I spent years reading unpublished manuscripts (such as Young Homoerotic Hemingway) by cowed academics who craved the cachet of a Sontag, a Barthes or a Baudrillard, and by know-it-all blowhards whose heart’s desire was a grave like Morrison’s at Père Lachaise. Then I retired, more than ready to lay down the kid gloves, the forceps and thankless labor of yanking a malformed would-be masterwork from an eager beaver with a book inside. Now that there’s no crying need for me to care about noun-verb pairs, logical fallacies and abrupt drops in lexical register, I don’t even catch typos at Chick-fil-A.
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Love the next to last stanza: “thankless labor
of yanking a malformed would-be masterwork
from an eager beaver with a book inside.” And the last line. I think I feel something equivalent as a retired psychologist though have no idea how’d I’d express it in a poem.
Retirement must be sweet from a challenging career! Drawing out the best of "the book inside" looks like more than grammar and style from those thar swamps!