Jonathan's cute comment is a mild & funny version of something I descibed yesterday as "malice constitutes the game of oppositions":

This got me thinking again about an idea I had several weeks ago: avant-garde eye for the mainstream poet: A team of four or five post-avant bloggers descend on the hapless straight man and start telling him to lose the blurb from Robert Pinsky, straighten out his similes. I think this could work. Any volunteers?

I've been talking about this phenomenon since the beginning of HGpoetics & long before; actually it's been my way of participating in the literary malice game.

"Oppositional poetics", built on a structural us/them division, is, in essence, a way of short-circuiting thought, a way of not talking about poetry, a way of avoiding substantial literary opportunities or challenges, a way of deleting reference to outsider audiences (outside the coterie) or general/anonymous audiences, a way of dumbing-down/negating literary history, a way of. . .

It's been the modus operandi of language-&-related school ("post-avant") polemics for years now. (It goes back before that to the hoopla around the New Americans, the debates about Paleface/Redskin, raw/cooked poetry; it goes back before that to the polemics of Moderns vs. Victorians, traditionalists vs. experimentalists, WC Williams vs. Eliot, & before that to Americans vs. British. . .) & I've been badmouthing it for years. It's been fun. Prof. Hinkel has even written a book about it : it's called The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey into the Labyrinth of Mirrors Known As "The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey Into the Labyrinth of Mirrors Known As The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey. . ."