2011 SCARRIET AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW MARCH MADNESS BRACKETS ARE HERE! MYLES & KNOTT ARE IN!

February 28, 2011 at 3:39 pm (David Lehman, Donald Hall, Donald Justice, Eileen Myles, March Madness)

EAST

1. JOHN ASHBERY— “LIMITED LIABILITY”
2. JAMES WRIGHT— “AND YET I KNOW”
3. ROBERT CREELEY— “BE OF GOOD CHEER”
4. JAMES TATE—  “DREAM ON”
5. STANLEY KUNITZ— “HORNWORM: AUTUMN LAMENTATION”
6. A.R.AMMONS— “WIDESPREAD IMPLICATIONS”
7. JACK SPICER— “A POEM WITHOUT A SINGLE BIRD IN IT”
8. BARBARA GUEST—”MOTION PICTURES: 4″
9. LARRY LEVIS— “FAMILY ROMANCE”
10. LESLIE SCALAPINO— “THAT THEY WERE AT THE BEACH PT.4″
11. DORIANNE LAUX— “THE LOVERS”
12. GREGORY CORSO— “30th YEAR DREAM”
13. CAROLYN CREEDON— “LITANY”
14. GILLIAN CONOLEY— “BECKON”
15. WILLIAM MATTHEWS— “GOOD COMPANY”
16. LISA LEWIS— “RESPONSIBILITY”

There’s some familiar names here from last year’s BAP March Madness: Ashbery, Ammons, Tate, and William Matthews—who advanced the farthest.  A strong grouping, but we’ll look for the usual upsets, because these top seeds: do they write poems consistently better than thousands of other poets?  No.  Big reps mean nothing when the bodies start bumping.  We like Leslie Scalapino, whose poem has a cinematic quality—it feels like a life is really happening as you read it, and few poems have that quality.  James Tate is another to put your money on.

NORTH

1. SEAMUS HEANEY— “AN IRON SPIKE”
2. PHILIP LARKIN— “AUBADE”
3. ROBERT BLY— “SNOWBANKS NORTH OF THE HOUSE”
4. DONALD JUSTICE— “IN MEMORY OF MY FRIEND THE BASSOONIST JOHN LENOX”
5. ANNE CARSON— “MY RELIGION”
6. ALAN DUGAN—”DRUNK MEMORIES OF ANNE SEXTON”
7. HOWARD NEMEROV— “IFF”
8. MICHAEL PALMER— “I DO NOT”
9. YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA— “FORGIVE AND LIVE”
10. DAVID IGNATOW— “EACH DAY”
11. HAYDEN CARRUTH— “QUALITY OF WINE”
12. MAURA STANTON— “THE VEILED LADY”
13. EDWARD FIELD— “WHATEVER BECAME OF FREUD”
14. BILL KNOTT— “MONODRAMA”
15. JOSEPH DEUMER— “THEORY OF TRAGEDY”
16. JACK MYERS— “THE EXPERTS”

The North Bracket seems to be all about the titles of the poems: solid, not too fancy, invoking the iconic and the important.  If you can get away with “Aubade,” do it.  We like Larkin in the no-nonsense North.  Iron spike, indeed.

SOUTH

1. ROBERT LOWELL— “SHIFTING COLORS”
2. ROBERT PENN WARREN— “NIGHT WALKING”
3. FRANK O’HARA— “TO JOHN ASHBERY ON SZYMANOWSKI’S BIRTHDAY”
4. CZESLAW MILOSZ— “ENCOUNTER”
5. SHARON OLDS— “THE REQUEST”
6. RICHARD HUGO— “LETTER TO BLESSING FROM MISSOULA”
7. STEPHEN DOBYNS— “ALLEGORICAL MATTERS”
8. NORMAN DUBIE— “SANCTUARY”
9. AMY GERSTLER— “SINKING FEELING”
10. JIM HARRISON— “LETTERS TO YESENIN #9 PAPER CLIPS”
11. TESS GALLAGHER— “THE HUG”
12. ROBIN BECKER— “A HISTORY OF SEXUAL PREFERANCE”
13. WILLIAM KULIK— “FICTIONS”
14. EILEEN MYLES— “EILEEN’S VISION”
15. JACK HIRSCHMAN— “THE PAINTING”
16. KAREN KIPP— “THE RAT”

The South has it all: an original New Critic, the poet for whom ‘confessional’ was coined, a New York School poet, a touring theoretical lesbian, and last year’s BAP editor.  We can’t wait for play to start in the South.

WEST

1. ALLEN GINSBERG— “THE CHARNEL GROUND”
2. DONALD HALL— “TO A WATERFOWL”
3. ROBERT HASS— “SPRING RAIN”
4. SYLVIA PLATH— “INCOMMUNICADO”
5. JAMES SCHUYLER—”RED BRICK AND BROWN STONE”
6. REED WHITTEMORE— “SMILING THROUGH”
7. STEPHEN DUNN— “WHAT THEY WANTED”
8. CHARLES BUKOWSKI— “NOT MUCH SINGING”
9. CAROL MUSKE— “A FORMER LOVE, A LOVER OF FORM”
10. SAM HAMILL— “WHAT THE WATER KNOWS”
11. HEATHER MCHUGH— “AFTER YOU LEFT”
12. STEPHANIE BROWN— “INTERVIEW W/AN ALCHEMIST IN THE NEW AGE”
13. JOY HARJO— “A POST-COLONIAL TALE”
14. RICHARD CECIL— “APOLOGY”
15. DOUGLAS CRASE— “THERE IS NO REAL PEACE IN THE WORLD”
16. HOWARD MOSS— “MIAMI BEACH”

And there they are: the 64  poets in the March Madness, the best of the “best” of APR from its beginning in 1972 to about 2000, when the APR anthology, The Body Electric: America’s Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review, was published.

The APR tourney reaches back a little further than Scarriet’s 2010 BAP tournament—Lehman’s Best American Poetry series commenced in 1988.

Sharon Olds is back, and so is William Kulik, who made it to the Final Four last year.  Stephen Dunn, who crashed the Elite Eight, is back with a strong poem.  Komunyakaa, Laux, Justice, Hall, and Dobyns return to action.  Ashbery, of course, is back, as is Heaney, both no. 1 seeds, in the East and North, respectively.  Robert Lowell is the no. 1 seed in the South and Ginsberg in the West.  A few Brits, and one Polish Nobel are included; if APR put them in their book, they’re eligible.  Again, the women poets are well under 50% in representation (as they were in the book); with the recently released VIDA report, that simple count will be checked more closely from now on.

