18 oct 2004

How can one read everything? For one thing, it's a mistake to only read American poetry published in the last 5 years. You wonder why everyone's poetry sounds the same! That might be why. I'm sure there are worthy poets I'm skipping over, but I don't believe there's thousands of truly interesting ones that I'm not reading. Probably the absolute worst is to edit a magazine and only read submissions. All of a sudden one is publishing crap that seems good against a backdrop of worse crap. If you aren't reading in a foreign language, or poetry from the past, you lose perspective very fast. Silliman should only read Beckett and Celan for a year, then come back and see how contemporary poetry of US stacks up. Or how about only Canadian poetry for a year? That would narrow it down.

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