It only took the New York Times eighteen days to run an obituary of Barbara Guest. My favorite part is when Margalit Fox, an editor for the Book Review who is routinely tapped for literary obits, makes language poets of the New York School:

The New York School emerged partly as a reaction against the angst-ridden work of the confessional poets of the late 1950's, among them John Berryman and Robert Lowell and, somewhat later, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. In contrast, the New York poets shared a concern with language as pure form, using words much as a painter uses paint.

Two paragraphs hence, we find this historical sleight of hand:

In 1960, Ms. Guest attracted favorable notice with her first collection of poems, "The Location of Things" (Tibor de Nagy Editions). But by the end of the decade, the spotlight had shifted to poets like Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich, whose work was overtly political.

Maybe Fox means that the New York Times’ spotlight had shifted. Or possibly that the big Book Review advertisers, the forerunners of today’s Gang of Eight, had decided that after John & Jimmy & Kenneth, they could ignore the rest of the riff-raff. In either event, Fox may be apt in her choice of metaphor here, tho it is the Times, not Barbara Guest, who stands revealed by that spotlight’s glare.