3 Comments

AN ANALYSIS OF THE PURITANICAL HATRED OF MUSIC IN POETRY

February 27, 2011 at 3:48 am (Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Moore)

Thomas Moore, Central Park, New York City

There Silence, thoughtful God, who loves
The neighborhood of Death, in groves
Of asphodel lies hid, and weaves
His hushing spell among the leaves. 

—”Alciphron”  Thomas Moore

Edgar Allan Poe, in an 1840 review of “Alciphron” by Thomas Moore, writes the following:

At page 8, he [Moore] either himself has misunderstood the tenets of Epicurus, or willfully misrepresents them through the voice of Alciphron. We incline to the former idea, however; as the philosophy of that most noble of the sophists is habitually perverted by the moderns. Nothing could be more spiritual and less sensual than the doctrines we so torture into wrong.

Thomas Moore was Ireland’s most beloved poet and a friend and biographer of Byron—their letters read like a 19th century version of Lennon and McCartney trading song lyrics; Moore wrote famous songs, and Poe, ‘jingle man’ that he was, admired the Irish bard exceedingly, and Poe goes so far to wonder in this review whether Moore might not be the best poet of all time—that’s right: No. 1. 

But Poe wrote real Criticism; his reviews were Criticism, not puffs, and therefore we see in the quote above a stern disagreement with a mind he very much admired.  Such things go on in the heaven of Letters, far above the little minds who think classical music is funeral music and Criticism is mean.

When he called Poe ‘the jingle man’ in a private conversation with a young William Dean Howells, Emerson wasn’t being mean; he was just being stupid, for Poe excelled in so many genres never attempted by Emerson that it would jingle the stoic New Englander just to think on it.  It is not that Emerson never rhymed himself; he did, but he somehow fancied that his rhymes harbored a rich philosophy while Poe’s rhymes were only rhymes—well, that is a point not yet resolved, but Poe was not bereft of thought—but why waste our time on a silly remark of Mr. Emerson’s?

The following passage may suffice to illustrate that Poe’s reviews were more than a little thoughtful, at least as thoughtful as Emerson’s colorful sermons which cogitated upon gigantic ideas, while Poe wrote philosophically on actual things:

["Alciphron"] is distinguished throughout by a very happy facility which has never been mentioned in connection with its author, but which has much to do with the reputation he has obtained. We allude to the facility with which he recounts a poetical story in a prosaic way. By this is meant that he preserves the tone and method of arrangement of a prose relation, and thus obtains great advantages over his more stilted compeers. His is no poetical style, (such, for example, as the French have—a distinct  style for a distinct purpose,) but an easy and ordinary prose manner, ornamented into poetry. By means of this he is enabled to enter, with ease, into details which would baffle any other versifier of the age, and at which La Martine would stand aghast. For any thing that we see to the contrary, Moore might solve a cubic equation in verse, or go through with the three several demonstrations of the binomial theorem, one after the other, or indeed all at the same time. His facility in this respect is truly admirable, and is, no doubt, the result of long practice after mature deliberation. We refer the reader to page 50, of the pamphlet now reviewed; where the minute and conflicting incidents of the descent into the pyramid are detailed with absolutely more precision than we have ever known a similar relation detailed with in prose.

A remarkable observation from a ‘jingle man,’ but not remarkable to those who have actually read Poe; and his remark on the French is pertinent: Poe wrote in many different ways to a purpose, and Emerson’s ‘jingle man’ gibe is but the jealous growl of a man who wrote in the same style—and not a precise one, either.

One style: this is true of the current followers of Emerson and his line—which includes Whitman, who wrote in the style of Emerson’s prose (except for “O Captain! My Captain!” which modernists hate) and William James, Emerson’s godson, whose nitrous oxide philosophy influenced Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, which brings us right to the present day of scribblers who fancy themselves very modern and very free. 

The moderns’ practice is so free, their writing has no shape at all, for it is but poetry trying to shake free of poetry, form that is trying to shake free of forms, and thus the whole structure of po-biz is one gigantic bee-hive of prose that buzzes sans music, sans philosophy, sans criticism, sans poetry—a prose without any style whatsoever, except that style which rejects all style, like that philosophy which rejects all philosophy; a good example might be the head-scratching ruminations of 1990s Jorie Graham, the strolls in the park at twilight by John Ashbery, the cacophony of thousands of William Carlos Williams-influenced modern poets who race to the end of their lines like school-children hurtling pell-mell out of school.

One style of No style. 

How was such a horror allowed to occur?

My guess is that somewhere along the line, it was decided that, to have a style, and, worse, to be proficient in a number of styles, was insincere. 

How dare Poe write “Ulalume” —and Eureka— and his Criticism— and his humorous tales— and his detective fiction— and his “To Helen” and his “The Masque of the Red Death”—and his Marginalia—and his Sea-faring novel—and his Reviews—and his essays—and his Tone Poems—and his Romances—and his early Science Ficiton—and his tales of horror—how dare he!

Surely Poe was some Victorian prank, and modern poetry, with its frankness and its bare-bones honesty and its one trusty style has saved the best of us from the sin of that populist trash.

So goes the unspoken analysis of the solemn modern who ponders Emerson and Pound with the utmost somber common sense.

But where’s the music? 

Music?

Why, if we allow music, the ‘jingle man’ and his jingling might creep back into the tent, and with him all those styles, the Criticism (O mean criticism!), the poetic stories, all those genres he invented or developed, and that is so much work (what do you think we are?  Geniuses?)—better by far to proceed down the noble path of making poetry as “free” as possible!  Quick! Get me my copy of Aldous Huxley’s send-up of “Ulalume!”

For isn’t this the 800 lb. gorilla in the room?  Poe recounting how Thomas Moore is more descriptively precise in his poetry than anyone else in their prose points a cold finger directly at it: Shakespeare, after all was a poet in his plays and Shakespeare’s works are remarkable for their story-telling popularity as well as for their music; Moore, Shakespeare-like according to Poe, was very popular in his day, that Irish sun hidden now by the prosaic little moon of american modernism.

