quick visit to the library where, in the new books enticement shelves, I copped a book by Mark Doty, one by Frank Bidart, and BAP 2005. I feel like reviewing them, sight unseen. you know, I predict a poem in which, blah blah blah. I don't love poems. poetry, if the distinction holds, means more to me than the little shacks devised as poems. when I was younger, I read widely in the world of poetry. in my hoary dotage, I don't want to read a lot of poetry. it is bootless to say I want to read only good poetry, I can't know it is good till I present my eyes with the word, but I have less patience with what strikes me as culled from the past. I read a short poem by Doty, and laughed aloud. voici:

Shahid's Couplet

Your old kitchen, dear, on Bleecker: sugar, dates, black tea.
Your house, then ours. Anyone's now. Memory's furious land.

Bleecker, that's got a permanent footnote attached. it's so Greenwichy. that kitchen boiled down to magical three. intended to evoke but the details seem so random. my kitchen boasts the same, but that don't relate me to Doty. the 2nd sentence and 3rd telescope relationship into barest nothing. meat of the poem. couldn't it have been a single sentence? yes and yes. last sentence, very boiled down but with the stupid and excessive adjective. he has received fellowships and is a professor. it's like he didn't quite get Pound's Metro. minimalism is not a trick, but Doty tries t make magic. I think of Tom Beckett, who (I assume) pares and pares. not, that is, just a matter of stopping or cutting out, but intensifying into the very (few) words. or Grenier, who is simply amazed by every word. Doty's yanking our chain, using a trick or gambit. his details have no grasp. there's no specificity in his selection, only the word dear gives any emotional energey. the fury of memory's land is not indicated by anything in the poem. all seems pretty ho hum. professor offers this lalala to HarperCollins, and HC foments the revolution upon the pome-buying public. an exercise in lameness. national book critics circle award for poetry. I'm too tired to wrassle properly with this sort of clunk.