For years, I have been reading Michael Greenberg's remarkable column in the Times Literary Supplement and wondering what the English make of it. The New York Jewish quality of Greenberg's take on the writer's life, under the rubric "Freelance," is emphasized by the way he takes turns writing the column with an English poet, Hugo Williams, who is a writer of a wholly different species. Williams is deeply ensconced in the world of poetry-writing programs, residencies, and workshops--the whole infrastructure of institutionalized creativity, which seems no less formidable in the United Kingdom than in the United States. When Williams is not writing about giving a reading or teaching a class, he is often discussing his wife's chateau in France, or his father, a British theater and film star from the 1950s.
