"Well," he says. "It's quiet enough."

This month brings Mr. Muldoon's 11th book of poems, Maggot. The 59-year-old Irish native writes poetry to read with the Oxford English Dictionary in hand. His stanzas are seas of subtle puns. He has been a major poet since his first collection, New Weather (published when he was just 21 years old), because of the quiet perfection of lines like, "What was he watching and waiting for/ walking Scollop every day?/ For one intending to leave at the end of the year/ who would break the laws of time and stay," from "February." He is either referring to his own memory or anyone's or creating a new myth entirely. It could be all three.

It is Mr. Muldoon's ability to walk the line between comedy and tragedy, autobiographical and universal themes, colloquial and stylized language, all with equal grace, that has made him influential. It has also branded him with labels like "postmodernist" and "difficult." Indeed, he is a jester, but only in the sense of Lear's Fool: Though he's not as grave as John Ashbery or theatrical as Anne Carson, his jokes and tricks are among poetry's most serious and illuminating examples of beauty.

In 2007, David Remnick appointed Mr. Muldoon poetry editor of The New Yorker. The choice caught some off guard--he is not American, and Alice Quinn's exit from the position was unexpected. But Mr. Muldoon has brought a freshness to the magazine's poetry section that only he could. Yes, he publishes Mr. Ashbery and C.K. Williams, but he also leaves space for emerging poets like Michael Robbins, who broke in with a controversial poem titled "Alien Vs. Predator," or for Dave Musgrave's single-line poem, "On the Inevitable Decline Into Mediocrity of the Popular Musician Who Attains a Comfortable Middle Age" ("O Sting, where is thy death?").

"One of the great things about this moment, and one of the reasons I was even interested in doing the job, is that there are many styles," Mr. Muldoon told me. "I don't have to go desperately looking for a range of poems."

Maggot is Mr. Muldoon's first collection since 2006's Horse Latitudes. He considered retiring after that book, but the impulse to write did not fade. Still, Mr. Muldoon is reluctant even to call himself a poet. "Generally," he told me, "the people who come out of the woodwork and say, 'Hey, I'm a poet. Here's a poem for you.' You say, 'Oh my God. When's the next bus?'"

Back in the moth-covered screens surrounding the porch of Homer Noble Farm, the deer flies buzzing around us, I sat and sipped coffee with Mr. Muldoon and his wife, the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. Every summer Mr. Muldoon comes here to Ripton, Vt., to teach poetry to high-school teachers at Bread Loaf (named for Bread Loaf Mountain, on which the campus rests). The corners of Mr. Muldoon's mouth are perpetually turned up in a half-smile. His eyes look red and tired, but always attentive, nearly hidden behind a pair of thin glasses and a thick mop of unruly hair.

"The phones that connect the cabin were used for Frost and the secretary to get in touch with one another," he explained.

"He was shtupping the wife," said Ms. Korelitz. "There's a phone line that connects from the house to the cabin so the wife could call up there and say, 'My husband is away.'" She raised her eyebrows.

"You say that," Mr. Muldoon said, "with such authenticity."

Mr. Muldoon was raised Catholic in Northern Ireland. His father was an illiterate farmer, his mother a schoolteacher. The house where he grew up was largely barren of books, save for an encyclopedia for children. In grammar school, he encountered a slim volume, Book of Verse for Young People, which collected the most famous stanzas of Burns, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Yeats and others. Donne's "The Flea" remains Mr. Muldoon's favorite poem ("It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,/ And in this flea our two bloods mingled be."). His interpretation typifies the seriousness with which his own poetry employs humor and sex--attributes of Donne as well: "It's the greatest pickup line in the language," he said.

He left Ireland at age 35 to teach part-time at Princeton. After a stint at Oxford, he returned to Princeton, where he is director of the Lewis Arts Center. His on-campus office, where he does much of his writing, is stacked floor to ceiling with the collected works of Auden, Bishop, Keats and every other major poet since Homer. The complete volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary sit close to his desk. Mr. Muldoon told me that when he writes, he enters something like a literary fugue state and prefers "to have absolutely no sense of what I'm doing"--echoing T.S. Eliot's belief that poetry is a giving over to the unconscious. He writes every day, as he has for nearly a half a century.

