Luckily I've brought "Solution Passage" back with me for the holidays. It's interesting that these poems were written in a period of time (1978-1981) when I was an undergraduate and not aware of the existence of Clark Coolidge. I remember knowing creative writing graduate students at the time who wrote hokey poems about baseball or vegetables. I was told, by prominent feminist critic and poet whose name still appears in Poetry, that WCW was bad influence. Academic year 1979-80 I was in Spain. I think subscribing the the American Poetry Review in those days was a mistake. It was depressing and bewildering: so many poets, writing in so few styles. I hated the emphasis on what the poets looked like.

"I AM a poet." Why did WCW have to insist so much, at a relatively late point of his career, that he was indeed a poet? He didn't really start writing his best work until he was almost 40. Recognition was slow to come.

The poem in which he defined his variable foot "the descent beckons / as the ascent beckoned" (or is it the other way around?) is curiously abstract and Latinate in vocabulary. There are no things. His earlier poetry is more prosodically interesting.

I think of myself as devoted to only a handful of writers. Yet when I make up the complete list, over half a life-time, it adds up to quite a few. About 100 I have read deeply and assiduously. Another few hundred I have read deeply for a less prolonged period of time. Many times more I am professionally responsible for or have read more casually. I am not completely up to date in my reading of the younger American poets--and I probably never will be since more are always emerging. I do like Lisa Jarnot and Susan Schultz. I have books by Jordan Davis, Stroffolino, and a few others, along with Ed Foster's anthology.