and it is me

I found the perfect reader for my poem, and it was me: Only I could see all the nuances, subtleties, allusions packed into the poem.

ups and downs

He wrote his dissertation on the variations in iambic modulation.

hearing loss

Having attended too many slams, he was now deaf to the more nuanced forms of poetry.

subtleties of the game

Gradually, in what at first had been purely mechanical repetitions of the championship matches, an artistic, pleasurable understanding began to awaken in me. I learned to understand the subtleties of the game [chess], the tricks and ruses of attack and defense, I grasped the technique of thinking ahead, combination, counter-attack, and soon I could recognize the personal style of every grandmaster as infallibly from his own way of playing a game as you can identify a poet’s verses from only a few lines.

—Stefan Zweig, Chess (Penguin Mini Modern Classics, 2011: Copyright Stephan Zweig 1943; translation copyright by Anthea Bell, 2006)

mental tuning

Whenever I read short Japanese poems (haiku/tanka) I think of how out of tune my mind is to all kinds of subtleties and nuance from reading so much Western poetry. A real sense of intimacy comes across in many of these of poems, in the way that two people who have known each other for a long time don't need to elaborate to make themselves heard. And because so little is being sketched in by way of background or temporal markers (not counting the prevalence of seasonal words), a little poem from the 8th Century can seem not at all antique.