What poet in our day—and we can include the whole previous century–has the popular, story-telling, philosophical appeal of a Shakespeare, or an Alexander Pope, or a Thomas Moore, or a Poe, or a Byron?

This is a large topic, but something tells me it begins with the moderns’ horror of poetry that has music.

16 Comments

MORE APR POETS CRASH AND BURN AS MARCH MADNESS APPROACHES

February 25, 2011 at 4:15 pm (March Madness, Marla Muse)

 

They’re falling like flies.

Here are the poets eliminated so far:

Ai, Alvarez, Angel, Asekoff, Bell, Berrigan, Berryman, Boland, Booth, Braun, Broumas, Buckley, Burkard, Ceravolo, Clark, Clifton, Curbleo, Dickey, Dove, Early, Eberhart, Emanuel, Forche, Gibbons, J.Gilbert, Gluck, Goodman, Graham, Herrera, Hillman, Hirsch, Hirshfield, Hoagland, Hogan, Hollander, Howard, S.Howe, Jeffers, Keelan, Kinnell, E.Knight, Koch, Kumin, Lauterbach, Lederer, Lee, Levertov, P.Levine, Lieberman, Lima, J.Logan, Lux, Major, Marks, McGrath, Mead, Medina, Meredith, Merwin, Miller, H. Moss, S.Moss, Olson, Oppen, Orr, Osbey, Pecor, Pereira, Plumly, Rakosi, Rawson, Rector, Revell, Rexroth, Rich, Roberts, St. John, Sadoff, J.Sandburg, Schwerner, Seidel, Seidman, Sexton, D.Shapiro, K.Shapiro, Simic, Simpson, D.Smith, Snodgrass, G.Snyder, J.Snyder, Stafford, Stern, Stewart, Stone, Stroffolino, Stryk, Swenson, Valentine, Walcott, Waldman, Warsh, Weigl, R.Weiss, T.Weiss, Wenderoth, Wilbur, C.K.Williams, C.Wright, Yau, Zweig.

There are some poets…when you put them on the court…BAM!…they perform…they rise to the occasion…they impress the crowd…they leave the audience with something…they have that ‘poetic gift’ which is always at their disposal no matter what they happen to be doing… and it doesn’t matter how many people are watching and how close, or tense the game is…they never lose the touch on their soft shot…or lose accuracy…or lose concentration..it can’t be explained..some have it.

Other poets, the ones eliminated here, in isolated instances, with valiant effort and pre-meditation, accomplish something wonderful, but they have bad nights, bad days, they express things that resonate in themselves but not with others, not with the crowd.  (Listen to that crowd, poets!  They sound like the sea.  Smell them.  The salt of their sweat.  Hear them.  Their cries.  Their urgencies.  They move the air; they say: Make us feel.  Make us understand.  Write for us, the world, not your own idea, wrapped, warming beneath a lamp, in a dim alley of your brain. Not in there.  We are here.  Here we are!)

But the losers do not move the crowd. 

The losers wrote (occasionally it might seem like there’s a typo which mars the text below—but that’s how it is with bad poetry—no typos in the following; what appears is the poets’ actual text):

We say a heart breaks—like
a stick, maybe, or a bottle
or a wave.  But it seems

Or:

Sat., Apr. 26, 1973
Jefferson City, Mo. 65101
(500 yards, as the crow flies,

Or:

Almost at the end of the century
this is the time of the pain of the bears
their agony goes on at this moment

Or:

Reading I spilled the wine.
Do you care? Are you wet? Do you care?
In a later epistle, hands dry, I will say

Or:

After seven years and as the wine
leaves and black trunks of maples wait
beyond the window, I think of you

Or:

To survive things have to be blunted,
Raw experience is too fierce to endure.
The mind blots out much of experience

Or:

The way things move sometimes,
light or air,
the distance between

Or:

where the raven suddenly wetly and rawly
roughens the low vacillations of various windsweeping
hushings—as if he’s clawed

Or:

When the immutable accidents of birth—
parentage, hometown, all the rest—
no longer anchor this fiction of the self

Or:

She saying, You don’t have to do anything,
you don’t even have to be, you Only who you are,
you nobody from nowhere,

Or:

The universe is sad.
I heard it when Artur Rubenstein played the piano.
He was a little man with small hands.

Or:

I look out the window: spring is coming.
I look out the window: spring is here.
The shuffle and click of the slide projector

Or:

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.

The percentage of women in this APR collection, and reflecting in the March Madness Tournament is not sizable: it’s roughly 25%, which will not make a lot of people happy, right, Marla?

MARLA MUSE: No.

The gender issue will always partake of the particle/wave paradox:  All the individual can ever say is that he will not reject women who are good.  As an individual, he cannot say: I will accept women who are bad and I will reject men who are good.   

Aesthetics and justice are unfortunately oil and water.

If the relations between the sexes are ruled by the wicked heart, it would not be wise to then let the judgment be swayed by the heart in other matters. 

Contrarily, if the heart, which makes men and women behave as they do towards each other, is good and operates in a way that passeth understanding, in that case the judgment needs to defer to that heart. 

In either case, the judgment should not presume to get involved legislating the heart in any controversy between the sexes—regarding poetry.

This, I believe, is as much as can be said philosophically on the subject.  Marla?

MARLA MUSE:  I don’t like what you say, but I think you have a good heart and (sob!) I am in love with you, Tom, …don’t worry folks, I’m fine!….so I will carry on the best I can in these circumstances, won’t I? 

Good!  I vow I will not take advantage of your feelings when I speak again on the subject.  And I’m sure you’ll have more to say as Scarriet Poetry March Madness continues!

MARLA MUSE: I’m sure I will!

1 Comment

OH! AND THAT SHOT MISSED BY A MILE…!

