April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

An unhappy people in a happy world--
Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference.
An unhappy people in an unhappy world--

Here are too many mirrors for misery.
A happy people in an unhappy world--
It cannot be. There's nothing there to roll

On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.
                   (from "The Auroras of Autumn", Wallace Stevens)

The bad...

Hypothesis of parasitic-push-outwards.

She sucks on his hypothesis.

Turns it in her mouth until there's a lozenge-shaped crevasse
that begins to slice sides off her tongue.

A hank of chopped silence gathers.

Verification slides his black eyes toward her
to check the effect against the ammonia.
                    (from MODESTY: LESSON NO. 2, Karen Houle)
_______________________________

Without meaning to be one Stevens's verse is philosophic; Houle's is, however, simply there, opened in front of her like the academic's connect-the-dots imitation of a favourite author. Stevens's "Auroras" is, beyond even the philosophic, a very mirroring Torah and the mystery between itself and the Master of the Universe never more reverentially problematized. Of course, it's never apparent to the readerly sense and yet the mysteries of an autumn season were never more happily read. The quickening cynicism of a people condemned to be unhappy in an unhappy land is a very jewel refracted (and never just vulgarly seen) in poetic light. By contrast, "hank of chopped silence" is a rather stupidly misappropriated sense of movement and rhythm altogether. Even in the age of différance, the stupidly misappropriated movement of a "hank of chopped silence"...