Reddit mentions of Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing

Oh, what a fun comment!

And here I was worried that this poem was way too obvious, haha. I usually struggle in a place between extremely obscure references and trying to craft simple things. You're right, that the poem is only a device for me to think about some of my favourite words. I love the sound of the words "chalk" and "ash" and I find these references to them perennially in my own writing. This was my attempt to think out why because I had never done so. I'll consider the title - in the end, they are my favourite words, and it's as simple as that.

The first three lines are quotes. Yes, the mauve thing is absolutely because of his synaesthesia! There is a book on the subject of Nabokov's favourite word: https://www.amazon.ca/Nabokovs-Favorite-Word-Mauve-Bestsellers/dp/1501105388 I was on a John Donne binge last summer and in one scholar's work I read, he made a comment to the effect that gold and wombs were subjects never far from Donne's mind. And for Hopkins, the line in God's Grandeur: "it will flame out, like shining from shook foil" was the first poetic image I ever fell in love with. That was also the first modern poem I ever memorized. So this is about poets and writers I love, and about being in love with them through this historical distance.

Poetic love is not tender, though. It is the stuff of chalk and ash - breaking oneself, crumbling, at best hoping for a transcendental immolation in that burning fire of desiring to create but having it consume you. The rest of the poem is on those themes of the literal visual effects of chalk and ash, and the quasi-alchemical process by which they change to things which can be used for annotation: one dark(as in the charcoal that preceded ash), the other light. It's also about hoping to create things - like poems - that might live on after you. A process which resembles birth, but also death. Or the poems, if they do not live, might also be consumed by fire and fall into obscurity, also becoming ash.

I'm so intrigued that ash is "too bright" in the Talmud, and that blindness is a condition of light, not darkness. I was thinking of that muted whiteness ash has, so dry that you sometimes can't see its contours.

https://www.amazon.com/Nabokovs-Favorite-Word-Mauve-Bestsellers/dp/1501105388