More on the "victim canon." (What the hell is that? asks Aaron Tieger.)

We don't read Frank O'Hara, or Jack Spicer, or John Ashbery, or Robert Duncan, or Adrienne Rich, or Allen Ginsberg, or Gertrude Stein, or Kenneth Koch, or Jerome Rothenberg, or James Merrill, or Eileen Myles, or Charles Bernstein, or David Shapiro, or Elizabeth Bishop, or Carl Phillips, or Langston Hughes, because they belong to some "victim" category (Jew, Lesbian, gay, black). We read them because they simply are American poetry. That is, take them away, and you have only a significant few writers left. And this is true of both avant-garde and "academic" poetry.