It's not often the New York Times runs two simultaneous reviews of poetry, but it happened yesterday: Dana Goodyear reviewed Jane Kenyon's of Collected Poems, and Kay Ryan, one of my favorite poets, reviewed Dan Chiasson's Natural History. Before I read the review, I was more interested in it than in Chiasson's poetry, and it's the same afterward. I'm not sure what I think about that, and I'm not really sure what Ryan thinks about Chiasson. Hannah Craig seems to have had a more definite reaction, but then she already knows the poetry, and all I know is that I think his opinions on other people's poetry are suspect. Who's the pot? Who's the kettle?
I am almost comforted by Auden: "Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered." But then all I have is a homemade chap.
Ryan wrote a hilarious piece for Poetry (where Chiasson reviews) a few months ago on her visit to the AWP, and I tried to find it online and failed miserably, though the search was not fruitless: here's a wonderful interview with another favorite poet of mine, Samuel Menashe, whose poems are no bigger and contain no less than Ryan's.
7:25:16 PM 
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