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Jon Corelis wrote: > Cleverness is a technique, which can be well or poorly used like any >other technique. What a very odd thing to say, Jon--as if intelligence itself were a "technique" to be acquired by training or practice. But maybe you mean something along the lines of "street smarts" and other kinds of applied intelligence(?). I can certainly see how "cleverness" might designate a certain poetic intelligence brought to bear on individual poems--an intelligence that all great and even good (enough) poetry probably evinces. (Keats, did you say? Now, there's a clever one!) With Muldoon, though, the term seems to be designating a foregrounded, self-conscious "cleverness" as a poetic stratagem in some of his work (for better or worse). I would never take anything that conspicuously foregrounded in a poem by someone as obviously intelligent as Muldoon at face value, since the aim of it's foregrounding is likely to be beguilement. He doesn't have to prove how clever he is, in other words, so I wonder what he's up to with his swash and his swagger in the Gaelakota tongue of those cleverly bespoked poems. "Holy Thursday" doesn't seem to me to have that sort of quality at all, though, with its muted, vaguely "kindly" air of languor--a downstyle that deploys simplicity as seasoning and gives this poem (stew, soup) an unexpectedly rich, robust broth: a very clever poem indeed (as Peter Howard has already noted). Candice %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%