"That's the sort of phrase you read and think, 'My God! Didn't he have something better to do?'" he said. "Unfortunately, the fact that one has attempted to do it for 50 years is completely immaterial. One of the questions I have for myself is, 'Is it time to quit?' There's no point in doing it unless it's sort of half-interesting. If you're a chef, the more often you make sushi, the better you might get at it. Maybe even that's not the case, but it sure as hell isn't the case in poetry. One tends to get worse at it, if anything. And here's the thing: Even one's best friends probably wouldn't even tell you that it's not interesting."

This worry was particularly palpable with Maggot, a collection that Mr. Muldoon has his doubts about, even after it flowed out of him following a rare period of not writing poems. To be fair, Mr. Muldoon had other things to think about: raising two children, being a husband, his job as an administrator and teacher at Princeton, curating the poetry in The New Yorker. People have debated poetry's importance since Plato, but the question remains: Is poetry worth the effort when there is a life to be lived?

"Is washing one's socks worth doing?" Mr. Muldoon says. "I think poets are often their own worst enemies, engaging in these debates about 'Does poetry matter?' Really why not just get on with it? It does matter. It does matter."

Jonathan Galassi, Mr. Muldoon's publisher at FSG, told me about how Mr. Muldoon wanted to quit writing after Horse Latitudes.

"He was tired out, and yet here we are with a new book," Mr. Galassi said. "His mind is just zapping all the time with linguistic games and connections. Maggot is like a kind of résumé--a reprise of many things he's done as a writer. What it's telling you is that he can't stop writing."

"What do you think about Paul saying he's getting worse with time?" I asked.

Mr. Galassi let out a loud laugh.

MR. MULDOON BEGAN his career with these lines: "The early electric people had domesticated the wild ass/ They knew all about falling off." 

At once archaic and forward-looking, optimistic and hopeless, the words already predict and characterize Mr. Muldoon's style: He electrifies language. He uses each word not only aware of its entire history, but also activating it. With Maggot, one of his most consistent, enthralling collections, he creates a quietly connected series in which every syllable is packed with meaning. In it, he rhymes "dork" with "Scythian torc"; composes a lengthy ethereal sequence about traveling in Japan and struggling to write the poem that the reader is reading; and, in "Balls," creates poetry's greatest sex joke since Donne's "Loves Progress." The very title, Maggot, suggests myriad understandings: As a noun, the word signifies those off-putting creatures that arise hopefully out of a corpse, the single sign of life among death--but also in the word's verb form, "to fret," a word that can also mean "to gnaw," in the manner of a maggot. 

The entire book is a kind of maggoting, in every sense imaginable, predominantly derived from the paradoxes of life continuing on both in spite--and because--of death. Consider, as Mr. Muldoon would want his readers to, the etymology of the word "metaphor"--itself the operative function of any poet's work, but also the dominant linguistic technique of the recurring signifier "maggot," a sustained metaphor throughout the collection. "Metaphor" comes from the Greek metaphero, meaning "to carry over," suggesting, at once, the literal connotations of the noun maggot (organic life "carrying over" as a result of death), but also the symbolic nature of such reciprocity as a poetical trope.

Such a delightfully antithetical (and antithetically delightful) notion repeats itself in the strange contradictions of Maggot's best images: "maggots, for their part,/ are content to be in a crowd scene from which they'll nonetheless depart/ about as gracefully as Swift would retire/ from a debate on the slave trade," or a girl with a tattoo that reads, "I REGRET THIS." For all his claims of ignorance, Mr. Muldoon has crafted a highly nuanced, interconnected text, one that demands to be appreciated at all levels of interpretation.

THE DAY I left Vermont, Mr. Muldoon was on his way to a Jon Bon Jovi concert in Saratoga Springs. We were driving in his Prius.

"Are you a Bon Jovi fan?" he asked.

"No."

"Me neither. But I feel like I should go to this. It's a sociological experiment."

He drummed on the steering wheel of his car, singing Bon Jovi lyrics, hiding his Irish accent beneath an approximation of Mr. Bon Jovi's Jersey croon.

