Every time I start a post on the Dangers of PoMo Theory, I mean to say something about how I got started at all, and since I haven't yet, I'll do it tonight when I don't really have time to finish my argument anyway. Hang coherence! I'm not sure I'm ever really coherent. So, Jonathan Mayhew, in a multi-blog discussion of a Bruce Andrews poem from BAP which I despise and he likes only a little, had this to say:
"Sure, when I serenaded some construction workers this afternoon with it, they weren't too appreciative. ... Maybe you need a teeny bit of context to understand what this kind of writing is trying to do. Context that a critic might provide, that being the critic's job."
Then, a week or so later, Daniel Green wrote Spontaneously Attuned to the Text in response to a post at Charlotte Street (must add to blogroll). Daniel Green's post ends "If literature and literary criticism could be wrested from the institutional hands of the academy, literary theory as it is presently known would be dead." Now, that's not really a fair summary of the post, and he claims to have "made extensive use of the work of Derrida," but, combined with Jonathan's remarks, it got me thinking about just how disastrous it is that most American poetry is now being written by people who make their living in the academic world. And it's not because of writing workshops or cronyism — it's because, too often, talk about poetry in the abstract, about the discourse of poetry or the social role of poetry or the whatever of poetry take precedence over reading and thinking about poems, so much so that we've reach the absurd state where, according to Jonathan's report of Marjorie Perloff's account, there are PhD candidates in English at Stanford who have never read "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
I promise I'll be done with this before the week's out.
7:27:52 PM 
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