Total absorption. When you read Ron Silliman’s blog, or Jordan Davis’s, you get the sense of someone totally absorbed in poetry, night and day. You might get the same feeling from mine as well, yet compared to these people I am quite isolated from others who share this obsession. I don’t know that many personally (I’m not counting copious email correspondence). My feelings about peoples’ work is not influenced by friendships, for the most part. Not really being part of this community, except “virtually,” I tend not to know the work of as many poets.

Take Language poetry. I am quite devoted to Coolidge. Aside from him, I several books by the following:

Silliman (5 or 6)
Bernstein (4 or 5, mostly essays)
Susan Howe (3 or 4)
Lyn Hejinian (4 or 5)
Leslie Scalapino (4 or 5)

I possess a single book by each of the following:

David Bromige
Fanny Howe
Steve McCaffery
Alan Davies
Barrett Watten
Rae Armantrout
Michael Palmer
Bob Perelman
Douglas Messerli

Plus a few anthologies and a few more poets I might be forgetting. It doesn’t seem like an awful lot, considering I might buy 40 or 50 books when I go to Spain.


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I went to visit my daughter's 2nd grade class this morning. They were doing poetry. The teacher is wonderful, but she had never heard of "Wishes, Lies, and Dreams" or "Rose, Where did you get that red?" The poem they were working with was not horrible, but it wasn't wonderful either.