This at one time seemd outrageously modern--

"somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence"

Omitting the space after the comma, how incomprehensible that made the poem. There was a guy named Stanley Coblenz, I believe, who in the 1960s was writing books like The Poetry Circus in which Cummings, Eliot, Moore were castigated because they were too prosaic. From Cummings to Coolidge is not too big a step:

"The tune of a cold trunk is thin
mute cat behind glass
that I write at all is bannered
in the close grains of sight outlasted"

From Creeley or Niedecker to Armantrout is a baby step. Silliman is easier to read than Duncan. Bernstein is easier than Stevens (doesn't make him better).

Language poetry is a conservative movement, trying to maintain the discoveries of modernism; to have all that not lost in the rising tide of workshopped lyrics. In order to be conservative in this way, it has to push forward just a little bit.

What is "craft"? It usually means conformity to a period style. The well-crafted poem is one that in Poetry will not seem like it shouldn't belong there. Usually the amateur poem that has been revised in order to look like a well-crafted poem is still basically an amateur poem. It's lost its amateur status but hasn't gained very much. Isn't that the moment to reach for a more profound sense of craft?

***

Weinberger famously called Bly "A windbag, a sentimentalist, a slob in the language."