An Empty Prescription Pleasure in Contemporary American Poetry

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DAV I D K I R B Y
An “Empty Prescription”: Pleasure in
Contemporary American Poetry
Who Are These People?

Take a look at the latest issue of the premier magazine of the writing field, the
glossy one most professional writers and wannabes subscribe to. Typically, the
cover features writers who are young, handsome, and diverse: all-American
guys and gals, an Asian fellow, a vaguely Russian-looking woman or two.
All are slim. What have they written, though? Not much: remember, they’re
young. But these writers are certain to change the world; the article in the
magazine assures us of that.
And the article might be right, though the world of poetry is not what
it used to be. Like every art form, in the last fifty years poetry has become
much more horizontal in nature, much less vertical. To use music as an
example, when my generation was in its twenties, fans divided their loy-
alties evenly between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones; the hippies were
true to Bob Dylan and the more traditional types to Elvis, but no matter
whom you idolized, the stars shown above you, and you gazed up at them
in awe. Within an astonishingly short period of time, however, each of the
big groups or individual artists had spawned ten thousand imitators. Before
long, there were bands to the left and right as far as one could see, stretch-
ing from horizon to horizon. And if you could play three chords on a gui-
tar, chances were that you might have belonged to one. Today, if you have
a desktop computer with a few add-ons, you can replicate the studio the
Beatles used to record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the corner
of your dorm room. Anyone can be a musician; not a good one, necessarily,
but at least you can claim the title.
The same is true – truer, really – of poetry. To the poet’s shame, the first
question he or she is usually asked after self-identifying as a poet is “Oh –
published?” There is no really good riposte to that implied insult. One might
say, “Is there any other kind?” But the fact is that it’s even easier to write
poetry than to record music, and the Internet makes it possible for everyone
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David Kirby
to publish these days. The quality of poetry is greater than it has ever been,
but as with music, the days in which Frost, Lowell, Bishop, and a few others
occupied most of the field are gone. Add to technological change the uni-
versality of higher education and especially the explosion of creative writing
programs, and the result is a rich, crowded, bewildering, and, if you look in
the right places, very rewarding profusion of poets everywhere, more than
anyone can appreciate or even catalog.
So when a friend sends me an article from The Huffington Post titled “Ten
Recent Books of Poetry You Should Read Right Now,” I’m not surprised
that I only recognize the names of two poets.1 A few days later, an editor at
the New York Times recommends five new books of poetry, and I do better,
since I can identify three poets this time. Still, that’s a score of 60 percent.
On most tests for driver’s licenses, you have to score a 70 to pass. So I – who
have published and taught poetry for more than forty years, who have writ-
ten extensively on poetry and reviewed hundreds of books of poetry, and
who attends poetry festivals and goes to dozens of readings annually and
has more poet friends than he can count – am a failure. I am a poetry expert,
and I don’t know who the poets are.
Now why is that? There are a number of reasons, beginning with the recent
population surge of poets described above. Too, poems and collections of
poems are short, for the most part; they don’t have the heft of historical stud-
ies, or of the kind of novel old-school publishers used to refer to as “a door-
stop.” Poetry collections are also printed in small runs (a thousand copies is
typical) and never achieve the profile of more visible art forms. Finally, poets
are quicker out of the starting blocks than other writers are. Their fifty-page
collections, much of which is white space, get written and published a lot
faster than the four-hundred page novels of their peers in fiction, which means
that the meadow where poets gambol and play is a lot more crowded.
But no matter who these poets are, or how ephemeral or adamantine their
reputations will be eventually, it’s safe to say that the genealogy of each can
be traced back to the middle of the twentieth century. In order to map out
the world of poetry we live in at present, let us step back a few decades.
To sketch the landscape we discover there, and then note the subsequent
changes in it, should make the perplexities of today’s crowded “poemscape”
more manageable.
A History Lesson
Let’s begin with the outbreak of what is called the War of the Anthologies,
which stemmed from the appearance of two influential poetry compilations
totally at odds with each other. The first, edited by Donald Hall, Robert
