Re: “Eleven Essays I’m Not Writing About Contemporary Poetry” by Zach Savich (the title of which should be, “Eleven Essays (I’m not Writing About Contemporary Poetry).”

Once again interesting pieces by an intelligent person that make me forlornly wish someone like him would finally write something in the visible media about where poetry has been besides Wilshberia the past thirty years.  It continues to amaze me that people like him really don’t know!

One further remark, on Harold Bloom’s silly characterization of the (American, I assume) poetry era since Stevens as the age of Ashbery that he brought up.  I grant that 1970 to 1980 may in fifty years come to be known as the age of O’Hara, who did what Ashbery is best known for better.  I think of that period compared to the age of Stevens as being our equivalent of the Victorian Age (whose Ashbery may have been Browning) compared to the Romantic Era.

I have no idea who posterity will deem the dominant American poet of the past 30 years.  I can’t believe they would go for Ashbery.  I doubt they’d choose an Otherstream Poet–for the same reason the academy never thinks of Cummings as being as important a poet as Stevens (though probably too scatteredly influential on poets much better than the many almost solely influenced by Stevens to seem important, and–needless to say–still too adventurous technically for academics.  Clark Coolidge might be their choice (especially if no one was allowed to vote on the basis of a poet’s gender or ethnic group).

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Cowboys and Aliens