Thanks to Peter Pereira, an excellent article written by David Biespiel. Check it out:


Now consider the balkanized world of American poetry. Like Americans everywhere, America's poets have turned insular and clustered in communities of aesthetic sameness, communicating only among those with similar literary heroes, beliefs, values, and poetics. Enter any regional poetry scene in any American metropolis or college town, and you will find the same cliquey village mentality with the same stylistic breakdowns. Over here you have the post-avant prose poets, over there the kitchen-sink confessionalists, and across the road are the shiny formalists--and no one ever breaks bread together. As with politics, where you have "I'm voting for That One" liberals and "Time for a Tea Party" conservatives, poetry has evolved into a self-selected enclave, and also--exactly like other sectors of American life--it has stratified into enclaves within enclaves that are hyper-specific and self-referential.

Is the Canadian poetry world as balkanized?  Precisely because there aren't as many of us here, the blurring of distinctions between us is more apparent than in the US, where, owing to sheer numbers, the illusion of self-referential, polarized camps is more easily maintained.