I stubbed my toe on it while I was looking for Christian Wiman things — specifically whether or not the poems of his I’m likely to be (re)reading this spring are in the poem-volumes of his that I already own… a simple task if I were at my Austin house (where those books are right now), but I’m not, so I have to rely on the interwebs. One truth of my current life is that the book I need is frequently Not With Me. A corollary is that the scrap I want from the book not with me is seldom on the interwebs. Sigh.
Anyway, instead I discovered this glorious bit of snark about the contemporary state of US poetry mixed in with a review of Wiman’s volume of selected works (2016). Anything that refers to Tom (aka T.S.) Eliot as “patient zero” of “fashionably opaque poetry” is all right by me. Plus their illustration is choice.
“Clarity, Faith, and a Dash of Dyspepsia,” by Jason Guriel in Slate, Dec 06, 2016.