I would be a boring blogger indeed if I kept apologizing for my laziness, but I did have a bit of interesting feedback on the Gilbert poem and so I'll post it, since it made sense to me. Here it is, if I can figure out how to cut & paste:



"Now, about that Gilbert poem--it saddened me. I really like Gilbert, but that NYer poem seemed like the ultimate proof that a guy that operates like him has a tough time when he's trying to carry a "message" (who doesn't?). I shouldn't say this about a poet whose boots I am not fit to lick, but the poem seems hokey to me. Perhaps there is an ironic layer there, as you suggest, and I am not of the constant ironical/cynical/ain't I an arch and hip little schoolboy school."



Still, I can't figure out which way the Gilbert is to be read--surely he intends to present the riddle. Dead-on, it is sentimental: its writer would have to possess the kind of flagrant optimism that's kind of sickening. Then again, I am repeatedly attracted to poetry that my more critical friends find sentimental, ditto for my responses to culture at large (when I heard Condie Rice say today (our occupational let's-put-on-a-show, say- it-in-your-Ethel-Merman-voice election day,)"The Iraqi people are brave," I got a little phlegm in my throat at the same as I threw my shoe at the radio. Ambivalence meaning to hold two feelings at once, what Keats was talking about when he talked of "negative capability," which is another way of saying wishy-washiness.



The corn-pone usually speaks to me. Perhaps it is just my bad taste.