Borrowing phraseology from, of all poets, David Letterman, he swipes at the use of jokes in other poet-critics' essays as "stupid reviewing tricks" and then makes some really lame ones himself: he shuts down writers of confessional poetry like so many hecklers, sneering at their "contemporary mush of me, me, me".
Classical is me in search of the spiritual, and contemporary is me searching for science, destroying and taking things apart".
It turned out to be that TV masterpiece Old Flames, in which Stephen Fry played a father-to-be hallucinating, as he awaited the birth of his child, about a school contemporary - me - he had once bullied.
"She looks very contemporary to me".
"Jim was like a terrier," a contemporary told me.
Horgan, she says, "is much more contemporary than me".
There is a longing for something not contemporary in me, and in many people of course.
"During a recent discussion about Achebe, a political contemporary asked me if I felt as though I had somehow become part of the system that we so bitterly decried in our youth," Mahama wrote in a recent tribute.
Maps reminds me of a period where it was the end of Mo'Wax and there was an American explosion: the Strokes and White Stripes had arrived, but the YYY's were just more contemporary to me in the way that they wrote records.
"Our pictures provide 100% ambiance, so at least you can say, 'That one's too contemporary for me, I don't want to make the trip.'".
"Jonathan," one of his contemporaries told me, "did nothing that lots of people weren't doing at the time.
