Apologia [and I apologize for this]

'We are one happey poet & one unhappey poet in India which makes 2 poets.'

It's useful (edible). It's more than what the reader makes of it. It should be beautiful. It's hard to have well-developed opinions on poetry, and usually not nice. It's the worst for the poet himself, who's been told that poetry today is 'very good,' which is not what he thinks. For his part, he doesn't know whether he's a poet or a poet manqué, a critic or a critic manqué, etc. He has to work just to keep his head up. He has to read. He has to worry about 'bone-laziness, doldrums, proto-despair.'

As he gets older, he has to re-fashion himself, constantly, if he can. Some attainments are already impossible. Others are mechanical rabbits, the carrots in front of the carthorse. It's already too late to be Rimbaud or Keats. But I'll certainly be Frost or Stevens or Edward Thomas. Or Hopkins. So the dialogue goes.

Then there is other people's poetry. It's not my own. (So the dialogue goes.) Someone said that if everyone wrote the same way we'd only need one poem by one poet. Larkin said that we write poems because all existing poems are somehow inadequate. Against that, Jarrell said that it takes a lot of courage to like your own poems twice as well as Hardy's. God with the brave.

You don't have to like it, and you don't have to read it. It's surprising (surprising!) how little a poet can get away with reading. J. C. Shairp wrote of Burns that 'wider knowledge would have paralyzed his singing power.' (The highest of inspired nonsense.) For poetry, our own time (like all times) is as good as our friends' poems, as exciting as the 1750s, as individuated as twenty nights in the shithouse.

What I've said thus far applies to a certain sort of poet. But there are other sorts: 'Fizzy, a paid ape, wrote a tome in an hour, a silly lie. (Pain.)' Fizzy will tell us all about it. And yet I don't want to be told why theory is really a poem, or why a hawk is really a handsaw, or, to bell the cat, an ass an elbow. I, at least, having been given my mind, let the tyranny of ideas over feelings fall out of said mind.

There is a junta of straw men to notice. Dana Gioia [*] blames the universities for homogenizing poetic output and strangling it off from the ordinary reader. Joan Houlihan [*] alerts us to the special contributions of the mutual-appreciation-societies of blurb-writers. Karl Shapiro ranted until he died that the Eliot-Pound critico-poetical duprass was 'willfully obfuscatory and permanently destructive.' Invoking Kant, Jarrell claimed that the age of criticism ate poetry. In honesty, I suspect that there are maybe a few hundred or so readers today who have any idea *at all* of how to read a poem, though many more probably can figure out how to read books of them. Harold Bloom [*] insists to us that if aesthetic criticism dies then aesthetic poetry will die (if such were possible!), and 'we will cease to know good from bad poetry.'

To say that our criticism is wrong is to say that we're all thick and none of us knows what we're talking about. To say that our criticism is beside the point is to say that what we think doesn't matter. To say that we don't need criticism is a disaster—oh, criticism is impotent, domineering flailing, and every reader has to read everything for himself. I don't like these options. But to say that our criticism is feckless—.

I haven't said yet that the responsibility for producing better poetry falls on poets. Poets have to live in their heads (where poetry has been found), not in a department or on a masthead (where it still eludes discovery). And what do we count on? Dozens of bookfuls. Jim Richardson writes, 'If you're Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you're not? More than enough.' This is an obvious enough prolegomenon to my own poems.