>
> Sevanthi, as in the flower.
Sorry for the typo.
> And actually, I must say that I have no
> problems remembering the diversity of the audience for poetry, since
> those
> poets who are often mentioned on this list--Creeley, Levertov,
> Olson--are
> not poets I estimate very highly.
On Olson and Creeley, I agree.
> But I think in this specific instance--i.e. our different observations
> of
> which poets are popular in America--I suspect that it's not so much a
> question of regional poetics as, to put it delicately, other variables.
Put it indelicately. Otherwise, it's hard to know who or what is being
insulted.
>> "New Formalism, for example, which is sometimes misleadingly portrayed
>> as an academic literary movement, is actually of a piece with rap and
>> cowboy poetry in recognizing the auditory nature of poetry."
> And yet, rap's historic continuities are with poets who wrote in open
> forms,
> from The Last Poets to Linton Kwesi Johnson. Not to mention, say the
> influence of Ntozake Shange on someone like Talib Kweli.
And with James Brown and Parliament. -- however tangled the roots, the
flower is formal.
> Really, I can't take Dana Gioia at all seriously. In Can Poetry
> Matter, he
> goes on about the diminished role of poets without pausing to
> acknowledge
> how incredibly important poetry has been to American social movements.
> And
> sometimes, as in the case of Marilyn Hacker or Gwendolyn Brooks or Anne
> Sexton or Carolyn Kizer or Thom Gunn, to my tastes rather fine poets.
Again, a list not very different from my own -- and not, I suspect, very
different from Gioia's.
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