Anis Shivani: What Is the State of American Poetry? Leading American Poets Speak
When this article appeared in Huffington post three weeks ago, I immediately posted it to Facebook, as a kind of bookmark for myself, where it also got some positive response from literary readers. Posting there was a simple click-click process. It's more cumbersome to cross-post attractively on Blogger -- especially to import an eye-catching image.
Anyway, at the time I was too busy to read it myself, but there's a lot of worthwhile material here, which I'm reading now -- interviews with Clayton Eshleman, Annie Finch, Ron Silliman, and Danielle Pafunda, along with videos, poems on pdfs, and further links to their works. Anis Shivani did a really good job in bringing these poets to a wider audience. (CBC could take a cue here...)
To me articles like this are of particular interest, since they form a natural follow-up to my own article "Can Poetry Matter -- 15 Years After", itself a response to the seminal essay by Dana Gioia that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, now 19 years ago.
1 comment:
I haven't taken the time yet to read the Huffington article but did stop and read yours which was quite good.
I thought of this David Wagoner quote from the intro to '09's Best American Poetry:
"Poetry began out of necessity, out of irresistible impulse among preliterate peoples. It began together with song and dance around the campfire, out of grief at the sides of graves, out of the boasting and fear and hunger and the search for power before and after the hunt and making war and love. If it were all to disappear from books and magazines now, out of our libraries, out of our memories, the poets among us would begin all over again inventing it, shaping it, speaking it, writing it down, and I'm certain, after a half-dozen generations, poems would be enriching American speech and our lives once more."
I'd like to think so...
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