"A moment later, my first poem began. What touched it off? I think I know. Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordite leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando dow the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent."--Speak, Memory. Nabokov would go on to write Pale Fire, a 999 line novel in poetry form by the fictional John Shade, with commentary by Shade's neighbor, Charles Kinbote--the Boswell of the tale. Nabokov's own description of his first prosody sounds a bit like Stephen Hawking: "Tip, leaf, dip, relief--the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes..."
read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy (with a painting by Hallie Cohen), The East Hampton Star
