Kinds of poets, part 2...

New formalism, I've got down. That's fairly straightforward and many of its practitioners are prominent. School of Quietude or "Mainstream" poetry--whatever you want to call it--okay, that's Billy Collins and ilk. The flarf business ("Waste Land"-type collaging + Google?) and the New Brutalists (haven't pinned this down yet, though I like the poems of all of the "official members") seemed to start as kind of in-jokes--but then so did Imagism and Vorticism. So I'm only about half serious when I say I'm anxious about it.



On the other hand, I do see "genres" within poetry as much as within fiction. The personal domestic lyric : "New Yorker fiction" as language poetry : David Markson or Gertrude Stein's fiction (as one top-of-head example).



A couple of years ago I spent a few weeks trying to formulate my thesis around this idea, particularly on why there isn't any poetic genre equivalent to literary sci-fi and fantasy (think Octavia Butler and magical realism, not robots and elves). But poets for the most part just don't seam interested in that kind of imagining, though there are certainly examples. (Goldbarth's Psychonaut Sonnets, fer example.)



I have a tendency to read (and let's face it, to try to emulate) many of the post-avant or "experimental" poets, but I love a virtuoso formal poem as well. And while I generally do not respond positively to the everyday flabby personal lyric, there are plenty of lyrical exeptions that keep me from making a rule about it. And I love comedic elements in poetry, and am heartened to see that not everybody's as serious these days as they once were. But I bristle a bit at the uber-ironic stance of lots of po-mo fiction and nonfiction. That's McSweeney'sesque wit does become grating.



Flexibility, I guess, is what I'd like to hang on to.




Somebody create a Quizmo quiz and let's just get this all over with.