June 7: I continue to be in the null zone, unable to do much more than post these almost completely worthless notes to this blog. My one accomplishment during my time off has suddenly zeroed away: my new laptop no longer lets me do anything with large high-dots-per-inch works, I don't know why.
So as to say something here, I will now quote what I earlier psted at the Harriet Blog, having returned to it to read an I Hate Poetry post by Eileen Myles that some people at New-Poetry had brought up:
I read Eileen’s piece and agreed with the first half of it, was neutral or disagreed with things in the second half. For instance, I think it natural and healthy for poets to band together and even to call themselves a school.
I read a few of the responses but didn’t have the zip to read more–or do more in response than float the following few thoughts. (1) The main problem is over-population. (2) What we need are a few intelligent, accessible books not OF poetry but ON poetry, and journalists who will discuss them for a readership of more than a hundred instead of the crap they currently discuss. (3) As I’ve been saying for years (at About Poetry, among otherwheres), we need a complete or near-complete list of the schools of contemporary poetry (call them what you will) with which to confront all the professors and their students who think Wilshberia the whole of the poetry continuum, and to help people who are bored by what’s done in Wilshberia but might go for visual, sound or–gasp–mathematical poetry, for instance, if they knew it existed.
–Bob Grumman
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The two posts immediately after mine praise, respectively, Billy Collins and Maya Angelou. I'm curious to see if anyone comments on what I wrote. Just about no one commented on my posts about visual poetry. My attempt to get somewhere with Poetry was laughably unsuccessful.
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