"You give love a bad na-ame!"

There is a potential poem here.

He said he "takes a stab or two at playing guitar."

It was strange to hear him say this. He talks of his poetry with a similar air of informality: a hobby he takes a "stab" at. I recalled a conversation we had in his office the previous month. We sat surrounded by the collections of influential poets, his own books buried away on the shelves.

"I don't think of myself as a professional poet at all." His voice was serious, but his face was still half-smiling.

"Do you think there are any professional poets?" I asked.

"Um." He paused for a long time.

"Because that begs the question: If you are not a professional poet--"

"Who would be, is that it? There's something about being a poet that's different from being a physician. If I were a physician and I were to say to you, 'Yeah, I sort of try to be a physician,' you would think, 'Well I better find somebody else to do this.' If one could pass oneself off as not just a poet, but a good poet, maybe it would be easier to say, 'I'm a poet.' But because I wouldn't want to be a poet at all unless I were a good one, and I think this is true of many people, one would tend not to say it. Maybe it's just time to embrace it and say this is what I do. For better or worse. This is what I do."

mmiller@observer.com

The Associated Press reports:

The lights went down, a screen lit up. We got to watch Harold Pinter's speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Litteratoor from 2005. The playwright wore a red lap blanket and said the crimes of the U.S. were legion and unreported, from Nicaragua to Chile to Indonesia to Iraq, and Tony Blair was the U.S.'s poodle. The speech went on for 40 minutes, it felt like; and was a little motheaten.

After the speech the lights came up and without fanfare Chomsky came to the podium. He said he was going to take questions now. Well I thought that was odd. The event was advertised as a lecture from Chomsky. No. He was just taking questions, after Pinter's taped old speech.

There were a half dozen questions, and then Chomsky said, OK, Thank you, and walked off the stage. A short burst of applause, and that was the end of it. He had answered questions for 15 or 20 minutes, it felt like. Most of it was a tired attack on the big corporations, and—a newer thread—celebrating the democratic movement of integration that is occurring now in South America. I wanted more, much much more. I wanted to see that mind in real exercise, on the jumbotron. (I wanted to hear more about Israel than the idea that it is America's client, trying out 100 new warplanes—his one statement about Israel.)

As it was, the event seemed faintly squalid. The mind at the end of the day, in its nightclothes, wandering around a house. It was so casual as to be insulting to us, all the folks who had paid to hear him. And I heard a lot of grumbling as I went out on to Broadway.

When someone had asked a more difficult question, Chomsky said, Well that is a complex question, I've written about it. As if to say, don't make me jump thru any hoops, kid, you can go buy the book.

He had one interesting idea/emotion. Maybe I will get his actual words off my taperecorder later (for now I'm infected by his laziness). He kept saying that If we wanted to stop the war, we could. We possessed the power. He said that the people of Venezuela had shown great resolution, and any people was capable of democratic resolution, if they only cared. There was something wonderful and sour about this idea. He was judging us pitilessly, and saying, You are responsible for this war because you are doing diddly and you have all the rights in the world. You could be holding your elected representatives' feet to the fire. A student asked him to endorse the Feb. 15 strike by students, and Chomsky had said, Well that's good, maybe you will actually do something. Another time he described us as privileged with free speech, and we face no risks to expressing ourselves, unlike South Americans, or Russians, or Saudis.

It was a theme that wanted to be developed, in a grand speech. No grandeur. Just nightclothes.

A few possible explanations:

1. Chomsky had given a speech about linguistics earlier that day at Columbia. Dude is 78. You can't expect multiple pops. (OK; but he shouldn't have scheduled this speech and demanded $5 from all of us.)

2. Chomsky's whole life is this now: the guru of the left continually answers questions from eager minds, 24/7. What you see is what you get. Why do you expect him to stand on ceremony? This is a better explanation, actually. Chomsky does email all day long, answering questions. He answered one of mine once. He feels a real responsibility and I guess this is genuinely now The Chomsky presence, he doesn't put on a tutu, he answers a few questions, like the Delphic oracle. If you're expecting a stemwinder, go listen to a fool, turn on CSpan. (Well I still expect a little moment. A little concentration of energy for a hall full of young people. Just think of Norman Finkelstein's speeches, they're an hour long and full of wit and ideas).