February 23, 2011 at 10:39 pm (Helena Wurzel, March Madness, Marla Muse, Michael Burkard)

I’m here at courtside with Marla Muse as we watch another poet shooting all wrong, trying to get into this March Madness tourney…

Marla—oh! two players tangled up…one fell on top of the other hard at midcourt…that had to hurt…Marla, what seems to be wrong with Michael Burkard…

MARLA MUSE:  Oh, I don’t know.  He graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1973.  I suspect drugs, booze…  Can you imagine getting a creative writing degree at Iowa in 1973?  Happy hour?  Dime beers?  The 60s were still happening in 1973!  Nixon is still in office.  Can you imagine…the Iowa Writer’s Workshop?  When “Nights In White Satin” was on the radio?  I don’t think Michael Burkard has anything left.  He’s terrible.  He’ll never make the tournament.  The APR gave him 9 poems in this anthology—more than almost any of the 180 poets represented, but he’s awful.  Look:

Wait, Marla, are you going to quote the whole poem?

MARLA MUSE:   I have to.  They have to see…how bad this poem is…they won’t believe it otherwise…I have to quote the whole thing…they’re all this bad, too…every poem he’s ever written…they’re all this bad…it’s hard to believe…but you know, when you’re smoking all that dope…

Yea, it must have been a strange life…teaching at Sarah Lawrence in the 80s…I wonder if anyone ever told him his poetry sucked…or maybe that wasn’t cool back, then…in the 80s…you just didn’t do that…or bad was good, or something…

MARLA MUSE:  Yes, that could have been it…bad was good…it was the 80s…poetry was adrift…Lehman’s  BAP came along at the end of the 80s…there was no direction in poetry…the first writing workshop generation was getting old and putting together their Complete and their Selected…the next generation of workshoppers were following, directionless, in a cloud of pot smoke…they were strange times…I remember the fall of the Roman Empire…no, but even this doesn’t compare…OK, let me read this poem…just imagine it emerging from a giant cloud of weed…what else can explain its badness?  OK, here goes:

[I Have A Silence In The Rain]

I have a silence in the rain
and I have my horses.
I have my shoes and I have my name,

the beginning of the street
and the street downtown, between the canyons,
and the trees which shine my shoes.

I have a silence and an end,
an end which is not critical,
not the weight. The houses bloom

and they’ve never been mine,
but there were beings in the rooms,
there were souls to each of the houses,

each of the rooms,
and this extended to the prison of the city
and the prison of the sea, the towns

there, by that sea, and that end
which was narrow
and by itself.  It was so much itself—

that end—
that I was uneasy there, a facade
it seemed, I had a reputation

for going nowhere.
I was always elsewhere
and that was why. I extended my weight

to my shoes and the few trees
and the horses—and the old closed motel
on the thing I called the bluff, the motel

closed for years, staring in the terribly pink sunset
with its pink vases
and pink doors. And the silence which stared.

The horses were below.
The horses were weight, in the evening
they shined too.

—Michael Burkard (1986)  from The Body Electric, America’s Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review

Wow.  Marla, I’m stunned.  That’s…that’s…bad.

MARLA MUSE: It’s safe to say this poet will not be joining the 64 in the March Madness tournament…but you know what that kind of poetry says…?  It says: man, I was enjoying life…I was getting high, I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence…everything I touched was profound…I didn’t even have to try…I’d just put on a wrinkled button-down shirt….and black jeans…and comfortable old brown shoes…and I had my Iowa MFA…and that’s all I needed…and I’d look out the window and scratch my head and THAT was cool…my very being WAS COOL…maybe today we can’t see it…but this kind of poetry should invoke a world of cool, relaxed, pleasure…campus breezes…campus sunsets…campus parties…

But here we are in the 21st century…March Madness…and it’s all different…March Madness, baby!

13 Comments

WALT WHITMAN, VICTORIAN

February 22, 2011 at 3:47 pm (Charles Kingsley, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, T.S.Eliot, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams)

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was the most Victorian of authors, the very opposite of a modernist or imagist.  His poem, “Darest Thou Now O Soul,” for instance:

Darest Thou Now O Soul

Darest thou now O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

No map there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.

I know it not O soul,
Nor dost thou, all is blank before us,
All waits undream’d of in that region, that inaccessible land.

Till when the ties loosen,
All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.

That we burst forth, we float,
In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last, (O  joy, O  fruit of all) them to fulfill O soul.

In Whitman’s poem rhetoric is far more important than image, and the manner and the subject are utterly Victorian, and not in the least modern.  Whitman travels solo, an American vagabond, cut loose from all, and yet his yearning to connect within his profound disconnectedness is what gives him his signature attitude and emotion.

Let us look at another classic Victorian poem, this one by Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), born within weeks of Whitman, but in England, and so much more connected to life than Whitman:

When All the World… (from The Water Babies)

When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.

When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down;
Creep home, and take your place there,
The spent and maimed among:
God grant you find one face there,
You loved when all was young.

Now both of these poems are highly expressive and highly emotional; but Whitman’s poem is free of the world and without image of the world; Whitman is completely taken with “O Soul,” but Kingsley is immersed in “the world” and images of “the world” and memories and lessons of “the world,” dragging in trees and swans and lasses; Kingsley is grasping the world with all his might, while Whitman has let go; Whitman is transparent, invisible except for a rhetorical gesture, a desire, a wish, an expression only, an urge. 

Whitman is a Victorian looking backwards at Shelley; Kingsley is a Victorian looking forward to Yeats and 20th century Symbolism and Imagism. 

Kingsley was an early supporter of Darwin’s ideas; no “O Soul” for Kingsley; that’s more for the more sentimental Victorian, Whitman.

Here again is Whitman, and again we see the Victorian morality, the sermon, the speech, the gesture, without any need to be in the world, as such; the world is insignificant, the world is gone, and for Whitman only a  moral and mystical intuition remains:

To A Common Prostitute

Be composed—be at ease with me—I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lusty as Nature,
Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.
My girl I appoint with you an appointment, and I charge you that you make preparation to be worthy to meet me,
And I charge you that you be patient and perfect till I come.

Till then I salute you with a significant look that you do not forget me.

One thinks, of course, of Christ’s forgiveness, the instant understanding that washes away sin, for we all are sinners, all “lusty as Nature,” as Whitman says he is, and therefore as the sun shines on all, so the sun shines on this “common prostitute” and then Whitman implies he is going to come to her after she makes ready and it is intentionally ambiguous what he is going to do: rape her as a Zeus-like figure disguised, or give her wise counsel; as usual with the Victorian Whitman what is clear is the emotional wallop; he is morally equal with her and placid, but at the same time he is morally superior and even morally inferior because he wishes her to remember him almost as if he were a common wooer of her; it is a miraculous attitude as Whitman manages to be Pagan god, Old Testament father, New Testament Christ, and humble lover towards his “girl” all at once—here is the truly protean Whitman able to be/say everything by dint of his complete loving detachment. 

