[New-Poetry] Bob

[Alexander Dickow]

Hm, if I may. Interesting issue as always, this problem of "innovation" and how to parse it, but when I'm wearing my critic's hat (it's a huit-reflets, a gibus c1911), I tend to find the category problematic, to the extent that it seems to lead to battles of priority: ie, "X did Y before Z did." Example: Blaise Cendrars wrote "Easter in New York" before Apollinaire wrote "Zone" (or vice-versa). Or: "Easter in New York" is a "more important", because "more new" or "more fresh" (or some variation on this) than "Zone" (or vice-versa). 
Someone eventually comes along and says they both stole it all from Andre Salmon's Marmeladoff anyhow. 
One by one, people reach back through time, looking for the actual or potential origins of a technique, combination of techniques or some such *specific* innovation. 
Example: Free-verse in France originated with Gustave Kahn in the 1870s. Nope! wrong, it started with Marie Krysinska, in the 1860s. Nope! wrong, Ronsard (16th Century!!) used free verse in one of his weird little monsters hardly anyone knows about. 
But then someone pipes up and says: gee, but Ronsard's really not using this technique for the same reasons/in the same way/in the same context/with the same significance at all, for x, y and z reasons. Which means we can't postulate him as the origin of free verse, unless we refine what that category covers, and decide either to exclude Ronsard's "version", or not (and eventually, this tactic looks rather arbitrary). You can stalemate this move by shoring up the categories in various ways: affirming their timeless nature, or excluding context as a relevant definition for the poetic technique in question (the latter option, which Bob might or might not choose, seems to me to end up watering down the category, reducing its usefulness by excluding and ignoring crucial differences in favor of inessential similarities - I can elaborate if need be).
Step The Next is to recover a notion of ineffable Lyric Particularity: the newness of a poem cannot be reduced to techniques, nor truly replicated; the New becomes unlocatable.
Then Bob comes back and says, no, that's all wrong, we should reintroduce a set of more refined and careful categories, and We're All Back to Square One.
That's all well and good, but I like interpreting what on earth the poems might be trying to say and do a lot better than worrying about what "newness" is. There are lots of ways to show why a poem is important, rhetorically speaking, and I don't know that slippery notions like this one are necessarily the best: but Bob knows that, too, since he's engaged in very fine readings of many kinds of poems that he thinks are important.
So I ain't pickin' on Bob, either, darn it. Or anyone else, blarg.
Amicalement,
Alex