A review from Poetry Magazine, back in 2004:
Readers may remember how the U.S. military blared Van Halen and others at the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, when he took refuge in the Vatican Embassy in Panama City during our invasion of Panama years ago. This method of rousting the wicked proved so successful that it was repeated during the recent Afghan experience, when heavy metal chart-busters were unleashed on caves thought to be sheltering Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. The English Guardian newspaper reported last year that we were breaking the wills of captured terrorists, or suspected terrorists, by assaulting them first with heavy metal followed by “happy-smiley children’s songs.” The real spirit cruncher turns out to be the “Barney, I Love You” song played for hours on end. Even the most hardened, sadistic killers buckle under “that kind of hell,” or so asserted a reliable source. But if that fails to work, I suggest a round-the-clock tape of Garrison Keillor reading poems on his daily Writer’s Almanac show…Keillor means well. Of course he does. That’s his problem. His execrable Almanac begins with a few bars of hymn-style piano. And how could it be otherwise? We are in church. Garrison is ministering culture. A series of four or five capsulized, and trivialized, biographies of writers born on that same day follows: “Emily Dickinson was born on this day in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. She wasn’t a picture, God knows, and was reclusive in her ways. She wrote small, puzzling poems that no one read until she was dead.” Keillor then proceeds to read a poem, of Ms. Dickinson’s, if we are lucky, or of one of his stand-bys like Billy Collins, if we are not. It doesn’t really matter. Keillor embalms whatever poem he reads within the burnished caul of his delivery, a voice one friend of mine describes as “probably taken out at day’s end and left to stand all night in a glass of bourbon.” Keillor then signs off: “Be well, do good work, keep in touch.” You bet, Garrison, I’m right on it.
I have little doubt that a Keillor staffer picks the poems for the show, a superannuated former M.F.A. from the Iowa Workshop would be my guess, one familiar with Keillor’s appalling taste, sentimentality, and the constraints of format. Keillor will deny this, as will his staff. But there’s no way he’d have the time, either to read poetry or even sift casually through volumes current and old, to choose an appropriate poem. He not only has his weekly radio show, he’s busy producing rotten books on what seems an almost seasonal basis…
Well, that put a smile on my face this dreary morning.