18 May 2004. I'm less worn-out than I was yesterday even though, for some reason, I only got about three hours of sleep last night. Nonetheless, this will be a short entry--a paragraph or two about the David Orr review of Carl Dennis that I wrote about in yesterday's blog.

Orr's first paragraph is a good introduction to Dennis's New and Selected Poems. It gives the reader a little background about Dennis, such as his having won a Pulitzer Prize, and an impression of what kind of poet he is: half an academic who might bring up Epicurus, but half an ordinary guy whom "it's easy to imagine . . . sizing up window treatments at Home Depot."

He reveals his out-of-itness quickly after that, however, telling us that his "crowd-pleasing approach puts Dennis squarely in the middle of the Great Audience Debate, in which the defenders of art for art's sake face off against the marketers of books with titles like 101 Poems From the Heart." This is a bad over-simplification. While it is true that there is certainly a debate going on in the poetry world about what audience, if any, a poet should aim his work at, those participating in it are divided up into decidedly more than the two sides Orr mentions. Orr is clearly a stasguard, minimizing the complexity of current American poetry by limiting the debate he speaks of to the two safest sets of knownstreamers he is familiar with. Or else he's truly ignorant that the Ashbery-to-Wilbur continuum is only about a third of the actual poetry continuum of our time. Assuming he is that knowledgeable--not, that is, aware only of the Collins-to-Wilbur continuum.

There's also the Silliman-to-Wilbur continuum that most language poets are trying to broaden universities into accepting--although most of them consider only the Silliman-to-Ashbery part of it viable. I'm for the John M. Bennett-to-Wilbur continuum, myself, Bennett being--of all the poets whose work I know--the most widely serious and effective. Well, except maybe in the Hallmark vein. . . .

That's it for today. I hope to add more to this tomorrow.