It's the last day of National Poetry Month, or, as Christian Wiman calls it in his editorial in the April Poetry, National Defibrillation Month. With all the hoopla here and at New Poetry over the essays on Keillor's Good Poems by Gioia and Kleinzahler, it's a little surprising that, even though it's not online, no one has done more than ask what Wiman had to say introducing them. Well, I'm happy to answer anyway: not much. It's all in one paragraph. He says Keillor has some ideas about how at least some kinds of poetry might be presented to our overheated culture, and Gioia and Kleinzahler have "very different responses" to Keillor's ideas.
The bulk of the essay is about the dire condition of both poetry and our culture at large, about whether poetry can survive in the image-ridden, short-attention span mess television has made of our world. It's a version of the argument recently made by Camille Paglia, and supposedly leant some scientific rigor by this study, in which five questions on a survey diagnose attention problems. I'm not impressed by any of it.
But I'm very impressed by the poetry in this issue, enough so that I subscribed again. There's not enough of it—only 39 pages—but there's 5 new poems from A. E. Stallings, one of my heroes, and 2 from Vicki Hearne, who I didn't know wrote poetry but whose Adam's Task is wonderful. Several poets new to me. A review of Joe LeSeuer's Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara that makes me want to bring my Collected up from North Carolina. Lots of metrical poems, maybe half the issue.
And tomorrow you get new metrical poetry from me.
9:26:39 PM 
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