only one-hundred

These days if you are familiar with the work of one-hundred contemporary poets you’re just getting started.

playing catch-up

Contemporary poets clamoring for my attention, I tell them: I’m still trying to catch-up to the poets I missed during twentieth century.

one hundred

If you can’t name one hundred poets, then you can’t say you have even partial knowledge of contemporary poetry.

the living and the dead

Had he reached a tipping point where he could recall more dead poets than living ones?

poets' opinions

Poets can’t be trusted when it comes to their opinions of their contemporaries. Their lack of distance causes deafness to rival voices or results in a chummy humming in tune.

bloodless

The anemic criticism of one who has clearly not read beyond the contemporaries.

harper's logan lite

After reading this piece in Harper’s, Poetry Slam, being an avid reader of contemporary poetry, criticism and reviews of same, my first response was to the by-line: Who’s he, I said to myself, and why am I interested in his critical take on the state of contemporary poetry? I still can’t answer that one. From a quick check of Edmundson’s credentials (on-line) I determined that, other than being an English professor at a major university, he seems to have little or no background in the field of contemporary poetry (which becomes evident by the poets he cites and his severely limited viewpoint). Edmundson is neither a poet actively engaged in the art, nor is he a well-published critic or reviewer of contemporary poetry.

What was Harper’s agenda in publishing this piece of drive-by criticism? To stir things up among contemporary poets? Not the biggest playground to trot out an unknown no-nothing bully onto. I guess someone more qualified, like William Logan, wasn’t available. Because I think of Edmundson as a William Logan wannabe, one who is trying to take a shortcut to the role of naysayer without doing the requisite reviewing, the thrashing and trashing, that Logan has done over the years.

catch the prevailing wind

His poems are raised sails that never fail to catch the Zeitgeist. [Thinking of Billy Collins.]

center will not hold

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

—Guillaume Apollinaire, "On Painting," The Cubist Painters (1913)

stadium

I estimate it would take a stadium seating about 100,000 to contain all the contemporary poets*. What a compelling cacophony it would be if they all stood at once and began to recite their poems.


*US only, actively publishing/performing

poet laureate of anywhere & everywhere

The Poet Laureate of the Corner Store; The Poet Laureate of Greenland; The Poet Laureate of Half-Past Ten O’Clock; The Poet Laureate of I-10; The Poet Laureate of the Burning Trash Barrel; The Poet Laureate of Wal-Mart; The Poet Laureate of Leap Year; The Poet Laureate of Las Vegas; The Poet Laureate of Pinehurst Golf Course; The Poet Laureate of Fairhaven Cemetery; The Poet Laureate of LAX; The Poet Laureate of the Moon. It’s such an honor to be named Poet Laureate…