March

 I'm keeping a verse journal in March inspired by Creeley's book Hello, a journal he kept while traveling in 1975 or so.  What I like about this Creeley book is that many people reading might not think it adds up to very much. I myself think that sometimes when I read it. It has many nice moments in it, but it is not loading every rift with ore.  If you edited it and only got the nice bits, you would lose a lot. This, I think, was what the late poet Charles Simic missed about Creeley. I won't even defend Creeley against you if that is not your thing.  Berryman thought he was dull, but really Creeley offers a different quality of emotion from what Berryman was going after. He (Berryman) also thought Wallace Stevens was cold, but I think that is based on an inability to respond to a certain register of affect.  It is like thinking Koch is funny, or O'Hara is casual, or Ashbery is abstruse.  It is not wrong, but it doesn't really get to the thing that you are trying to get at.  

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Vallejo and Hernández both wrote Civil War poetry, in España, aparta de mí este cáliz and Viento del pueblo. Both are great poets, but Vallejo manages to write propaganda poetry that is also great, whereas Hernández falls into rhetorical propaganda, as in his sonnet in honor of the international soldier fallen in Spain.  Vallejo imagines wild scenarios, like the bombing of a cemetery bringing the dead to life again.