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Pack, and Louis Simpson and titled The New Poets of England and America
(New York: Meredian, 1957), solidified and furthered a conservative way
of writing whose most representative writer was W. H. Auden, that cham-
pion of good sense and plain speaking. Meanwhile, Donald Allen’s The New
American Poetry, 1945–1960 (New York: Grove Press, 1960) showcased
experimental and avant-garde poets. What is most significant about these
radically different texts is that while each pretends to speak for an entire
generation, as their titles suggest, the two do not share a single poem or poet
in common. Yet from these two books come the dominant schools of the
rest of the twentieth century.
The Hall et al. anthology embodies the best of the Academic Poets, so
called partly because the majority of them held teaching posts at colleges
and universities but mainly because of the buttoned-down formalism of
their verse. This group includes Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Eberhart, Randall
Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, and Richard Wilbur, all believers in the traditional
well-made poem in which consummate craftsmanship organized the mate-
rials of poetry according to the standards of such poet-critics as T. S. Eliot
and (say) John Crowe Ransom, whose The New Criticism (New York: New
Directions, 1941) argued that a poem is an object worthy of close scrutiny
for itself alone and not as a product of the poet’s life or times. A sub-group
of this school loosened the collar of academic attire somewhat and wrote
poems that, while still chastely disciplined on the page, often spoke of the
poets’ struggles with mental illness, divorce, and other intimate problems;
this Confessional School includes John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia
Plath, and Anne Sexton.
In contrast, the poets sanctioned by the Allen anthology were developing
their own particular idioms. The groups in Allen’s compilation include the
Black Mountain School, which challenged the Academic Poets by starting
their own anti-academe in western North Carolina. Founded as an experi-
mental school in 1933, Black Mountain College drew various avant-garde
poets to its campus over the years, including Charles Olson, Robert Duncan,
Denise Levertov, and Robert Creeley. After the dissolution of Black Mountain
College in 1957, Olson and Creeley both ended up at the State University
of New York at Buffalo, whose faculty and students have continued to be at
the forefront of poetic experimentation.
Creeley was also the link, through Allen Ginsberg, between the Black
Mountain poets and the Beats, who claimed their school’s name was a
diminutive of the word “beatific,” though clearly “beat” evokes the sense
of “exhausted” and “oppressed,” as well as the idea of musical time – espe-
cially that of the jazz that sometimes accompanied public performances of
Beat poetry. The October 7, 1955, reading in San Francisco’s Six Gallery,
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which announced the formation of the Beat School and which featured
Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Philip
Lamantia, became the standard for coffeehouse readings today. It was there
that Ginsberg first read Howl and a drunk Jack Kerouac urged the perform-
ers on as he shouted, “Yeah! Go! Go!”
Much Beat poetry consists of social statements that grew out of the polit-
ical turmoil of the time, a mode that becomes even more direct in the work
of the Protest School, which included Civil Rights poets such as Gwendolyn
Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Imamu Amiri Baraka; feminists such as
Carolyn Kizer and Adrienne Rich; and the antiwar poets, who numbered
established writers such as Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, and Robert Bly
among their ranks.
Bly has had an enormous impact through his Deep Image Poetry, an out-
growth of both the Surrealism and Imagism movements of the early twen-
tieth century. Eventually the Deep Imagists included James Dickey, Donald
Hall, Galway Kinnell, Louis Simpson, and James Wright. With its emphasis
on evocative metaphors, the Deep Image poem appeals to the anti-formalist
by appearing to make what the poem says more important than how it
says it.
The often-somber portentousness of Deep Imagery was more than
matched by the high spirits of the New York School. Frank O’Hara, James
Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery produced poems
that charmed and startled with their kaleidoscopic views of urban life and
their sheer velocity. Many of these poets were art critics as well, and the
same vividness they admired in such “action painters” as Jackson Pollock
and Willem de Kooning is mirrored in their writing.
To sum up, then, beginning in Audenesque calm with the Academic poets,
the postwar period was ruffled by the noisy gusts of the Beat and Protest
poets and the mile-high thunderheads of the Deep Imagists. As the winds
howled and the drops fell, the poetic weathervane began to spin wildly in
every possible direction, sort of like the country itself.
The History Lesson Simplified

