From Back-cover:
"Ambitious and witty"--Ronald Wallace, UWisconsin
"Nonosyllabics are a brilliant form--I'd like to teach 'The Form' in my section on meta-poetry in my intro to poetry course next year" "I am rereading PL with great pleasure."--Margaret Ferguson, UC Davis

"It has fine local things, though, as with Berryman, I had trouble getting from one 'part' to the next, kept getting lost. Is this part of the game? I do hear some of JB's voice in this." "To traverse pages of witty wordplay and then to hit the sequence about Tom W's death. Very moving, and thoroughly surprising, unsettling. I guess this is the 'uprising' you mention at the end of your note."--William Pritchard, Amherst College

American poets have written about themselves for two hundred years, yet Chaucer, Moliere and Shakespeare did not. This narrative poem follows in the footsteps of Pushkin, Persius and Berryman, but it features a couple dozen parodies.The main character was the author's brilliant college friend, himself a parodist in the classes he taught at Yale; his tragic end completes this otherwise amusing poem.

Author's debts: Rolfe Humphries, his Freshman Humanities professor, loaned him Latin, Thyestes; Archibald MacLeish taught both him and his brilliant friend, Tom Weiskel ( Harold Bloom protege), fictionalized here as Onagain. Author rode the bus at the University of Minnesota with John Berryman, a neighbor. JB did not know AP, but JB wrote a story poem he came to admire, as he did Pushkin's Onegin based partly on Byron.
See FB page, same title, for Country Western parody performed by California professionals. ( )