Conventionally good poetry. By this I mean poetry that's extraordinary in at least two or three dimensions: visual, auditory, intellectual, or emotional. This seems obvious. People can't ever agree, though, on which poetry satisfies on these levels. I started writing false "Barrett Watten" lines in my head after reading Silliman's blog on Watten:

1.

Pant cuffs determine fashionability.

Egregiousness is not at fault.

2.

In capitalism bread loses Marxist connotations.

...

But I quickly found my lines were far too witty. I couldn't get that Watten flatness, that deadness of tone, no matter how hard I tried. (But of course I was writing a parody, so I had to be somewhat witty.) There is also a historical problem: I have always read Watten as sort of a cliché or stereotype of "language poetry" in its ideologically pure state: only by reading about Ron's Silliman's reaction to Watten many years ago can I take myself to a time and place where this would have been seen as fresh and alive. I suddenly "got it" when I saw it through another's eyes.

Now Charles Bernstein is another thing entirely: he tries way too hard to be funny. Some things cannot be forced. That awful "canned" humor! I am a funny guy myself, but I cannot tell a joke, which is probably all for the best. I realized a little while back that I had no interest at all in Bernstein's poetry, that I owned several books of his essays but only The Absent Father in Dumbo. This is not a judgment I'm making about his work, but a discovery I made about myself. I was a little surprised, since I look favorably on him in many ways and instinctively distrust the attacks made on him by the likes of Richard K.