By all means, let us praise Mary Oliver-- more poets should model themselves on her, if they are going to write that kind of accessible Free Verse. She does it legitimately-- you can pretty much look at any MO poem and decide whether you think it's fresh or stale, tight or slack, significant or trite, competant or fumbled. That's a kind of integrity...she throws herself on the mercy of her audience-- but at least the attempt is there, and it's easy to tell when she has failed. She has no Academic or Post-Modernist postures to hide behind.
For Gary, I wanted to say something I never got around to saying on another thread: the above is largely true of Ashbery too, and to his credit. His is a sort of honest Avant-Gardeisme...and curiously old-fashioned. If you accept his premises, there are at least some loose guidelines you can use to judge his individual poems, and the efforts of others so-inspired. This is a lot different from some Post-Modernist phony, who plays on the reluctance of the contemporary audience to condemn gestures the audience isn't quite sure it understands.
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