Wrong Target

“What’s the matter with poetry?” Karl Shapiro asked recently in the New York Times Book Review. The sharp answer might be: Karl Shapiro. For Mr. Shapiro, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, is certainly a member in good standing of the poetic Establishment. Though his next book will be called In Defense of Ignorance, this is but partial mitigation. Mr. Shapiro’s plaintive yodel on the ills of contemporary poetry betrays more than it explains.

True, his preliminary diagnosis makes sense. Contemporary poetry does present “a tangle of subtleties and grotesques.” A small group of poet-critics do dominate the field— and “a literary junta or gang can seize power as surely as a political gang.” There is no doubt that criticism today “is a propaganda for a handful of power-hungry writers, many of whom are the authors of the criticism itself” and its obscurantism “is as great as that of the poetry it tries to defend.”

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Ralph de Toledano

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Gore Vidal

“What’s the matter with poetry?” Karl Shapiro asked recently in the New York Times Book Review. The sharp answer might be: Karl Shapiro. For Mr. Shapiro, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, is certainly a member in good standing of the poetic Establishment. Though his next book will be called In Defense of Ignorance, this is but partial mitigation. Mr. Shapiro’s plaintive yodel on the ills of contemporary poetry betrays more than it explains.

True, his preliminary diagnosis makes sense. Contemporary poetry does present “a tangle of subtleties and grotesques.” A small group of poet-critics do dominate the field— and “a literary junta or gang can seize power as surely as a political gang.” There is no doubt that criticism today “is a propaganda for a handful of power-hungry writers, many of whom are the authors of the criticism itself” and its obscurantism “is as great as that of the poetry it tries to defend.”