We’re entirely for artifice, stock in trade. When J Schuyler remembers J Brainard and F O’Hara, what’s biographically accurate beyond artifice is the entirety of their kinship, the tubby, transfixing emotional sustenance that comes with love and ebullience among friends. T Towle dreaming of O’Hara seems credible as both artifice and credible proposition on similar if more ‘platonic’ grounds. L Warsh has been long licensed, so to speak, to feel and dream the turning shadows of poets as lovers present but out of practice. R Creeley evoked J Wieners alive and, to more tragic effect, vice versa. Friendship and love are components of the vetting process the onlooker or reader-writer follows to decide for herself whether a writer, beyond artifice, walks among the ardent ghosts of Wieners or young O’Hara.