I haven't yet read these books, but have 'em on order now! Thanks for the lead.
I did think that Kirsch was right on about most everything he said about WCW, but maybe is slightly unfair in moments. Yes, WCW failed often and regularly, sometimes for years and years at a stretch. But when he hit it, he hit it out of the park, as in the later very personal triadic line poems without which we would never have had the confessional poems of Lowell and Plath and Sexton, not to mention the Beat poetics of Ginsberg and Creeley, and those who followed, from C.K. Williams and Philip Levine to Tony Hoagland and Kim Addonizio.
If WCW seems non-intellectual, it is in part because he composed with a sense of his reader's intelligence, burying his treasures to be unearthed instead of declaring them outright. But, really, this is like the early critics (even Ezra Pound, who should have known better) who thought Robert Frost a crackerjack country bumpkin whose meter was clumsy and off. This late in the game, we should know better about WCW, as we do about Frost.
If we focus on a quick, very early, one-off imagist poem like "The Red Wheelbarrow," instead of about a complex and interesting later poem such as "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" or "The Orchestra," it will certainly make him seem a much less interesting poet than he is. I'm glad Hirsch acknowledges WCW's ongoing attempts to incorporate the wild strains of modernism into his verse. In fact, if WCW fails, he fails because he is relentlessly experimental for much of his life, and the true battle in his work is between his rage for clarity and his rage for a poetry of the avant garde.
Well, okay, I'm ranting.
See ya,
Tony
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