>"It was contemporary North American poetry that I now
>found wanting. Compared to the British, a lot of what
>I saw in our magazines and books struck me as
>formulaic. The favorite kind of poem was a
>first-person, realistic narrative that told of some
>momentous or perfectly trivial experience. It was
>written in free verse often barely distinguished from
>prose. Audacious flights of the imagination and use of
>metaphor were rare. In the age of political
>correctness and the evr-growing lists of forbidden
>words, topics, and attiftudes, irony and wit became
>suspect. And so did humour. The chief strategy of
>these poems was to conceal that they were poems by
>avoiding anything taht seemed too imaginative or
>irreverent. . . ."
>
The potentate, it appears, is nude.
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