Aaron Gleeman analyzes this year’s Hall of Fame candidates. He gives too much weight to career value and too little to peak value, which is to say he votes for Tommy John and Jim Kaat and against Goose Gossage, where I would do the opposite. But those are all close calls, and beyond that we agree perfectly.

Last night Megan “Jane Galt” McArdle, Ken “Illuminated Donkey” Goldstein and I, crossing Broadway without looking after a Paul Frankenstein-sponsored poker game, were nearly mown down by oncoming traffic, and it got me thinking: suppose we had all bit it? What would the magnitude of the loss be to the blogging community?

A. February 3, 1959: The Day the Music Died (Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson)
B. October 20, 1977: This Bird It Will Not Change (Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines)
C. March 5, 1963: Sweet Dreams Baby (Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins)

Patsy Cline was and is internationally renowned. Copas and Hawkins are known for dying in a plane crash with Patsy Cline. Exactly. Other suggestions welcome.

Now winter nights enlarge
  The number of their hours,
And clouds their storms discharge
  Upon the airy towers.
Let now the chimneys blaze,
  And cups o’erflow with wine;
Let well-tuned words amaze
  With harmony divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
  Shall wait on honey Love;
While youthful revels, masks, and courtly sights
  Sleep’s leaden spells remove.

This time doth well dispense
  With lovers’ long discourse.
Much speech hath some defense
  Though beauty no remorse.
All do not all things well:
  Some measures comely tread,
Some knotted riddles tell,
  Some poems smoothly read.
The Summer hath his joys,
  And Winter his delights.
Though Love and all his pleasures are but toys,
  They shorten tedious nights.

–Thomas Campion

(Update: Cinderella points out that this, like many Elizabethan poems, was meant to be sung, and provides a link to the music, also written by Campion. I would rather hear it recited, but the fact that so many Elizabethan poems were written as songs partly accounts for the remarkably sensitive meters of such masters as Campion, Dowland, Nashe and Morley.)

So I’m reading Michael Kinsley’s too-clever-by-half piece in Slate on the University of Michigan case, and I happen on this:

Undoubtedly, Alan Bakke [the plaintiff in the 1978 Supreme Court that allowed schools to consider race “as a factor” but disallowed “quotas”] would have been admitted if he had been black. But that’s not the right question. The right question is whether, as a white, he would have been admitted to medical school if all those places weren’t reserved for blacks. The same question arises in the current case, Grutter v. Bollinger…

Figures from a representative year included in court documents indicate that the school [University of Michigan Law School] gets about six applicants for every available place, and that even among those with Grutter’s [Barbara Grutter, the plaintiff] impressive [3.8/4.0] GPA, your chance of getting in is about 1 in 3. Even assuming, implausibly, that every single one of the special-treatment minority students was less qualified than Grutter and would not have been admitted if they were white, that would have improved Grutter’s own chances by about one-eighth. The likelihood that affirmative action done her in is very small.

The facts are not clean enough to suit Kinsley. Unfortunately it will always be impossible to prove that a rejected applicant was kept out of law school by affirmative action, since many admissions criteria are non-objective and the matter is ultimately at the admission committee’s complete discretion. The Supreme Court understood this, and understood that Grutter’s obviously damaged chances of admission were a sufficient grievance, which is why they took the case. The facts will never be clean enough to suit Kinsley.

Kinsley’s math is also lousy. If you increase the spots available by one-eighth, you do nothing for the bottom half of the applicants, who will be rejected anyway. But you do a great deal for the marginal applicants, like Grutter. You certainly increase their chances of admission by more than one-eighth.

Garden-variety sophistry so far. But then:

And while we’re playing “what if,” we should also consider the effect on Grutter’s chances if she found herself competing against blacks and other minorities who had experienced the same variety of advantages and disadvantages as the white candidates in the applicant pool…
And if justice entitles her to the higher chance of admission to Michigan Law School that she would have enjoyed if there was no reverse discrimination, that calculation should also reflect the lower chance she would have had if there was no discrimination of the traditional sort either.

