The writer’s and reader’s mutual yearning for each other’s presence becomes the absorbing consolation for the failure to transcend the limits of the text.  If language fails to name or command, it still has the power of what anthropologists call ‘phatic communion,’ the power to create social bonds through meaningless gestures.  The reader must know that the poet has nothing to tell him, but know at the same time that he is communicating with him.  Writing becomes a way of perpetuating the writer’s contact with other lives, and thus preserving his own. (514)

                                      --"John Ashbery and the Idea of the Reader,” Bonnie Costello (Contemporary Literature, 1982)

...even if I don't want to give up on the rhetoric of At-home.