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Like Tim, I too am "struck by the overriding aesthetic notion of the radical and a distancing of the work from real sociological radicalism that should always lay at the root of innovation." Johnson, I have not read much of. A few bits and pieces written for a specialist audience who need be aware of the recondite lineages and relationships between a host of late 20C academic-poets, in order to fully cognize them - and a couple of satirical pieces on the Iraq prison abuse scandals: both of which have a lot of fucks in 'em: which I take it is a strategy to lend visceral emotional authority to the terror these people underwent. ~ The thing which has struck me about American po-mo generally, in the last few weeks, is the chasm in politico-aesthetic, between what's overtly stated and what is actually done in the name of Poetry per se, by the predominatly academic poets, is laughably and transparently, sad. Thomas Graves had been writing under the name Thomas Brady on the Harriet blog, clarifying a position, that there has been a systematic alienation of the casual reader from poetry in the last 100 years, due to the academicizing of poetry, which began - according to Graves - "at the beginning of the 20th century, with a coterie of friends who spread out into institutions and supported one another in their minor ‘revolution of taste which left the public behind in a triumph that was unfortunately humorless and arrogant." Basically, this position argues that the academy went from a place where poetry was studied, to the primary site of its productiomn. Lacking any readers for their work, the 30's modernists took over the American academy and artificially inflated their work there. So, you are a prof of English/CW and you and your pals make false reps in the very classroom you eek out the day job. This is the background Graves was facing when he first began propounding his theory, that contemporary American poetry is run by coteries of subsidised poets with an artificial audience of Creative Writing students: his general thesis being that in the absence of any readers for their work, poets like "Tate, Pound and Ransom bashed the mere professors of literary history and the coup of the creative writing program was accomplished by Paul Engle (whose Yale Younger had come from a Fugitive poet judge) and the Modernist/Fugitive/New Critical army." Being an outsider and not knowing enough to get involved, what drew me to Graves/Brady, was that his language is so alive, readable, and no one was getting the better of him. Far from it. He was always readable, very witty and simply the best online orator in contemporary American poetry I have read. You may not agree with him (or me in this assertion), but in the absence of any real competition, he was (i think) the de facto champion debater on Harriet. Unlike myself, he is unfailingly good humoured and never blown off course, always coming up with startling similies and metaphors to make his point. By comparison, the phd crowd who tried to take him on, seemed humorless and uptight in the extreme. Brady (along with me and a 70 year old poster called Christopher Woodman) had our posting rights removed by Travis Nichols, the one person executive moderating body responsible for that blog. Nichols, a young longuer and ennui guy, phd-serious careerist in charge of Harriet, wrote to the three of us around late June explaining that some changes were about to be implemented on the blog: that people had been moaning about the length and frequency of our posts, and could we shorten them and post less frequently, because he would 'hate to lose you' from the blog. I suspected that 'hate to lose you' really meant he would love to lose me, in part because Nichols gave no indication of what word-count or frequency we should post. I wrote back, returning 40% less text than he had sent me, saying 'thank you very much Travis, of course, no problem' and he wrote back in a totally different tenor, which made me realise that they guy just wanted me to like him all along. I just laid off there and spammed various other gaffes and watched developments there. ~ The changes Trav brought in, were laughably blunt: what he termed 'handy' 'dislike' and 'like' icons, next to every post, which posters can click to show they 'dislike' or like the post. Clicking 'like' produces a green, thumbs up - whilst 'dislike' shows a red, thumbs down next to the post, and with the number of reds and greens displayed next to the post. After seven reds, the post is concealed. Seven was the number decided on after a trial run, because that was the average needed to hide Graves' posts. The changes were brought in, because he wanted us three out, but having no reasonable grounds, set about his strategy to get rid of us by means of a popularity contest. What was interesting is that on 1 September, Nichols removed all three of our posting rights, did not write and inform us why, because there are no posts which contravened the talk policy. So on one hand we have - as Tim says - an "aesthetic notion of the radical", in people like Niochols: young Americans speaking up as if they are liberal humanists, willing to speak about the wrong in real events which they are detached from; but when it comes to handling 'real life' at the very basic level of tolerating others, they show themselves up as being radically intolerant - over something as innocuous as talking about poetry online. ~ The site Jeff links to, where Johnson attempts to breath into being his New Chicago School: when Graves Woodman and I started posting there, we were immediately banned by whoever owns it: not for any offensive speech, but purely because whoever's it is, is playing a political game in which anyone presenting a position which seeks to sincerely engage in debate with counter arguments - are not tolerated. And since we stopped posting at Harriet, the level of conversation has wilted to one liners and congratulatory blurbish back-slaps among the ones Nichols would have in his club: The New Chicago School of not very competent poets. But it isn't all doom Jeff: you got a compliment off Graves/Brady here, at the blog Alan Cordle opf Foetry fame set up so the banned can still comment on what posts appear at Harriet. http://scarriet.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/the-merchandizing-of-poetic-genius/#comments