The latest Poetry is a gas. I like most of the poetry, some of it a lot: Tim Murphy's "Mortal Stakes," Sherod Santo's sonnet translation "Star-Crossed Bride" of two thousand year-old poem by Antiphanes, Neisha Tweed's "Skin Teeth," Barbara De Cesare's "O, Anna," Geoffrey Brock's "Forever Street," and the way his sonnet and that of Jill Alexander Essbaum somehow converge in their last lines. The prose is good, too. Donald Hall's remembrance of Thom Gunn is truly moving, Danielle Chapman convinced me to order Samuel Menashe's The Niche Narrows, and one line in David Orr's set of quick reviews had me laughing all weekend: "This is what John Ashberry's poetry might sound like if it were translated into Polish and then translated back into English by someone who was trying, simultaneously, to peel carrots."
But it was Adam Kirsch's review of Twentieth Century American Poetics and of Classic Writings on Poetry (together with a comment a few posts ago from Nada Gordon) which made me realize I was in mortal peril of fuddy-duddy-dom. Here's the relevant passage from Kirsch:
… the American generation that came after modernism could most accurately be called the Authentic poets. Not to falsify one's personal experience, even or especially in the name of art, is their great principle. The poem is only a means of synchronizing the reader's experience with the writer's: "The poem," O'Hara writes, "is at last between two persons instead of two pages."
It is in the pursuit of such authenticity that these poets made the great refusal about which the romantics only speculated: the immolation of meter, rhyme, and form. … Here is the aggressive egotism of authenticity, … [and] here too is its puritanism, its hostility to pleasure. For meter, like all artifice, finds pleasure in the gratuitous, and the gratuitous is the enemy of accuracy.
I'd have been happier with "the authentic" or even "earnestness" than I am with "accuracy" in that last sentence, but what the hell. Tim Steele has more in common with flarf than either side imagines. His handbook on (primarily iambic) meter is called All the Fun's In How You Say a Thing.
Donald Justice died last Friday. His essay "Meters and Memory" is perhaps my favorite piece in Twentieth Century American Poetics, and it's certainly the sanest and most humane.
Vague Memory from Childhood
It was the end of day—
Vast far clouds
In the zenith darkening
At the end of day.
The voices of my aunts
Sounded through an open window.
Bird-speech cantankerous in a high tree mingled
With the voices of my aunts.
I was playing alone,
Caught up in a sort of dream,
With sticks and twigs pretending,
Playing there alone
In the dust.
And a lamp came on indoors,
Printing a frail gold geometry
On the dust.
Shadows came engulfing
The great charmed sycamore.
It was the end of day.
Shadows came engulfing.
Donald Justice, 1925-2004
8:29:20 PM 
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