Rexroth can maudlin, as Gary has pointed out. In the 100 More Poems from the Japanese, he invents this horrible poet named "Marichiko" and writes her horrible poems in a sort of "baby Japanese," then translates them into English: "I cannot forget / The perfumed dusk inside the / Tent of my black hair." Parody? Like Kenneth Koch's "I look at you. Oceans of beer gush from the left side of my collar bone." Well, the Rexroth is not quite funny enough; it's just bad. Maybe that's why people don't get the joke when Gary reads his poem out loud. The problem (with Rexroth and others) is not (just) orientalism. The same process occurs when we translate from the Ancient Greek or the Spanish: the cultural stereotype mediates. Why do American poets cite Lorca's duende essay so often? Partly because it seems exotically Spanish. There is no way around this problem. We can't say we are getting to what the Greeks were really about: we can only substitute another representation of Greekness for one we see as outmoded or stereotypical.