[New-Poetry] Not For Grammarians

[Anthony Lawrence]

Leithhauser's comment is ludicrous. Back to Muldoon again. What would  
Leithauser make of him, who can rhyme
rock with crow, and get away with it? What kind of hellish private  
domain would he define, in Muldoon's collected?


On 04/09/2006, at 3:56 AM, JforJames at aol.com wrote:

> 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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Anthony Lawrence
ajlawrence1 at bigpond.com



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