[New-Poetry] Re: WEPD Banana

[Barry Spacks]

I maintain that poems may pass the Excellencey
test even if only some of the test's criteria help to build its case.

Regarding "Bananas," a sort of Zenish jeu d'esprit, working it
through the whole WEPD word-grinder becomes
a joke about a joke. The poem must, I feel, go elsewhere
for justification.

I'll put before the court an excerpt from my mini-essay on the poem,
composed for a wide-ranging anthology in progress.

Speaking of "the unsayable," here's an experimental piece that some
may take as simply silly, an arbitrary blurt. Yet blurt is the wrong
word, for the tone here is unassumingly quiet and calculatedly  
subversive. A "Language" poem, the piece takes to a far level Wallace  
Stevens dictum that poetry "should resist meaning almost  
successfully." Heavy emphasis, in cases like this,  falls on the word  
"almost."

The fact that Andrews' four word tease appeared in the prestigious   
Paris Review in 1972 has helped to gain it attention. The poem's  
energy lies in its oddity, running against received notions of "making  
sense" to free the imagination toward limitless suggestion.

As Robert Pinsky writes in his short survey THE SITUATION OF POETRY,  
"Comic and reductive, Andrews's poem calls attention to the somewhat  
arbitrary nature of any connection between specific examples and  
general ideas...[it] might be made to exemplify nearly anything."

Unique, hence unrepeatable in strategy, the poem may best earn  
relevance from the reader in connection with its tongue-in-cheek daring.
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