A human being cannot do this, only poetry can.

For the modernists, poetry will become an irony as it reaches what is apparently its limit; the dream of Shelley has invaded all aspects of life, the past, the present, the future; a pagan statue bathed in the holy light of Christ now become the mind of the poet itself and the poem literally bursts with too much soul and what is left is the hard fragments of the imagists or the elusive ironies of the moderns.

The hard ground of common-sense, which Victorian poets like Charles Kingsley walked upon, was rejected by the new poets of the 20th century; but for some reason Whitman, who represented a Romantic/Victorian end, and we can clearly see the ‘traveled as far as one can go’ in Whitman’s prostitute poem—for some reason, Whitman, the culmination of the Romantic/Victorian line, was welcomed by the moderns as a beginning, and, after some initial reluctance, hailed as a true modern.

Why?  Because Whitman used dramatic speech, unencumbered by strict meters? 

Were the moderns simply unable to write good free verse themselves (free verse being one of the modern tenets) and so Whitman, though born in 1819, had to be borrowed, so to speak, for a 20th century job? 

This may be part of it; remember, the chief poet of Modernism, T.S. Eliot, achieved his best results sliding back into retro-meters, and Pound just couldn’t pull off free verse interest like Whitman could. 

OK, Walt, you’re hired. 

But this was a deal with the devil, because you can’t give a Victorian a job in the Modernist factory, and finally the work that had to be done did not get done; ghosts cannot run a modern firm.  Think, too, of another keen modernist theorist: John Crowe Ransom—another rhyming throw-back.  Or Cummings, a Victorian love-poet if there ever was one.  Auden?  A balladeer?  He wasn’t modern enough, either. 

20th century painting looked so different from 19th century painting.  But poetry, trying so hard to be modern, either jingled too much in a 19th century manner, or looked too much like haiku, a form that looked backwards, as well.

This is why Whitman was heavily recruited for awhile, and now we think of him, with Dickinson (b. 1830) as moderns, not Victorians—which is what they are.  This had a tumultuous affect on modernist literature.  No one was supposed to be rhyming, but poets did, so Eliot went for a collage effect, burying his meters in fragments—but this was a deal with the devil, too; you just don’t sacrifice artistic unity out of weakness, and this is what Pound and Eliot did. 

Pound was also unscrupulous in another way; he and his friend Williams wrote haiku—anything to avoid looking Victorian—and re-named their haiku-writing Imagism to pretend they were moderns, doing something new.  But no one was doing anything new: they were re-naming, smashing, and recruiting 19th century poets (Whitman, Dickinson, Baudelaire) and at the same time pretending they were “new”—so desperate were the would-be ‘moderns’ that previous eras were rejected whole cloth, and this made the problem even worse; sources of inspiration continued to dry up as the new writers self-consciously struck their ‘new’ poses, selectively trashing, breaking, rejecting, and recruiting. 

Luckily for the Modernists, most intellectuals just wanted to join the ‘new’ party, whatever it was, whether it was justified or not; looser morals alone was enough to get people onboard the ‘modernist train,’ and painting was doing a pretty good job of looking ‘modern,’ so if Pound wore a beret and the poets hung out with a few painters, all was fine. 

They just had to be careful not to use terms like “O soul.”

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LONDON CALLING: AMY LOWELL AND THE MODERNISTS

February 21, 2011 at 2:08 am (Amy Lowell, Dial Magazine, Eight Harvard Poets, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford, Horace Gregory, Witter Bynner)

Readers of Scarriet know Literary Modernism is essentially a reactionary movement, an “avant-garde” of male-dominated fascism, feudalism, futurism, and blood-primitivism.  This is the chief reason why great female poets like Elinor Wylie, Edna Millay, and Amy Lowell were, and still are, kicked to the curb by the ‘Pound Era’ Dial magazine clique. 

And the shame is that women  today ignorantly go along with Pound’s “revolutionary” agenda, believing the lies of a small, influential, men’s club clique. 

There’s only three female poets one is allowed to really respect: Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Bishop’s mentor and Eliot/ Pound Dial magazine clique-member, and Emily Dickinson from the 19th century.  That’s it.  Gertrude Stein, perhaps, but she was more important as an art collector. All the other ‘great’ poets, like Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence, are men.  (And the only respected female critic in the world, Harvard University’s Men’s Club Modernist apologist, Helen Vendler, agrees.)

If we look at London in the summer of 1914—right before that insane war—and the dinner hosted by Amy Lowell, sister to the president of Harvard, we see a drunken Ezra Pound misbehaving with a bathtub, ridiculing the hostess-poet as, at that precise moment, the Imagistes, as they called themselves, were split in half:

Some of the Imagists stay with Pound, because he gets them published in the only game anywhere, Harriet Monroe’s Poetry.

Some go with Amy Lowell, because of the money and the Lowell name and because she sincerely believes in Imagism (and Japanese prints) and will put her devotees in her popular anthologies—H.D, H.D.’s husband, Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher (Imagist and Fugitive), and even D.H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell becoming Lawrence’s only American friend.  S. Foster Damon, Lowell’s official biographer, is one of The Eight Harvard Poets, a collection edited by Stewart Mitchell, also an editor of The Dial and one of many male poets who made a career of absuing and ridiculing  Amy Lowell.

Pound’s trump card at Amy Lowell’s London dinner is Ford Madox Ford, sexist pig, War Propaganda Minister for His Majesty, gentleman, lover of war, and hater of the Hun, and by far the most influential person at that July, 1914 dinner, one of the original Imagistes; Ford, grandson of a pre-Raphaelite, is the first one to meet Pound off the boat when Pound goes abroad in 1907.  

Ford Madox Ford hated Amy Lowell at first sight, and his scorning her in 1914 as a “neutral,” is not insignificant. Pound serving Ford, and later, Mussolini, is no accident; Ford really believed in a world of hereditary aristocracy, dog-eat-dog, ’who’s side are you on?’, rapacious bigotry, and Pound learned his fascism partly from his relationship with the imperialistic Ford Madox Ford, War Propaganda Minister of the British Empire.

