The poetry of everyday life by John Hollander is a volume in the series "Poets on Poetry" published by The University of Michigan Press, collecting critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of their new generation.

I do not know whether John Hollander is an important poet in the US, or anywhere else. This collection of articles was very disappointing. The title piece The poetry of everyday life is a loosely structured compilation of ideas (it can hardly be called an essay). Hollander falls into the trap of believing that words have their own magic; they may in poetry, but in prose it just doesn't work in the same way. In the introduction he calls this poetic fictions in prose (not, in fact, prose poems, but rather parabolic or otherwise enigmatic narratives). Much of it is just a whole lot of bollocks, as for example this extract from Talking to Our Cats (on page 7):

(...)feline names are never in a true grammatical vocative. Cats never respond to their names per se, as do dogs. Their names are the titles of poetic texts, the names of tropes, into which all of the uncharacterizable life of each particular cat seems to grow. We read the cat as an unfolding book, and our glossing of its invisible expressions is like moralizing a dark pregnant myth. Our discourse is with a fable we have invented, albeit in order to explain one of the most compelling presences, a domestic spirit. Its response to us, and ours to it, are both parts of a parable..

Now, my cat simply comes to me when I call him, as did my dog before. The passage above is just one of many outbursts of flatulence, which make one wonder whether the poet cum sage is humming high on a pillar, stoned or otherwise out of his mind. Naturally, poets have the prerogative to make words, e.g. seemingly incorrect uncharacterizable or twist usage, i.e. I know of stories unfolding, but fail to see how a book could unfold!

In other parts of the book, the reader will often come across that word, tropes. Hollander is apparently very fond of creating bombastic words. In the selected articles consisting of literary criticism, we find "magnificent" adjectives, such as "gothicized", "Spenserizings of the Ovidian fable", "post-Fraserian gothicizing" (in "translating the classics"), "Epicurean position", "anti-Cartesian views" and Aesopian fables (in "translating La Fontaine"), "Whitmanesque incantation" (in "translating the Pessoas (sic!)) and "Tocquevilleian overtones" (in "About Daryl Hine").

The three essays of literary criticism on translation do not seem outstanding in any way. They are rather dreary pieces, as one expects any university professor to be able to to, and possible be forced to churn out, more as a must than as a lust. They are far too specialist for the general reader, and cumbersome to read because of all the (unrendered) French in it. They were obviously written for an entirely different readership.

Altogether, a very uninspiring volume. ( )