I've added BirchLane to Culture Blogs and 10 new blogs to Poetry Blogs:
If I used some method to determine if and when links get added I'd tell you. I do check every site listed over there almost every day. It's exciting to find so many people passionate about poetry, and I love many of the poems and poets I've found, but you won't be surprised to find I often disagree with the critical and, especially, the theoretical opinions expressed in some of these blogs.
In fact I have little patience for most literary (and political) theory, which seems to me to be hopelessly mired in pre-scientific, pseudo-scientific, or even anti-scientific ideas of human nature. I especially include Marx and Freud and their intellectual children in all three categories. That's not to say that a truly scientific literary theory would necessarily help anyone write better poems, but a wrong theory certainly won't.
I used to get particularly exercised when people used the word "experimental" to describe their poetry or paintings or theater or whatever, partly because I thought they were illegitimately assuming the mantle of the scientific method. After all, a poem cannot be an experiment in that sense: there is no theory from which a testable hypothesis has been derived for which the poem is the test. A scientific experiment fails if afterwards there is no more evidence for or against the theory than there was before the experiment. Can a poem fail like that? Why would anyone want a poem to succeed in that way?
Some of the early modernists did think they were making poetry scientific: Pound, in ABC, describes "THE IDEOGRAMMIC METHOD OR THE METHOD OF SCIENCE." But one thing I've learned from these young bloggers (all but a couple are younger than me, anyway) is that "write an experimental poem" is more likely to mean "try something new and see if it's fun." With this, I am entirely sympathetic.
In fact, it's what I do. With sonnets.
One last thing. I really do walk around with my iPod playing poetry at me: 3 volumes of the Caedmon Poetry Collection, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens from the Voice of the Poet series, the Hudson Review's 55th anniversary CD. The other day I heard Robert Frost's "The Oven Bird" and Gertrude Stein's "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Pablo Picasso" back-to-back. They sounded exactly the same.
6:28:48 PM 
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