For a few years I have searched through the poems of Kenneth Koch for this passage, but could never find it, despite my clear memory of having read it there:

So many lousy poets
So few good ones
What's the problem?
No innate love of
Words, no sense of
How the thing said
Is in the words, how
The words are themselves
The thing said: love, auto...

Well yesterday I finally found it. I also discovered the reason why I had been unable to find it. It is in "The Morning of the Poem" by James Schuyler. I probably had been reading it the same time as one of those later Kenneth Koch poems about writing. I don't think Kenneth would disagree with JS in this case either.

Schuyler grew up wanting to be John O'Hara. He could have been this elegant New Yorker short story writer. Instead he became a New Yorker poet (Howard Moss liked his work so he published there a lot).

"The Morning of the Poem" is not as good as "Hymn to Life." Not as good as my memory of itself. Today I might read "A Few Days" which in my faulty memory is the best of these three poems.

I forgot how good "Hymn to Life" was, not to mention Hymn to Life.

Visual description is probably the most boring use to which writing can be put. It is vastly overrated. Aren't descriptions what most people skip over in a novel?

Put another way, do you miss the visual when it isn't there? As in Creeley who is very abstract and often doesn't present a visual image at all? Despite his obvious indebtedness to WCW?

Isn't visuality in most great canonical poetry quite conventional and generic anyway? Language itself is very abstract, in that even visually suggestive words, like color names, present a platonic archetype rather than an eidetic image. There aren't miniscule descriptons of cherry blossoms in Japanese poetry. We already know what they look like so language's role is not to paint a picture of them.

Take this as a contrarian view. I'm assuming that the valuation of visual elements is a given; we were all raised on imagism. My point is that the imagistic imperative is not necessarily universal, that it is the product of a particular history and doesn't really apply to all or most poetry in most languages and periods. It can't be a way of valuing one poet over another. For example, if I were to say that Schuyler has a keener visual eye than Ashbery (true enough) that wouldn't imply that Schuyler is better.

Was that post on What's for Dinner? confusing enough? I was having an argument with myself about the book and hadn't resolved the problem before I wrote about it. Alfred and G. is better. Now I have to find a copy of A Nest of Ninnies.

***

I have never heard of any of the Book Critics Award nominees in poetry, except for Snyder and Rich. I just cannot keep up with everything being published, nor do I have any desire to. I'm sure I'm missing good books. I'm also sure I'm avoiding many books that would depress and overwhelm me in their sheer quantity. Surely these writers, (aside from Rich and Snyder) are "mid-list." I looked up a few on the web, and wasn't impressed. The National Book Awards had a more impressive list of nominees.

I found it odd that Jordan had not heard of the existence of the book by the two famous poets, while at the same time he knew more about the poets I had never heard of .

***

I used to get depressed reading the APR, because it seemed to set itself up as a major journal, but to have no criterion of value other than fame and photogeniality.