Last Friday’s letter, “Little Rooms,” begins:

“Great things start in little rooms.” That’s André 3000 of Outkast in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech, referencing Jack White of The White Stripes, who told young artists in his acceptance speech to “get your hands dirty and drop the screens and get out in your garage or your little room and get obsessed.” In my opinion, White’s “Little Room” is the greatest song ever written about success. Here it is in its entirety:

“Well, you’re in your little room
and you’re working on something good
but if it’s really good
you’re gonna need a bigger room
and when you’re in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started
sitting in your little room!”

I followed that item with this line from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation:

“I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.”

And ended with a line from my typewriter interview with poet Matthew Zapruder:

“To me poems / feel like rooms / you enter / again and again.”

After I sent the letter out, Scott Newstok sent me his “How to think like a sonnet, or, fourteen ways of looking around a room”:

What’s in a room? Whether it’s Emily Dickinson’s “mighty room” or Samuel Daniel’s “small room,” William Wordsworth’s “narrow room” or John Donne’s “pretty rooms,” we strive to “find room” in these “little room”s — a phrase invoked by Hayes, and before him Billy Collins, William Wordsworth, Thomas Campion, and John Donne. As Ted Berrigan self-reflexively queried, “Is there room in the room that you room in?”

I was surprised nobody asked why I didn’t mention Virginia Woolf.

And I remember, only now, that almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a letter about writing being a place that you enter.

It was called “Room to think.”