[New-Poetry] Re: Sounding my barbaric AWP

[Bob Grumman]

David Graham wrote:
> I guess I am an ultra-talker, at least in some poems.   I'm in the 
> TriQuarterly issue, in any case, so I guess it's official.  Much of 
> the AWP panel did wrestle with the definitional question, of course, 
> and no one's foolish enough to attempt an airtight taxonomy or deny 
> the many and deep roots of the phenomenon.  
>
> Mark Halliday in his talk made the shrewd choice of defining by 
> negation, and his example was W. S. Merwin in his *Lice* phase:  the 
> opposite of ultra-talk turns out to be a lyric like "For the 
> Anniversary of My Death."  A poem of "holy hush," he called it, and 
> contrasted it with a very funny rewrite he'd done, turning it into a 
> proper ultra-talk poem. 
>
Even when speaking only of solitextual (solely textual) poems, I should 
think haiku would be more opposite ultra-talk poems than what I guess 
the Halliday lyric to be.

--Bob G.