Lovely Tim Powers quote

This is from an interview with Tim a few years back that can be found here. In it, Tim talks of himself and Blaylock reading the poetry of their creation William Ashbless at weekly creative writing groups:
And so we began bringing Ashbless' poems in fact to this little writers group that the old Irish lady hosted and we would say "Our friend William Ashbless gave us these to read here and he wants to know what the company thinks of this work." And people would go "Why couldn't he come on his own?" and we'd go, "He's hideously deformed! Terribly crippled!" and everybody would go "Oh, good heavens! That's so sad. Do, do read his poems." And so Blaylock and I would start reading but we couldn't get more than four lines in before we'd start laughing real hard. And everybody thought we were just totally insensitive to be laughing this way at the work, no doubt painstaking, laboured work of this tortured cripple. Ha! And some of these people, of course, would claim to see huge significance in Ashbless's work. Just vast, you know, layer on layer of meaning. And Blaylock and I would try subtly to indicate our contempt for the people who thought this, but of course after a few pitchers of beer your estimate of what is subtle diminishes, you know? So by the end of the evening it was usually pretty disgraceful!