Reading Whitman, I hear a lot of Koch there. In other words, I am reading Whitman back through the lens provided by KK's "Geography." And sometimes I hear Vicente Aleixandre of "Historia del corazón" in Whitman too.

I don't hear a lot of Ginsberg, on the other hand. Whitman is all about the balancing of phrases, the echoing patterns of sound and syntax. Ginsberg is after different effects.

Not all long lines are sloppy; not all short lines are taut. Not all long lines are inspired by Whitman.

Tayson on Whitman and Language Poetry. A profoundly wrong-headed article. (Via Josh (who incidentally is one of most consistently intelligent poetry bloggers out there.) I especially love the contrast between Sharon Olds and Leslie Scalapino, in which the young poet siimply takes the latter's emotional coolness at face value. And when he quotes Jorie Graham; that's priceless. The poetry that he seems to dislike, that found in most literary magazines today, owes more to Graham than to Scalapino or Bernstein. Isn't it Graham who dilutes Ashbery to just the right consistency to be acceptable in the MFA programs? I see much more second-rate Ashbery/Graham imitations than second-rate Clark Coolidge imitations. The period style of today owes very little to LP.