I feel like I keep harping on this issue, but I wanted to direct folks to yet another mixed/dubious analysis of Merwin’s appointment.

I was originally drawn to this piece because it seems an incredibly well thought out explanation that seems to summarize many of my own vague feelings of unease and disappointment.

Now though, I am more struck by the first comment someone left below the article – a Mr. Conrad DiDiodato.

He notes that the appointment “seems to be sticking in everybody’s craw” and asks about the “hidden psychology of resentment underlies much of [it].”

So, the question becomes – how much of this is about me? Merwin has been a highly respected poet and man of letters for decades. I admit to admiring some of his earlier work. But he’s just not my cup of tea. Yet somehow, his appointment inspires in me (and others) a certain deeply held resentment.

What did we really want? What is he failing to personify?

Is this actually part of a feeling of disappointment that creative class has felt regarding the Obama administration?

Are we reacting to hidden statements about the poetry and the poet’s place in America?

I don’t actually have answers. But I suppose it is true that I have not honestly asked the question – if it’s not you, Merwin, is it me?

I would like to indulge in a classic activity that people over thirty have enjoyed for ever since the leading cause of death among humans ceased to be “killed by sabretooth tiger”: mourning the loss of a time and place that never was.

Much as Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner wishes to return to an America of strong unions, high taxes, and virulent racism, I feel a certain sense of mourning for the seeming loss of a certain brand of intellectualism.

I was partly inspired by reading this article on the feeling that the traditional black canon has lost its place in the development of young, black collegians.

My own feeling is partly driven by a reading of Arthur Koestler’s essay on leaving the Communist Party in The God That Failed and partly by a re-reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins.

I wonder whether young people entering college still feel the drive to read the classics of the intellectual canon. Do their bookshelves have copies of The Communist Manifesto, Howl, Naked Lunch, or God and Man at Yale (for the young conservatives out there)?

A friend famously noted that half of the movements we (my friends and I) made towards this intellectual canon were driven by hormones – we thought that, perhaps, there were some girls out there who might be intrigued by a man who could quote from either subversive political tracts or dirty-minded poetry from the Beats. But we did move towards it.

And I can still remember that first flush of discovery (much mocked by our parents, when they overheard us) of these seminal figures. Even though virtually all of them were long dead, we could still feel their subversive power and authority.

When hundreds of thousands of people read the latest poorly reasoned drivel by Glenn Beck, one wonders if anyone bothers to read and be amazed anymore by the intellectual “heft” or a true giant, like the late conservative public intellectual, William F. Buckley? Have the recent rantings against socialism driven anyone to pick up The Darkness at Noon by the once famed anti-communist Arthur Koestler?

If these books are no longer regularly read by young college students, what have we, as a culture lost?

I know that I am probably mourning for a place and time and that never were (much as Boehner is mourning for a myth of the American past the only exists in his head). But I still mourn.

For me, e. e. cummings was someone you got really into your first or second year of college, but didn’t really think about after that. If I hadn’t gotten into Ezra Pound first, I would say that cummings is a sort of way station en route to Pound.

In short, since the early to mid 90’s, I haven’t given him much thought.

But, I kept seeing this edition in some of my favorite local bookstores (Kramerbooks and Bride Street Books). I assume it is a relatively new published collection (obviously, the poems themselves are not new), because I had never seen it before.

I am a big fan of erotic poetry (the Mary Ann Caws edited Surrealist Love Poem is a favorite of mine), so I picked it up.

To make a long story short, if you are like me, you have spent most of your life thinking of cummings as that modernist poet with a personal grudge against punctuation and capitalization. And, well, you would be right, but you would also be missing so much more.

A silly realization I know – one of the twentieth century’s truly canonical poets and I am surprised to find out he’s any good?

So, instead, let me say, this a wonderful way to reacquaint yourself with a poet you might not have considered in a long while and great gift for a broad-minded loved one.

The Christian Science Monitor is also wondering about how Merwin will handle the (relatively) new expectation that the Poet Laureate also be an activist and cheerleader for poetry.

However, the author, poet Elizabeth Lund, is far more sanguine about Merwin’s prospects.

She is absolutely correct that his lifetime credentials as an advocate and activist for social and environmental justice are impeccable.

But I still wonder whether an octagenarian who lives more than 2000 miles away from the lower forty-eight can fulfill the role I now want our Poet Laureate to take in public life.

W.S. Merwin was appointed the new United State Poet Laureate. He takes over from Kay Ryan.

What do I think of this?

I think that I have tried to like Merwin. I can see his book Flower & Hand sitting on my bookshelf.

I think that Merwin and his feel “Deep Image” poet, Robert Bly, represent a certain aesthetic from the sixties that looks a little stale 40 odd years removed.

I think (though this also contradicts my previous statement) that Merwin some really good poems in the late sixties and early seventies (before, I suspect, he settled in Hawaii on a permanent basis) and that he has been re-writing those same poems over and over again in the decades that followed.

Kay Ryan was also a selfless educator and promoter of poetry (a role she had been fulfilling long before she was named Poet Laureate), but I fear that the semi-reclusive Merwin, though an aesthetically defensible choice, will not bring the sort of missionary zeal we got from Ryan (and from Hass and Pinsky, too).

I think it’s possible that I’m just jealous.

Ted Joans was not the most prominent Beat writer nor was he was nearly the best Beat writer.

If he is famous, it is for demanding that one of his poems be removed from the second and future printings of The Beat Reader (he had not been recompensed for its publication in the first edition and flatly demanded that it be removed from all future printings).

But he was one the only Beat poet I ever met.

I have mixed feelings about the Beats. Every good teenage boy should experience a literary crush on the idea of the Beats, but I feel their literary value is something of a mixed bag. Allen Ginsberg, for example, wrote at least one great poem (Howl) and arguably wrote two more (Kaddish and Supermarket in California). Similarly Kerouac wrote one great novel (On the Road) and then followed it up with a series of novels of varying quality, none of which measured up to the archetypal and literary quality of that early work.

Personally, I would suggest that only Gary Snyder and William S. Burroughs got beyond the “one off” curse (one work of enduring quality, followed by a series of works that never measured up to the effect of that early work) and actually produced an oeuvre of real quality.

But… I have no mixed feeling about what Ted Joans meant to me personally.

To a young man in Paris for the first time, he was an enormous and generous figure. I was just one of a several young men who waited patiently for him on Sunday at the Cafe Deux Magots and who drank vin chaud (hot wine, drunk with sugar and lemon) because that was what he drank. We imitated his shabby chic dress (though I never tried to pull off the felt beret he wore to cover a smoothly bald crown).

Ted Joans is gone now – as are his stories of his house in Timbuktu, his good-natured impersonations of Gregory Corso, and all his future poems.

When I became something more financial stable than a poor student and would-be poet, I should have spent more of those ill-gotten gains on the small presses that published his books.

It’s too late for Ted to benefit, but I finally got around to purchasing his last book from Empty Mirror Books. If you have time, you could assuage the guilt of a former young man and send them a little love.

You can also check out Ted Joans Lives for some tribute to the late, great man.