Verse from the West Coast.(Brief Article)

The wedding of the poet and novelist Carol Muske to the actor David Dukes (who played, among other stage and film roles, a murderer in "The First Deadly Sin"), made Liz Smith's column and gave Muske-Dukes a title for her collection of autobiographical and critical essays: MARRIED TO THE ICEPICK KILLER: A POET IN HOLLYWOOD (Random House). Muske-Dukes, who was shocked to hear the words "Helen Vendler" in the mouth of a Hollywood agent, mourns the Californiacation of poetry--the trophy books on producers' shelves and the creative-writing students who worry about "market value" and professional "contacts." These days, poems may no longer have to struggle so hard to make themselves heard above what Budd Shulberg called the "insistent hum of the dream factories," but they still have to compete with the roar of the freeway. In the capital of car culture, a group ...