A Mysterious Humming Noise

Howard White says, "Some poets try to capture rare butterflies in their writing. The things I go after are more like houseflies." The comparison does him no favours but it is true inasmuch as his writing is notably unpretentious and concerned with common and everyday realities. That is, if your everyday realities include such things as sinking docks, driving bulldozers, arguing about sand, baseball, pouring without a funnel, dancing in the street, thought guns, coition, brainfarts, not sending sympathy cards, not shooting your father, and sea otters. In this book he also writes quite a bit about writing, not so much the kind of personal writing he does in this book so much as that he has done as an "accidental chronicler" for "a galaxy of voices" he acted as a "conduit" for in his work as a memoirist and publisher.