"Society's trivialities" in one poet's hand are materia prima in another's. Geoseffi's unfortunate implication-that society is trivial, and that the poet is a superior being for rendering it meaningful-is made all the more so for sitting at the end of the stanza, unconnected with what has preceded it, or, indeed, with what will follow. The poet neither attempts to explain what she means, nor does she even give us the benefit of a grammatical sentence. This is not as well written as prose. What follows, in the next stanza is more than embarrassing, and I cite it with the understanding that we do not mistake it for poetry, but only because it illustrates a problem of proportion.

Joy begets joy; sorrow;
sorrow,
and so I've gone on cheerily
since you hit me
and I ended here
shedding women's tears
to the doctor.

Much of the work in The Cortland Review does not rise above the anecdotal-small slices of experience, no doubt interesting to the people that had them, but only interesting to readers-and editors, I might add-who are similarly free of ambition. But how can readers schooled on the searing self-scrutiny of Plath, and the baroque carriage of Lowell-to mention just two of the poets who might seem to hover behind Geoseffi's work- be expected to tolerate a line like "since you hit me." Not the lack of craft, or of reference to something outside the poet's feeble vision, or of aesthetic texture- which is what draws us back to the best poetry again and again-but the sheer banality, and the ineffectual sadness of this discourse is what most imposes. Geoseffi's flat and uneventful language, her self-importance and unrelieved sentimentality, and her conclusive lack of wit, is reduplicated, in the "Features" section of The Cortland Review, in DeWayne Rail's jejune interview prose. His fascination for Philip Levine's pedagogy stretches one's patience horribly.

Actually, Levine produced the apples from somewhere deep in the pockets of his jacket. Suddenly he would just reach in his pocket and pull out an apple and then eat it. It was the most marvelous act….We would sit there and repeat the things Levine had said, you know, trying to imitate him, and laughing ourselves sick over the incredible wit of the man. I could never sleep after one of his classes. I would lie in bed, and my arms and legs would literally just twitch as the electricity ebbed away. His writing and teaching both influenced me a lot. I loved his poems, but I didn't want to sound like him at all. It was a different voice, you know, Detroit, not me at all.

This interest in raw, unmediated experience, and a fascination for the pedagogic rather than the intellectual life of poets, or the history of writing classes over the history of ideas, and the transformation of this material into either "literature" or "critical discourse" is, all of it, situated at such a distance from previous standards of rigor that it becomes, itself, a kind of measure of what is wrong with American poetry, and, in a broader sense, of what has happened to our intellectual and artistic life over the last two decades. Let me cite another student recollection just to show you how far we've come. This one, by Horace Kallen, published originally in The Journal of Philosophy in 1921, recalls George Santayana.

Those who remember him in the class room will remember him as a spirit solemn, sweet and withdrawn, whose Johannine face by a Renaissance painter held an abstract eye and a hieratic smile, half mischief, half content; whose rich voice flowed evenly, in cadences smooth and balanced as a liturgy; whose periods had the intricate perfection of a poem and the import of a prophecy; who spoke somehow for his hearers and not to them, stirring the depths I their natures and troubling their minds, as an oracle might, to who pertained the mystery and reverence, so compact of remoteness and fascination was he, so moving and so unmoved. [cited in The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant, Pocket Books, 1974]

Both accounts share the sentimentality which invariably comes with the terrain, but while Levine provokes his students to "laugh themselves sick" over his "incredible wit"-the only evidence for which seems to be the manner in which he eats apples-Santayana inspires at a level altogether more "troubling". Our comparison is between pedagogic tricks (at least in Rail's account) and something rarer, the echo of complete immersion in a body of knowledge: "so compact of remoteness and fascination was he, so moving and so unmoved." So too is the emphasis different. Rail inclines inevitably toward his own response and away from whatever content Levine's classes held: " I would lie in bed, and my arms and legs would literally just twitch as the electricity ebbed away. His writing and teaching both influenced me a lot." This tendancy to back away from substance toward the anecdotal perisists in other facets of the The Cortland Review.

This interest in raw, unmediated experience, and a fascination for the pedagogic rather than the intellectual life of poets, is at such a distance from previous standards of rigor that it becomes a kind of measure of what is wrong with American poetry.

