Who is this great poet lapping near our feet?
 — this shaggiest dog that ever swam ashore
and shook its coat dry onto the dull pebbles.
The Atlantic itself? at Rockaway Beach?
Mumble-master of toneless sublimities,
who won't stick to a point or even get to one,
always talk-talk-talking with its mouth full
 — impossible to tell just what it feels
and, therefore, to understand why it goes
on and on about itself so, and in
some clunk's vocabulary restricted to
the slurps, thumps, bangings, rumbles and whooshes
of onomatopoeia.
Like a drunk trying to count his wad of dough,
this big lug is all thumbs and tongues,
helplessly unable to divide sound
from sense, or content from form, "organic"
with a vengeance, and woozily puttering
its fluent thumbprint over every shore.
Like the ungifted who invariably swear
(hand on heart before Art's customs agents),
"I only write for myself," it achieves
an exclusive sufficiency, which — whenever
we sit on the beach or wherever we dip
into it — goes on "relating to itself."
And why does it prefer its company to ours?
Surely it hasn't arranged this exhibition
 — in broad, horizontal, full-color
centerfold nudity — just to be looked at!
Of course, one happily concedes its "greatness,"
and one did come prepared to admire — still
we might wish for less conceit, oh, a touch
of vanity, say, some little hankering
to hear applause, a wink of willingness
to, well, uh, meet us part way, and put aside
the indulgences of its "song of oneself."
 — Obsessed old salt blubbering to our damp lapels
flecked with by-spray and bad breath from its brine maw.
Tell me, What damn duck did we ever do in
to be pummeled by all this humorlessness?
The bore is father to the solipsist:
feeling unperceived — since unresponded to — 
one loses confidence in "reality."
Oh, we might call it "awful big poet," except,
unwilling to say anything large by way
of any little, it lacks, precisely, scale,
being a multitude of behaviors
that can't or won't get an act together.
And how can we know this poet from its poem?
 — with its naturalism of mental contents,
its "whatever I happen to be thinking now,"
its queasy slipslop of selves, wobbling riffraff
of fish and turds and tarballs, of orange rind
and old hats, kelp and tires and glittery grit
 — all this churning visionary trivia
and stuff, this "stream-of-unconsciousness,"
this lost topography that's left us "all at sea,"
this pounding platitudes into subtleties,
this diluting any old sludgy cliché
to the palest world-hue, this everlasting
running running running running away ...
Oh, too grand to blush for its banalities,
and grandly disdaining fastidiousness
 — this poem that cannibalizes all its texts —
look at it guzzle the palimpsest of foam! 
Incapable of pretense, of stepping back,
as we do, and taking thought, of putting
itself into (for example) our leaky shoes,
it ignores us perhaps from fear that we
may interrupt its droning and give it pause,
impose the artifice of closure, and beginning ...