Round 59

Yusef: "There's trouble Everywhere" by Charlie Smith

Bob: "Tenets of Roots and Trouble" by Elizabeth Robinson

Smith writes in a discursive, prosy Ashbery-inflected idiom--"The day / refers to itself in third person." His diffuse and thoughtful poem isn't really all that different from Robinson's Ashberianism of the Left: "There was a tribe adopted first person singular pronoun: / I." What I mean is that both styles are rooted in a single influence, but take this influence in opposite directions. We've already seen the Ashbery to the right in Goldbarth and Koethe. I prefer the leftward turn, of course, because it seems to me that the Ashberianism of the right was pretty much exhausted in the 1970s (by Ashbery himself at times.) So the round goes to Bob for Robinson's exploratory poem.

After 59:

My bookkeeping is messed up. I have to go back and figure out where I went wrong.

Later: 17-32-9

That adds up to 58, but one round no points were scored.