from the New Directions blog:

This year, essayist and literary critic Eliot Weinberger published Wildlife––a collection of his essays on animals––with Australian publisher Giramondo. While many of these pieces are republished from our editions, there are four previously unpublished works that make their debut in Wildlife. One of these, “What Makes a Poet a Tick?” (written in response to the question “What Makes a Poet Tick?” Mr. Weinberger has graciously allowed us to reproduce here.

“What makes a poet [a] tick?” I think someday soon Weinberger and Xi Chuan should co-edit a New Directions anthology of writers on insects.