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.
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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.
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"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."
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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.
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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.
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Again, a list not very different from my own -- and not, I
suspect, very different from Gioia's.
