Kent Johnson (in comment on Tony Tost's blog) has this idea that I reject narrative poetry, or poetry written in non-experimental modes. He mentions "a Cavafy, or a Parra, or a Horace, or a Bronk, or a Catullus, or a Reis, or a Rilke, or a Sor Juana." Well, I happen to be a big fan of Cavafy and Bronk, and of Catullus and Horace as well. I wouldn't call them linguistically transparent. Rilke I have my problems with, for opposite reasons. Ricardo Reis is a heteronym of the great modernist/avant-garde poet Pessoa (unless there's another Reis I'm missing?). Sor Juana, a Mexican baroque poet, would have been the avant-garde of her own day. No transparency there, either. Parra was admired and translated by WCW. There's no division here.

[An aside: I'm told Cavafy employs a mixture of different "registers," demotic Greek of his own day mixed with Hellenistic and Classical resonances. If so, I find this effect flattened out in the otherwise very good translation that I have here in my office. The linguistic surface seems quite uniform in English.]

Silliman is a narrative poet (read "Albany") in a way that Rilke is not, so I cannot quite understand the terms of this dichotomy. But at least Kent thinks I should write "Post-Avant Garde Poetry for Dummies," so I forgive him his "Leninist" crack, if directed, however indirectly, at me.

***

UPDATE: Kent has posted another coupla comments up there on Tony's blog. I can't seem to comment there on this computer: I get the "flickering screen" effect when I try. I should point out, as Kent himself did, that 3 of the poets in the quote that Tony quoted (from a post here at Bemsha) also figure in the list of poets that Kent himself offers as ones that people like me are likely to ignore: Rilke, Pessoa, Cavafy. I hope that sentence makes sense. I would like to know who all the dull avant-garde poets occupying creative writing positions are. It's a hard argument to make without naming names, which would convert the argument into a personal attack and thus detract from the argument.