I followed a link in my referer logs, and got this:

Mesmerising. Not so much the world as a blog, but the blogosphere as a fishbowl.

Why don’t more people have GeoIDs? Besides the whole stalker thing, that is? Oops, never mind.
9:19:13 PM  #  comment []

Bruce Wexler thinks poetry is dead, and that he helped kill it. Discuss.

Whoops, I meant to write more. Notes:

Wexler places the blame on the surrounding culture, rather than poets and the institutions with which they surrounded themselves, as Gioia did.

Edmund Wilson: “Is Verse a Dying Technique.”

Epstein once asked in... Commentary, was it? “Who killed poetry?”

He ends with an allusion to Frost, much as Plato’s Republic turns on the pure poetry of the language. Wexler just isn’t as good as Platon.

Experimental poetry of the sort...

Love of language is the root of poetry; not all verse is, or need be experienced, as written verse. Nor was poetry strictly limited to the lyric anciently.

The New Formalists and the Expansives have been telling long stories with verse... but do not seem to get much buzz. The book-length poem is not dead: James Merrill, Rachel Hadas, Frederick Turner, Vikram Seth, John Bricuth, ...

By the way, would someone please apply some smackdown to Happy Tutor concerning Wallace Stevens and philosophy while I rummage about for the Necessary Angel? I can’t find my copy to do it myself.
12:01:01 AM  #  comment []