“When one goes at ideas directly, with hammer and tongs as it were, ideas tend to elude one in a poem. I think they only back in when one pretends not to be paying any attention to them, like a cat that will rub against your leg.” John Ashbery, Interview in What Is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde, ed. Daniel Kane, NY: Teachers & Writers Books, 2003, p. 32.