Ernest Hemingway, who met Ford in 1920s Paris, and who was physically repulsed by the monstrous Ford, relates first-hand that Ford saw the world in terms of a strict heirarchy, with English gentlemen at the top of the heap: Henry James was not even good enough to be a gentleman, because he was American, and Pound suffered the same flaw in Ford’s eyes.  Nazis and fascists, such as Pound, were wanna-bes before the Crown of Empire Britain and its bejeweled Euro-cousins; fascists were mere thugs with a love/hate relationship with their blue-eyed masters in London.  Pound, defeated in an Imagist p.r. war by Amy Lowell (she was a far more popular and influential Modernist than Pound in the 20s) ran and hid in Italy, seeking a higher Modern pedigree in Roman fascist primitivism and ‘classical’ hyperbole, trading one type of bombast (his so-called Imagism) for another (his unwieldy Cantos).

Not only was Ford at the center of early Imagism, and an effete, philandering, warmonger English gentleman, but he later traveled to America to network with the cranky, philandering Allen Tate and the reactionary Fugitive/New Critics.  Tate, with friends John Crowe Ransom, Paul Engle (a Fugitive judge gave Engle his Yale Younger Prize) and Robert Penn Warren, will create the Writing  Program empire, so the Modernist Dial-clique, rejected outright by the public, can find their dreams fulfilled as they slip inside the ‘new writing’ university canon-apparatus.

The Language Poets are a mere continuation of reactionary Modernism—the Imagists sought to strip away and destroy Victorian discursiveness and morality, just as the Language Poets seek the same end in a slightly fancier and more “advanced” theoretical manner.  One can trace Charles Bernstein’s mentors, for instance, right back to WW I era Oxford and  Cambridge.

Imagism was a movement which was popularized not by Pound and his friends, but by the American aristocrat Amy Lowell.  Yet Lowell was still put in her place by the top-dog aristocrat Ford and his despot-on-a-leash Pound. 

Imagism was not original with Ford or Pound.  The stunning Japanese victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War made Japanese art suddenly prized among the wealthy and the fashionable; a haiku rage ensued (what a coincidence!) right before the birth of what was re-named Imagism.  Mere prejudice hides the profound Japanese influence, just to give all the glory to Pound’s “theories” (slapdash, mad-scientist manifestos) and his pal William Carlos Williams’ red wheel barrow. 

Reading the commentaries, one would think Pound invented the image and the art of China and Japan himself, such is the ignorance of that whole Amy Lowell-dominated period in American literary history.

The Amy Lowell story is a complicated one, but it’s interesting to note that Lowell was attacked by the same Pound-clique who viciously attacked Edna Millay: men like Ford Madox Ford, Horace Gregory, the now-forgotten Bollingen Prize winner, and Hugh Kenner, Pound’s adoring admirer and lackey, author of The Pound Era—in that work Kenner condemns Lowell as the “hippopoetess” and treats her shabbily throughout.

It is true that the Imagistes were ridiculed (and justifiably, to some extent) as a group—think of Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke’s ‘Spectrist’ literary hoax in 1916, which aimed its satire at the Imagist school: Pound and Lowell were often bruised by the same poker.  Bynner, Harvard ‘o2, and Ficke, with an art dealer father who imported Japanese art in the late 19th century, were both older than Pound, and Pound’s Imagism to these fellows—and many others at Harvard, or in Greenwich Village, or traveling abroad—was narrow, historically short-sighted, and pretentious. 

To 99% of the scholars, poets and artists living during the first part of the 20th century, calling that time “the Pound era” would have seemed nothing but a joke.

It didn’t help Amy Lowell’s reputation to die in 1925 at the age of 51.  Like the premature death of Poe in the previous century, Lowell’s death provided an opening for a certain hyena-and-jackal element to move in and re-write history in their favor.

Amy Lowell championed Frost (who was there in London in 1914, too, keeping a distance from the Imagists; but Lowell helped Frost, anyway) and Lowell championed Keats; she was open to other cultures, dared to live openly with a woman, and smoked cigars, and had an extensive life-long correspondence with D.H. Lawrence, and also was the champion of Imagism, and still going strong in all this at the moment of her death—but upon her demise she was assailed by the Pound-clique (who begged for money to her face, while making snide remarks about her obesity and her ‘not knowing her woman’s place’ behind her back) and her reputation is still falling as we speak.

A theory why Pound’s reputation got a tremendous bump in the 40s: Pound was chosen as a scapegoat/buffer/distraction by an anglo/Harvard/Fugitive-centered literary establishment with its own closet rightwing (even Nazi) sympathy.  Giving Pound, the bigot, a Bollingen Prize was a smokescreen, and was done less for Pound than (secretly) for them.

It was, in fact, the Bollingen prize-receiving members of the Pound-clique who abused Edna Millay and Amy Lowell, and as Lowell is forgotten, so is Keats a little more forgotten (the Pound/Eliot Modernists are notorious Romanticism-haters) as, meanwhile, the Pound-Modernist clique men’s club grows apace in reputation.

The shake-up, when Pound is no longer useful, will happen, sooner or later; dedicated historicism, distanced enough from the era, at last, will investigate and clear up the matter; the reader may see this Scarriet defense of Amy Lowell as a preliminary writing on the wall.

And Imagism, what was it, finally? 

Oh, nothing, really.  The image was nothing new in poetry.  Nothing new at all. 

Just as there was nothing new about painters influencing the New York School. 

E.E. Cummings, one of the Eight Harvard Poets, and also part of the Dial clique, having married the publisher’s wife, was a respected abstract painter—many people forget that, and they said back  then that Cummings’ white spaces in his poetry were due to the fact that he was a painter. 

It might be a great selling point for a manifesto styled for an up-and-coming avant-garde academic. 

But meaningless, really.

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POETS GATHER TO CELEBRATE MARCH MADNESS

February 20, 2011 at 3:48 am (Allen Ginsberg, Harold Bloom, John Ashbery, John Berryman, March Madness, Robert Creeley)

Though eliminated from the 2011 Scarriet Second Annual March Madness Tourney based on the Best Poems from APR, John Berryman spoke, and spoke for a long time.  He insisted quite a few times that he “wasn’t boring and he wasn’t drunk—like some of you out there…” (!!)

