Girls with Insurance

When a writer is emotionally uninvolved with his subject matter, I call that “distance”. The stretching of emotional distance de-emphasizes original motivation and emphasizes craft. This is considered by many to be the sign of a master. What the master lacks in emotional intensity he patches up with odds and ends of knowledge and scraps of imagery, snazzily sewn together into a pretty shawl of irrelevancy. In his poem “The Shirt” Robert Pinksy produces a poem containing nothing but vast empty territories of distance.

To kick off the 1983/1984 school year, we were supposed to pray for a mate, but I didn't believe it could be as easy as asking.

It was not the praying that was the problem. Praying was like walking, which I did all the time. I also bent all the time to pick up the add/drop slips that skated away from me across fake marble floors. Other times, I shopped for wristwatches, calendars and fudge in the campus bookstore, because they had fudge at this place as well as watches, and if there was nothing else that was great about this college, that alone was remarkable to me.

But back in the dorm I did not like to make a big show of kneeling with my back to my roommate. 

Because I had to watch her constantly.