FIRST ARGUMENT:
Change of Person
Its not very useful to accuse writers in secession to current trends that they simply wish to be poets from some other century - the usual charge made by academics who write nothing understood by a wider reading public. I don't think I know what poetry was really like in any other period, or if there were more advantages to be a poet in any other age than the present. I can recognize no language of former styles that I would prefer to modern American language. The voice I have created cannot have its effect in a language of any other period than the present. I've read the sizable record of dead poets and feel that most of our best loved poems come down a single favorite line, a single stanza that still rings true, or a striking quality of a single, brief voice. I don't think Ezra Pound, for example, ever really had anything to say - nor if he did say anything nobody could understand it - but he had some wonderfully measured lines and an American voice with that "unknown quantity" each poet should rightfully seek. As his friend might have said, Pound communicated without the necessity of being understood. Sometimes a new voice is all we can ask of a great poet. Sometimes they give us more.
Nor do I think I will take much satisfaction from assuming that I might be a poet for the future - or gain some measure of recognition in the future. A living poet should have contempt for every moment that he or she cannot be the master. A poet has only one task: to master the unaccountable. This requires a modicum of pretension, and anyone thinking otherwise may have little experience with foolhardy or ambitious literary projects.
Concerning the present time, I will tell you I have watched from towers with the innocent hope of a child - daily expecting all parties to set things straight. Like children concerned with the thing they love most, I always have kept a remarkable faith in the basic rightness of things. It is especially hard to hold on to a belief one posses some talent in a field currently marginalized by 50 years of failure and disappointment. I can remember reading in 1998 some lines of James Merwin written in the 1960's - and thinking someone came before me with the idea for the same project. I remember seeing two or three poems with same nuclear charge I refined in my own reactors, but in the end his project was unsustainable. Now, like all American authors with a name, he has settled down to quiet translations of poets from other nations. That is a challenge and should anger somebody.
I think in the future no one will take the last 50 years of modern poetry very seriously. It simply has not been present at the scene of daily life. Since the 1950's, I believe, poetry has served the masters of other arts: popular music or political factionalism. As we are already reading this, it seems that "modern" poetry is already only a nightmare.
I don't want to rehearse too much what is currently well known about an art fallen outside the cultural mainstream - maybe it will only seem too bizarre and unreal to future generations. I believe all poets are charged to bear witness to joys; naysayers exhibit little minds possessed by little talents - especially naysayers to bold, new movements in literature. I would ask them first what they have to lose in a well thought out poetic venture? This is a period after all, when there is simply no market to sustain even a handful of poets, when the persons wishing to be known as published poets may out number the readers who wish to support them. Solidly a silver age. Surely there is little to be lost and much to be gained.
It is a time when a small community of academic poets are culturally "balkanized" and stand apart in separate hostile political camps: one camp for a rather large group of those who have discovered quite rightly they had been victims in their lives (though I believe we all take our turns) - and now demand status as deserving poets based on the merits of their rather common human experiences - not by the power of their line or their language. I have worked this over in my mind and I cannot find another way of saying this.
This is a time when the many praised names in modern poetry - I mean since about 1968 - were exiles of some other country, who despite not being especially brilliant in their own language have been awarded in the West for turning their verses into worse English. Yet we learned to honor them since - after all (and this is my first argument) modern poetry is about the pose of a poet - political or social - not the merits of his work.
Next,