Up late this morning. ‘They’ are doing the

road outside, putting in traffic-calming

devices: trees in the middle of the road,

speed platforms, kerbs, marked lanes. Is this

how prize-winning poets write, stopping up

the voice with lines all roughly the same

length, occasionally enjambing? Oh, I forgot
to break up my musings into blocks

of three or four or five lines. Even

two lines is common. Every other

time is a space. You don’t have to

breathe anywhere in particular. Breathe
whenever you want. It’s flat like

what I suppose is the endless prairie, the

Nullarbor, the suburbs. The engines at 7am

going wherever they go. All the lines,

all the blocks (must I say stanzas?)
having equal status: the lowest. Yet the I

sits in the middle, the I is always at the

wheel. Her small electricity arcs in

the words, the figures, the juxtaposed

closely-read signifiers, and now and then in
an assonance. It’s a Plain Style all right.

Why is this the way, this abstraction of

calmed traffic? (Ending with a question, a

rising inflection, is, of course, not on.

You mustn’t go tooting your horn like that.)