Not all observers enjoyed the tumult. Following the War of the Anthologies,
the second shock that jarred the poetry world was the assault on poetry itself
that began in 1983 with the publication of Donald Hall’s essay “Poetry and
Ambition.”2 That assault continued to rumble for more than a decade with
the appearance of such essays and books as Joseph Epstein’s “Who Killed
Poetry?” (1988), Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?” (1991), Jonathan
Holden’s The Fate of American Poetry (1991), and Vernon Shetley’s After
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the Death of Poetry (1993).3 The most negative of these assessments not
only addressed the marginalization of poetry but also attributed its decline
largely to poets’ self-indulgence.
As if to prove the naysayers right, the Language Poets, who are frankly
hostile to the first-person epiphanies of mainstream poetry, sought to subvert
what they call “official verse culture” by taking modernist free-association
techniques to new extremes. Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Ron
Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, and others juxtaposed ideas and
images in a manner seemingly intended to baffle the uninitiated. On the
other hand, New Formalists such as Dana Gioia, Marilyn Hacker, and
Wyatt Prunty gave new life to the accentual-syllabic tradition of previous
centuries. Meanwhile, such Prose Poets as Stuart Dybek and Russell Edson
built on a century-old French tradition to produce playful, often surreal
poems in paragraph form.
For sheer showmanship, though, no group outdid the Performance Poets,
whose work is mainly intended for live audiences, though it is gathered
in such collections as Burning Down the House: Selected Poems from the
Nuyorican Poets Café National Poetry Slam Champions (Berkeley: Soft
Skull Press, 2003).4 Certainly poets such as David Antin, Anne Waldman,
Paul Violi, Jayne Cortez, and John Giorno have a significant presence in
print even though they are known for their performances as well, and they
are collected with other similar poets in more inclusive anthologies such
as June King and Larry Smith’s Coffeehouse Poetry Anthology (Huron,
Ohio: Bottom Dog Press, 1996), and Charles Harper Webb’s Stand-Up
Poetry, issued first in 1994 (Long Beach: University Press), and re-issued in
an expanded edition in 2002 (Iowa City: Iowa University Press).
This brief catalog of the many types of poems that have appeared and con-
tinue to appear in recent years, while far from comprehensive, is intended
to carve out of the crowded poetry world a visible landscape with a few
skyscrapers here and there, some other buildings to the left and right, and
enough signposts to make the scene navigable. When all’s said and done,
though, there are really just three types of poems being written today.
First, there’s the poem that approves of and transmits the received wis-
dom of our culture. This can be formalist poetry that adopts the rhymes
and rhythms that poets have used for centuries; it can also be a free-verse
poem that passes on traditional homilies (nature is good, war is bad, and
so on). Or it can be a combination of traditional form and traditional sen-
timent. Much of this work is produced by writers, editors, and publishers
who dominate the often lackluster poetry list at major trade presses. Many
of these people aspire to be cultural transmitters and not much more; an
uninformed reader who encounters their work in a magazine can say, “Oh,
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well, it’s twenty lines long and talks about nature and approves of it, kind of,
so I guess it’s a poem, maybe even a good one – who am I to judge?”
Second is the kind of poem that declares war on the poem that embraces
the dominant culture. It will be an example of postmodernist and possibly
Language poetry, as described earlier, work whose adherents sometimes call
the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school, fracturing the word and dramatizing the
unconventional use to which it’s put. There’s often a Marxist tinge here,
real or hidden, deliberate or accidental, because subversion’s the idea, not
support, as in the first type of poem. (No doubt the late English poet Adrian
Mitchell was thinking of this type of poetry when he said, “Most people
ignore poetry because most poetry ignores most people.”5)
Taken together, these two poem types include the majority of poems writ-
ten today; together, they explain why I frequently get emails from read-
ers like the one who said recently: “I am a highly educated person and a
passionate lover of great music and art, and a sculptor myself. But except
for Shakespeare and other verse dramatists, I’ve always had trouble with
poetry.” It’s why, praising the writing of Frederick Seidel, Michael Robbins
writes that “the clearest sign that American poetry is in disarray is that the
best poet we have is Frederick Seidel. I say this approvingly, for one effect
of reading Seidel closely is to realize just how sodden the rest of the poetic
field is. In one row we find mealy-mouthed banalities dressed up as wisdom
literature; in the next, the stale avant-gardism of half-wits. No wonder no
one reads the stuff.”6
There you have it. Two-thirds of the poetry written today is not only
not very interesting to many people but also inimical to its own cause,
since it baffles and repels would-be fans. But there is a third type that more
than repays the reader’s interest; whenever I hear or read someone gushing
about a poet the way my youthful peers raved about John Lennon or Keith
Richards, I know it’s going to be someone who writes what might be called
three-dimensional poetry. (Note on terminology: I use “three-dimensional”
and “fully-dimensional” in this essay partly for variety but mainly because
I find it deforming and constrictive to speak of a single school of poetry
or, for that matter, to rely too much on terminology of any kind. In the
words of Paul Valéry, “it is impossible to think seriously with such words
as Classicism, Romanticism, Humanism, Realism, and the other -isms. You
can’t get drunk or quench your thirst with the labels on bottles.”7)
Three-dimensional poetry had different names earlier. There was the
Maverick Poetry gathered in an anthology by Steve Kowit, a group includ-
ing Frank Bidart, Stephen Dobyns, Edward Field, Allen Ginsberg, Dorianne
Laux, Sharon Olds, and Gary Snyder. These poets, neither Beat nor aca-
demic, write in a “contemporary Whitmanesque idiom,” as Kowit notes in
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his introduction; theirs is “an heroic and colloquial poetry: large-spirited,

