5) The local hero, the respectable mediocrity, the professional academic poet with some claim to fame, like a Celeste Turner Wright. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=100&issue=1&page=41. Maybe a poet working in an old, unoriginal style. Someone who never had an honest critique of their work, or who has very limited range, like a Billy Collins.
6) The poet without any particular pretension to being great, but who manages to make a good poem or two out of very little (apparent) artifice. A Richard Brautigan, or Charles Bukowski. You might wonder why it is a poem at all, yet it actually beats out the more respectable and earnest modes we have discussed so far. Sometimes a prose writer writing poems will achieve this level, like a Raymond Carver or like the two I've already mentioned. John Updike writing a poem can achieve a 5 level, maybe a 6. On the same level as a 6 might be a poet like Gilbert Sorrentino, who is brilliant in prose but only so-so in verse, despite his extreme degree of poetic culture. For this level, a poet would have to be have a distinctive personality as a writer, even if the poem itself doesn't come off. I'm not sure why all the names I'm thinking of are also writers of prose?
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