Reviewing 'The Body Electric',

Reviewing 'The Body Electric',
                          America's Best Poetry
                                        from
                the american poetry review  c2000

John Ashberry, you major in colonic polemics
flushing crap with your connect the dots
psycho-babble allusions to simpering bent-over
poet-wannabe-toadies paralyzed in anal fear of your
white ice-cream sophistry nonsense which always gets
the emperor-wears-no-clothes trophy
in the not so important anymore NYer.

Stan Kunitz, you make me laugh, but at you
cuz you'll never be the 'man' again presiding over
all those Yale younger poets encouraging while
you had them do your lawn like
Olga B. at your manse on the fashionable Cape.

C.K. Williams, you make me wonder
what is poetry when you squash prose sentences
into poetic pseudoform and punctuate house day drama
with the supposedly stinging words "bitch" and "pimp".

Rita Dove, you make my skin crawl
a schwartze frau embracing the German
language as if it made your poetry more serious
or perhaps darker than growing up poor in Ohio.

Al Dugan, you make me feel sorry at your passing
for what was once a vibrant voice
now spent in revisionist vissicitudes of being old
and married to a lover who gave you entre
into a sophisticates world of prized culture
watching dewy outrageous youth evaporate off your tired skin.

Yusef Kumunyakka, Jorie Graham, Sam Hamill and your ilk,
you don't deserve mention or credit
for you are poets of self-import
and like so many others now editors
now judges now professors now workshop gurus
who pander themselves shamelessly
writing nonsense and demanding accolades
so you are listed now reeking of shit.

Len Roberts, you continue to make me wonder
at how someone with so little talent
gets listed and listed and listed
writing parochial stories that don't
sting with the sharp slap of Catholic wooden rule.

Leslie Scalapino, you make me cringe
at visions of a beach that depressingly
extends on and on never allowing the reader
to become part of witless expanses of sand
while you piddle in some rowboat
never allowing our souls to feel tidal mud
as you become one with the mechanical birds.

Let's hear it for all of you
who have used the au courant word 'aubade'
Yes you Louise Gluck and you James Wright
Don't snicker Rita D. and Stephanie Brown
for how many of us know what 'schadenfreude' means
And so many others who write of saints
to glorify each other in this body
not electric but comatose while
the ubereditor Harold Bloom tells us
how privileged we are that
John Hollander, Richard Howard, and Claudia Keelan
are embalmed here poets only for their own benefit.