[New-Poetry] NatPoMo

[Jason Quackenbush]

> 
> Can't see that I said or suggested that, Mole.  I just pointed out that 
> the poetry Bernstein attacks is easy listening compared to the kind he 
> likes. But I would say that less people are going to like challenging 
> poetry than easy listening poetry, just as less people are going to like 
> calculus than arithmetic or Ingmar Bergman than As The World Turns.
> 
> --Bob

I think that's a very good point, and one that doesn't get made often enough in conversations like these. Also, I think it's worth noting that even 
though some poetry is easy listening, being easy listening doesn't make it prima facie bad. i mean, i like to think of myself very much in the 
tradition of the otherstream (a word i hadn't paid much attention to before today, but that i like quite a lot and plan to use quite a bit) and i like 
the poetry of that movement. At the same time there are poets i don't like as much, and there are some mainstream poets that I like quite a lot. I 
would, for example, much rather read a book by BH Fairchild than I would read one by Susan Howe. And that's not saying that I think Fairchild is a 
good poet and Howe a bad one. I think they're both brilliant, but I enjoy the one more than the other. I think a lot that gets lost in the camps of 
difficult vs accessible, and mainstream vs otherstream is that there are a lot of people doing good work in both traditions. It's easy to get bogged 
down in the sniping from both sides. While I think there's value in Bernstein calling out Official Verse Culture, or Ron Silliman criticizing the 
School of Quietude, and I disagree strongly with some of the anti-otherstream comments that have been made by poets like Collins and Kooser, it 
doesn't mean that we can't all get along. I mean, at least we're not all writing Harlequin Romances.