My taste must be different than yours tough, as Berry, Oliver, Simic & Co. seem to me precisely the sort that Kenyon, Ploughshares, Poetry & Co. so love to tout. I doubt future generation will have any reason to remember them, as their “record” contains precious few facts about the world at large, and their “elation” is of the totally manufactured kind, not the elation of true abandonment.

Don’t get me wrong; I have no sympathy for the ultra- and post-modernists and their willfully obscure (that is obscure because of ambition and insufficient understanding) poetry. But poetry is the individual expression of a comprehensive understanding (another way to say the specific application of general powers), and as such must be complex and difficult in necessary ways (it is the job of poets to make their poems as clear as possible).

The divide between difficult and accessible poetry that the establishments always love to harp on seems to me akin to the divide in our politics between liberalism and conservatism – it is a structural and virtual divide that purposely or not keeps out viable alternative voices. We must ceaselessly combat academicism of all kinds.

Sorry for the long post!

I’ve been reading and HUGELY enjoying some more elliptical poets this year: DA Powell, whom I discovered on the Poetry Foundation website; Philip Nikolayev, whose book made me laugh out loud on a commuter train; Frederick Seidel, creepily and sinuously gorgeous. All these three juxtapose words hyposyntactically and to great effect.

Am I getting the terms wrong? I know completely what you mean re the universities. And the in-crowd thing. And the examples you quote are indeed not pleasant. And I have had a rejection from them (again) only this month! But surely an art form that only tries to do one kind of thing, that only tries to reach “ordinary people” who “hate” that artform, is firstly very limited. Secondly, an academy of its own sort. And thirdly, er, sort of dead.