Lest I sound like one of those cretins that populate the Buffalo Poetics List or Foetry, I must emphasize that, in a sense, she represents the kind of person I most would have liked to be, once.
She is the perfect representative of a prelapsarian view of poetry, such that I wonder if my hostility originates in a sense of betrayal -- that someone who could love Donne and Shakespeare's Sonnets could edit such a snore as the Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry.
Like her, my gut reactions to poems are formalist and aesthetic. The problem with her is that she doesn't see issues of attitude, personality, and yes ideology as part of the formal apparatus. I am so totally a fallen poet! I guess I must be...the snake in the garden.
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Last night I dreamed of a response to these last two posts, and woke up laughing. Of course I don't remember it now, but here's something I read this morning--
Poetry is like food, remarked one of my first teachers, freeing me to dislike Rocky Mountain oysters and Robert Lowell. The menu is vast, the list of things I don't want in my mouth relatively short. (C.D. Wright, from her essay collection "Cooling Time")
What would a garden be without snakes?
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