[New-Poetry] 100 Poets You Should Know

[Bob Grumman]

Jason Quackenbush wrote:
> Any process of selection by some standard which includes some and 
> excludes others has an agenda, and in this case i think it's revealed 
> in the list title.
Jason, as I said, apparently in another post, the title probably meant 
that the list was of poets whose names we would likely know.  All lists 
include and exclude, but it's silly to say they have agendas because of 
that.  For me, to have an agenda means to desire to convert people to 
some point of view.  Jim's list doesn't seem at all intended to do 
that.  What about a list of the one hundred cities in American with the 
highest populations--what's its agenda? 

But, like you, I don't care whether the list has an agenda or not. 

--Bob
> These are poets you should know. Should being a normative, imperative 
> statement used in isolation from any reasons other than the body of 
> the list, we have to assume that it is the list itself which is 
> justifying the deontodynamic nature that is being claimed by its 
> title. So we know that these poets are alive, they are "american" and 
> they are visible and are chosen for their visibility. So that's 
> valuing the criteria of visibility, and it follows from that that it's 
> agenda is to implicitly advance whatever it is that the folks on this 
> list have in common by means of which they have become more visible 
> than the folks off the list.
>
> Any list like this has an agenda, like I said, and I don't really have 
> trouble with that. It's that the agenda is implicit rather than 
> explicit that i don't like. but then I like Jim Finnegan fine and i 
> truly believe he's someone who cares deeply for the art of poetry and 
> does what he does to try to be a benefit for that, so I'm not 
> particularly sweating it.
>
> Bob Grumman wrote:
>>
>>
>> Jason Quackenbush wrote:
>>> I prefer agendas that are clear and out in the open. It's the 
>>> agendas of things like the original list which go largely unnoticed 
>>> that i find unsettling.
>> But, Jason, the original list neutrally recorded the names of the 100 
>> most visible American Poets (in James's view).  I don't smell an 
>> agenda.  Each reader of the list is free to make of it what he 
>> will--I as strong evidence of the importance of conformity for 
>> visibility, others as strong evidence that there are only three kinds 
>> of valuable poetry, Iowa Plaintext, Formal and Language.  So what?
>>
>> --Bob G.
>>
>>
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