PoetryFoundation.org Podcast for 4.1.07

Now that April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, it's time for poets to go on pilgrimages, reading their verses, chanting like chanticleers on public radio.

In Curtis Fox's April Fool's Day podcast sponsored by Chicago's stupendously well-heeled Poetry Foundation, "important contemporary American poets" Tony Hoagland and Dean Young sound less like roosters or literary lions than like two good-old-boy neighbors yukking it up over the back fence. (They're actually chatting long-distance over the phone.) Young quips that it's appalling: there's too much poetry for one person to read; poets should be given grants "to not write" -- notice the fashionable split infinitive! Ezra Pound's son, "Extra Pound," said that the purpose of poetry was to be the "Dental Floss of the Soul." To which Hoagland deadpans that Realism is the "purgative of dreams" -- whereupon Young defines Memory as the "repository of the mediocre." Hence, the perfect poem is one that "we instantly forget because every time we read it it's new again"!

Is poetry more like a crayfish or a waterfall? In a Muse-inspired burst, Hoagland opines that poetry is "like a fireplace in a swimming pool"!

For that matter, truth in advertising dictates that the Poetry Foundation should be renamed as the Poetry Lost and Foundation!

The sound quality's not great; from time to time it's tough knowing who's speaking. But hey, what fun!