Richard Brautigan Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Gilbert Sorrentino

Critical Essay by Gilbert Sorrentino

[The Galilee Hitch-Hiker] has nine short poems which take their shape from quotations from Baudelaire, and from the kind of residue in the reader's mind concerning his recollection of Baudelaire's life—or what we take his life to have been, relying on his poems. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. The perfect poem is the second one, The American Hotel …—which is really a kind of comic genius. It might be useful to note that these poems have a sense of "camp" about them, clearly manifested, and much more intriguing than what is now going down as wit…. But they are very subtle and literary, and function dryly. (p. 59)

Gilbert Sorrentino, in Poetry (© 1968 by The Modern Poetry Association; reprinted by permission of the Editor of Poetry), April, 1968.