Slam Poetry for the Cyber-crowd?

By Neal 

Dinitia Smith files a story for the NYT arts section on poets playing about on the Internet—specifically on a site called QuickMuse, where versifiers square off to write simultaneous works in 15 minutes or less. It’s hard to call it a “competition” when they don’t actually appoint a winner, so when former poet laureate Robert Pinsky squares off tonight against Julianna Baggott, who’s better known perhaps for her fiction, any snap judgments we might make will probably turn out to be wrong..which could be the best thing that could happen to them.