we are cold and disquieting at heart

in his review of john ashbery's hotel lautréamont, "in and out of the loop," john haines offers the following excerpt as an example of what is wrong with contemporary poetry ("could a poetry like this, with its constant shifting of images and viewpoints, have been written before the age of television? this seems to me to be a question worth asking, for reading these poems is uncannily like watching a series of sound bites, of news images projected and then withdrawn, to be immediately replaced by others totally unrelated to what one had just been watching and listening to.") i liked it.

(from "American Bar," ashbery, 1992)

. . .
We bake a dozen kinds of muffins every day
yet we are cold and disquieting at heart.
I fear for his sciatica, though
we were never lovers.
Let me memorialize this mattress, M.
le Comte, . . .
. . .
In the casual track of a zipper my penis
once got stuck, and it's been like that ever since:
feet stop where no snare lives, the best
is to die down and desist. Perhaps life is better
near the Arctic Circle,
. . .

(fables and distances, j. haines, 1996)