A line popped into my head the other day: "Wearing ridiculous hats as a badge of honor." It was just part of the babble that's always there. The first part of the creative process, for me, is listening to this babble, noticing it and rescuing certain fragments. In this case, this line may not be worth rescuing at all.

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The cheerfulness and the earnestness of the New Formalism, to me, are disconcerting. These poets tend to be light where I would be serious and serious where I would be light. Thus I feel justified in feeling irritation both at the frivolity and at the earnestness of this poetic movement.

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While my daughter was at her library book club, I looked in the stacks at the public library and found this book, The Poetry Circus by Stanton Coblentz, published in 1967. Apparently this guy was also a science fiction novelist. Anyway, the thesis is that modernism had ruined poetry. He fulminates against Eliot, Cummings, Auden--and almost everything else he can shake a stick at. He finds bad poetry in magazines--poetry written by people that I have never heard of as well as people I have--and offers brief snippets for inspection. Almost all of it is found wanting: Marianne Moore, Karl Shapiro, Donald Hall, William Stafford, Alan Dugan, Howard Nemerov, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley. The distinction between academic and New American poetry is not even relevant for him. The dividing line is between modern poetry, of whatever brand, and traditional lyric of the Edna St. Vincent Millay variety. A great deal of what he holds up for ridicule actually does actually look bad, by almost any standard. I could do the same thing with Poetry or Paris Review today, or even with Eratio. It is easy for the nay-sayers to be right, by the sheer statistical preponderance of bad poetry at any given place and time. What proves that they are right by sheer accident is their lack of discrimination. If nine out of ten Cretans are liars, I can be right 90% of the time if I disbelieve 100% of Cretan statements.