The Familiar Wallpaper Stain

      Call me a crank, a cynic, a bastard or whatever epithet comes leaping first to your mind, but there's a great deal of truth, as I see it, in Joan Houlihan's extended rant-cum-diatribe-cum-manifesto on the state of American poetry. At the end of the first section (of eight, for now) she launches into a familiar statement that would send most of our current clique of poets and academics to the foams of defensive rabidity:

There’s no doubt that it is important and necessary to declare the nakedness of the contemporary American poem, to reject the notion that a poet, renowned or not, can perpetrate this continuing fraud of passing off their amateurish or unfinished prose jottings as poems. The machinery of publication must have vigilant and knowledgeable editors, unafraid to publish excellent, unknown poets or to reject inferior poems from established poets—even their friends.Before they can presume to make another year-end collection of the best contemporary American poems, they should be sure they have poems to collect.

As much as I'd like to dispute Houlihan's assessment, I can't. I simply, sadly, can't.

      It's worth reading all of the sections of this jeremiad-- though probably not all in one sitting-- including the five stages of reading a contemporary poem outlined in section eight. The stages-- the same as the stages of death-- match up with a lot of my experiences in reading poetry after the 1950s. *shrug*