I suppose my previous post could be seen as utterly insane hubris.

Au contraire. I would suggest that one of the central, if unspoken, raisons d'etre for literary cliques & groupings & movements is to provide a security blanket against the Grand Tradition, the Only Real Club : Poetry-At-Large. Poetry simple. Poetry per se.

Then again, I'd be too cynical (& simplistic) if I thought this was the only motivation. Sometimes poets gather together in order to resist some way of writing which has worn out, lost its usefulness or vitality.

But maybe what has grown stale in our own day are some modern/postmodern tendencies themselves. I'm thinking of some of the more purist & extreme manifestations - those which reject not only traditional modes or styles, but basic grammar and syntax, basic rhetorical means, literary history itself. They want to re-invent the wheel solely by means of their own jargon and polemical-ideological armature.

I know I'm batting a straw man here, to some extent. But the magazines & blogs are full of idioms or styles which seems basically a-historical. & one of the theoretical (or subconscious, maybe) justifications for this state of affairs is the notion that old = bad, traditional = irrelevant, new = good, assertion is better than deference, ignorance is OK as long as it's got flair...

The group I want to belong to would not only express an affinity for that aforementioned pantheon of literary greats (& others), but also devote itself to a comprehensive scrutiny of, & a loving involvement with, the long & complex history of poetry itself. There is a perennial "need for roots".