[New-Poetry] 100 Poets You Should Know

[Jason Quackenbush]

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. 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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