gushy

"The diaries were a revelation," Roffman writes, "because the voice of the poet was so present already," years before his mature (or immature) poetry took shape: there, unmistakably, were "his wry sense of humor, patience, impatience, and attention to the experience of his experience." A precocious teenager, no doubt, though it's just as fair to say that Ashbery the twenty-something (even the eighty-something) was constitutionally adolescent: Ashbery grows into a voice that can turn gushily romantic or moodily evasive, self-amusing or parodic of any adult pretensions within earshot.

I gushily introduced myself, and asked, "Do you think Fred Astaire would have embraced Zumba?" She said, "Oh, definitely, as all dancers would." I told her, "I'm trying to get some of the Astaire buoyancy and lightness into my Zumba work." She smiled at me indulgently, as if I had told her that there were tiny people living inside my mailbox.