Books, Arts & Manners: Plain(s) Talk, in Verse

Always a Reckoning and Other Poems, by Jimmy Carter (Times, 130 pp., $18)

THERE ARE two foolproof ways of getting your unpublishable poetry published. One is to be some sort of irrelevant celebrity, e.g., movie star (Jimmy Stewart), wife of a famous aviator (Anne Morrow Lindbergh), or Pope (Karol Wojtyla, a/k/a John Paul II). If this route isn’t available to you, try dual entitlement, such as being both black and female. This has worked wonders for the likes of Maya Angelou, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and many others. I have a certain soft spot for Gwendolyn Brooks, however, if only for watching her pass out from the free fruit punch served at the White House on Poetry Day.

JS

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John Simon

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Always a Reckoning and Other Poems, by Jimmy Carter (Times, 130 pp., $18)

THERE ARE two foolproof ways of getting your unpublishable poetry published. One is to be some sort of irrelevant celebrity, e.g., movie star (Jimmy Stewart), wife of a famous aviator (Anne Morrow Lindbergh), or Pope (Karol Wojtyla, a/k/a John Paul II). If this route isn’t available to you, try dual entitlement, such as being both black and female. This has worked wonders for the likes of Maya Angelou, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and many others. I have a certain soft spot for Gwendolyn Brooks, however, if only for watching her pass out from the free fruit punch served at the White House on Poetry Day.