SOURCE: “Here Today: A Poetry Chronicle,” in Hudson Review, Vol. XXIV, No. 2, Summer, 1971, pp. 320-27.

In the following review, Carruth uses a poem by Simic to demonstrate what he considers to be wrong with contemporary poetry.

Pound once wrote: “No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, and not from life. …”

Again: “Poetry is a centaur. The thinking, word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties. It is precisely the difficulty of this amphibious existence that keeps down the census record of good poets.”

Further: “Don't imagine that a thing will ‘go’ in verse just because it's too dull to go in prose.”

Further still: “When you have words of a lament set to the rhythm and tempo of There'll Be...