So what is the Greatest Living Poets Project all about? Simple, yet pretentious; ambitious, yet dedicated to a more vital poetic. We wish to correct the defects of the current ideas of modern poetry and, by talent - and talented grandstanding place our idea of modern poetry before the Western world. Not a very modest project and, by any measurements, fraught with difficulties. A poet in this school will be valued for the power he creates from our language - not for any new technique you can admire; for the "unknown quantity" of associated ideas - not for the craft you can understand and imitate.

The project reintroduces the uses of the sublime - without the ill effects of a self-conscious effort of language to sustain it. In our focus on the "unknown quantity" of language we seek a chance felicity of sharp expression idiomatic in the language and forever untranslatable - rather than a more studied imitation of known perfections. Modern prose poems have a word for word equivalent. Poetry as we use it cannot be translated only approximated badly. This is the watermark of the Greatest Living Poets project.

Ours is not a violent literary revolution. I think as moderns we can agree on important and commonly held principles. In modern poetry there is only one tool: the common usage language. I agree that a poet's self-expression must approximate natural expression as closely as possible and his art must reject all the devices of artistic verisimilitude in favor of natural thought and speech.I only protest that this has been done very badly - and the result is not modern poetry but modern prose. And to a public outside the academic circles, there is no visible justification or excitement for a separate genre called poetry - it seems to have been in practice, and effect, subsumed by other genres - music, prose, script writing - and I can't disagree.

Should you be concerned about all this posing? Can it be argued that any of us can be moved about and manipulated by master operators? Style is all about smoke and mirrors. Fame is the sum of all outrageous rumor gathered around a name - a public pose. Style seems to be substance and content for humans. Style is what humans do; after being fed, clothed, and sheltered, it's the only thing humans really want. After necessities, the only thing we can buy with our money is style. I think I have gone to some trouble to show how grandstanding (style) has a rather rich and honored tradition in our culture. Ziggy like, I must stake out a patch of cultural ground and make myself a target. They only fail who also have no talent to mesmerize the audience they have gathered. Then we are back to the issue of confidence and a healthy pretension.

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The "Unknown Quantity" in Language

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