7 or 8 years ago I made a list of linguaesthetic (words-only) poetry schools, hoping to get comments, and–best–additions to it.  It was pretty much ignore.  Here it is again, anyway (and because I’m running behind, thanks in part to my word-processor’s killing four days of my work on the Sonnet book):

1. Edwardian poetry–the kind of standard formal poetry written by most American poets as the twentieth century began.

2. some school between the above and the next?

3. imagistic poetry

4. country poetry, the kind Frost would be the exemplar of–and, yes, I need a much better name for it.  Quotidian subject matter, formal techniques

5. surrealistic poetry

6. plaintext poetry (the kind of which Williams would be the exemplar)

7. objectivist poetry (if that’s different enough from 5.)

8. neo-formalist poetry

9. language poetry

10. infraverbal poetry

11. New York School poetry

12. beat poetry

13. ethnic poetry

14. contra-genteel poetry (Bukowski, and his followers)

15. feminist poetry

16. Haiku

17. Neo-Hopkins Poetry–what Dylan Thomas wrote at his best, word-splash, not the sprung rhythm.

* * *

Hmmm, I left out surrealist poetry and jump-cut poetry.  Odd.  Probably others.

Here’s a Poem poem I wrote at about the same time:

.                                  Another Failure

.                                  For half the night
.                                  Poem struggled mightily
.                                  to sing himself a sleep
.                                  that melted understandings into him
.                                  as intricately deepening as April rain
.                                  dislodging a woodland’s smallest wisdoms;
.                                  but nowhere in it did
.                                  anything extend beyond
.                                  its decimal point.

 

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