critical blindspots

The kind of conservative critic who wouldn’t have recognized most of the canon had he lived during the times when the works were written.

fool's golden age

Now matter the glow, it’s always an iron pyrite age.

tested by the times

So many canonical poems that would be cut down in a workshop these days.

the many vs. the few

Spew words versus few words: the dialectic of contemporary poetry.

demotic speech

If poetry had not turned to demotic speech after Modernism, after Beat, after New American Poetry, etc., it would have become like a collection of antique music boxes that are only wound from time to time to keep the springs in good working order.

young and beautiful

All the poets are getting younger and more beautiful.

always a refuge

Whatever poetry is or becomes, let it always be a refuge for beauty.

postmo tv

It’s not coincidence that Post Modernism and television came of age concurrently.

poet again

Sometimes all I need to do is to think of those times when I first thought myself a poet, and I’m a poet again.

glories of analog

Makes me sad to think of the young poets who do all their writing on their phones. They will never know the notebook in all its analog glory.

through or over

One must read through or over the antique poetic diction.

playing catch-up

Contemporary poets clamoring for my attention, I tell them: I’m still trying to catch-up to the poets I missed during twentieth century.

english to newer english

Earlier English poets who we now read in translations conforming to later conventions of syntax, punctuation and spelling.

judge unknown

He knew he was out of his times when he couldn’t recognize the name of the poet judging a major prize.

paper tomb

In the internet age, books are where poems go to die.

learned and declaiming

It’s not hard these days to be known as an intellectual poet.

brain drain

After the Enlightenment the exegetes fled from the Bible to literature; hence we have scholarly critics.

of leaves and fascicles

Nineteenth century America produced just two preeminent poets, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886).

Walt self-published his books and was a great self-promoter, to the point of publishing reviews in newspapers of his own books. Walt had the goods and knew he had them: Walt’s poetry was expansive and innovative, pressing particularly on the boundary of poetry and prose, and putting equal pressure on the mores of his times. His poetry (Leaves of Grass) was published in several editions. He sunk his teeth into the times, and at the time of his death, the literary world had grudgingly caught up to Walt. His Leaves inexhaustible.

Emily was not known in her lifetime. Note that her dates fit within Whitman’s. Though she wrote many poems, she published only a handful of them. Her style was eccentric and her thinking was bold. If her poems were published in the state they were written, most readers of her day would be appalled or nonplused by them. Emily took pains to preserve her poems; tied up in tidy fascicles stored in a bureau drawer. Then she asked her sister Lavinia to destroy them upon her death. That didn’t happen and Emily's poems, surviving well-meaning but intrusive editing, eventually were recognized.

In time we’ll know who were the most important poets of twentieth century America. There are contenders but will it be as few as two?

tell it

Necessarily the times had shifted poetry toward rhetoric.

surfs the edge

She was a critic who could keep up.

[Thinking of Marjorie Perloff]