9/27/07

Clayton Eshleman on American poetry

From Clayton Eshleman's new essay, "Wind from all Compass Points":

[...]

Some years ago, in Sulfur #10, Charles Bernstein defined the officially sanctioned verse of our time as characterized by "a restricted vocabulary, neutral and univocal tone in the guise of voice or persona, grammar-book syntax, received conceits, static and unitary form." This definition is still good today, some twenty years later. In the academic writing programs, the post-Confessional and Language poetries of the 1970s have fused to produce, in the main, a poetry that is an abstract display of self-sensitivity, the new "official verse."

[...]

Ever since I discovered the poetry of César Vallejo in the late 1950s, I have intuited that poetry is at a very early stage in its potential unfolding.

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