Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: The Poetry of Al Young Book

Consider this passage, chosen at random, from "Vocations":
The problem is that trying to make the recalcitrant segments of the dream cohere is distracting;
my mind is always half following what happens while it's half involved in this other procedure.
Also, my ideas about meaning keep sending directives into the dream's already crowded circuits,
and soon I'm hard put keeping the whole intractable mechanism moving along smoothly enough to allow me to believe that at least I'm making a not overly wasteful use of my raw materials.
That's not poetry--it's just prose with line breaks.

Then there's this, from "Helen":
She'd known how much he needed beauty, how much presumed it as an element of desire.
The loveliness that illuminated her had been an engrossing narrative his spirit fed on;
he entered it and flowed out again renewed for having touched within and been a part of it.
In his meditation on her, he'd become more complicated, fuller, more essential to himself.

It was to her beauty he'd made love at first, she was there within its captivating light,
but almost secondary, as though she was just the instance of some overwhelming generality.
She herself was shy before it; she, too, as unassumingly as possible was testing the abstraction
which had taken both of them into its sphere, rendering both subservient to its serene enormity.

As their experience grew franker, and as she learned to move more confidently towards her core,
became more overtly active in elaborating needs and urges, her beauty came first....

She'd been grateful to him, and that gratitude became in turn another fact of his desire....

How childishly frightened he'd always been by beauty's absence, by its destruction or perversity.
For so long he let himself be tormented by what he knew would have to happen to her.
He'd seem the old women as their thighs and buttocks bloated, then withered and went slack,
as their dugs dried, skin dried, legs were sausaged with the veins that rose like kelp.

He'd tried to overcome himself, to feel compassion towards them, but, perhaps because of her,
he'd felt only a shameful irritation, as though they were colluding in their loss.
Whether they accepted what befell them, even, he would think, gladly acquiescing to it,
or fought it, with all their sad and valiant unguents, dyes, and ointments, was equally degrading.

His own body had long ago become a ruin, but beauty had never been a part of what he was.
What would happen to his lust, and to his love, when time came to savage and despoil her?
It goes on and on, for eight pages, and it's like a caricature of pompous misogyny, male hypocrisy, and the male gaze.
He could only get it up for super hot chicks? Wow! How enlightened of him! What a nobility of spirit that reveals!
Fucking a really hot chick made him "more complicated, fuller, more essential to himself"? That's really good to know! I bet all the other dudebros in his frat totally respected him more for banging a really hot chick too!
He made love to her beauty, and SHE was secondary? Oh really! I guess that's what true love really is!
He hated and resented ugly old women, and worried that he couldn't still love this woman when she got old and ugly? Well, I guess we know now why some cultures burn widows on their dead husbands' funeral pyres or expect them to commit suicide the moment their husband dies: because women's value is predicated entirely on their fuckability, and if no one is around to fuck them, they need to just die.
He'd never cared about his looks, but so what? Why should he? He's a guy and didn't need to be attractive; he needed to be attracted? You don't say.
Also, the word "enormity" doesn't refer simply to size. It means "the great or extreme scale, seriousness, or extent of something perceived as bad or morally wrong." A better choice would have been "magnificence" or one of its synonyms.

As I read this book, noting how pleased and impressed it is with itself, I kept thinking of a bit of advice sometimes given to women: "Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man." Only a white guy could win accolades for writing this badly. This collection is the mediocre expression of mediocre ideas, and it's valued and praised by people who mistake abstraction for profundity.