I thought about my literary ancestors and how they strove to balance language and emotion in their poetry. Words for them were transparent to the truths they expressed. For me, try as I might to achieve their clarity of purpose, words has become nothing but a distortion. The more earnestly I chose them, the falser they became. Long ago the Chinese poet Du Mu struggled with this problem and ultimately decided:In this world unmoored, except for poems, all words are forced.