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If one wants to know what's happening in contemporary American poetry, you'd have to read some Jorie Graham. "Drivel" is not a word that comes to my mind. She may be a difficult poet (full of allusions to & elements drawn from philosophy, the arts & sciences, social criticism); sometimes the showiness of these wideranging interests & investigations can come off as being pretentious. Or she may be overreaching her grasp of the concerns & concepts drawn into her poetry...still, her poetry does mark a turning away from the simpler, tightly wrought, unified lyric voice that had dominated contemporary mainstream poetry and turn toward the "ambitious," "unwieldy," & "discursive" poetry of "intellectual essay" (in the propositional & exploratory sense of the word essay). In short, in my opinion, she deserves to be read & reckoned with. Jorie Graham, who is now at Harvard, I believe...was long the masthead poet of the Iowa Writers Workshop (by most measures "THE" MFA program for young aspirants to that terminal...some might say "dead-end".. degree). Though I've seen only grudging credit given (perhaps suspecting the co-opting influence of her generosity), she was instrumental introducing language poetry and more avant-gardist practice to the Iowa program...thus opening up what was & is a major training ground for the contemporary mainstream poets. I can't say what the long-term effect of that will be. But in other poets like C. D. Wright & Brenda Hillman, notable contemporaries of Graham, you can see how poets who in 80's would have been seen as "mainstream" have moved their poetry toward the techniques and textual undertaking that were once associated with the radical fringe. Finnegan .