Pierre Joris has a new blog, Nomadics. In a recent post, Pierre (and Jerry Rothenberg) answer Silliman's recent contention that Millennium II offers an implicit argument for Fluxus, and not the New American Poetry, as the central movement of our time. This will be an interesting debate to follow, although I hope it can be done without too much personal acrimony.

Millennium II reflects the personal perspectives of its two editors. How could it not? It is also markedly "United States centric," despite its international reach. That is, it touches on the work of many, many North American poets while viewing "foreign" poets much more selectively and through an inevitably American/European viewpoint.

I am not sure how "domestic policy" and "foreign policy" relate to each other in this debate. I don't think Ron is that concerned with international poetry very much at all, for one thing. But I suspect the disagreement has to do with "local politics" in a way I don't fully understand.

Several of my favorites, too, are missing from Millennium II. I won't list them because that is too easy a game to play. I hesitate to criticize the book at all, in fact. Let me just say that one writer I missed originally was José Lezama Lima, and I am happy to say that he is one of the "Poets for the Millennium" in a book series published by UC Press and edited by Pierre and Jerry. The editor of the Lezama volume is Ernesto Livón-Grosman. Check it out, it's a "Bemsha Swing Selection." Translations by Robert Tejada, Nathaniel Tarn, and James Irby, among others. (James Irby is Ken's brother, btw.)