Thomas Lux's nineteenth book of poems, The Cradle Place, turns poetry into performance. Lux must have found a method while writing the previous eighteen collections: for all his crankiness and swagger, he whisks each of the poems down the page with inveterate ease, like Johnny Carson swinging his invisible chipping wedge. Some of the entertainment value comes from true talent. Lux has a gift for the swiftly turned expression. In one poem, volcanos appear as "great domed cathedrals of rage." In another, jungle flora becomes "bug-brailled." Such immediacy and quirkiness will hold a reader. But in the end, original descriptions aren't enough to make a poem.

The problem is not simply that Lux knows the course his poems will take before he begins, though this probably contributes. It's that he writes from above his material. Reading Lux you rarely sense a consciousness moving down in the lines themselves. The poems are set speeches: their odd images or turns of phrase glimmer for moments then disappear as Lux glides on toward his desired effect. Often that effect is a kind of lugubrious humor. Many of Lux's poems would make wonderful Heavy Metal album art. Consider the opening of "Uncle Dung Beetle":

Hail, Uncle Dung Beetle!, he who
wherever dung meets dirt, which is everywhere,
    is our sweet savior,
without whom
each of us on the planet up to our necks
in two-day-old—crusty on the outside,
soft in the middle—cow pies

I don't know why a poem about poo should necessarily fail. The requirements of good poetry are not those of polite society. And Lux shows some promising instincts here: his exaggerated speechifying and his extended syntax strike a contrast with his basic subject matter. But shrewd narration won't supply feeling to mere novelty. Feeling depends on the texture of the verse movement, and there's nothing to differentiate these lines from prose. When so little pleasure comes from the medium itself, all that remains is a succession of familiar gestures: the little act someone performs when he wants to impress you. You might as well be watching the reruns on Comedy Central.

Lux seems to have no qualms about such crowd-pleasing. Here he is in a recent interview:

If you have an art form that is not accessible, if you can
only get it if it's explained by other people, it becomes
snobbish and elitist and people aren't going to be interested
. . . . That's one of the reasons people hate poetry,
why it has such a small audience. And that angers me
because it takes poetry away from the people.

"Accessible." You can send twitters around the poetry circles by saying this word. It simply means "affording entrance." It made its big debut in English literature in Paradise Lost, where it described the path leading from earth to the alabaster gates of Heaven. But these days, when someone like Lux says "accessible," he's not talking about the ascent of the soul.

The current meaning arose in the early sixties, when "accessible" began to pepper the art sections of popular weeklies. Now it appears all over those magazines, since journalists expect that their readers are fed up with modern art. The readers might have good reason: everyone has seen a painting or read a poem that perplexes for no purpose at all. But art that refuses to challenge, that merely entertains, repels the imagination as fast as willfully obscure art. Emptiness lurks behind the surface of such work: when Lux says "accessible," he never suggests what the readers will find once they're afforded an entrance. The word is like a billboard, mapping the way to the nearest blow-out sale.

This assumption about the inherent value of popular appeal lies unexamined everywhere in this book. So many of Lux's poems seem to have been written merely to create an effect at readings. None of the work rewards sustained engagement. Here, for example, is a poem called "Three Vials of Maggots":

were collected from the corpse
found lying in a field
near a small stream. From these the lab can tell
at what time the dead one died.
They have schedules, the flies.
Some lay eggs
which hatch to maggots
which consume the corpse. Others come to eat
flies, maggots, eggs.
Hide beetles arrive to clean the gristle.
It's an orderly arrangement.
What the maggots do
they do for you.

If you cut and paste the most inane joke email, and tack a rhyme to the end, you'll have a poem like this one. And The Cradle Place has poems like this one the way a centipede has legs.

— Peter Campion