Poetry

     You are sent to the Freeport Motor Lodge to interview a visiting lecturer, James Talbot, who is a writer of fiction, a literary critic and a poet. He is English and his work appears in the Times Literary Supplement in England and in many quarterlies in this country. He is to lecture on modern poetry tomorrow noon at Mallory College. Your editor tells you that Talbot has recently written a book, Melodious Frontiers, that maintains that modern poets are as rich and varied in their work as in any period in history. Because your readers include academicians and students, your editor suggests you ask Talbot about some of the poets he likes. "Get some good quotes," is his final advice. He wants 250 to 300 words.
     Talbot, 45, tall, thin, dressed in a gray suit, invites you to his room for "an hour only so that the good professors" can have him to lunch at the faculty club. Here are some of your notes.

     Yes, it's true I like modern poetry because of the variety. You have a Ginsberg coming out of—Was it your Brooklyn?—with his political and social consciousness, and we have an Eliot whose "Love Song" is a display of bad temper at the times.
And there is the rich lushness of a Thomas singing hymns to grass and the "muscle pools and the heron-priested shore" on his 30th birthday. And the dry, sometimes incomprehensible, lowercase Cummings with his, "how do you like your blue-eyed boy, mister death?"

     He pauses for breath, and you realize you are going to need someone to find the material from which these quotes are taken. You do not trust your spelling of some of the words, nor the punctuation, and you are not sure you caught the names correctly.

     He resumes:

     I mean to say that, if you look back, what we have is all this mooning about—boy wants girl and then tightens bow to shoot arrow at resistant target. And in the Earl of Rochester we have the bow misfiring now and then. Good old Andy Marwell and his coy mistress, urging her on. It's good enough I suppose, for hot-blooded young men in freshman English.
But why don't you read your own Walt Whitman with his great understanding of the democratic experience. If I were an American teacher of literature, I'd have my students read nothing but Frost, Emily Dixon, Wallace Stephens, Ted Rutkey and any two you can name.
     Sorry, time to go. As T.S. would say, "Hurry up please it's time."