The Folger Shakespeare Library‘s most recent poetry reading featured the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner, Mark Kraushaar, who won for his second book, The Uncertainty Principle, and British poet James Fenton. Fenton was also the final judge of this Hecht Prize this year and selected Kraushaar for the honor.

Kraushaar was a somewhat awkward reader and his poetry not completely to my taste. I know that The Uncertainty Principle has wound up on several “best of” lists and I won’t deny its quality. It is just not my cup of tea.

His poems are very prosy and narrative with colloquial language. When introducing him, Fenton noted that his poems are indubitably “about something.”

Fenton suggested that too many poems are inscrutable for the sake of being inscrutable, or rather because of a vicious loop in the MFA community (there’s a lot of discussion about MFAs and their effect on poetry lately). He held Kraushaar as a counterweight to that.

Naturally, I am little unsure about that dynamic. I don’t mind – and frequently enjoy – poems that resist easy interpretation. “This poem is about X.”

However, when Fenton himself read, I was blown away.

Some years ago, in Alabama, I think, I bought a book of his poems. I don’t know why. I think that I barely touched them.

But listening to him read from his Selected Poems… intricate and compelling rhyme schemes, a fierce political ethic, and a willingness to put himself in the shoes of people far different from himself (a child soldier in Cambodia in the seventies, for example). Fantastic stuff.

Naturally, I bought his book and asked him to sign it.