402. Hollis Summers said "all poems say 'look at me'"

Hollis Summers said "all poems say 'look at me'" and I believe him when I hear so many voices saying to me as I read "aren't I the most whimsical surprising imaginative speaker you ever listened to you never know what I'm going to come up with" though we know one thing it will have no surface connection with what went before which would get it called incoherent by Ezra Pound who said "good poetry must first be good prose" and since we all know good prose is coherent we've got a lot of poets, especially New York ones, saying look at me aren't I writing the worst prose you ever read and since we're not distracted by any connections we say yeah you win the whimsy prize which to E.B. White would be the ego prize and (you know because White said "leave no marks of ego on the page") get this poetry winner kicked off of his floor at the New Yorker and that would be especially satisfying to me if sensibly imaginative John Updike, master of prose and New Yorker light verse and E. B. White's student there, did the kicking satisfying but not perfectly satisfying because my restricting coherence to "surface connections" above leaves open the possibility that I have missed psychological and symbolical connections too deep for my imagination.