Belated Saturday Suck: The Overrated List

Here's something you don't see every day: an article on the 15 most overrated contemporary American writers. 


The poets on the list?

• John Ashbery
• Mary Oliver
• Sharon Olds
• Louise Glück
• Billy Collins

I have a love/hate relationship with these types of "listicles" - articles in the form of lists. For one thing, the bullet point and catchphrase format doesn't really give much leeway for nuance or doing justice to the subject matter. Especially when we're looking at hot-button issues like which poet sucks and the world doesn't know it, I'd like a second opinion. Or at least some confirmation the first one was done right.

On the other hand, listicles are massively fun to read, especially from online sources like Cracked.com. (Digression: how in the heck did a Mad Magazine spinoff manage to update to a 21st-century format and proceed to run circles around the parent publication? I haven't read MAD since I was in high school but I will read Cracked articles out loud to friends. For my money, the best to narrate is How to Punch Oasis in the Face.)

And on a final hand, with the possible exception of Mary Oliver (my personal jury is still out) I can't argue with any of the names on the list. In these posts I've done my fair share of needling, deriding and otherwise calling Billy Collins out. I thought about similarly going through the others, Olds and Glück (who is even less interesting in a live reading, I can attest to). But it just made me tired.

However, I will mention Ashbery - I've never understood his appeal. Even his Wikipedia entry has a quotation from Stephen Burt, poet and professor of English, who claims Ashbery is a figure, "whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible."

It's not his vocabulary which bothers me, per comparisons with Eliot. It's the dearth of anything I care to hear him say. My star witness:

This Room

John Ashbery

The room I entered was a dream of this room.

Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.

The oval portrait

of a dog was me at an early age.

Something shimmers, something is hushed up.

We had macaroni for lunch every day

except Sunday, when a small quail was induced

to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?

You are not even here.

So I'll admit it, I cheated. It's not Saturday and they don't suck. They're just no good, either. If this is as good as American poetry gets, we're as screwed as Bruce Willis in "Armageddon."