socially-engaged, heart-centered and defiantly wacky,” work not “tepid,
mannered and opaque.”8 For her part, Nancy Pearl singles out the
Kitchen-Sink Poets, a “gang of five” made up of Billy Collins, Campbell
McGrath, James Tate, Dean Young, and myself, who share a “conver-
sational, seemingly stream-of-consciousness approach to their subjects
(which are wacky in their own right) and the ability to make readers feel
that they’re about to become involved in often complicated and convoluted
stories.”9
The most notable predecessor to three-dimensional poetry, though, is the
“Stand Up Poetry” collected by Charles Webb in the 1990 and 2002 anthol-
ogies noted above, and practiced by many of the poets named above, as well
as by Kim Addonizio, Catherine Bowman, Maxine Chernoff, Jim Daniels,
Stephen Dunn, Russell Edson, Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, Jack Myers,
Maureen Seaton, Maura Stanton, Judith Taylor, Natasha Trethewey, and
Al Zolynas. Webb uses “Stand Up” in the double sense of both “Stand Up
comic” and “Stand Up guy” and then lists the qualities of the “Stand Up”
poem: humor, performability, clarity, natural language, flights of fancy, a
strong individual voice, emotional punch, a close relationship to fiction, use
of urban and popular culture, and wide-open subject matter. And whether
they acknowledge it or not, most of the essayists and anthologists I’ve just
surveyed owe much to the idea of “leaping poetry,” a term introduced by
Robert Bly in a 1975 book of the same name (Boston: Beacon Hill Press);
he has in mind the wild association and surrealism of such poets as Neruda,
Lorca, and Vallejo.
“A Wildly Enthusiastic Speech”

