^* The damage wrought by careerism in modern American poetry is documented in my study The American Poetry Wax Museum. As Robert Duncan remarked long ago, the cornmodification of values extends even to poetry. The quick fix, the easy target, the vapid solution are as eligible for poetic as for press conference recitation. An apparent growth in the popularity of poetry readings in the 1990s is not necessarily salutary. Philip Lamantia derided a poet who “thinks poetry’s at his beck and call” (Meadowlark West, 21), and John Clarke complained, “Poets are so comfy, they can’t see anymore these nasty / historical habits, e.g., Capitalism as any other than / simple evil, as though some lucky slung stone would bring / down the giant” (In the Analogy, 201).