Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The subtitle delivers what it promises: a secret history of poetry and kitsch. We look at kitsch differently when we see it as originating from controversies and scandals about poetry during the rise of popular culture in the eighteenth century, and not just with reference to the visual arts and material culture in the twentieth century. We also look at poetry differently when we see how entangled with kitsch elite poetry was, and still is, despite Wordsworthian attempts to purify the language of tribe, and Modernist efforts to denounce kitsch and switch attention from diction to form. As a poet, I'm rather more interested in looking at poetry differently, and this volume casts new light on, finds a thread through many apparently different lots of poets: the renovators and falsifiers of the ballad revival in the eighteenth century, the Shenstone and the Walpole sets, Baudelaire, Ezra Pound, the first and second generations of the New York School, and five twentieth-century American...

I've been ploughing through the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, more out of a sense of obligation than anything. I am surprised, however, by the amount of pleasure I received. Sure, there were many things that I would not care to read again, but the poets that I would sue to know better were not a few. I still think Charles Olson is over-rated. John Cage I read with anthropological interest rather than aesthetic delight. Robert Duncan's mysticism is too hand-wavy for me; I am more for Denise Levertov's "ecstatic Protestantism," as editor Paul Hoover puts it. "Illustrious Ancestors" and "Where Is the Angel?" bear re-reading. I am also drawn to Barbara Guest's lyricism. Her "Red Lilies" begins so practically: "Someone has remembered to dry the dishes;/they have taken the accident out of the stove," and ends with magical flight: "The paper folded like a napkin/other wings flew into the stone." Ro...