I stumbled on Hayden Carruth's Selected Essays & Reviews at Second Reader on Hertel. I'm delighted to have found this, after being introduced to Carruth's poem, Ray. True to that opening, this book promises to be plain-spoken and insightful. I opened it to the middle and started with "A Location of J.V. Cunningham" from 1972. (Image from barnesandnoble.com.)

He writes: "I still cannot see, after years of watching the critics, how anyone can confront a shelf of poetry embracing every imaginable mode and maintain the possibility of prescriptive criticism; yet time and again they do it, especially critics who are also poets. Perhaps for certain strongly creative personalities a belief in not only the universal but the exclusive applicability of their own technique is a psychological necessity. Beyond that what can it serve?"

And earlier: "Poems, like their authors, occur in time, submerged in historical muddle and encumbered with social and cultural appurtenances which, though bearing scant relationship to the poems themselves, still obscure them from general understanding. Hence the real-- and menial-- work of criticism is to dispose of this excess."

An excerpt from an untitled poem of Cunningham's that Carruth quotes:

Poets survive in fame.
But how can substance trade
The body for a name
Wherewith no soul's arrayed?