Gradations of Snark

Ahhh, if I only had a tenth of the talent of these blurbers. After these quotes, the legacies of these poets told of the effect.

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"A pig rooting among garbage."
--on Walt Whitman

"A blandly inoffensive barns and farms poet, suitable for use in seducing blue-haired old ladies."
--on Ted Kooser

"Pinsky wants to dance with his poems. The problem is, he has a lead ass."
--on Robert Pinsky

"It's hard to say what's worse, his milquetoast attempts at "the uncanny" in his profoundly overrated "crow" poems, or his tepid early nature poems. Brother should have stuck to children's books."
--on Ted Hughes

"Like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep."
--on Alfred Lord Tennyson

"A hack with a tin ear, ....should have been forgotten long ago."
--on Edgar Allan Poe

"A humorless fraud, cold and toady."
--on Seamus Heaney

"The praise she gets for [her poems] is the same kind of praise I give to my undergraduate creative writing students when they make one good word choice in a ten-page story. I cringe every time I read a Dickinson poem."
--on Emily Dickinson

"Keats. Fucking Keats and his fucking Grecian Urn."
--on .... John Keats

"This will never do."
--on William Wordsworth

"Boring conversational lines."
--on Chris Banks

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And to close with a snark so damning, the unfortunate recipient has been expunged from history:


"You small and runny pile of encephalitis. "American Literature is dead." Where'd you get that insight, the LaBrea fucking tar-pits? Keep raving in your forest, pal, but you are a far, far cry from earning any love/cred from us real snarkers. Your own yawn is bored with you. God knows you're not worth the gurney they'll inevitably strap you down on."




Who says reviewers don't have influence?