This is the John Lennon School of Legal Reasoning. (It’s easy if you try.) We may as well consider the effect on Grutter’s chances if we all lived in a different galaxy and she found herself competing against silicon-based life forms. Exactly what “variety of advantages and disadvantages” does Kinsley wish us to iron out? I’d wager on affluent, well-educated parents and better elementary and high schools. But why stop there? Why not genetic endowments as well? Some of us were born stupid: where’s the justice in that?

Kinsley is rarely stupid. But he is often slippery.

(Related: John Rosenberg has interesting comments on the same piece. So does Jane Galt.)

Howard Owens, proprietor of a fine blog, gets himself into hot water with a couple of pomo poets. “Poetry must be at least as well written as prose,” said Ezra Pound, and says Howard, and I agree. Howard’s critics, practicing contemporary poets God help us, would not know a good poem if it walked up and punched them in the mouth. One of them, Mike Finley, praises this (scroll to the bottom if you insist on following the link) by Charles Potts. I will spare you most of it; here’s the beginning of the last stanza:

Down a lazy river to the polluted sea
The flotsam jettisons thoughtlessly along,
Contributory to a natural disaster.

“Lazy” is the laziest possible adjective. “Jettison” is a transitive verb, and the accidental association with “jetsam” is doubly unfortunate. “Contributory” would mar a business memo, let alone a poem. Someone who praises this has at best a nodding acquaintance with English.

Another, Joseph Duemer, thinks that Alone, by Jack Gilbert, is a great poem:

I never thought Michiko would come back after she died. But if she did, I knew, it would be as a lady in a long white dress. It is strange that she has returned as somebody’s Dalmatian. I meet the man walking her on a leash almost every week. He says good morning and I stoop down to calm her. He said once that she was never like that with other people. Sometimes she is tethered on their lawn when I go by. If nobody is around, I sit on the grass. When she finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper in her soft ears. She cares nothing about the mystery. She likes it best when I touch her head and tell her small things about my days and our friends. That makes her happy the way it always did.

This is prose. The reader may insert line breaks where he chooses. They won’t be any better than Gilbert’s, or any worse.

Unfortunately Howard himself goes in for similar stuff. He quotes with favor this bit from Richard Howard:

… Everyone knows my history,
complete with goddesses, islands, all those hoary lies!
I have no tales to tell, I have only
echoes. The real Ulysses puts in his appearance
between other men’s lines, the true Odysseus
shows up in unspeakable pauses, the gaps and blanks
where life hasn’t already been turned into
“my” wanderings, “my” homecoming, even “my” dog!

This is prose too, loosely iambic like most prose, dotted with random chunks of blank verse. The second line and first half of the third form two nearly perfect pentameter lines, and then suddenly the iambs disappear. That’s not a poem, no matter where you break the lines.

Free verse, like all verse, can be scanned. If there’s no proper scansion then it isn’t verse. Free verse is syllabic, with a regular number of primary accents per line — anywhere from one, as in H.D.’s Orchard, to three, as in Wallace Stevens’ The Snow Man; more than three is unmanageable. There is a varying number of secondarily accented and unaccented syllables and an occasional half or double line. It’s real verse, and even without understanding the technical details — consult Yvor Winters’ essay in Primitivism and Decadence, “The Influence of Meter on Poetic Convention,” if you care — a competent reader who takes the trouble to read carefully the two poems I cite will hear the difference.

(Howard comments further. Joseph Duemer replies and so does Mike Finley. Alex Knapp tries his hand at a parody, which is no worse than the real stuff.)

(Update: Blogosphere laureate Will Warren, a poet with actual talent, is retiring. He reminds me a lot of the fine and nearly forgotten 19th century comic poet W.M. Praed. Some of these rhyming haikus are my favorite things of his.)