[Ed Shacklee]

Well, I’ll try to make at least some amends for our barbling and warbling, and give my two cents about modern American poetry. Looking for good poetry has always been like looking for needles in a haystack; but though I suspect that needle production is humming along at a normal rate, the haystack is immeasurably larger; and, in fact, it isn’t really much of a haystack any more.

You can’t go to The New Yorker or Poetry these days and expect to find the best poems reliably collected for you, and if there are worthier journals out there – I think there are – they have very limited distribution. If there is an honest to gosh “Best of” anthology of modern American poetry out there, the common reader of poetry would be hard put to find it among all the other anthologies with their own agendas and protégés to push.

For the new reader of poetry, what this means is that you either have to know or have been taught by a skilled needle finder, or you have to get lucky and come across a few needles on your own, or else it’s likely you’ll just give up, having found little or nothing that excites you.

I see a lot of free verse with plain spoken, minor epiphanies, and a lot of hipper-than-thou obscurity, sneering and otherwise; but that might say less about the prevalence of that kind of verse among those writing poetry today than it does about the tastes of prominent editors -- they may have drawn an admiring crowd, for a while, but there were only a couple of tailors responsible for the emperor's clothes, as I recall.

So I would say that modern American poetry seems timid – in the sense that the same sort of treacly stuff keeps getting elevated, for no reason I can see – and diffuse, when viewed as a whole. But, while it affects the reception of poetry, the whole probably doesn’t matter that much in terms of writing poetry. There are good poems being written, just as there have always been, and that heartens me.

Best,

Ed