Some Notes on Lyricism

“Like most people, I would rather be someone else. The prose this other self would write would be sharp and coiled, deadly like a snake; not all soggy and attenuated like a garden hose, spritzing dewily, indiscriminately, over thorns and flowers. But it seems one can’t just choose to be a snake. Temperament, sensibility, culture—all come into play. To be Jewish, for instance, is to incline, from Eden onward, less toward the snake than the snake victim. Most of us, with the notable exception of Isaac Babel, lack that cold equipment, that steely, scrupulous will to violence seen in writers like Flannery O’Connor, John Hawkes, Robert Stone, Cormac McCarthy, and other Catholic rednecks. So the matter is not uncomplicated. Then too, given that any investigation of our personal linguistic patterns will inevitably be conducted within the confines of those patterns, there’s bound to be a certain maze-like, funhouse-mirror effect of not being able to see beyond the freakishly elongated reflection of our own heads.”

— Robert Cohen at The Believer in “Going to the Tigers”