Where the Bee Sucks: Workers, Drones, and Queens of Contemporary American Poetry

It's hard to dislike a poetry critic who chooses to discuss John Ashbery in the form of a mock-colloquy between two overeducated characters named Dick and Jane (``Reaming eucalyptus roots from sewer lines is simpler than deciphering Ashbery,'' Dick asserts). Peters ( Poems, Selected and New ) takes a refreshingly unacademic approach to the assessment of contemporary American poetry; these essays, representing his work of the last quarter century, try to cut a path through the ``safe forms, safe language, safe themes'' that in his opinion have clogged the scene. His correctives--positive proselytizing, witty naysaying, and the mixed review--are imaginative. Interspersed with pieces addressing a broad range of writers--Tess Gallagher, Allen Ginsberg--are more thematic chapters that inspect and assail opening lines in poems and (in ``Biopsies'') question the hows and whys of Language Poetry. Peters is openly impatient with failure and pretension, and he makes no effort to sound a representative note. In his view of criticism, consensus seems not to be the point. That's partly why his views are both arguable and bracing. (Aug.)