Having succeeded in getting Rick out beating the bushes for enemies of
academic Eng. Lit. amour propre and defenders of the proposition that a good
poem should be spontaneously liked by lots and lots of non-academic people,
I shall scuttle back to my jungle bivouac. (“The bivouac of life,” of
course.)
If it’s poets you’re wanting, though, see my upcoming piece on George Crabbe
in the NY Sun (tomorrow, I think).
In the meantime, let me canvass reader (and contributor, if you like)
opinion here. On my “36 Great American Poems” CD I included Joyce Kilmer’s
“Trees.” A reader just emailed in to
ask why. Thinking about it, I am not sure.
Yes, I can see why “Trees” is a slightly absurd poem, a
soft-center-chocolate sort of poem. Some of that, though, is due to the
fact that “Trees” is, as I remark on the CD, the most-parodied poem in the
American language. Most of us, I imagine, encounter a parody of “Trees” (in
my case it was Ogden Nash’s) before the thing itself, which distorts
judgment. So why do I like “Trees”? It’s not even what Orwell called a
“good bad poem,” because it’s not *quite* bad enough. I don’t know, there’s
a mystery here. “Trees” works for me, and that’s the ultimate test. (As a
small plus, which really should not be factored in, but which I think
probably was, Kilmer was a genuine American hero.)