A poet’s prose nails her reputation time and again. Elizabeth Bishop, James Schuyler, Edwin Denby, to speak of the dead. Are we examining a ‘real’ voice, or are we merely more at home with the subject-verb-object flow of normalized speech? When Gertrude Stein adopted plainer or more standard prose for Autobiography she became a pop sensation: “she took Alice’s voice, her acerbic, lucid style, her declarative sentences, malicious asides, quirky jokes and regular punctuation” (Diana Souhami). Is that it? we can more readily stay with sentences even when they’re overstuffed (say, with personality) so long as they are conventional, making sense, well punctuated?