We love words
and "form" is simply having fun with words.

Thus my Mandelstam obsession
is merely an expression of "nightingale fever"
(ie. the joy of speech for its own sake).

Ovid (et al.) frames the meaning of politics & social life
within a context of happy babbling.
That's what poets do.

". . . for lack of what is found there."

The great forms
are great imitations
of greater forms
(like fern leaves).

then of course there's the flip side, the problems for sense & sensibility & living created by T*H*O*U*G*H*T*S. . .

TS Eliot's turn of the screw (Metaphysical poetry exhibited fusion of thought & feeling, everything downhill from there).

Comes back to the fact that poetry is as Mandelstam put it

NIGHTINGALE FEVER

thought/feeling/action/word/deed - compacted into small feather-winged container

flying NOW

Nada asks why she wrote "hummingbird fever".

My guess is she was thinking of the book Nightingale Fever, a study of Mandelstam (who originated the phrase), Akhmatova & Pasternak (? or Tsvetaeva), by British poet & translator D.M. Thomas.

Or it could be coincidence.