[New-Poetry] bg's contra-genteel..

[Chris Stroffolino]

there goes bg again, acting like he's open to a wide range of poetry,  
but then I see your definition of contra-genteel is only of the  
"bukowski's followers" ilk....
it's okay to shock the bougie, i suppose, but the second it gets more  
political, a la ginsberg, then suddenly BG is at least as  
conservative and restrictive as wiman...

ah, we love you, we really do
(i enjoy being the teddy bear of the Truckee poetry scene...

C

On Sep 21, 2008, at 10:09 AM, Bob Grumman wrote:

>
>> >it's interesting, but i still think Christian Wiman is a bigger  
>> threat to poetry than poetry about theory.
>>
>> Why?
> Jason gave his answer (from out of my "long shadow," which it was  
> nice of him to say).  I pretty much agree with it, but wanted to  
> throw in a small answer of my own.  It is simply that from what  
> Wiman has written about poetry (as I vaguely remember it), and what  
> he's mostly published in his magazine, my problem with him is that  
> he is committed too narrowly to poetry that would have been  
> considered conservative in 1950.  As I keep having to say, I have  
> nothing much against such poetry, but feel that too little is being  
> done for my kind of poetry--basically visual, infra-verbal and  
> mathematical poetry--and other kinds of otherstream poetry I  
> frankly don't know too much about like cyber-poetry, sound poetry,  
> language poetry other than infra-verbal poetry (which I consider a  
> form of language poetry), and what I call contra-genteel poetry  
> (basically work by Bukowski's followers).  Poetry magazine could do  
> a lot of good for such poetry by regularly printing it, and-- more  
> important--allowing people who know something about it to discuss  
> it critically on its pages.
>
> I happen to be all for the establishment's "appropriating" rebels,  
> so I approve of Poetry's accommodating language poetry of late,  
> even if not the best language poetry around, and (amazingly) visual  
> poetry, a selection of which will be in an upcoming issue (but none  
> by me).  The question is whether Poetry is doing anything seriously  
> helpful to otherstream poetry, or just tokenisming a defense  
> against the charge of excessive narrowness.
>
> --Bob G.
>
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