Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky has a new column up at Slate about kvetching poets:
The Yiddish verb for complaining, kvetch—literally to squeeze or to crush—has an onomatopoetic quality to my ear. All of those consonant sounds, squashed into a single syllable, surrounding the explosive grunt of the short E sound, to me, like the prolonged insistence of a grievance. And who has not occasionally been a kvetch, the noun—a relentless complainer?Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky
Possibly the most noble and eloquent poetry-kvetch in the history of the art in English is Ben Jonson (1572-1637).
Listen to Robert Pinsky read Ben Jonson’s “An Ode to Himself” at Slate
Listen to Robert Pinsky read Robert Herrick’s “Upon M. Ben Jonson, Epig.” at Slate