Wallace Stevens has always been my favorite poet, and also somehow a strange counter-model to the modern "desk job" existence. He was an introvert who worked a

Wallace Stevens has always been my favorite poet, and also somehow a strange counter-model to the modern "desk job" existence. He was an introvert who worked a whole career as a mid-level executive. And he also created incredible linguistic and philosophical gems, over and over, for thirty years. (Also, he was first published at age fourty-four.) The disconnection between going to work every day at Hartford Insurance, and writing, say, this, is something that I have spent a lot of time thinking about, and still find fundamentally mysterious: I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.