3. Arrogance. He is overly adored, it has made him contemptuous and lazy. I don't want to believe this.

4. Chomsky's handlers were hustling him on to another event. Beforehand, I saw a truck unloading gold party chairs on Broadway. Maybe a fancy dinner? (If true, inexcusable Marie Antoinette behavior).

5. Old. My father tells a story about a scientist waiting to meet Einstein because he wanted to be worthy of him when he does; so he wins some prize and then sees Einstein at Princeton and Einstein is old, not all there, and the guy feels punctured.

6. True sourness. Many greats go sour as they age. Robert Frost, Mark Twain. Maybe Chomsky has doddering contempt for us as soft and overprivileged, which he expressed.

In a way, it goes back to the spirit of the early Edgy Enthusiast columns, which were numbered riffs on cultural obsessions. Playlists, even—dare I say it? —pre-blog blogging. Not really: but ….

1 Did you know that Jorn Barger, the guy generally known as the inventor of the Weblog—both the thing itself and the word for it (he coined the term, according to Wired)—is back? After a temporary retirement, Mr. Barger is blogging again with his unique mixture of intellectual provocations, polymath erudition and cryptically worded (occasionally crackpot) links (www.robotwisdom.com). I'd been a regular visitor to his site until a particularly long hiatus; I only learned of his return recently from Blogebrity, (www.blogebrity.com), which is a lot of fun to read in a different way.

Anyway, I want to get right to an important disclosure about the greatest novel of the past century; shift to an astonishing performance of Shakespeare's exquisitely obscene poem, Venus and Adonis, featuring Claire Bloom (Claire Bloom!); and make a stop along the way to celebrate the birth of a remarkable underground literary form, one that has concealed itself in the thickets of the Amazon.com “Customer Reviews.”

So let's continue with …

2 A new conjecture about Nabokov's Pale Fire.

Last winter, I received an e-mail from David Glenn, a writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, who said he'd been traveling through Oberlin, Ohio, and had seen a flyer for a forthcoming Oberlin College lecture on Nabokov's debt to Robert Frost in Pale Fire.

I believe Mr. Glenn thought I'd be interested because of past columns I'd devoted to Pale Fire—either that or my more recent essay on the “cryptomnesia” controversy (The Observer, April 19, 2004): the claim, last year, by a German academic, Michael Maar, that Nabokov derived the title and theme of Lolita from a little-known 1916 German short story about a young girl named Lolita and her affair with an older man. Mr. Maar argued that Nabokov might have read the 1916 “Lolita” when he lived in Berlin in the 20's. Mr. Maar believed it wasn't plagiarism (although some misinterpreted it as that), but rather a case of a submerged memory (“cryptomnesia”)—one that Nabokov wasn't aware of when he wrote his nymphet novel in the 1950's.

But the controversy raised issues about the creative process of perhaps the greatest writer of the modern age and the secondhand description of the forthcoming Oberlin lecture on Pale Fire seemed to promise to raise similar questions.

I immediately got in touch with the Oberlin lecturer, Abraham Socher, a professor of intellectual history, who told me that his talk would focus on the famous opening lines—“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”—of the poem in Nabokov's Pale Fire. The poem, composed by Nabokov's fictional John Shade and entitled “Pale Fire,” is a 999-line work in rhyming couplets that is the subject of the fantastical commentary by the now-iconic Charles Kinbote, whose half-crazed footnotes form the bulk of this amazing novel. The poem is, I believe—even embedded in a novel—perhaps the greatest American verse work of the 20th century.

Professor Socher wasn't claiming plagiarism or cryptomnesia, or anything quite so scandalous, but an influence that gave us an insight into the way Nabokov conceals and reveals his sources. To me, in the literary realm it was a headline-making assertion.

