I finished the last chapter of my book this morning, with help from Helen Vendler, Pierre Reverdy, Frank O'Hara, and Jordan Davis.

Vendler reassured me that a chapter can be short. If I say everything I want to say in 14 pages, that's fine. Vendler doesn't even have footnotes and bibliography and she's a Harvard professor. Many of her chapters are four or five pages. While I don't share her disdain for 30-years old poets, she writes well and says what she needs to say and no more.

Reverdy came to mind as a poet that I could use as the model of the "unpretentious modern poet." Reverdy is a great poet, but he doesn't bring to bear that baggage that we associate with high modernist poetry. Think of the Poundean baggage or the Rilkean baggage as two particular examples, very different from each other. So obviously I thought next of Frank O'Hara: "My heart is in my pocket. It is Poems by Pierre Reverdy." Then I thought of Jordan's attempt to write a "poetics" statement, placing himself somewhere on a continuum of values not of his own making. Wasn't that the critical problem I was dealing with in my chapter, trying to "place" a poet who, like O'Hara, is too hip for the squares and too square for the hips, in the quaint lingo of that period which still has some application today?

I will always prefer poets like Reverdy, O'Hara, D. Shapiro, Schuyler, Creeley, Davis, and Lola Velasco, subject of my chapter, to poets like Duncan and Olson. Even if it makes me an arch-reactionary, I like a certain kind of "purity," a poetry that doesn't depend on external clutter.

[Note: I am not personally acquainted with Vendler, Reverdy, or O'Hara, much as I appreciate their help]