Stan Apps on Rules for Drinking Forties

Morgan Myers’s insightful write-up of “Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren)” got me thinking about Stan Apps’s excellent review of “Rules for Drinking Forties” a couple years back. That may count as navel gazing, but what I like about both is how smoothly they move out from the poems into larger areas of inquiry. For Myers, it’s the poetic virtues of appropriation and the “emotional extremism” we no longer much tolerate in poetry, but allow ourselves in the schmaltzy excesses of pop; for Apps, it’s the process by which the “impure” vitalities of idiomatic speech come to nose their way into the privileged linguistic locker room of the literary and “poetic.” I’m glad for both responses, and for the blogs that still let you read them during workdays at a click.