'Watch the Words You Choose'

“Going Home Again” is an epigram R.L. Barth wrote in the early nineteen-nineties, forgot, recovered from an old floppy disk and sent to me as a Word document with nineteen other poems. It has never been published and is the first poem by Bob I have memorized. I thought of it on Friday when I realized a graduate student I was interviewing was not listening to most of the questions I was asking, and for the third or fourth time had answered with “Whatever”:  

“The curse is nuance; watch the words you choose:

Precision will seem pretense or a ruse.”

Precision of speech seems to embarrass or offend certain people. I don’t mean dry-as-dust pedanticism. To be articulate would seem to be a moral obligation. We want to be understood and to understand others, but among hipsters the ethos of cool predominates. The point is not to be understood or to appreciate shades of meaning, notes of ambiguity and irony, but to say things your coterie already agrees with, and never to be uncool, the rest of humanity be damned. Auden celebrates the prince of articulation in “At the Grave of Henry James”:

                                    “Master of nuance and scruple,

Pray for me and for all writers living or dead . . .”