John Ashbery seems to actually be paying attention to John Berryman.  He, along with Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, are still waiting to see if they make the final 64 poets playing in this years March Madness Tournament.  They all have poems in The Body Electric: America’s Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review, edited by Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, and Arthur Vogelsang.

Harold Bloom’s introduction to The Body Electric is typical Whitmaniacal trash from the esteemed blowhard, and need not be discussed here, for it is wholly uninteresting.  It begins, “This anthology takes its title from Walt Whitman, who shares with Emily Dickinson an aesthetic eminence not quite achieved by even the strongest American poets of the century just ending: Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and, as many would add, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and others.”  Oh, please shut up, Harold D. Bloom.  That’s enough from you.  We do not know a single person interested in what Harold Bloom has to say, or ever did.  His cacophony has been tolerated long enough.  Someone throw him out of the building.  He won’t be invited back.  (Though he did perform a serviceable job as commisioner of Scarriet’s 2010 Poetry Baseball League this past summer.  We thank him for that.)  Marla Muse is said to fancy Mr. Bloom, but we believe it is only because  Mr. Bloom once had Camille Paglia in his classroom, and Marla Muse hearts Ms. Paglia.

We’ll have the usual round of interviews with Marla Muse in the weeks to come!

The excitement is growing every day as Scarriet’s 2011 Second Annual March Madness approaches, and fans wonder who will make the tournament!

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BORDERS IS CLOSING! BORDERS IS CLOSING!

February 19, 2011 at 2:26 am (Borders Books)

Stephen King must be heartbroken. 

I used to go to Borders.  I’d leaf through the coffee table books.  I’d listen to CDs at the listening stations.  I’d sit in a soft chair and read a book.  I’d have a cup of coffee.  I’d browse magazines. 

See, I love to read.

I wouldn’t buy anything.  How could such a business afford to support customers like me, I wondered? 

It turns out it couldn’t.

Especially not in a world of Google and Amazon.

But worry not. 

We have libraries. 

Borders has displays of best-sellers, horrible books with movie tie-ins. 

Borders tells you what to buy. 

Libraries encourage reading by subject, getting to know a particular subject, rather than getting a shallow view of a subject by the latest spin doctor which is put on display. 

Hawthorne once lamented the rise of best-selling twaddle for women: books as cheap soap-opera.  Books can even perpetuate cretinism: books, in themselves, are not a good, and this is something your average bookworm has trouble understanding.   

Reading trash is still a trashy activity, and even worse is the half-educated person who actually thinks they know something.  

The mind is just at good at deceiving its owner as bringing it information, and incomplete information is an excellent deceiver, for we don’t know when we have enough information; we don’t know when we are being deceived by information itself.

The only way to avoid being deceived by one’s mind is to use it as little as possible, and instead, embrace the cause and effect immediacy of the physical world: if one practices to cook by cooking, tasting and eating, a book will not fool that cook.  But if one learns to cook by consulting a book, how is the student to know if the book is wrong, or not?  One can see by this simple example that books are supplements to experience and not a substitute for them.  But the bookworm allows books to be a substitute for experience.

Theoretical science is not, as the mere bookworm might suppose, abstract, for to comprehend formulae, the understanding must literally travel through the sequences of the formulae, precisely as a piece of music, written out, to come alive, must be physically manipulated.  The partial information provided by a piece of music cannot deceive, as selected facts can, because the information of the musical piece is mathematical, and thus presents itself as an idea that already exists: the rigors of science, music and mathematics are based on re-discovery, and partake of immediate sensual understanding of physical qualites such as perspective, proportion, shape, duration, pitch and beauty.

The reader of mere fiction, who likes to participate in imagined gossip, is performing quite a different operation than the scientist, the mathematician, or the musician—active participants in the world, a world whose beauty is a concrete way into it.  No, the mere reader of fiction—and the gossip and half-lies of poorly written biography and history—is instead lost in that realm in which information is only partially given, and thus the fiction reader learns information in the manner that deceives, because the reader has no idea what information is missing. 

This misunderstanding of what true knowledge is creates your typical smug, ‘educated’ person, who has no real intellectual curiosity—their mind is built on reading fiction and slanted biography and history, in which missing information is the key element, and thus a true spirit of inquiry actually frightens them, since they are comfortable in their fiction-universe.

Certainly fiction-universes can make us comfortable, and those who condemn religion say it is merely a fiction of false comfort, but it is not for me to question fictions which make us happy; the point of this essay is Borders bookstore, and no one I personally know is a better person because of Borders bookstores; the books sold at Borders would not interest a scientific specialist or a connoisseur.  A true lover of knowledge would always prefer a good library, not a bookstore which piles books on display and serves a marketing/publishing empire which tells people what to read.

In their daily conversation, or in their jobs, none of us are helped by anything sold at Borders.   The half-knowledge of politics, economics, nutrition and science (which is useless and even harmfully deceptive) must be blamed, in part, on cynically marketed books, and the half-knowledge—unfortunately so often a point of pride—is actually worse than ignorance, and bookstores (like much of our so-called education) produces this insidious state of things.

It may be said that even trivial knowledge is good, because it can bring people together in a common atmosphere, and this is invaluable; let us grant this; but trivia can be found anywhere, not just in books; and a community can just as easily be brought together by trivial facts such as ‘our grocer has red hair’ as ‘the grocer in a book sold by Borders has red hair.’

Defenders of poetry and fiction will finally state that deception is the whole point in the fictive enterprise, and here is where  Aristotle and Plato (and the whole world) differ: the good in one philosophy is an evil in the other.  But this division aside, to reject Plato’s hard-nosed search for truth, and reduce everything to rhetoric, which either convinces, or does not, and so partakes of power, or does not; power being all, and truth nothing, is a falling off; indeed, but one that unfortunately supports all sorts of abstract, wasteful, superficiality which we usually dare not question, like books, poets, poetry, fiction, schools, and bookstores.

So you may have the person who fancies themselves ‘educated’ who puts down TV, because they get a little superior-feeling thrill by doing so.  Oh, those reality shows, they are such trash.  I read poetry, instead.  These are well-meaning folk, who have a vague idea what it is to affect a certain educated demeanor, but unfortunately their own ignorance is so massive, it over-shadows everything.

