I teach Renaissance literature, particularly poetry, and poetry of other periods, too. I am currently at work on a couple of smaller projects on sixteenth-century prosody, and a new book about ideas of poetic style in the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. Though I am a compulsive interpreter, the style project has a lot to do with how we interact with poems when we’re not trying to say what they mean. One of those ways is imitating them, and if you take a class with me, you may find yourself adding a new paragraph to Ashbery’s “The System,” or rewriting eight lines of Fulke Greville in the style of Walter Raleigh, and eight lines of Walter Raleigh in the style of Fulke Greville. This is the future, and you heard it here. My own poems—of which the following is one—have appeared in the TLS, Paris Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere.

Folding Star

(a star rising at folding-time;
an evening star)

My book as it lapses into the bath
unminded, relaxes,
and now the stitches give, and the pages
petal and fan

as though it were being eased of some pain:
of someone’s pain
it had not known of. Soon the ink,
diluted, trickles

out with the slurry of cooling bathwater
prattling down
through a succession of widening pipes
to pool somewhere,

too cold now to bathe in, somewhere outside
where the sheep are gathering
past their bedtime—pausing to drink
and drinking too much.

Above them an apoplectic star
turns on itself:
once and again, quarto, octavo,
impressively dense.

The sheep talk freely in the dark.
The foundering shallows.
O I have taken too little care of
care of this.