I'm sure I don't have to explain this for most Observer readers, a literate bunch. But just to remind those who haven't reread Pale Fire recently, here is that opening quatrain:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

The reason that the origin of these four lines is worthy of attention and investigation is that they capture, in compressed form, the preoccupation of Pale Fire with the question of art and life, art and afterlife, of artistic “originality,” with fiction as the “reflected sky,” the distinction between primary experiences and their afterlife in aesthetic reflections of it.

Indeed, it is often forgotten that the mystery of the afterlife itself is at the heart of the poem whose ostensible subject is the suicide of the poet's daughter and his subsequent meditation on the possibility of finding her in the afterlife.

That waxwing—a bird deceived by an image, by a reflection (the “false azure in the windowpane”)—smashed into the window and died, but “lived on” after death, “flew on” in the afterlife of art, the “reflected sky.”

While Robert Frost is a figure in the poem, (John Shade, Nabokov's fictional author, ruefully characterizes himself as “one oozy footstep” behind Frost in poetic reputation) no one has heretofore suggested that Frost himself was a source of the “waxwing” image.

In the past, the passage from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens that gave Nabokov his title (“The moon's an arrant thief / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun”) has been considered the most salient thematic source for Pale Fire.

Professor Socher wasn't alleging theft from Frost on Nabokov's part—far from it. But when I asked him to send me a draft of his Oberlin lecture, it turned out that he believes he's found what you might call the sun to the “waxwing” quatrain's moon: a little-known Robert Frost poem that could well be the origin of the waxwing/window image.

I thought Professor Socher's lecture made a persuasive case; I suggested that he try to get it published in the U. K. Times Literary Supplement, which had published Mr. Maar's “cryptomnesia” essay. And, in fact, he did—you can read a 4,000-word version of it in the July 1 TLS. (I hope he puts it online as well.)

Now for the Frost poem itself, a short work that first appeared in a 1958 issue of The Saturday Review of Literature (Pale Fire was published in 1962) under the title “Of a Winter Evening.” Professor Socher quotes these lines:

The winter owl banked just in time

to pass

And save herself from breaking

window glass.

And her wings straining suddenly

aspread

Caught color from the last of

evening red

In a display of underdown and quill

To glassed-in children at the

window sill.

Professor Socher carefully builds his case for the owl being the source of the waxwing by adducing some surprising (to me) connections between Nabokov and Frost (the Nabokovs rented a house that had once been occupied by Frost; the two did a couple of readings together; Frost lost a child to suicide, the ostensible subject of “Pale Fire.” Also, Nabokov once said that he knew only “one short poem” by Frost, never identified.) And Professor Socher notes that the issue of The Saturday Review with Frost's owl poem featured a commentary by John Ciardi on Frost's “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—more reason to suspect that Nabokov, who knew Ciardi, might have read that issue.

The most convincing evidence (which Professor Socher expanded on in an e-mail to me after the TLS piece came out), was that Kinbote, Nabokov's unreliable fictional narrator, “seems to have profited from [Ciardi's Saturday Review commentary]”—in other words, Kinbote's creator, Nabokov, seems to have read Ciardi, which would place that issue of The Saturday Review in Nabokov's hands, with only a few pages between the Ciardi piece and the owl poem.

I'm persuaded by Professor Socher's scrupulous essay that this could be a major discovery, the source or inspiration for the signature image in one of the great works of literature of our time, and a further clue to Nabokov's creative method: the way he invokes Frost overtly while making use of him covertly. (Professor Socher told me that Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd had e-mailed him to say that he'd also found his conjecture convincing.)

I asked Professor Socher how he'd made the connection, and he told me that while the book he was writing was on the 18th-century Jewish heretic Solomon Maimon, he'd been reading both Nabokov and Frost since his youth, and that he'd come across the owl poem in Frost's last collection of poems. That he'd traced it (under a different title) to the original issue of The Saturday Review he'd found in a university library, where the presence of the Ciardi commentary allowed him to solidify his conjecture that Nabokov had read the owl poem further on in the issue.

I would only add something that Professor Socher and I politely disagree upon. It seems to me that the owl poem demonstrates something I've always felt: that Robert Frost is a vastly overrated poet and that “Pale Fire,” the poem itself, is one of the most underrated American poems of the past century.

