In 1971 Gilbert Sorrentino published a novel about poets, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, a savage book full of judgments his acquintances must have prayed would not be thought to refer to them. ("Free! Free! Irremediably poor. Such work is irremediable because it has no working parts. It is a great chunk of, say, Liederkranz."…) I mention this book because it is very good, still awaiting its public, at least on my coast, and because Sorrentino has both gifts, fictional and poetic, in a measure I don't think we've seen since Williams.

These poems dazzle at first with their intense colors, and inside them like a bee is enough spite to scare the browser…. Immediately you hear Stevens, and Rimbaud at his bitterest. "Note the bitterness and wanton/patterns of assault," Sorrentino urges.

He doubts his readers, offers his cruel poems and his tender ones with a faint sneer. He is offering a great deal. With color in The Orangery he makes a street from the past (his, America's) to the nerves of his reader….

The Orangery is a series … in an elegiac key, in which anger is the treble to a bass of grief and memory…. It is a life-story told in a few scenes barely limned—or invented…. It is also a portrait, in vignettes, colors, ditties, of an invented Texas (Sorrentino is a New Yorker), a sleazy brilliantly-colored place inhabited by Mexicali Rose and Mr. America among others; outside this Texas are an equally chromatic Florida: a real (though past, and softened) New Jersey; the fields of Kansas; Brooklyn and Queens; Joliet, Mobile. I think this is the best poem-of-America (taking it as one poem in many parts) in years. Sorrentino's sense of strain is not the popular anxiety, but the strain, as Williams experienced it, of being American, being an artist in America, trying to see without repudiating the whole, to repudiate without losing sentience.