Spent some time snowed-in reading Gabriel Gudding's Defense of Poetry. For Gudding, parody is deployed almost like a geometry. I bet he studied Latin & Geometry the same year in high school. The geometry creates spaces in which languishing old US threads suddenly glimmer through again - sounds of Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, Stevens (but not the usual Stevens - this is a Stevens-Pandemonium), Plath, Lowell. . . all keyed to comedy. Along with these American threads are waves of arcane ancient vocabulary & burlesque - a vast & goofy weird-hoard.

Why does GG have to twist the presentation to such a high pitch of the ridiculous in order to "defend" poetry? He seems to be clearing a space for himself, most obviously maybe in the poem about the Tippecanoe County Courthouse (I don't have the book in front of me, unfortunately). Something about getting clear of the (poetry?) bureaucrats & flying light. Maybe he's getting ready for take-off.