I find it incredible that people enjoy poetry that I think is beneath contempt, while dismissing work by writers whom I admire. Why is it that people don't have the good sense to arrive, spontaneously, at judgments that coincide exactly with mine? Never mind that the poets I like are those with whom I am most comfortable, those I have been reading for over twenty years. In fact, I can easily tell whether I will like a given poem just by looking at the NAME OF THE POET. If I have never heard of the poet, then chances are the poem will not be very good--what are the chances that someone I'VE NEVER HEARD OF could write a decent poem? After all, Keats, Shelley, and Byron are not born every day. Of course, if it is a poet I ALREADY DON"T LIKE, the chances are even greater that the poem will be bad.

When flipping through the average "literary" magazine, it is quite obvious to me that most of the poems are quite bad. So usually, I just read the first few lines of every poem: if anything in them is redolent of the sort of poetry I DON'T LIKE, I move quickly on.