in letting down their guard, opening themselves to free association and chance, McAuley and Stewart had reached inspiration by the side-door of parody; and though this can't be argued on behalf of all the poems, some of which are partly or wholly gibberish, it contains a ponderable truth... The energy of invention that McAuley and Stewart brought to their concoction of Ern Malley created an icon of literary value, and that is why he continues to haunt our culture. In the "Individual Notes on Works and Authors" in the "Special Collaborations Issue" of Locus Solus, Kenneth Koch wrote, "Though Harris was wrong about who Ern Malley 'was' (if one can use that word here), I find it hard not to agree with his judgment of Malley's poetry." The American poet John Ashbery said of Ern Malley, in a 1988 interview in the magazine Jacket: I think it was the first summer I was at Harvard as a student, and I discovered a wonderful bookstore there where I could get modern poetry – which I'd never been able to lay my hands on very much until then – and they had the original edition of The Darkening Ecliptic with the Sidney Nolan cover. [...] I always had a taste for sort of wild experimental poetry – of which there really wasn't very much in English in America at the time – and this poet suited me very well. [...] I am obliged to give a final examination in my poetry writing course [at Brooklyn College, NY], which I'm always rather hard put to do, since we haven't really studied anything. The students have been writing poems of varying degrees of merit, and though I give them reading lists they tend to ignore them, after first demanding them. And the way the course is set up there is no way of examining them on their reading. And anyway they shouldn't have to pass an examination because they're poets who are writing poetry, and I don't like the idea of grading poems. So in order to pass the examination time I had to think of various subterfuges, and one of them is to use one of Malley's poems and another forbiddingly modern poem – frequently one of Geoffrey Hill's 'Mercian Hymns'. And asking them if they can guess which one is the real poem by a respected contemporary poet, and which one is