In 1971 Gilbert Sorrentino published a novel about poets, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, a savage book full of judgments his acquintances must have prayed would not be thought to refer to them. ("Free! Free! Irremediably poor. Such work is irremediable because it has no working parts. It is a great chunk of, say, Liederkranz."…) I mention this book because it is very good, still awaiting its public, at least on my coast, and because Sorrentino has both gifts, fictional and poetic, in a measure I don't think we've seen since Williams.

These poems dazzle at first with their intense colors, and inside them like a bee is enough spite to scare the browser…. Immediately you hear Stevens, and Rimbaud at his bitterest. "Note the bitterness and wanton/patterns of assault," Sorrentino urges.

He doubts his readers, offers his cruel poems and his tender ones with a faint sneer...