SOURCE: Kitchen, Judith. “In Pursuit of Elegance.” Georgia Review 54, no. 1 (spring 2000): 763–80.

In the following excerpt, Kitchen praises Walcott's elegance in Tiepolo's Hound, but finds the volume overly analytical and academic.

Bertolucci called me when I was about to start shooting, and he said, “Have you learned that everything is form and form is emptiness?” No, I'm always the last to know.

—Martin Scorsese

I've always suspected there was an affinity between soccer, mathematics, and poetry. For twenty-five years, I've watched soccer whenever I could. I've lost two whole summers to the World Cup. I was once a hopeless fan for the hapless Lancers (who were in the same league as the moneyed Cosmos) and now I'm a raging fan of their successors, the Rochester Raging Rhinos (who won the 1999 US Open Cup). In the old days, as we sat on the bleachers, we could hear at least five...