I don't recall who attacked Keillor's Good Poems; maybe you can refresh my memory, but it really doesn't matter. "Good" when it's used as an adjective is always subjective--good food, good music, good wine, etc. There are all kinds of standards of taste that can be applied. The New Critics liked wit, wordplay, complicated metaphor, rhetorical skill, and all that, but very few contemporary critics hold to those standards. Which is to say, Bill, that I essentially agree that almost any verbal contraption can be called a poem, just as silence can be called music, just as any mixture of tints on a surface can be called a painting. But then when we get into, "Yeah, but is it a good poem?" we move into the realm of taste--one man's meat, one woman's poison. My own tastes are pretty limited; others' are far more catholic. Some are even more limited than mine; others' are far more catholic than others'. I do think that a century or so of hard experience should have told us that newness can't be equated with progress.
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