The structure of a literary summit lends itself to performance and posturing. It can also highlight the thin film that sits between the Poet-Thinker and being a person in the world. Some stay locked into their self-determined roles, but we all know the “real” conference occurs in the late-night bars each night, where the “real” person gets to shed their awkward costume and say what they really meant to say. The summit, then, is posed for the Poet-Thinker, the Poet-Fan, the Maverick of deep and studious reflections, the Beautiful Poet whose beauty either enables or hinders their ability to be taken seriously. The summit that takes place in Rainer Diana Hamilton’s and Violet Spurlock’s This Reasonable Habit turns into an “excessively scrupulous analysis of interpersonal norms.”

In this universe, the ordinary ways a person moves through the world is less attractive than their convincing erudition. But what if the most interesting part of a gathering is the collection of minor interactions that build a community? What if, alongside fighting over a poetic history diagram or smoothly inserting Freud references into an argument, we also collectively discussed important social questions, such as, “What constitutes a good reason to dislike someone?”

A successful literary summit might do away with the pretenses of Poet-Thinking or lean into them so devotedly that they invert into that form of sincerity that comes with unbridled attention. This Reasonable Habit invokes such an inversion. It presents a premise of conversation: the tensions and fears of what is said publicly versus what is said privately. The opening poem “Proposal,” a piece that snakes out of late-night phone conversations from the authors’ respective homes on the east and west coasts of the United States, presents a dialogic framing that lays bare the insecurity and curiosity which will come to energize the book’s subsequent sections. In this opening poem, Rainer complains privately to Violet about “recent poems and essays and, honestly, dinner conversations that put beauty, as it is recognizable by the most boring possible set of authoritative onlookers, above all else.” It is not so much a case against beauty as a case against constrictive standards of it. On my second read of this book, I wondered if its style, the lines, the sentences, enact what Rainer goes on to describe as preferable: Orson Welles’s gravity, Jessica Fletcher’s (of Murder, She Wrote) irresistible independence. At the very least, the lines in this book remain compelling and demand all the reader’s attention—they are their own kind of beauty, certainly not run past authoritative onlookers for approval.

“Proposal” teases out these private vs public anxieties, from state-surveillance-aware Signal chats to the saved DM logs of a severed friendship and the potential for blackmail. Rainer, in the poem, notes opinions kept private to avoid “critical tweets from 24-year-olds,” and there is also the entire embarrassment that is heterosexual sex. Implicit in both this interest in the public vs private conversation and the book’s structure—the program and transcripts of a summit in which each segment is driven by a specific question—is a playful remaking of the intricate webs of poetry and writing communities in the US. Which is to say, readers familiar with some of these webs may recognize the named poets and the suggestive personalities that appear as the 26 participants, anonymously initialled from A to Z. In fact, the opening section, in which each participant speaks in a roundtable discussion, is presented as an expanded take on the Abecedarian poem. This Reasonable Habit floats a premise: that there are fluid movements between poetry communities and their related aesthetic modes (See, for e.g., G.’s secret draft diagram of the so-called “Bernadette Mayer ring”) and the ordinary exchanges of everyday people who might be moved by “leaving their soul in the Agnes Martin room at SFMOMA” as much as another might be by “dancing with an ex at a Juliana Huxtable set.” One of this book’s triumphs, then, is its ability to build on intimacies between individuals while also capturing, at a broad scope, the tics and performances of those who take poetry seriously. While many participants might invite light-hearted teasing, a knowing sort of ribbing that is afforded to those of us who may have been just as implicated in such a scenario, there are real and interesting ideas that come from the characters at this summit, often out of digressive thoughts.

One such digression, rich and cascading and rewarding a reader’s pause, occurs during a panel that asks, “What is accidental writing?”, where participants argue over an “imaginary diagram of poetic history.” At the suggestion of the CIA-funded Iowa workshop as the diagram’s core, one person is

as the group tries to determine how to consider the political in questions of style—a theme Hamilton has previously explored in their collection God Was Right. I am struck here by the reminder of the inescapable vested interests that mar poetry’s history within its broader tendencies towards radical thought. That one must know where they stand, and how machinations of philanthropy and industry work in the shadows. I’m reminded, as I write from the settler colony of Australia, of the money pumped into the arts from various mining corporations and (in recent years) detention centre security companies.

