Are the Objectivists bores? (Nada Gordon on Oppen.) It is refreshing to hear this point of view, because that "weighing of each syllable" approach in American poetry has always been boring to me. It is fine when the results are spectacular, as in Niedecker, some of Z..., some of Creeley, but oftentimes the results are rather strained. I'd love to admire Oppen, but if I reflect honestly I don't really dig it. A lot of middle Creeley also suffers from this "strained" effect that O'Hara noted in his interview with Lucie-Smith. Even William Carlos Williams wrote many prosodically inert poems, if we can be perfectly honest. I know because I read Williams everyday for about 7 or 8 years. This might explain my ho-hum reaction to Grenier's "sentences." They are pretty Williamesque, considering that Williams, though he emphasized speech ad nauseum, often wrote for the page.

That being said, there are numerous Williams poems that noone has read that are wonderful. "The Jungle," for example, or "To be hungry is to be great," a great title if nothing else.