Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

the "mainstream" poetry that has those qualities in abundance. Obviously
> there are other restrictions he is bringing to his evaluation that he
> doesn’t mention–like (I’m just guessing) "communication forms drawn from
> ordinary conversational practice or logical discourse are excluded," or
> something like that. Whatever they are, these extra criteria, the ones
> that distinguish LP from "mainstream," ought to be describable, and that’s
> what I’d like to hear, provided the describer can communicate clearly.
I guess I have to respond here, since my name’s mentioned, but let me state that
I have NEVER done any of the following:
a) dismissed mainstream poetry (tho I dismissed Tim Steele’s prose–would you
care to defend it, or describe him as "mainstream"?);
b) said I don’t read mainstream poetry (I do, in fact, even the occasional Alfred
Corn, even Philip Larkin, tho I once called the latter "asinine");
c) excluded any of the things he mentioned from my likings (ordinary
conversational practice etc.)
In fact, poetry popularly described as LP (I won’t quibble about terms here,
about who is or isn’t LP, I have no interest in that game, my own recent poetry
learns from it but probably wouldn’t be described as such) uses all of those
things: ordinary conversational practice, logical discourse, etc. Sometimes its
critical discourse has seemed to dismiss such elements, but that’s the difference
between the blanket of theory and the field of practice.
As for the dismissal of mainstream poetry by some language poets, I don’t
think it’s more surprising than other critiques by excluded groups in other
contexts, and a lot of times it’s right. Just to take your own post for an example,
one thing that pisses people off is the concept of a "mainstream" in the first
place – something that, for most people who believe in the term, is best eaten
reified. When, just to take an almost arbitrary example, J.D. McClatchy begins
his Vintage book of contemporary American poetry by arguing that no camps
need form because everybody already knows who the big ones are and then
begins the book out of chronological order with LOWELL and BISHOP,