LRPG '80

Dorothy Alper (ed.)

I probably shouldn't spend nearly as much time as I'm going to on this painful little piece of doggerel. But (a) I feel like it, and (b) while it is long and mercifully out of print, if you're a true masochist, there's a signed copy floating around Amazon's zShops for $20 at present. Which is about $25 more than it's worth.

Normally, an anthology of crappy verse like LRPG '80 (whose editors were so brilliant that they released this anthology in 1978) would just kind of pass under my radar with a few snide comments. After all, it's far too easy to take cracks at an anthology that publishes “verse” like

“When life becomes a fervor of getting,
Haggai, the prophet, tells me, ‘take care!'
Life is building with energy and purpose,
No need to hurry here and there.”
(Martha Gifford, “Expression Shared”)

It doesn't get any better. This is stuff that could have come straight from the collections of Barbara Cartland or Helen Steiner Rice. It's pretty much the definition of “doggerel.” If you stick a spoon in it, it'll coat the back and not drip for minutes on end. It will leave a nasty aftertaste in your mouth reminiscent of a piquant mixture of Lifebuoy and dog turds, but is ultimately harmless.

So why does this particular anthology draw great ire? Because, as the preface tells us, this is not an anthology of poets picked off the street by any random editor with excruciatingly bad taste. Oh, no. The people immortalized in these ever-so-flammable pages are graduate students. Yes, they're graduate students, and they all come from a series of classes in poetry taught originally by Vivian Yeiser Laramore Rader (whence the LR in the anthology's title; the PG is “Poetry Group”) and taken over by one Frank S. Fitzgerald-Bush upon Ms. Laramore Rader's death in 1973.

The anthology opens with a poem by the late Laramore, and it should
have served as warning enough that the following hundred sixty pages
were going to be ugly:
“…When she is dust, kneel down and sense her breathing
In pulsing grass and little trembling roots,
And you who seemed to think that she was leaving,
Will find her where the rising sun salutes.”
(“Requiem”)

When you have enough of an idea of what enjambment is that you can write the third and fourth lines of that excerpt, and then still fuck them up by putting a comma at the end of line three, you're working at being a purveyor of doggerel. It's not a question of just writing bad verse (and this is just verse, nothing about it approaches the level of poetry); it's a question of striving to write bad verse. It's idolizing people like Cartland and Rice and wanting to imitate them. No doubt, handed a volume of, say, T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound (both of whom were writing when Ms. L.R. published the pieces of nastiness from which the above is excerpted), Vivian Yeiser would likely have turned up her nose and asked, “but why aren't there full stops at the end of every line?”

Well, worry not, dear departed one. All of the sheep you've shorn to make this anthology of puerile piddling have cleaved to your ideas of what makes for poetry all too well. Some of them do manage to show a glimmer of talent when not under your thumb; the contributors' page lists poets who have been published in such vaunted places as The Lyric, The Journal, Modern Haiku, Fiddlehead, and Bitterroot, but you'd never believe it from reading the flowery tripe they've vomited up onto these pages. (It is, perhaps, more telling to count the number who have appears in such deathless repositories of verse as Good Housekeeping, Directions, and The Saturday Review.)

I would cap this review off with another excerpt pulled from a random page, as the first one was, but that would rather be like a monkey throwing more shit against the wall after he's already coated it. One more nugget, however splattered, isn't going to turn feces into art. Hopefully the board of directors at Florida Southern University, where the devil and her consort had their lair, has realized this and shut down this factory for the production of nausea.