June 21: My term, "Wilshberia," is being misrepresented again at New-Poetry, so I felt compelled to try to set matters straight again. I wrote:
Sorry (really) to seem to be interminably talking about this, but the term "Wilshberia" is not supposed to describe a single school of poetry. I believe there is a continuum of (serious) contemporary American Poetry. On the left is the poetry of the neo-formalist school, then comes Iowa Plaintext Lyric Poetry, then comes (perhaps) simple NY School poetry, then comes the poetry of Jorie Graham/ John Ashbery and their followers. I'm not super-current on this, so there may be other kinds of poetry in this portion of the continuum. What do they have in common? The respect of the Establishment. As language poetry is more and more coming to have but not sound poetry, visual poetry, mathematical poetry, cyberpoetry, performance poetry. Yes, you could call it "mainstream poetry," but my term specifies it better--from the very formal (although I realize Wilbur does other kinds of poetry) to quite informal poetry . . . uses words only, avoids the extreme focus on language of the language poets (when they're language poets and not just called that), and (sorry) uses no poetic device not widely used fifty or more years ago. Nothing wrong with this. Many superior poets never venture out of Wilshberia. But it is not the only worthwhile location on the contemporary American poetry continuum.
|
|