old ones-- either fleeing in panic over the massing of all those words, or else going way over budget and buying books that I know will move from pile to pile until we manage to shelve them or give them away.

All the literary magazines at the Gotham that day were old. I don't know why. I read a few stories by people I used to know, one about brushing teeth. I picked up a copy of the Hungry Mind Review for my husband, because it had a piece I knew would interest him. Meanwhile the book dealer in the back was having a loud conversation about a woman who had sued him and then died before her deposition.

"A lunatic," he said. "Anyone who listened carefully knew right away she was lying, but it didn't matter. And then dying like that....."

I wasn't the only customer, but might as well have been, since each of the few of us in the warren of rooms seemed utterly engrossed with himself. Probably that accounts for why I decided it was fine to climb all around the desk in the back, where I found a 1964 paperback by Rumer Godden, a British writer who grew up in India and whom I started to read on my mother's recommendation. I had to climb, scrambling up the shelves like a monkey, because I am so short. Typical of the Gotham, no one noticed. The anesthetized quality of sound in the store and the oldness of everything in it made me feel like I was among ghosts, ghosts who understood a code I didn't have, ghosts that had no use for me, not even to chastise, which was depressing. On the street that day, amid the loud traffic, the traffic and noise that annihilates everything around it, people seemed to have been noticing me, either because of my haircut or the lipstick, which might not have been flattering in either case, but at least I existed.

After that, having misbehaved, I could be more serious. Poetry. Nothing else seemed urgent. Why does one thing seem urgent at a given moment? (On another occasion at Gotham I'd read the indexes in lots of the memoirs, looking for familiar names, and came upon Kenneth Burke's account, in a letter to Malcolm Cowley, of my grandfather, who was a novelist in the thirties and worked with Cowley at the New Republic before going over to Time magazine, convincing Burke to become a Communist. My grandfather broke with the Party by the mid-thirties, as a result of which some of the old guard walked out during a funeral in the 1960s when he gave the eulogy for his best friend, Kenneth Fearing, a novelist and journalist who had not broken with the Party until it was respectable to break with the Party. I have never been able to get through anything by Kenneth Burke, no matter how renowned a critic he is said to have been. And I have inherited a family hatred of Malcolm Cowley, who, as my grandmother said, was always trolling for other people's good ideas, but that is another story -- as if anyone cares about old disputes. When I came back later to buy the book, it was gone. )

With my smart new haircut, and tiny bit of confidence, it still took me a long time to decide exactly which poetry seemed urgent (dead? alive? opaque? modern? lyric?) – until I settled on wanting a book by the dead British poet Louis MacNeice, a friend of Auden's who seems to be having something of a resurgence. In graduate school, in a course called Politics and Literature, the Louis MacNeice book on the syllabus had to be withdrawn, as it was both out-of-print and not in the library. I spent considerable effort for this course, trying to locate the out-of-print books this professor assigned in order to find an obscure paper topic, but MacNeice foiled me. Instead I wrote on an out-of-print collection, History , by Robert Lowell, an American and less-dead poet (the last poet, if you don't count Bruce Springsteen, to be on the cover of Time ), and according to my professor drew faulty conclusions by failing to take into account Lowell's by that point well-developed madness. About five years later I reread my secondhand copy of the book, a paperback, heavily annotated. Lines of his haunt me still. That book ends, "The slush ice on the east bank of the Hudson / is rose-heather in the New Year sunset; / bright sky, bright sky, carbon scarred with ciphers." I was working then in an office with a view of the Hudson, and loved the early winter sunsets, and the tempting near-legibility of cloud shapes, which I took Lowell's image to be, confounded with the symbols on a sheet of used carbon paper. For a time after reading that, I took to using carbon paper as well. I discovered that copying a great artist's habits doesn't bring any of his gifts to you. The world, or rather, the world as reconstituted in art, remains a cipher. Considerably later, when my fifth-grade son was writing a report on Alexander the Great, I started to quote Lowell to him-- "Alexander's moist eye missed nothing" -- and realized, in the face of his blank look, that this sort of fragmented and not-quite- sensible poetry is an acquired taste. »