Print

Print


I for one am stunned by the badness of the "poetry" by Lehmann (offered for
our attention by Mark Weiss - thanks Mark) - who I had never heard of before
this thread started -: can this be serious? The first seems to be a
grotesquely misconceived pastiche of Kenneth Koch's pseudo-naif rhyming
verse, not a very flattering form of homage, as it makes one rather want to
go off and watch a Shirley Temple movie than read any more of this kind of
stuff. The second is completely pointless if you haven't read _The Man in
the High Castle_ ; and completely pointless if you have, since the novel
means so much more than the poem and is utterly unilluminated by it,
illumination being surely the only reason for writing such a homage. If,
which I doubt, there are higher flying ironies here, the language fails to
embody them. It would be a joke to compare this Machwerk to the work of,
say, Roddy Lumsden or Pierre Joris, two poets whose work I didn't know and
very much appreciated being able to read thanks to their recent featuring on
this list. I certainly shan't read the book on the New York poets now,
though the first reports whetted my appetite.
Yours, Martin



%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%