Each April, Alfred A. Knopf, once an independent publisher but now just a “brand” at Random House, sends out weekday emails that “celebrate” National Poetry Month by advertising Knopf volumes of poetry. The Knopf list is generally a roster of the tradition to which alternative traditions seek to be an alternative: Hirsch, Hecht, Hollander, Levine, Merrill, Merwin, Strand, Justice, Clampitt, Van Duyn are more typical than not. In general, the press requires its women and authors of color to be more interesting: Plath, Carson, Olds, Jordan, Dove, Sapphire, Langston Hughes, Kevin Young. Michael Ondaatje publishes books of poetry here, but that’s because Knopf will publish verse in order to situate itself favorably with best-selling fiction writers. That explains all the books of poetry by John Updike & even the works of Stan Rice. The one really notable exception to its rule that recent authors must generally fit into the reactionary anglophile tradition is Kenneth Koch. In this catalog, he stands out like an undone zipper.

 

“A Fragment: the Cause” is the poem that Knopf issued Tuesday, April 8, by Edgar Bowers. Because I expect that I would get a letter from the lawyers if I were to quote it in full, I’m going to link to the poem here – I recommend that you right-click on the link & open the poem in a separate window. This poem is actually the work that Knopf posts on the website as an example of Bowers’ verse. For its April mailings, Knopf at least partly chose this poem because of its presumed relevance to the issue of the devastation of war. 

 

If the clichés don’t get you – “Rapt murmuring,” “the cry profane,” “spent bitterness” – the sheer overwriting will – “mask of numbness,” “silent foreign call,” “Medicinal hope’s spent brevity” – this is such an intense little catalog of bathos that one almost wonders if the poet is, perversely, making fun of the dead.

 

“A Fragment: the Cause” would be a dreadful poem even if turned in by a college freshman – that it appears at all in Bowers’ Collected Poems is an indication that he had no editor who cared very much about the man, a sad comment really. Not unlike having a publisher’s website that tells you that Bowers “now lives in San Francisco” three years after his death. That this same web site posts this work as an example of Bowers’ poetry, or as an example of poetry at all, is shocking.

 

What does it say about Knopf & its poetry marketing prowess that they would send this howler out to hundreds, perhaps thousands of poetry readers? At one, very basic level, it’s a confession of illiteracy from the heart of the trade publishing industry. No news there – Carcanet’s attraction to the soft porn of Sophie Hannah demonstrates that this isn’t just a U.S. pathology. But at another, more important level, it may be an acknowledgement that Knopf knows exactly what it’s marketing & that this firm recognizes that its poetry list is to verse what Harlequin was for so many decades to fiction, the home of the overripe trope.

 

That this may be deliberate is worth thinking about, especially when we consider that roster of poets in the first paragraph. Bowers’ poetry, after all, has been described by no less than Harold Bloom as being “in vital form, in accuracy of perception and sensation, in a vision at once original yet profoundly representative of the American imagination at its most eloquent maturity.” Today, in fact, there will even be a conference on Bowers at UCLA. The participants that may be most recognizable to readers of this blog are Turner Cassity, Timothy Steele and Robert Mezey. We envision much rapt murmuring and cries profane.