Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Maria Damon
Subject: Re: what does it do?
Tony Green points out the problems with the "they who use pop and Hallmark"
as against "we who could once use Wallace Stevens but who now have learned
to use Gertrude Stein etc etc" model of critical inquiry. I agree. I’m
uncomfortable with we/theys that imply either monolithic wes & theys or
dichotomized wes vs. theys. i love pop songs as i suspect most of the ultragroovoids
on this list do, or have done. "originality" is not the sole purview of
modernist poets, though it’s their rallying cry. i hesitate to get into this turf
here, but i think academic people who are passionate about poetry can only
gain by expanding their embrace of other people’s definitions of poetry. Isn’t
the person who waits anxiously to find out what the pop hits were, or copies
greeting card verse into a notebook, just as passionate about poetry as someone
who peruses Pound for hours on end to grok his prosodic mastery? –as
someone who, until my book came out, thought i was a "cultural studies
person" with a private love of poetry and now has a public/professional profile
as a "poetry person" with a cultural studies orientation, I feel caught between
two discourse communities when previously I didn’t personally experience any
discontinuity between them.