When Hugh Kenner dubs classic American modernism a homemade world he not only elevates a method, he s given voice to an enduring ingredient. Like yogurt or sourdough, poetry increasingly needs Poetry to get started, to keep brewing. The whales do not sing. In hysterical restraint apples fill the tree we call the Apple Tree . . . . What the bird sings is bird .
Words are things.
Rice s direction is good, it s impatient. Like the man who buys a Do-All and then gets so raptly involved with the owner s manual he never gets to turn the thing on. Drops of her menses shine on the golf coure. In Getting Lost he can write a Creeley poem loosened from the basso Get lost, she said. She did not have to give such good advice Twice.