That owl poem—so crude, so poshlust, as Nabokov would say: “Oooh, look at Nature, so red in tooth and claw!” So scary and all—the thin pane of glass demonstrates how little separates us from predatory death, etc., etc. Snooze.

Meanwhile, the poem called “Pale Fire,” perhaps because of its peculiar place within a novel, has often been denied its due as a poem. Some have mistakenly called it a parody; some have shown that it demonstrates the justness of Shade's self-deprecatory characterization of himself as an “oozy footstep” behind Frost. In fact, taken on its own, it surpasses in every respect anything that Frost has ever done. Deal with it, Frostians.

One thing people sometimes forget when thinking about Pale Fire is just how funny it is (another contrast with Frost, who is, to my mind, utterly humorless). And, in fact, it was Pale Fire that led me to the discovery of—what should I call it?—a new genre, the hilarious comic novels in progress being written in the form of Amazon “Customer Reviews.” I'm speaking of …

3 The ongoing work of the pseudonymous Mister Quickly (and certain others). This work came to my notice, actually, from a peculiar posting on the Nabokov discussion listserv. Someone wrote in to the list asking about a strange-sounding “review” of Pale Fire that had appeared in the Amazon “Customer Reviews” section for the book.

Here is the review in full:

“HHH Beyond the Pale Fire

Reviewer: Mister Quickly “Amazon epicurean” (Victoria, BC Canada)

"Fire—a timeless subject. Perhaps rivalling the wheel in terms of its importance in human development, fire has been an important companion in our teleological quest towards perfection. This book didn't really directly tackle the subject of fire as poignantly as would suit my tastes. If you're interested in furthering your knowledge of fire I recommend the movie ‘Quest for Fire,' or the song ‘Fire' by Arthur Brown, and ‘Backdraft.'”

End of “review.” Brilliant! A kind of pitch-perfect higher cluelessness that really says more than it seems to, Kinbote style.

Which someone on the Nabokov list picked up on and posted:

“I did a quick search: Mister Quickly is a joke and writes silly reviews as a hobby. See www.amazon.com/gp/ cdp/member-reviews/A2752XIGJY2Y H6/.”

The U.R.L. took you to a list of 49 Amazon reviews by Mister Quickly (a pseudonym that must be a variant on Shakespeare's Mistress Quickly), almost all of them as hilarious—and ingeniously so—as “Beyond the Pale Fire.”

I particularly liked his reviews of gadgets and guidebooks: His thoughts on the “Rowenta Genuine Replacement Steam Cleaner Hose Pipe,” for instance (who knew you could get it on Amazon?), offer a metaphysical speculation on hoses and pipes.

And his review of Caring for Your Miniature Donkey has a tragic poignancy (with a possible note of pervy horror): “This is an excellent book, and a most welcome read after the disastrous experiences I had with my first 3 miniature donkeys …. I'm only thankful that this wonderful edition has helped me prolong the life expectancy of my current miniature donkey, Gerhardt.”

Through a chance conversation with a writer friend, I was initially persuaded that Mister Quickly was the pseudonym for Christopher Sorrentino, a New York City novelist (Trance, his much praised new work, is just out). But when I contacted him, he said that while he often did write pseudonymous Amazon reviews (which he suggested we call SPAMAZON Lit), he wasn't the pseudonymous Mister Quickly. (Mark Felt then, maybe?)

He only revealed one pseudonym of his own that he'd had a special fondness for: “J.S. Mason, a.k.a. the Blind Architect,” whose fictional life, Mr. Sorrentino told me, “followed an arc that each successive review extended. His ‘fans' learned about his wife, his blindness, his professional career, his setbacks.”

See Amazon reviews, which we all know goes on. This is a genuine literary form that Amazon has inadvertently nourished.

There are others out there in the Amazon underbrush. Well, at least two, maybe three (several years ago, Slate linked to some guy calling himself “Henry Roddicks,” I think. Is Henry Roddicks a different person from Mr. Quickly? Henry posed as a bitter, middle-aged, half-soused Brit “reviewer” before he disappeared from Amazon. (I think Amazon removed his “reviews.”)