By now, the reader with a sense of the poetic tradition will be saying,
“What’s so new about all of this? Poets have been writing this way for
years!” True: three-dimensional poetry is as old as poetry itself. Hasn’t some
form of it been written, not for years, but for millennia? Make it new, said
Ezra Pound, and it’s hard to be an artist of any kind without telling your-
self that you’re going to do something absolutely unprecedented; the bane
of every writing instructor is the sophomore who announces the intention
to write “experimental poetry” this term. But the best kind of poetry being
written today is, in a sense, the oldest.
Let’s take a minute to look at that noble lineage. Long before there was
Maverick or Kitchen-Sink or Stand Up Poetry or Leaping Poetry, there
was dithyrambic poetry; the word “dithyramb,” which originally meant “a
frenzied, impassioned choric hymn and dance of ancient Greece in honor
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of Dionysus,” has come to mean “a wildly enthusiastic speech or piece of

writing” or “poem written in a wild irregular strain.”10 Neither lyric nor
narrative, the dithyramb embraces both the emotionalism of the former
and the sprawl of the latter. The greatest poetry in the dithyrambic tradi-
tion may be found in Euripides’ Bacchae, and the six poetical books of the
Old Testament – Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and
Lamentations – stand as a fine example from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
It may be no accident that religion and dithyrambs seem closely tied, since
dialogue is at the heart of confrontations between mortals and their maker.
All journeys to the underworld are dithyrambic in one way or another, as
seen in The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and
The Vision of Tundal, a twelfth-century account of an Irish knight’s trip
through Hell.
The master traveler to dark realms is, of course, Dante. Down to hell he
goes, not alone but accompanied by his master, the Virgil who guided him
as Dante guides us, and there he sees every manner of creature: bad popes,
virtuous pagans, heroes from legend such as Odysseus, three-headed
dogs, harpies, centaurs, imps and demons and Satan himself, his beloved
Beatrice, angel-headed hipsters, saintly motorcyclists. Yes, it is Ginsberg’s
Howl that is paraphrased at the end of this list, but that is because these
two poets would have much to say to each other: they would disagree
violently on many matters, and Dante would not have hesitated to put
Ginsberg in Circle Seven of his Inferno with the other sodomites, but they
would have conversed brilliantly because each had a large mind and loved
learning.
In the years between Dante Alighieri and Allen Ginsberg, many “wildly
enthusiastic speeches or pieces of writing” have been set down on paper,
notably those that occur in the plays of Shakespeare, a master at mixing
levels of rhetoric, speaking to both courtiers and groundlings alike when
he uses a polysyllabic Latinate word and then “translates” it with a crisp
Anglo-Saxon synonym, as in Twelfth Night, when Sir Andrew Aguecheek
listens to a song sung by Feste and pronounces his voice “mellifluous” and
then, in his next line, “sweet” (2.ii). Shakespeare was derided for his lack of
education by such jealous contemporaries as Robert Greene, who sneered
that he was “Maister of Artes in Neither University” (this enmity didn’t
bother Shakespeare, who cheerfully filched the plot of The Winter’s Tale
from Greene’s Pandosto: The Triumph of Time). But he possessed a tool
greater by far than any university could give him; he had at his command
what Simon Winchester calls the “foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility”
of the English language.11 As with much else in contemporary poetry, a huge
debt is owed to Shakespeare for using so many now-familiar words for
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the first time, as when, for example, he added the Norman French -able to
Old English laugh to allow Salanio in The Merchant of Venice to declare a
jest laughable. And the rich stew of English that is compounded largely of
blunt Anglo-Saxon and sleek Norman French has been further thickened by
words from dozens of other languages, including Malay (bamboo, ketchup),
Turkish (kiosk, sofa), Algonquian (raccoon, wampum), and Dutch (cruise,
knapsack).
Not every ayatollah (Persian) or mullah (Urdu) is likely to endorse
Winchester’s chest-thumping description of English as “so vast, so sprawl-
ing, so wonderfully unwieldy, so subtle, and now in its never-ending fullness
so undeniably magnificent” (11). Yet no one can deny the language’s utility
to such word-drunk poets as William Blake, whose “Marriage of Heaven
and Hell” blends the chatter of devils and angels with the screeches of cop-
ulating, cannibalistic monkeys as well as the speaker’s mid-journey refuta-
tions of Aristotle and Swedenborg.
After Blake, the greatest dithyrambic poets of modern times are Whitman
and Ginsberg; H. D. and Anne Waldman are their children, as are, in
many ways, such performance artist as Tracie Morris and the poets of the
Nuyorican Café. And while this is not the place to explore broader applica-
tions, surely Nietzsche and Melville wrote dithyrambic prose, work rich in
Bakhtinian heteroglossia; there is much in their work of the “carnivalesque”
and “poly-vocal,” to use terms borrowed from Continental criticism, or
the “riotous” and “many-voiced,” as we Anglophones might say. In fact, as
evidenced by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Camille Paglia themselves,
there is even a dithyrambic criticism – indeed, much, and perhaps most, of
post-structuralist theory might be called dithyrambic.12
Wit and Story
Throughout the long history of the kind of writing that is described here, one
consistent note is that of laughter, a sound heard too seldom in contempo-
rary poetry. That, according to Billy Collins, is “the fault of the Romantics,
who eliminated humor from poetry. Shakespeare’s hilarious, Chaucer’s
hilarious. [Then] the Romantics killed off humor, and they also eliminated
sex, things which were replaced by landscape. I thought that was a pretty
bad trade-off, so I’m trying to write about humor and landscape, and occa-
sionally sex.”13 What Collins refers to as comedy or humor might best be
described as wit, that is, not pie-in-the-face slapstick but mental sharpness
or a keen intelligence – cleverness, in a word.
Note that Collins is saying that this quality may appear in poetry, not that
it must. The same is at least as true and probably truer about the element of
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narrative. Psychologist Drew Weston says that we are hard-wired to seek,

