[New-Poetry] Not For Grammarians

[JforJames at aol.com]

Snodgrass — it must be said — can be a frustrating poet. Like Marianne  
Moore, like W. H. Auden, he is an erratic punctuator, creating a level of  
uncertainty only exacerbated by the slew of typos in “Not for Specialists.”  It’s 
one thing to ask about a poet, What does he mean by this? It’s another to  have 
to inquire, Does he mean what he actually says?  
His penchant for sentence fragments (no other major poet of our time relies  
so heavily on them) can also be off-putting. At times, the result is  
wonderfully dramatic — as of a door closing abruptly in the faces of readers  more 
nosily inquisitive than they should be. But where a reader goes  struggling 
through dense syntax in search of a verb and meets in its place a  mere period, the 
effect can be deflating.


    Evidently Brad Leithauser had also read few of those  poets given the 
evidence of his Seamus Heaney review published recently in The New York Times 
Book Review (Sunday,  July 16, 2006). It seems almost beyond belief that a critic 
at the beginning of  the 21st century, after 100 years in which all but the 
most  traditional of poets writing in English have eschewed end-line rhyme, 
could  begin a review by asserting “I sometimes think there’s no more reliable 
way of  initially entering a poet’s private domain than by examining what he or 
she  rhymes with what.” Only a handful of contemporary poets, in fact, might 
reveal  themselves under Leithauser’s criteria. How many poets in the Gertrude 
Stein  volumes, I wonder, might reveal their “private domain” through rhyme? 
Is there  one?
 
Douglas Messerli
What Is To Be Done?
 
Introduction to the forthcoming PIP Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative  
Poetry in English

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