Versed Book

I don't despise it, but it does make me hate poetry. Everyone around me hates poetry, and I'm always defending it. Then this comes along, winning both Pulitzer and NBCC Award, and I want to go have a beer with dockworkers (I don't know any dockworkers) and talk about sports.

I would describe it as minimalist non sequitur--fragments of everyday speech, keywords from critical theory and contemporary science, pop culture winks, ordinary (as if overheard) phrases in quotation marks, and some spillage of private, unreachable stuff from the author's personal life, all of it presented in little bundles that look deceptively (enticingly) Asian from a distance, three bundles or so to a poem. The author is obviously intelligent, and the book jacket mentions her "signature wit," though I think we may have to take that in a special, academic sense that has nothing to do with funny.

Somewhere along the way poetry became a mode of communication in which the desire to communicate, found to be embarrassing, was eradicated. If Modernism was that explosion, this is its long-settled dust. I'm actually depressed tonight picturing a poetry establishment that looks up long enough from grading papers to acclaim this book so unanimously and throw big prizes at it. I feel like a Martian. A dockworker Martian with a six pack and a big telescope.

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[Next day.:] Feeling better, thanks. I recommend "Previews" on p. 88.