listen to, evaluate, and accept or reject stories:
The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories
our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could
be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they
hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure,
with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought.
Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of
literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans
would know how to read and write.
Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and val-
ues. Today we seek movies, novels and “news stories” that put the events of
the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable.
Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheis-
tic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has
shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against
their legal adversaries who just lay out “the facts of the case.”14
Later in his essay, Weston refers to “the repetition and evocative imag-
ery that our brains require to make an idea, particularly a paradoxical
one, ‘stick.’ ” Surely that description applies to contemporary poetry more
than any other art form. Yet by its very nature, contemporary poetry offers
nuance where none seems to exist and even opposes what it has proposed
but a minute before. One of our best critics, Frank Kermode, wrote of how
we love both the flow of story and that which impedes it. His New York
Times obituary, written by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, notes that,
despite the variety of his work, Kermode almost invariably tied what he
wrote to a recurring central concern of his: what the English literary critic
Lawrence S. Rainey, writing in the London newspaper The Independent,
described as “the conflict between the human need to make sense of the
world through storytelling and our propensity to seek meaning in details
(linguistic, symbolic, anecdotal) that are indifferent, even hostile, to story.”
Thus, as Lehmann-Haupt suggests, “in his best-known book, The Sense of
an Ending, Mr. Kermode analyzed the fictions we invent to bring meaning
and order to a world that often seems chaotic and hurtling toward catas-
trophe. Between the tick and the tock of the clock, as he put it, we want
a connection as well as the suggestion of an arrow shooting eschatologi-
cally toward some final judgment. Yet, as he pointed out in The Genesis of
Secrecy, narratives, just like life, can include details that defy interpretation,
like the Man in the Mackintosh who keeps showing up in Joyce’s Ulysses or
the young man who runs away naked when Jesus is arrested at Gethsemane
in the Gospel according to Mark.”15
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A Philosophy of Composition
Here’s a list of three-dimensional poetry’s most eye-catching features. Not
every good poem is going to have the same characteristics. But a philosophy
of composition for good poets and their readers would call for a poem that
features the voice of a speaker but other voices as well, at least by implication
(the speech of an actor standing alone in a pencil spotlight is made richer by
the eloquence of the players who are only temporarily silent); a poem that
focuses on the present moment but also conveys an awareness of a larger
world of time and space (a moment is most resonant when it appears to have
a past and a future as well as dimensions on every side); a poem that deals in
comedy but acknowledges tragedy, and the other way around (the funniest
poem will have a dark heart, just as a good sad poem will seem to have been
written by a poet capable of laughter); a poem that tells a story, even though
it is not a narrative poem on its surface (we are hard-wired to draw stories
from, and impose them on, our lives, and yet a good poem contains elements
that are indifferent, even hostile to story); and a poem that works on stage
will work on the page as well (the best poems are a delight to hear aloud but
will also grow richer during a silent rereading).
It’s no accident that these characteristics of three-dimensional poetry are
expressed as paired opposites, for the fully dimensional poem is willing to
include or at least consider everything. You can open any magazine and find
a wise poem (in the Longfellow tradition, say). Or an intellectually chal-
lenging one (Rilke). Or a comic poem, like one by Dorothy Parker or Ogden
Nash. But an Emily Dickinson poem has all three of these elements.
And so do the poems of hundreds of poets writing today. A number of
these have already been named earlier in this essay. Recently, when I asked
forty young writers who intend to make poetry their lives – that is, the
advanced undergraduates and graduate students in my writing workshops –
what contemporary poets they considered their relatives, they listed Josh
Bell, Jason Bredle, Louise Glück, Tony Hoagland, Philip Levine, Adrian
Matejka, Sharon Olds, Carl Phillips, Lawrence Raab, Charles Simic, and
Adam Zagajewski. These are all three-dimensional poets. Off the top of
my head, I’d add to my students’ list Sherman Alexie, Michael Blumenthal,
Matthew Dickman, Amy Gerstler, Terrance Hayes, John Koethe, and Lucia
Perillo. And next term I plan to teach a handful of poets who may not be
as well-known yet as some of these gray-hairs who write fully dimensional
poems: George Bilgere, Frannie Lindsay, and Travis Mossotti. These three
poets are a long way from collecting Social Security, yet they’re good writers
already because they write very well in a way that, all things considered, is
as old as Homer.
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But to return to the never-heard-of-them theme with which this essay

