Word: vierecks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...score or so of American poets who now stir the campuses, he is easily the most admired. Not that the suspicious young readily take to heroes, literary or otherwise, or are very clear about what they seek in poetry. Says Mount Holyoke Poet and History Professor Peter Viereck: students "crave the ever more shocking and ever more new. They are looking more for emotional release than purely artistic merit." Verse for edification or moral uplift; he adds, "is totally dead. A poem like Tennyson's Merlin and the Gleam would be the laughingstock of a coffeehouse today...
...Viereck is outdone by Todd Boli, whose poem, "To My Wife About Pears," is the best piece in the issue. The purchase of three dozen pears is not the most likely source of good poetry, but it succeeds here because Boli effectively brings us into the world of both characters. He captures his wife's thoughts neatly in these four lines...
...from that most insular of insularities, Quincy House, comes Opus. Edited by Alexis Viereck and Newton Kershaw, it is a tidy collection of prose and poetry by six previously unpublished students. Any local magazine would do well to look as attractive, and most would be improved by including some of its best pieces...
...editor, Alexis Viereck, is also forthright; witness this line of his short poems: "That I might fornicate with you." The line is actually more comic than shocking; his poetry of cruelty is really the poetry of humor in disguise. Viereck's other poems are more traditionally successful, and his imagery is more subtly sensual, although he consistently approaches cliche...
...will always be Philistines, but right now they are hiding in the woodwork, behind the De Koonings and the Klees. If there is any limit on the surge of artistic creativity, it is imposed not by the George Babbitts but by the "Gaylord Babbitts," a name coined by Peter Viereck to denote the arbiters of taste who run in packs and judge in cliques...