Joan Houlihan's poetry sounds more or less like this:

"Oh, my semi-precious, so much slow time
so much crawling and browsing
so much fascination with harmful insects
and corrosive sublimate.
As if you have as many eyes
as many eyes as the common fly,
and every one stuck open wide
to the wonderful, wonderful world."

Yet she cannot appreciate the humor of Lyn Hejinian's lines--

"I thought I saw a turtledove resting in a waffle.
Then I saw it was a rat doing something awful."

--lines she singles out for contempt: "any general audience would perceive, correctly, that the lines are drivel." I guess they would be drivel, if they were read *straight* rather than humorously. But where would you find a reader that incompetent?

I'd like to know why Houlihan's offspring is only "semi-precious," why she doesn't know how to use the subjunctive ("as if you have..."), and why she can't think of a better phrase than "the wonderful, wonderful world." But then again, I am not part of the "general audience" that knows what it likes and likes what it knows.

I normally wouldn't waste my time criticizing someone's amateur poetry. What I object to is that this person is setting herself up as a "poet," "editor in chief" and "essayist" with a cogent diagnosis of the malaise of contemporary American poetry.