Bodenheim insult of the day: Fellow poets

February 9, 2010

The poetic situation in America is, indeed, a blustering and verbose invitation to boredom and a slight, reviling headache. When not engaged in scrubbing the window pane ten times over, lest it prove opaque to an astigmatic public, American poets are discovering, with great glee, the perspiring habits and routines of sex, or naively deifying the local mannerisms of a blithely juvenile country--a lurching, colloquial, fist-swinging melee of milkmen depositing bottles on doorsteps and acquiring dignity in the process; chorus-girls and farmhands telling their troubles in a stilted slang; factory-owners falling in love with their female employees, to the tune of delicate and novel symbolism concerning "a longing to enter the house of her being"; ravings over the strength and poignancy of corn-fields and country-roads--"O, the corn, how it aches!" and "What is better than the patient and sturdy road?"--; much roaring about the importance and hard beauty of mills and factories--crudely smoky boxes of avarice faced by little, kneeling poets....Ah, the list, when extended, defies amusement. You must leave the theater unless you desire the thankless experience of vomiting.

(From the foreword to The Sardonic Arm by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1923, Covici-McGee)