Sorry Joe et al, I have been paying attention. I have (also) actually been focusing most on the books I am into reviewing.
Part of the intention of my original post was really (I think) about how a poem or a series of poems can lodge itself in the culture(s) memory (memory in the most present sense of that term). Good Poets come and go, good books much more quickly come and go, and their paper and/or online imprint (not matter the quality) is and remains ephemeral, How do we, as poets, sustain the/this vocation??
My query was in probably done in the sense of lament. The books I am reviewing are very good. Yet, I suspect - whether or not I write such a review - the books will be lucky to sell more than a hundred copies. But, maybe, a good anthologist will pick up a couple of the poems. Etc. Etc. A good poem - from birth - is on slippery slope.
And then you have a conservative hack like William Logan try to trash Frank O'Hara in the New York Times. El sicko.
On the other hand, I think many of us are always astonished and pleased (if not envious) of the sudden popular arrival (in their day) of a Frank O'Hara, a Ted Berrigan, (or anyone your favorites), whose work perked the ear, put a change in the color of the weather, the psyche, etc. And did it with books that got well distriubted by important publishers. That is, broke the barriers.
Tho I think there is much good work that I see (and/or hear in local readings) I don't sense anybody is doing that right now. That might be caused by encumbrance of too much new media - and that no one(s) has yet sorted out the way 'authoritative' work is going to be heard in the world.
I hate to think it (the new media) is all going to come down to proliferation/distribuiton on low-fidelity I-Pod and Cell Phones.
The question still remains as to the way in which a poem (ancient or contemporary) pentetrates and assumes any kind of authority in the culture (even with sustaining factors such as good schools that bring poems into the 'learning' picture).
Back to those reviews!
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
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