Midwest poets, arise!

Not that Ted Kooser really needs my help in defending his poetry, but why would the New York Times Book Review ask Brad Leithauser, who tends trippingly toward New Formalism and academia and also Poetry as Fun, to review Ted Kooser? Go figure. Isn't the realm of poetry broad enough yet to make room for something that can survive outside the east- or west-coast belly-button-gazing high-stakes (drumroll please) poetry towers?

It's not the first time Kooser's been smacked by a big-city snit at the NYTimes, but this is getting old. Not just Kooser, but non-coast poetry in general. I remember my first trek to the coasts -- 30 years ago, a venture to Massachusetts and what I hoped would be a society of poets. Well, not quite. A New York poet asked me where I came from and when I replied "Illinois" there was a blank stare. "Midwest," I then said, going up the ladders of abstraction to clarify. Ah, that did it. . . she looked at me in pity and tried to start a conversation about how there weren't, really, were there? any poets of significance from the Midwest -- but that's ok, I had lots of time to catch up. . .

Lots of us have run into this attitude. Poor Kooser. It probably means nobody will read his poems, or publish him, and if they do, he'll be the only one from the Midwest who really "made it." The rest of us poor flatlanders. . .

Are we to believe Marianne Moore wouldn't have written anything worthwhile if she hadn't left Missouri? Robert Bly is just a fluke. Gwendolyn Brooks hailed from Chicago, and cities that big can be excused from being midwestern. On the contrary, St. Louis, a pebble's toss across the river from my own midwest location, is home to a few MFA programs and a list of highly respected poetry mags: Boulevard, River Styx, Margie, Natural Bridge. It has a history of literature and poetry behind that, entertainingly memorialized as the ground we all (literally) walk on, the The St. Louis Walk of Fame.