Literary hubris. One thing that English grad students at Yale did (still do, I'm sure) to earn a bit of money in the summer was to serve as screeners for the Yale Press's annual Younger Poets Series competition. Hundreds of book-length manuscripts were submitted; you'd plow through as many of them as you could, as quickly as you could while getting (you hoped) a fair impression, grading them on an A - F scale (though anything C or below was failing) and writing a paragraph for the judge on the submission's merits, or lack thereof. Every manuscript was assured of at least two screener readings, to correct for anyone's idiosyncracies.

A very few manuscripts you'd feel like going to bat for, and you'd give them slightly longer writeups. Funny thing is, I don't really remember any of those: I don't even recall checking the Series results to see if a winner ever passed through my hands. No: the ones I remember are the cranks. The best thing I ever saw screening for the Series was a collection of poems on the sole subject of Brooke Shields—not dedicated to Brooke, mind you, but treating her, from every possible angle. This was not some sort of self-conscious, Warhol-esque exercise, either. The MS was divided in three sections—I believe they were "Child-Woman," "Mega-Star," and "Goddess"—each section prefaced with its own title page featuring, no kidding, a crayon drawing of Brooke in the appropriate phase of life. I had an instinct to hold on to the MS and call the FBI on Ms. Shields' behalf. I had an instinct to filch the thing for myself as an artifact, return policy be damned. Sadly, I did neither.

Yesterday, in the course of some aimless surfing, I stumbled into the Schneiderverse: the poetry world of Dan Schneider, at Cosmoetica.com. No, Dan's not the long-lost author of Brooke Poems, but he is a world-class poetry crank, and highly recommended. In particular, I give you his series "This Old Poem," in which Dan—who is confident that he's a greater poet than Walt Whitman, or practically anybody else who ever took up pen—plays literary contractor, engaging himself to renovate the atrocious, cliché doggerel of old and contemporary masters and bring the structures up to his own rigorous standards. And you've got to admire his moxie: the first old boy he takes on is none other than W. B. Yeats, one of the great poets in the language. Here's a glimpse of the results, as Dan spruces up the lovely early poem "Into the Twilight"—Yeats first, then Schneider:

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Outgrown part, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh there, again, in the grey’s delight,
Sigh then, again, with a dew not the morn’s.

That first bolded revision practically defines the term "tin ear." So does the clotted mouthful of "with a dew not the morn's" (say it aloud if you don't believe me). And how do you sigh "with" (in the sense of producing) a dew: isn't that less a sigh than an expectoration? [But who am I to quarrel? Dan appends a score to each of his reconstruction projects, the original versus his revision: Yeats gets a "Bad to Terrible" rating of 55 on a 100-point scale, while Dan manages to bump the poem all the way to an Excellent 87. Clearly, the objective numbers are against me.]

Dan runs a poetry group in Minneapolis, dedicated apparently to hacking away at candidate poems until they bleed, which on the evidence of Cosmoetica must be the workshop equivalent of Jim Jones' People's Temple. There's a long and uncondescending article on Schneider from a few years back in the Minneapolis City Pages, if you want to get more a flavor of the man than his own pages offer. Me, I wouldn't ever want to meet him, but I'm glad he exists.

posted by michael  1:23:08 PM  
tell me about it []