14 May 2004. A few days ago, I posted a brief excerpt of an essay I'm trying to write on contemporary American poetry that includes discussion of two reviews of Garrison Keillor's poetry anthology, Good Poems, that were in the last issue of Poetry. The reviews were by Dana Gioia and August Kleinzahler. My excerpt was about Gioia's. Today, I'm posting some of my comments on Kleinzahler's review--more because I am too worn-out and null to post anything better than because my comments are worth posting.

AUGUST KLEINZAHLER ON GARRISON KEILLOR'S GOOD POEMS.

Kleinzahler thinks less of Keillor than Gioia does, but says very little about his anthology. He spends a whole page simply insulting Keillor. Only in his fourth paragraph does he reveal what specifically is wrong with Keillor: he makes no demands on his audiences. Kleinzahler fails to say what kind of demands he would like made--except implicitly by describing what he takes to be the good example of Albert Ayler, "whose mission is to explode conventions and expectations"--as Kleinzahler's solitextual poetry rarely does, so far as I can see. After Kleinzahler is through, for a while, assailing Keillor, he tells us that William Carlos Williams is wrong to tell us that "It is difficult / to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there." "Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not." He is, of course, wrong--art is as necessary for human life as food.

Kleinzahler shows a tad more "critical acumen" than Gioia when he finally gets around to what's in the anthology, to wit: "prose arbitrarily broken into lines masquerading as poetry. The typical Keillor selection tends to be anecdotal, wistful: more often than not a middle-aged creative writing instructor catching a whiff of mortality in the countryside- watching the geese head south, geting lost in the woood, this sort of thing." Sounds accurate to me: Iowa Plainlays. Kleinzahler seems mostly against Keillor's mood, his liking "politely depressed poems" rather than poems of rage like the "brilliant" Roy Fisher's. So it is with visible commentators on American poetry, this concern with what poets are saying instead of what they are doing.

Not acting as a critic, Kleinzahler never shows by example what is wrong with the poems in the anthology, just as Gioia failed to show what was good about them. Kleinzahler faults Keillor for boosterism but his anti-boosterism is just as stupid. Only a stasguard could have gotten anything out of what either of the two reviewers had to say about the Keillor anthology. It would have been nice if Poetry had picked two people able to write usefully about contemporary American poetry but the days when Poetry was a responsible poetry magazine are long gone. Unfortunately, no other publication with a circulation above a few thousand is doing any better in this country.