The work of the scientist, the musician, and the mathematician are physical necessities—they have no abstract properties.  The abstract belongs entirely to fiction—and the half-knowning bookworm.

Everyone likes a comfortable bookstore.  I lament the end of that.

But the dragons, vampires, half-baked science and history, the gossipy fiction? 

I won’t miss that at all.

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MARCH MADNESS: MORE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION!

February 18, 2011 at 3:02 am (Ai, John Berryman, March Madness, Marla Muse, Marvin Bell)

The death of the poets continues as the 180 of The Body Electric APR anthology is reduced to the 64 of Scarriet’s Poetry March Madness Brackets.

We told you John Berryman was eliminated.  To see why, here’s the first stanza of “4th Weekend” reprinted from The Body Electric:

Recovering Henry levelled & confronted;
helpt Mary Lou, was helpt by Mary Lou;
accepted incest, etc.
Major his insights into other burns,
grand his endeavors on their sick behalf,
on the trip into sick himself

Do you see why Berryman won’t be in the tournament, Marla? 

Marla: Grrrr.

You can see this is just self-pitying, self-indulgent trash, can’t you?

Marla: mmmmm.

Thank you, Marla.

Who else has been elim-i-na-ted?

Ai

Through the hole in the hut’s wall,
I watch the old woman who put me up,
leaning against a wooden tub, elbow deep in wash water.
 

Julia Alvarez

He said in his mother’s house, growing up
he remembered roses, and his friend said
his mother could not abide print on her walls

Ralph Angel

Now that we’ve finally arrived here
you won’t let me hold you.
And were you stopped along the way by a reason to believe

L.S. Asekoff

Perhaps there has never before been such an open sea,
the malady of death & the long affair
in the absence of history

Marvin Bell

I wanted to see the self, so I looked at the mulberry.
It had no trouble accepting its limits,
yet defining and redefining a small area

Ted Berrigan

We remove a hand…
In a roomful of smoky man names burnished dull black
And labeled “blue” the din drifted in…

Eavan Boland

Life, the story goes,
Was the daughter of Cannan,
And came to the plan of Kildare.

Olga Broumas

I woke up in the dark
of a moon steamed against glass
black as if glazed with ebony

Can you see, Marla, how this writing isn’t going to win any prizes?  

Poets are supposed to, at the least, write good lines. 

Their lines are supposed to be more interesting than prose lines, than lines you would read in the beginning of a short story, or novel, because with a short story, or novel, you expect a story to unfold, so you don’t need every line to be wonderful; but with the poet, you do need every line to be wonderful, because otherwise, you might as well read a short story. 

Okay, so the first line is ordinary, but the poet can redeem himself with the second line that plays off the first line, to make an interesting pair, but with these excerpts above, this doesn’t happen; the lines themselves are not interesting, nor does the poet show any skill in using one line to sound interesting next to another, and by the third line, you can see that nothing at all interesting is happening.  (Not that we stopped reading after three lines with any of these poets and their poems in the APR’s The Body Electric.  We read them all.)

Die, poets!  In the sorrow and agony of your death, you become the dust in which the winners grow!  Climb winners, on the backs of the losers!  Some are born to sweet delight.  Some are born to endless night.

Marla: Aaaaaiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

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POETRY MARCH MADNESS TWO: SOME APR BIG NAMES DON’T MAKE THE CUT

February 17, 2011 at 2:23 am (Anne Sexton, Charles Bernstein, Charles Simic, Fred Seidel, Jorie Graham, Kenneth Koch, Louis Simpson, Louise Gluck, March Madness, Stanley Plumly)

Elimination.  It has to happen.  All grass cannot grow.  All things cannot live.  All chimneys cannot puff.  The poet who plays his pipe may play his pipe in vain.

The APR anthology, The Body Electric, features 180 poets published in the APR in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Only 64 of those poets are chosen for the tournament, and each one of those 64 rumble to the top with their best poem, chosen by Scarriet, with help, of course, from the ancient, but still lovely, Marla Muse.

The cuts do not reflect the talent of the esteemed poet, but rather the worth of the particular poems selected by the APR editors.  The editors were guilty, occasionally, as we all are, of being dazzled by names.  Famous poets at the bitter end of their careers tossed scraps at the magazine, and this is just one obvious instance of the sorts of errors in judgment which the Scarriet March Madness process will judiciously correct.

Marla Muse will read one of her own compositions before we announce the first of the cuts.

Take it away, Marla:

“Thank you, Thomas.   Ahem…first I just want to say that elimination is not a bad thing.  Death is not always bad.  We get rid of things.  We push away the worst and make room for the better.  And don’t be sad, poets, if you get eliminated.  You can always come back, next time.   This is only death for this time.

Death Is Love

Death is love’s friend.
Death is the one thing we cannot pretend;
All fools go on, except this end.

Death helps love live,
For nothing can withstand the long hours that give
Beauty wrinkles, and youth something even more primitive.

I once felt beautiful pain
Thinking of my own love’s dear name
On a stone, swept by leaves—but in vain…

My love, instead, fell gradually old with stumbling grace;
Death did not leave the memory of a beautiful face,
But took love slowly down to a different place.”

Beautiful, Marla!   Speaking of death, here are the first cuts:

John Berryman: Little pitiful-drunk rants
Jorie Graham: Early lyric promise crashes and burns
Louis Simpson: Surprisingly banal
Louise Gluck: Dully abstract
Anne Sexton:  Booze Muse
C.K. Williams: Can’t finish a poem.
Richard Wilbur: Rhyme buries sense.
Michael Ryan: Bitter confessing: adolescent.
Gerald Stern: Come on! Love me! Please!
Charles Simic: Two-cent Symbolism.
Kenneth Rexroth: Robot Zen.
Stanley Plumly: Chance of poetry, turning to prose.
John Hollander: Grade A Bombast
Kenneth Koch: Encyclopedic insincerity
Fred Seidel: I’m more connected and dangerous than you.
James Dickey: White spaces? You?
Richard Eberhart: Eh?
Charles Bernstein: He started a joke and started the whole world crying.

There are many more poets who have to go.  And we’ll let you know who the other losers are, and publish the 2011 March Madness brackets soon!

(cue drum, flute, lyre)

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