Kasey’s joined the great bandwagon of snipery, declaring the “confusion” of those who might dare to like work by poets from both the mainstream and the post-avant. It does bring to light the explicitly political way in which the post-avant cast poetry– the only explanation for a nonsensical (but pretty sounding) parallel between liking poetry [...]

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Gleaning from various blog posts and references, I’ve compiled a list of journals and zines that I should be reading (in the area of contemporary, other-than-mainstream, poetry). Many of them are unfamiliar to me and I’ll be ordering most of them. What’s missing?

6×6
32Poems
88
Carve
Chain
Combo
Crowd
Fence
Filling Station
Good Foot
Kiosk
Lipstick Eleven
Magazine Cypress
Quid
Small Town
Spinning Jenny
Syllogism
The Canary
The Hat
The Poker
The Tangent
The Tiny
Zazil

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Josh Corey independently labelled Kasey’s post a “brilliant” … “twinkie defense.” at almost the exact same time I did. Pure coincidence, I assure you.

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Jonathan posits a potential litmus test to weed out the riff-raff from the ranks of modern poetry: the idea that poetry is a distinctive kind of thinking, that cannot be replaced by paraphrase. Believe this and you are in, otherwise you have to wander around on the other side of the glass, confused, with Joan [...]

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Gina at a sad day for sad birds quotes this piece from Ben Lerner’s Lichtenberg Figures, a timely reminder that I really need to get my hands on this book:
The dark collects our empties, empties our ashtrays.
Did you mean “this could go on forever” in a good way?
Up in the fragrant rafters, moths seek [...]

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Jordan nails it in this post. A snippet:
You have an experience, you want to be able to talk to someone about it. You don’t want that experience to be minimized, set aside, belittled.
Therefore, we go around minimizing and belittling other peoples’ experiences.
and:
The great freedom of poetry is that no one ever knows in advance what [...]

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I don’t know how to “problematize my reception” or “foreground the struggle of artistic creation.” I’m not sure I want to. I value clarity. I value having something to say and saying it. I can’t bring myself to invoke– or invest in creating– a process filtering what I have to say in order to make [...]

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This is my problem with the “fast food analogy” of art (Josh Corey invoked it regarding his discriminating palate for difficult poetry, I’ve used it to talk about consumption of quality and pop music): it implies a hierarchy that only exists in one’s imagination, most likely an artifact of the common path by which we [...]

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I wonder which comes first: the aesthetic divisions or the combative pressures to explain and justify that which we find compelling? If the Avant Garde crowd is addicted to one kind of positive attribute, like being challenged, does it spring solely from a need to define themselves in the face of the opposition excluding them?
It [...]

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In the comments to one of Ron’s latest diatribes about the SOQ and Billy Collins (don’t have to go there to know what he’s going to be complaining about, do you?) there are a variety of attempts to interpret/explain a piece of a Rae Armentrout poem.
Those of us that appreciate work that is “conventional” [...]

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I’m sitting here completely dumbfounded upon reading this comment by Josh Corey:
I am simply unlikely to be really satisfied by an encounter with a poem that does not use some aspect of form to problematize its ready reception
This is precisely the kind of reasoning that I have feared I was seeing but had almost convinced [...]

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Here’s my final word on this subject: there is a difference between disbelieving something and not believing something has been demonstrated. I don’t actively believe that there is no significant, meaningful, and distinctive parallel between Bruce Andrews’ poetry and hip-hop. I simply don’t think that any such parallel has yet been demonstrated.
That’s a big [...]

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I don’t know what to make of Ron Ron Silliman’s take on Eliot Weinberger’s newspaper piece What I Heard About Iraq (which I read and recommended a few days ago on my other blog).
It had never occurred to me that anyone would mistake Weinberger’s writing as poetry, despite (or perhaps because of) his position as [...]

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I’ve been checking out Andrews’ work online and off since the discussion around BAP last December. So far, the one piece that I really enjoyed was one interwoven with words from Gertrude Stein. Gertrude kind of smacks Andrews down though!

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I could be as strident as that David Hess feller:
hip-hop, as a serially-produced collective practice which allows black youth to chronicle their lives while giving vent to their anonymity (not unlike the once-ignored Reznikoff did in Testimony), hope and rage, puts Andrews’s avant-garde to shame. Yeah, he’s better than Mary Oliver but how much better? [...]

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Jonathan writes:
“When I say that Bruce Andrews is a hiphop artist or that Paul Lake’s poem is Maoist in its anti-intellectualism I am making a poetic intuition, a hiperbole.”
(’hiperbole’ is cute, by the way, if intentional). And I realize that you are drawing a kind of parallel… the point I was making in my [...]

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Jonathan quotes Marjorie Perloff:
Perloff: “… paradoxically, the poems of Bruce Andrews or Harryette Mullen are at one level more accessible to students than are those of W.B Yeats or Ezra Pound. For however scrambled an “experimental” poem may be–however non-syntactic nonlinear, or linguistically complex–it is, after all, written in the language of the present, which [...]

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Although I’m happy that he is being pulled away by something good, this is still one of the saddest notes I’ve seen in a while.
It’s sad when someone’s conception of blogging makes it a lesser activity in the same way that it’s sad when someone’s “real life” work curtails poetry. I feel a strangely [...]

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Writes Greg:
“But after that easy chore is accomplished, you know what I would like better than Josh Corey’s series of Grood poets or Mayhew’s unindicted co-conspiracies and unnamed sources. I’ll tell you what. I’d like some avant pomo poet to criticize (constructively of course, or is that deconstructively) an avant pomo poem’s shortcomings (and [...]

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Thanks to a variety of comments I more clearly understand what has me feeling so edgy lately.
Gene wrote:
there are some forms of challenge that I find counter-productive in my own seeking. And one of the benefits of being an old man is that I’ve identified a few of those challenges I’m no longer interested [...]

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