What does all this have to do with …

4 The live reading of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, featuring Claire Bloom (Claire Bloom!) at the 92nd Street Y?

First of all, I still find it hard to believe I was fortunate enough to witness something so rare, so rich and so strange. A one-night-only, two-person performance at the 92nd Street Y that was revelatory about a poem I'd always appreciated for its over-the-top eroticism, though one that's always seemed a bit precious on the page.

But given living, breathing embodiment by Claire Bloom and her co-reader, noted U.K. Shakespearean John Neville (and directed by Robert Scanlan), it turned into a tour-de-force drama, its pentameter galloping like a hot-blooded racehorse, like a pounding heart, through the erotic struggle being waged at the heart of the poem.

As someone whose life was changed by Peter Brook's justly legendary A Midsummer Night's Dream, I haven't had many moments in the theater that equaled its exhilarating intensity. This one did. Ms. Bloom and Mr. Neville's riveting delivery gave the poem a superbly three-dimensional incarnation. It was dramatic, it was sexy, it was funny, and it was ironic and provocative on many levels, from the physical to the mythic and metaphysical. (Furthermore, it was introduced by my learned onetime Observer editor David Yezzi, now head of the Y's Unterberg Poetry Center, which presented the reading.)

What was strange was that NOBODY WROTE ABOUT IT. (Nothing I could find; it transpired on May 24 of this year.) I subsequently learned from a person at the Y that there's an unwritten rule in the city's theatrical media that nobody writes about productions which appear for only one night.

While on the surface, this might seem to make some sense (readers wouldn't be able to see what was written about), I think, in the larger sense—or at least in this instance—it's insane. Something like the Bloom/Neville Venus and Adonis should have had a dozen people writing about it from a dozen angles; it was at least that multifaceted. The great narrative poem from a primarily dramatic poet, the poem that made Shakespeare's literary reputation. One of the great Shakespearean actresses of our age … come on!

And yet, instead, plays that deserve to close after one night get written about all the time. Something is wrong here.

Yes, it's true you'd be writing about it for readers who couldn't see it, but maybe by doing so, you could encourage a return, a reprise. Maybe, at the very least, you could memorialize the historical fact that such a genuinely sensational event had occurred. Where were all the “arts journalists” that night?

All right, I won't go on about this anymore. I will just offer one remarkable way in which it relates to—surprise!—Pale Fire.

there was a line I'd noticed with special attention this time—a line that I'd suggest may have been the ür-source for both Frost's owl and Nabokov's waxwing.

It comes almost precisely at the center of Shakespeare's 1,200-line narrative poem, right after a hard-to-specify sexual encounter between Venus and Adonis that leaves Venus frustrated.

At which point, Shakespeare offers up this simile for Venus' frustrated condition:

Even so poor birds deceiv'd with

painted grapes

Do surfeit by the eye and pine the

maw.

It's a simile traceable back to classical Greek sources, particular to the story of Zeuxis, an artist who supposedly painted grapes so lifelike that birds came to peck at them and turned away frustrated. It's the locus classicus of the meditation on Art and Nature that recurrently preoccupies great artists.

But there it is: the bird deceived if not doomed by art, just as Frost's owl was initially deceived by the transparency of the glass, Nabokov's waxwing by the reflection in the pane.

Of course, I can't prove that either Frost or Nabokov read or remembered that image from Shakespeare. But as anyone who has read Pale Fire (or Bend Sinister) can testify, Nabokov knew Shakespeare inside and out. Inside and out: a distinction lost, alas, on the waxwing.

5 I'm running out of space, but don't forget to read Gerald Howard's splendid essay on Gravity's Rainbow in the special Pynchon issue of Bookforum. I will postpone for another time the discussion about the distinction between modernism and postmodernism (and my preference for The Crying of Lot 49) that I had with the estimable Mr. Howard. But he has an amazing story to tell about Pynchon and that book, if he'll let me tell it.

With the publication of Old School , Tobias Wolff-who freely admits to spending six months on a single short story-has scraped whatever sheen remains off the writer's mystique. I suspect that Mr. Wolff embraces the maxim attributed to Anthony Burgess: If you want to become a writer, admit that you have no God-given talent, then put your ass in a chair and type. That kind of work ethic doesn't come naturally to everyone, a problem that trips up the nameless narrator of Old School , Mr. Wolff's beautiful, frustratingly short novel.

