Helps to know that yesterday, besides posting that blog post, I also bought a 2nd-hand copy of the 1968 New York Poets anthology (Padgett/Shapiro). People are complicated. I'm trying to pick up the threads of my own distant past. Those people - & not just Ashbery & O'Hara, all of them - were very important to me. That paperback was new when I first bought it. I kept go back & forth through it, for at least a year, luxuriating. & went looking for books by the individual poets. I liked Berrigan, Tony Towle, Tom Disch... can't remember them all now. It was my take-offs on their poems (I believe) that got me into Brown University, friends - the whole thing was a fluke. & I'm still here, at Brown University (I mean, I did get away for a few years... about a decade...). What does that tell you? Weirdness.

I'm not about to get into another squabble over which poets or which school is or is not of value... that's the thing, the poets in this country (& the poet-critics, too) are always looking for a technical benchmark. Superior artiness, or superior street cred, or some combination of the two... Then you have the grad students & professors, no offense, dutifully marking out their "fields" for hero worship of previous generations... (to hell with expeditions to the jungle of actually living poets)... you get the Langpo Memoirs in all their self-assertive analytical blah-dom... you get everybody explaining their own special value in the American Literary Constellation... isn't it wonderful that Ashbery is on MTV, we love the old codger so much...

What kind of weather does NY School & its later morphs (ie. Chas. Bernstein langpo-elliptical crossovers), what kind of atmosphere do they provide? Well, it's a kind of delicate shuck-stream of the shoulders... how else can I put it... it's an artiness, it's a sweet sort of evasiveness... it's an overwhelming "sceniness", a clever-entertainerness... it's Jacket magazine as ceremonial barge des artistes... it's the poet as (not exactly musical) jongleur... it's a saying no-no-no with a sharp waggle of the head to the very faint & dessicated traces (in Robert Lowell, say) of the old 19th-cent. figure of the poet as bard, sage, scholar, statesman all-in-one...

I want to get away from hipness, from improvisation, from clubbiness... back toward those faint old forms of being a poet in the world... different shades of which you find in Dickinson, Whitman, Poe, Thoreau, Longfellow...

Every poet coming along is confronted with the irreducible conundrum, of what the heck is a poet supposed to be in the world? & soon or later the Dead Heroes & Potentates with all their academic garlands & worshipful followers have to be shoved to one side, because a new approach is needed - your own approach.