SOURCE: “What to Make of an Even More Diminished Thing: A Borgesian Sonnet Considered in a Frosty Light,”in Publication of the Arkansas Philological Association,Vol. 22, No. 2, Fall, 1996, pp. 77–85.

In the following essay, Wink praises Borges as a writer of sonnets.

Some years ago I heard an otherwise bright young man announce in the student union at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville a literary critical approach which promised to save time and which I have since come to think of as the arm's length theory of evaluative reading. He contended that he could hold a text before his eyes at arm's length and deem it worthy of reading or not based solely upon the shapes the words conspired to make on the page he was holding at bay. He was later prevailed upon to modify slightly this approach by agreeing that the number of permissible shapes might...