Old School is about writers and teachers and the mystery behind this question: "How do you begin to write truly?" It takes place during the narrator's fourth year at a peculiarly literary boy's prep school in New England. In their fourth year, the boys compete for a private audience with a visiting writer. As if they were bookies, they weigh the odds on each classmate. Their worst nightmare is that an undeserving dark horse might win. For example, Hurst, "a boy who wasn't even known to be a contender" and "an apparent Philistine … won an audience with Edmund Wilson for a series of satirical odes in Latin." Why the mad rush to meet poets and novelists? Our narrator explains, "I wanted to receive the laying on of hands that had written living stories and poems, hands that had touched the hands of other writers. I wanted to be anointed."

One of the great pleasures of Old School is the cameo appearances of visiting authors-Robert Frost, first and most memorably, then Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway. The visits, as a faculty member notes with disgust after the fact, are used purely as a motivational tool to summon a body of work from the boys. Sprinkled, blessedly, through the first two-thirds of the novel are scenes of literary heavyweights addressing an entire class (and a lucky student tête-à-tête). The glimpses are in step with what we think we know of these figures: Frost is an articulate, mean old man with a keen sense of humor, whose evisceration of a teacher falls nicely in line with the man who wrote of a dead boy's family in "Out, Out-": "And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs." Rand, all dressed in black and with sycophants in tow, is elegantly coarse. "If you had to name the single greatest work by an American author, what would it be?" She's asked. " Atlas Shrugged ," is her answer.

The schoolboys-our narrator included-are fanatically attached to writers, especially Hemingway, the bearded, pugilistic drunk who hovers, beautifully, offstage. The boys are in love with the final product-they love the writing, they love the author's persona-but they have no appreciation, no awareness, of the process. No surprise, then, that our narrator's own writing is sub-par, and almost none of it finished. Mr. Wolff nails the would-be writer's rationalization: "The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness." If the narrator were actually to complete something, he might be disappointed with the result.

A number of the most ardent students edit and distribute Troubadour , the school's aptly named literary magazine. As one of the editors, our narrator has no trouble finding space for his work. The meetings are all pomp and circumstance, with the editors solemnly agreeing that each other's work is suitable for publication. In the latter portion of Old School , this carefully propped-up dignity begins to crumble, prompted by a submission from a boy named Buckles. "Oh for Christ's sake, run the stupid thing!" says an editor. "It's not like the rest of this crap's about to set the world on fire."

The cold blast of this assessment leads almost immediately to our narrator's fall from grace. He's by no means a bad kid. His greatest fear is expulsion, a punishment so awful it's hardly discussed ("No announcements were made and no lessons preached"). He's expelled, of course, for a breach of the "Honor Code": He plagiarizes a story from another high-school literary magazine, an issue from five years back. The author is female-a girl called Susan Friedman-but our boy sees only himself in the writing: "Anyone who read this story would know who I was."

Years later, our narrator writes to her and they meet. It feels like an epilogue. Susan Friedman turns out to be a tough character; she's not at all serious about writing, about her talent. She's training to be a doctor. Our narrator informs her that she should "keep writing," to which she replies: "Mmm, don't think so. Too frivolous. Know what I mean? It just cuts you off and makes you selfish and doesn't really do any good." She has the decency to soften the blow: "Just one gal's opinion."

Old School is advertised as Tobias Wolff's first novel. It's not: He published a novel he's since disowned, Ugly Rumours , in England in 1975. When a fellow writer asked Mr. Wolff about it, he said, "I would be much obliged if you would let this sleeping dog lie." I've never read Ugly Rumours ; I can't even find a copy for under $1,000.

This new first novel won't disappear in the same way. It's a book even Susan Friedman would like: It looks back on youthful naïveté and laziness, on the half-truths and untruths we tell and believe in, and forbears from passing judgment. It favors those who persevere, who quit worrying about their God-given talent or the lack thereof.

Elon R. Green is a reporter at The Observer .