Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Also check out Hank Lazer's The People's Poetry in Boston Review.

It includes this silliman-esque moment . . .

The challenge for an immediately next generation (of post-Language writers) is to make use of the Language poetics as a means toward new modes of composition. While the Freud-Bloom model of generational conflict, a series of oedipal struggles and successions, may not be applicable, it is nonetheless hard to determine what this next generation seeks to overcome, or correct, or enhance. A slightly younger generation, a next-next generation—poets involved in magazines and presses such as Verse and Fence—has been schooled in a dizzying and seemingly miscellaneous range of styles and forms, and runs the risk of writing a tepid, eager-to-please poetry based on stylistic accommodations. Their poems often exhibit a sassy, glib, moment-referenced humor and the technical mastery of a range of experimental styles. A major hazard for this generation is a bland eclecticism, with technically adroit writing that remains superficial because the cultural and historical tension of the formal gestures has evaporated. But many of these poets are also beginning to advocate and explore renewed ways of engaging sincerity, expressivity, and personal statement, explorations that may generate desirable crosscurrents to the pressures for stylistic accommodation.