Jordan writes:

The resistance pressure I tend to overcome by throwing grappling hooks to the immediate environment. The continuous present/peasant. A post-Apollinaire method. Where the accepted Anglo tendency is Wordsworth's recollection -- the bias in the Anglo-American mainstream is toward that honey-thick congealed deep time mode. The kind Chris Lydon was asking Jim about, and was confused about what kind of poetry the bloggers were writing -- or rather, revealed his certainty that it was not a kind he recognized.

What's my suspicion of that mode -- do I have a bias that present witness is somehow more authentic?


If it's a bias, is it a stylistic bias? I mean NY School poetics seems to emanate this general stance. On the other hand, recollection can also be a present-tense activity - searching for something lost. Yes, Arcadia-childhood-recollection is an oppressively cliched "mode". Romanticism looking for lost felicity-divinity. On the other hand, the "it's all here now - be happy!" manner of bambini-poetics is just as limited.