Oh, this is delicious and predictable. Look, when you're around long enough, you get to know people, or their work at least. You don't necessarily know individual poems, though. I have no idea what the procedures were to get to the final round.
Moreover, if X. J. Kennedy has no professional stake in the poet at hand's work, the fact that he praised it at some other point should merely make the decision unsurprising. Cases that have had a greater whiff of corruption have been blown off here in the past. This one seems quite innocent.
[This message has been edited by Quincy Lehr (edited January 12, 2008).]
|