Congratulations and thanks to Jonathan Mayhew at Bemsha Swing last week: Jonathan pointed the way to a fine article by Dana Gioia on the reasons for Elizabeth Bishop's current reputation, received a research grant that will let him travel this summer, learned that he'd had an article accepted at Diacritics, and realized that in important ways it's hard to tell W. S. Merwin's poetry from Rod McKuen's. I'm not being snarky about that last item. It's an important insight into the dominant free verse mode of poetry in the second half of the last century, one I share, and one of the principal reasons I turned to metrical poetry.
I don't think it would be difficult to accurately assign whole poems to either Merwin or McKuen. McKuen's are never as strange nor as disturbing as Merwin's often are, and even Merwin's least adventurous poems usually display more comfort with uncertainty and doubt than one can find in all McKuen's together. But those aren't necessarily value judgments, and line by line, there's damned little to distinguish them. There's no difference in their technique: I'm not sure technique is ever a serious consideration in any of their poems, or, indeed, in the vast majority of the free verse wr itten in the last 50 years. I think that's behind much of the resentment so-called serious poets felt toward's McKuen's popular success.
What besides sensibility or personality or voice or take-your-pick of vague non-explanations distinguishes the technical choices—the line breaks, the kinds of sonic effects, the structure—of Sharon Olds' poetry from Alan Shapiro's? What can a young poet learn about making poems from reading Franz Wright or Louise Glück or Billie Collins?
You can't learn genius or personality or inspiration. But you can learn competence if you acknowledge there are practical skills to be learned. You can, for instance, learn rhetoric and meter. And then you can work hard so that should the muse come calling you won't be tongue-tied.
9:22:47 PM 
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