Impartial Remarks

Abstract

The editor of an important anthology recently wrote me that a certain writer was "not after all actively pursuing a career as a poet" and therefore not eligible for inclusion. Perhaps that statement should not have been puzzling to me in an age of specialization, an age in which there are no overlapping classes with membership-only null ones. No wonder then that there are few readers for a contemporary poetry so narrowly defined- much of it written in a private code decipherable only by those initiated via M.F.A. programs. At best the work of the brilliant maverick may be merely tolerated as a rather harmless intrusion into the realm of Serious Literature.