Joseph duemer has referred to at least four of my posts of the past few days. (Nice bonsai, Joe.) Usually nobody links back to me that frequently except maybe for Henry Gould or Michael Snider. I think Joe's decision to pursue writing and teaching and leave administration for those who badly want to do it is a good one, by the way.

I have nothing against Donald Justice. He was a fine poet and evidently a gifted teacher as well. I would only object if someone made a claim that Justice was one of the major poets of our period. I see a fundamental difference between poets who transform our vision of what poetry can be--Ginsberg or Creeley, Frank O'Hara, Ashbery--and not half-bad practitioners of the craft like Justice. Litotes is the appropriate figure of speech for a distinguished poet like Justice, who doesn't even approach the levels of these transformative figures. It's hard not to damn with faint praise in a case like this. I feel the same way with Cid Corman--certainly a respectable figure, but not a transformative one in quite the same way as Creeley.