To return to the book’s structure, the summit in This Reasonable Habit takes place over three days, which are divided as: ACCIDENTS, RELATIONS and PLEASURES. Segments are broken up as a series of roundtables and discussion panels, including a plenary on day two titled “Is Conversation Art?”, as well as check-ins and a 5pm bar fight on the third day, and appear as a transcript of sorts laid out as verse. The book’s acknowledgements reveal its earlier iterations, first as a series of epistolary sonnets between the authors, and later as a remaking of Lyn Hejinian’s verse novel Oxata. But in This Reasonable Habit, speech is staged as the prevailing mode of address. Characters speak densely, laying out a runner of intricate references and shorthand for arguments that emerged in poetry circles over the past few decades. But they are also direct, especially when sex might be on the cards, as when M. tells K., “If you want to make out, we should start soon. I want to make it to the morning panel.” It’s almost as though poets know when to put the words to rest, when a gossamer tank top or well-timed eye contact gets the point across.

It’s important to list some of the summit’s questions, so that the readers of this review might get a sense of what kind of conversation Hamilton and Spurlock have dreamed up:

The summit’s questions range from philosophical to material, and largely focus on social conventions and the painfully obtuse ways we navigate them. It weaves together an interrogation of artifice and genuine, un-self-conscious wondering, even if the resulting conversation might tie us into knots of pedantic argument. The artifice of conversation is possibly most audaciously revealed in the reproduction of “A more practical scholarship,” a script featuring a cast that includes a libertine, a bartender, a nun, and a bad poet. The libertine and the nun are reuniting after first meeting at a theory camp in Ithaca, and are continuously interrupted by these interlopers. The absurdity of conference discourse also appears in delightful ways, such as when the icebreaker host at the beginning of the summit declares herself to be “worried for” those who did not wish to participate in an exercise of describing each other’s outfits but who did so anyway. Later, during an animal-focused panel that also delighted me, one man in the audience is inspired to spontaneously form the Summit’s Harmful Animal Representation Committee (a supremely vital committee, we learn, when SHARC is called to action to stop a panellist at a later session from playing out a thought experiment with a dog from their dream).

While the questions and conversations are conjured from Hamilton’s and Spurlock’s dialogue, the physical spaces of the summit come from the authors’ actual poetic communities. Woolsey Heights in Berkeley hosts one panel, as well as Montreal’s Loyala Jesuit Hall at Concord University. The home of the Poetry Project, St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, hosts a panel on “How would human culture change if we kept different animals as pets?” Through the awkwardly institutional structures that govern a modern-day conference (icebreakers and other forced social breaks between serious panel discussions), these reminders of poetic spaces bring to the book echoes of past poetry movements—Berkeley Renaissance, New York School (first and second generation), Black Mountain, New Narrative. Or, at least, they romantically echo through the book. In these manifestations of poetry’s physical spaces as imaginary conference rooms, the book deepens its playful commitment to its poetry universe. Though “Accidents” is the theme of the first day’s proceedings, nothing about This Reasonable Habit feels accidental. There is careful thought among the playfulness and the serious poetry discussions alike.

In fact, the book’s playfulness is no small feature. The only thing that makes poetry’s seriousness bearable is its capacity for the utterly, joyfully, silly configurations it can take. The authors’ close attention to speech and social dynamics bring this playfulness alive, right down to the excited promise to meet up after the conference ends (“You’re in western Mass? I’m in DC, super close! Maybe I could visit someday!”), to the wise social advice: “If you’re going to be shy, I mean, treat it like Americans treat cursing, or smoking, or fucking: we don’t forbid it of consenting adults, but no one should wither near children.”

Spurlock and Hamilton satirize the often cloistered, elitist spaces that can characterize poetry scenes, and in doing so, they suggest a utopian vision of gathering together that reminds us how interpersonal relationships and communities become a pulse of poetry. This Reasonable Habit’s playfulness, its commitment to representing social speech, and its exacting, contextualising assertions for the rich history of literary gatherings, announce that poetry is, as it ever was, always of the people.