begins, the first step on the road to madness would be to try to name all the
good poets writing today. What I have given you here is an “empty prescrip-
tion.” I’m not telling you what poets to like; I’m just telling you why you like
them – they’re fully dimensional.
N OT E S
Some of the facts and opinions that appear here have been presented earlier in pieces
written by me, alone or with others, for various newspapers, magazines, and books.
These original sources are cited in the notes, as are the books and essays by others
that I use to give my arguments a greater heft than they would have on their own.
Unmentioned because they are too numerous to mention are the hundreds of stu-
dents and dozens of colleagues who have shaped my view of poetry, though I will
thank here the poet Barbara Hamby, an award-winning teacher and writer as well
as my wife and someone who lives every day, in the words of Russian writer Varlam
Shalamov, not for poetry but through poetry.
1 Seth Abramson, “Ten Recent Books of Poetry You Should Read Right Now,”
Huffington Post (August 25, 2011).
2 Kenyon Review, n.s., 5.4 (1983): 90–104.
3 Epstein, “Who Killed Poetry?,” Commentary 86.2 (August 1988): 13–20; Gioia,
“Can Poetry Matter?,” Atlantic 267.5 (May 1991), later reprinted as the title
essay to a collection of Gioia’s essays (Saint Paul: Greywolf, 1992); Holden,
The Fate of American Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991);
Shetley, After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
4 Edited jointly by Roger Bonair-Agard, Stephen Colman, Guy LeCharles
Gonzalez, Alix Olson, and Lynne Procope.
5 The remark dates to 1964 but has been often quoted since, whether by Mitchell
himself (who died in 2008) or by others.
6 See “Frederick Seidel’s Sordid Glory,” Chicago Tribune (September 5, 2012).
7 The remark (from a notebook dated 1931–1932) is preserved in volume two of
Judith Robinson’s edition of Valéry’s Cahiers (Paris, 1974): 1120–1121.
8 Kowit, The Maverick Poets: An Anthology (Santee, CA: Gorilla Press, 1988).
9 See Pearl’s Book Lust (Seattle: Sasquatch Press, 2003).
10 These and other definitions are aggregated at: https://www.wordnik.com/words/
dithyramb.
11 See Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English
Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 29. Subsequent refer-
ences to this book are given parenthetically by page number.
12 See, for example, Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn (New York: Pantheon, 2005).
13 Collins made the remarks in a July 8, 2001, interview with Malcolm Jones (of
Newsweek) on the occasion of his appointment as Poet Laureate Consultant in
Poetry to the Library of Congress.
14 See Weston, “What Happened to Obama?,” New York Times (August 6, 2011).
15 See Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Frank Kermode, a Critic Who Wrote With
Style, Is Dead at 90,” New York Times (August 18, 2010). The Sense of an
436
Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction appeared in 1968 (New York: Oxford

University Press), The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative in
1979 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
F U RT H E R R E A DI NG
Hamby, Barbara and David Kirby, Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, Death,
Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2010).
“The Ultra-Talk Issue,” TriQuarterly 128 (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 2007).
Howard, Richard, Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United
States Since 1950 (New York: Atheneum, 1971).
Kirby, David, Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, the Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music,
St. Teresa of Avila and 17 Other Colossal Topics of Conversation (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2007).
“Why, Poetry?” The American Interest 2 (July/August 2007): 83–91.
Orr, David, Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry (New
York: Harper, 2011).
Ruefle, Mary, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Seattle and New
York: Wave Books, 2012).
437

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31

Who Are These People?

The History Lesson Simplified

his introduction; theirs is “an heroic and colloquial poetry: large-spirited,

“A Wildly Enthusiastic Speech”

of Dionysus,” has come to mean “a wildly enthusiastic speech or piece of

narrative. Psychologist Drew Weston says that we are hard-wired to seek,

But to return to the never-heard-of-them theme with which this essay

Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction appeared in 1968 (New York: Oxford

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