In the NYTBR a review of a new collection by X. J. Kennedy. The point is made that this sort of (metrically conservative) verse is so technically adept that its practitioners can produce only one volume a decade. I think: the troubadours improvised in complex meters. Then: it's not all that accomplished anyway. It's not like it's Niedecker. (I love those little poems written on small pages of daily calendar, in collected poems I have not yet purchased; why did the editor have to transcribe them on the bottom of the page, though? Her cursive is quite legible.)

"As my head moves solid
in its whim rest of flake

The room has turned to
a populous pastnoon, trees

Twigs that chase brain
to a network of cracks"

These lines from Coolidge (Sound as Thought) demonstrate that technical mastery is not inconsistent with prolific writing. After all, if you write more, you will be a more practiced writer. Coltrane practiced night and day. He was so obsessed by music he didn't know who Willie Mays was. Chess masters have played thousands of games. One wouldn't expect them to spend ten years playing one perfect game.

***

The purest poetic talent I have known personally is Claudio Rodríguez, who wrote very little due to his alcoholism. But what he wrote shows the surest mastery. He had a hit rate of about 90%, the highest I have ever seen in any poet dead or alive. Frank O'Hara's early Edwin Denby-style sonnets are quite awkward, from a metrical standpoint, kind of like X.J. Kennedy. This proves nothing.