The blog will lapse into silence until next Tuesday or Wed during my trip. Hope to see some of you in New York over the weekend. I also won't be answering email very carefully.

***

I think subscribing to the APR during the late 70s made me very depressed. There was no standard, nothing but celebrity and maybe physical attractiveness. It was kind of the people magazine of poetry. It still is. It has a certain liveliness and élan, and every poet I like will eventually be featured, along with every poet I don't admire, but there's a fundamental lack of gravitas. Translation is used as filler there. At least Poetry magazine nutures some talents (or what they think of as talents), some minor miniaturists of the day like Kay Ryan. I actually went to buy an APR recently and coudln't bring myself to buy it. It just didn't seem to add up to $5.95 worth of poetry, or however much they are charging.

***

I too dislike it. It is a viscous substance, seemingly ubiquitous but impossible to locate with any certainty. Those who know nothing about it are officially in charge of it. Those who love it seek to destroy it with sadistic cruelty. To separate out its impure elements, its sentimentality, its narcissism, its pretentiousness, is to kill it. Yet these elements are what makes it, with few exceptions, almost unbearable.