Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Alfred Corn
Subject: More Forwards
To the POETICS list:
To answer the question "Who the hell is this guy?" I guess I’m not quite
satisfied with Ron Silliman’s thumbnail biography. I’ve published six books of
poetry and one book of criticism with Viking Penguin. The poetic line I belong
to, insofar as it can be separated out from the general Western tradition begins
with Whitman, goes through Crane and Stevens, on up through the poets
discussed in David Kalstone’s book about autobiographical poetry, titled Five
Temperaments. The ones he talked about were Lowell, Bishop, Ashbery,
Merrill, and Rich. I met Kalstone when I was just beginning to publish and he
shaped my ideas about what poetry could do. I’d like to think I’d added
something of my own to this poetic line, but it isn’t my job to say whether I
have. Silliman says I sometimes write about homosexuality for The Nation. I
have no idea what he means unless he’s referring to a review of the stories of
Edmund White (a gay fiction writer) that is in the current issue. A few prizes
have come to me for my poetry, but as the posts on this list amply demonstrate,
I’m not especially well known, certainly less well known than, say, Lyn
Hejinian. I teach as an adjunct in the Columbia MFA Program, but have done
visiting stints at other places as well–UCLA, Yale, the U. of Cincinnati. Will
this do as an intro?
To David Kellogg: No putdown intended. We were speaking at cross purposes.
I thought you understood that what I was asking for was the aesthetic of LP,
what makes it different from other approaches to writing poetry. The criteria
you gave overlap with the ones I apply, so I felt frustrated in the wish to get a
general introduction to the movement. Yes, I could just plunge in by myself,
but I did that before and got nowhere. A critical guide can save years of wasted
effort. Meanwhile I see that LP is only one kind of poetry that interests you, not
the only. That sounds reasonable to me. What I had been bothered by was the
foundational "exclusionary" line of argument I had heard elsewhere: that LP is
the "real" poetry of our time and the future; in fact, one of the recent posts takes
this position, dismissing the other approach as predictable and boring. (I had
used the term "mainstream" before because some of POETICS’s posters did.)