Pauline Kael used to write witheringly about musicals said to appeal to people who didn't like musicals, and we might feel the same about poems for people who don't like poems. 'Here is a poem,' the blurb for The Wild Party says, 'that can make even readers who have no time for poetry stop dead in their tracks.' It's true that T.S. Eliot said, in 'East Coker', that 'the poetry does not matter,' but he can't have been pushing for stuff like this:

LRB 6 April 1995 | PDF Download