Impartial Remarks

The editor of an important anthology recently wrote me that a certainwriter was not after all actively pursuing a career as a poet and thereforenot eligible for inclusion. Perhaps that statement should not havebeen puzzling to me in an age of specialization, an age in which there areno overlapping classes with membership-only null ones. No wonder thenthat there are few readers for a contemporary poetry so narrowly defined-much of it written in a private code decipherable only by thoseinitiated via M.F.A. programs. At best the work of the brilliant maverickmay be merely tolerated as a rather harmless intrusion into the realm ofSerious Literature