15 April 2004. Yesterday, David Graham spoke at New-Poetry, an Internet Discussion Group I participate in to the dismay of most of the other participants, of an essay by William Matthews called "Dull Subjects"--which, according to Matthews, are "subjects (that) we (poets) have failed." David went on to say, "I think there are a number of reasons for the persistence of this particular chimera, the Dull Subject: one is that there is always a good supply of dull readers."

To which I replied this morning, "A larger one is that so many poets are incapable of adventurousness. So their use of the subject matter in fashion tends to make sensitive readers assume, sometimes unfairly but most of the time accurately, that they will be as uninventive in their choice of form, diction, imagery and poetic technique as they are in their choice of subject matter.

"A nearly as important reason for scorn of the kind of poems David mentions is that there are so many poems that are nothing but their subject matter, plus their poets' absolutely predictable sensitive insights. When one hears, for example, that some Iowa Workshop poet has written a poem about his dead grandmother, we really don't have to learn anything more about his poem to be confident that it won't prove exciting reading for" those most sensitive to poetry.

I said that "the Ashbury to Wilbur crowd" might find it exciting, but I realized later that I only put that in because I like slamming those folks (who are those who are complacently confident of the breadth of their appreciation for poetry because they like the poetry of both Ashbery and Wilbur). "Finally," I continued, "no matter how good a new poem about some currently overdone subject is, there has to be a time when ANY poem on that subject is going to bore one. It is possible to overdo something. Same with overdone forms and techniques. Rhyme didn't finally lose out to free verse (albeit not necessarily forever) because there was something wrong with it, but (in good part) because it was over-used and people understandably tired of it."br>

"My favorite subject matter, by the way, is poetry. An in-progress sequence in which I use "poetry" as the dividend in long division examples and everything from 'words' to 'science' and 'madness' as divisors is already in the top ten of those of my own works I prize the most, so I would be the last to scorn a poem only for its subject matter."

The thread that had inspired David to make his post had been about some New Yorker poet's poem about his job in a Brooks Brothers store. So I ended my post with a reference to that poem, which I haven't read but thought was probably "fairly okay," and some of the boilerplate I use at New-Poetry: "My continuing gripe is that such poems are so close to being the only kind of poems the Poetry Establishment will publish, discuss, teach and give blue ribbons to."

(That I continue to make this gripe has caused Barry Spacks to satirize me as complaining about a Snodgrass poem for not being BURSTNORM--"Jus' DOWDY IOWA or something, oh woe, nothing NEW, like not done in colored crayons or urine-stains, so what's the point?" This is fairly typical of my reception at New-Poetry.