Best American Poetry 2013 Poem by Frank Avon

Mitch Susskind writes about
Joe/Adamczyk
in five-line stanzas
for twelve and a half pages -
and (by the way) holds your interest

even when Joe is reading
Gottloeb Fresge's 'Die Grund-
lagen der Arithmatik'
with a German-English dictionary.

So?

Aaron Smith writes about
Aaron Smith
himself, xxxxx his xxxxx,
his desires
and pubic hair
his own and just about everyone else's,
and underarm hair
whether or not
it's there,

and, by the way,
his piece (two dense pages)
is not poetry
but prose - a 'prose poem, '
one of those -
and prose is not poetry
and doesn't need to be
and shouldn't claim to be.

Poetry: define.
It's written in lines
(that's what verse means) .
Prose is what?
It's not.
It's as simple as that.
But never mind:
delete the last fourteen lines.

So
Joe/Adamczyk
is more interesting than
Aaron Smith
by a long shot,
which means that Mitch Susskind
is more interesting
than Aaron Smith, or
at least a better writer,
but Aaron Smith,
even when he persists
in talking about his own pubic hair
is a helluva lot more interesting
and a better writer

than all those others
who write about nothing at all,
or don't know what they're writing about,
or - to be more fair -
write only for one another
or only for themselves.

'By the way, ' Billy Collins writes
in one of his critical notes, 'is
anyone who is not a poet reading this? '

These 'poets' define poetry
as lines (or not)
that use words
to escape words,
to approach wordlessness,
to evade meaning
(what readers might
mistake as meaning) .
That's what they mean to do,
- er, aim to do, I should say
(a poem must not mean) -
what they do
even when they don't aim to.

Ergo,
most of 'The Best American Poetry'
isn't poetry,
though it means to be,
er, seems to be
(it's written in lines anyway) .

So
read Mitch Susskind writing about Joe
and Aaron writing about Aaron,
and a few others like that,

and keep hoping - as I do
(against hope - experience)
that one of these years,
there'll be

another Frost or Eliot,
Marianne Moore
or Langston Hughes
or Elizabeth Bishop
or Robert Lowell
(or even another Ginsberg)
a Nemerov or Dickey or Ferlinghetti,
Snodgrass, Sexton or Sylvia.

Maybe
it's gonna be
Jesse Miller -

just maybe -

who finds Eden
in his Florida
among the drainage ditches,
and a million mosquitoes,
'the scents and ghosts and shadows'
of 'this sputtering beautiful world.'