Let's up the ante and consider the case of Mark Jarman, neo-formalist par excellence. He is, in fact, the self-appointed millennial spokesperson for the iamb. Interviewed by JM Spaulding, the editor of The Cortland Review, the general tenor of his conclusions are somewhat Oprah-esqe. Though far more engaged with poetry, per se, than Rail is in his interview, he is quickly brought around to the magazine's me-centered gestalt. The principle themes are how poetry "moves" me, how my past is important, how important teaching is to me, and how important the iambic pentameter is to my poems. Early on, in fact, responding to the question: what is the first thing you notice about a poem, Jarman emphasizes, above all else, his own emotional response.

I wish I could claim that, like W. H. Auden, I looked first at what the poem was doing technically. But that's not altogether true. I read the poem and expect it to move me.

Ask not what you can do for your poem, but what your poem can do for you. Though at least Jarman knows there is another, and-one would assume by the wistful tone-he thinks a superior form of apprehension. Auden, even though he tried to be an American, remained an English poet till the end. His motto might have been "know what's moving you." It's not that Jarman is reducing experience to emotion. It's just that emotion is the correlating response. This tendency in less literate writers than Jarman, is what underlies the problem in mainstream American poetry today. The sad fact is that poetry, like just about everything else in American culture, has been reduced to a bite- sized medium suitable for the general dwindling of attention span and seriousness with which the age has equipped the average reader. In fact real reading seems to be increasingly less the point as it gradually gives way to that state of "being always about to read", and to surfing books of poems on the internet as though they were so many channels on cable TV. Without a capacity to respond intellectually to poetry, we are left with emotion and all that implies. The satisfaction is not for what happens in the poem- some syntactic, aural, or semantic quiddity brought to flower against the inherent restriction of language-but what happens in you, that adrenaline flush of internal fluid which hardly differentiates between Coleridge and Spielberg.

Jarman's "Unholy Sonnets"-four of which are published in The Cortland Review- have the excitability of what we normally think of as light verse, but without any of that submerged gravitas, or the satirical punch of good light verse. His lines hover somewhere between Ogdan Nash and John Donne. Where precisely, is the question. They are poems with a certain vertical drop, a brand of inevitability, but it is of the man running downstairs to catch the telephone, wondering if he's got the right tie on. It's all expediency. There is none of the aural limp and catch of Larkin moving slowly back to bed after a three AM. piss. Nor is there anything like that gravelly hitched quality Lowell gets in the sprung formalism of The Dolphin. Nothing of the weight and counterweight, the tragic caesura. Instead they are-the worst that can result in the belated attempt to write formal verse-sing song.

Unholy Sonnet

There is a law outside the daily racket,
The vertigo of distracting personal woes,
And one outside of that, and beyond those,
The one that fits the cosmos like a jacket.
And when I think of that--that big abstraction--
I feel like a retiree in Palm Springs.
The serene, tearless clarity of things
Settles me down into sublime inaction.

But I am not a retiree in Palm Springs.
The girls of anxious gravity, my sin,
Tug at my heart and pockets, and I spin,
Bracing myself against a storm of things
That pelt and paw me and caress and claw--
The law inside the law inside the law.

Poetry is, in the end, a question of lines. If they don't do it, the poem can't be expected to. Consider the one about "girls" who "Tug at my heart and pockets, and I spin" (matched with "sin" of the previous line, which, in the conflationary logic of rhyme, gives us the unfortunate "spun sin"). This rhythmically drab and insipid bit of versification is followed by a line which expresses yet another me-ish vagary: "Bracing myself against a storm of things". Padding out a line with "storm of" whatever might be excusable if the poem were just getting going, and it were a longer poem. But we are three lines to the end of a sonnet. We expect concision, we expect the explosion of music and sense, the excitement and density of the scored syllogism.

Poetry is, in the end, a question of lines. If they don't do it, the poem can't be expected to.

This is the kind of poem our nervous research hopes to turn up. It always seems, when we do, that the cost has been more than returned. But with a cottage industry run rampant, producing more poets than can be comfortably employed, whose only option is to become recycled as teachers of poetry, which, in turn, aggravates the problem even further, one naturally looks to the editors, erstwhile adjudicators who are not only choosing the poems we read, but creating-to a certain extent-the context in which we read them. Have they forgotten that the little magazine should be almost as well made as the good poem?