Quincy,
It all depends on one's own life and associates. Although I have lived a constant life with one partner many of my friends have been wildly liberated and free. My own group was into all sorts of experimental art, music and film and when possible, theatre. The only things that divide us are the more conservative attitudes of your generation which seem to be the result of the greater urgency to find employment and the way that things we had to fight for were taken for granted by the time you came along.

I could then list the technological advances in my life which, taken from my provincial New Zealand starting point, are immense. You are the generation that grew up watching television. That means that from some points of view you are much more heavily socialised than someone like me who was left to play alone in a garden and didn't see television until after I was married. Books were not optional. They were entertainment.

You all seem rather worldly, with the possible exception of Austin.

Quincy,

Surely eras are a different question from the age of the artist. Twenty or thirty years makes a difference in one's generation, but artists are aware of, and can work with and "in" (intellectually and/or artistically) as many eras as they choose to or are capable of.

You're asking whether others see what you, because you're within (?) your generation, can't? I'm not sure if that's an intimation here. I simply don't see any cohesive style (do we need a definition of "style"?) among these poets, and that seems hopeful.

Quincy,

I think you should take Terese up on this one. Of course it matters. I can't think of many things that matter more. What does Rimbaud say at the end of the drunken boat? It is necessary to be absolutely modern.

Now, I could tell you exactly what that statement meant in california in the 70's. I could go on and on. But I have no idea what it means now. Only you young whippersnappers can tell us.

Of course some of us are going to say that ageism is bad. That's because we're, um, age-y! With all that implies. But if you'd asked me in 1977 where poetry was going, and what it meant to be young and alive and a poet, you would have gotten a five page diatribe. ;)

So, where's yours? You guys have it in your power to change the landscape. And it's expected. Think of BLAST! Think of Marinetti.

Where's yours?

Thanks,

Bill

Well, I suppose it all depends whether you want to be a poet or write poems. And I wouldn't attend to much of what Rimbaud said - though he did write some great poems. After he turned eighteen he thought all poetry, including his own, was rubbish and spent the rest of his life as a criminal gun-runner. Didn't write a thing.

Probably Verlaine's fault. Poets? Huh!

I knew a terrific poet at uni Looked like a very pretty, and considerably taller, Bob Dylan, had a guitar which he c ould actually play (a bit) did all the poetic things, got the girls (probably got the boys as well). What a poet! Wrote reams of the stuff too some of it in French. All crap (well, I can't speak for the French).

Think of Marinetti and think of Fascism and think of machines that destroyed centuries of art and countless living humans. Where does that get you?

Maybe that is something in common: the lack of, and perhaps conscious avoidance of, or allergy to, any manifesto.

David R.

Is this about an age group or about a few like-minded people within an age group? Bill mentioned the Futurists. Wordsworth and Coleridge did Lyrical Ballads. A few sixteenth-century English poets imported the Italian sonnet.

Doesn’t sound “generational” to me so much as particular groups of sparks in a fire. Surely some of Wordsworth’s poetic peers were talking about something different from “writing in the real language of men.”

In retrospect, it’s the generation of the “Romantics.” But that is only after.

Quincy,

I haven't yet seen the anthology, so can't comment on the nature of the poems within. I will say that something interesting happened to a certain branch of my generation of poets, or the poets slightly older than me (Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux, Tony Hoagland, etc.)---they came up with a way of writing an emotionally intense, sexy, sometimes very funny, poetry that was wild as the Beats but that didn't rely on the old trick of rehashed Whitmanian anaphora.

Some of these visceral poets are interested (at least sometimes) in form---Kim Addonizio and Moira Egan, and Dorianne Laux, who is writing the occasional sonnet now. Tony Hoagland is still doing free verse, but I'd sure like to see what he would do if he put his hand to writing in form. Is B.H. Fairchild in the anthology? I think of him as a very intense poet.

In truth, the country is filled with far too many fine poets for one to talk of movements. There are currents, but the ocean is wide. An anthology provides a good way of defining such currents, and a good prompt for these discussions, but, again: taste. The nature of the canon will be defined by the exclusions/inclusions of the editor(s).

Speaking of academic environments, I need to go to sleep so I can teach Cavafy tomorrow. Now there was a formal poet with a visceral edge!

Be well,

Tony

Hmmm... I made no claim for movements, certainly not based on festivities here. But sorry, Bill, if I don't expound too much, as one of the recurrent themes in being younger, or at least less "established" (yes, it can happen when you're older, too--most of the poets with whom I associate on a day-to-day basis are Baby Boomers, after all), is that one gets taken remotely seriously... maybe half the time. Maybe.

And it gets a bit tiresome after a while. Oh, I'm not talking about rejections from magazines. Those happen, and in my case, the backlog is pretty slim at the moment. I mean more the condescension, the periodic attitude that seeps into a conversation or a correspondence that seems to say "you're really not worth my time--not that I've read a word you've written, but..." I mean, the correspondence unanswered because one apparently doesn't even merit a negative response. I've actually been told, as far as my own work is concerned, that good press in Ireland "doesn't count" given my present residence in the U.S., that my own work "is good enough" to read at an open mic by a host after I chose to read a poem by someone else one week (I've been doing public readings, mostly of my own stuff, for five years now!), and, in swear-word-laden messages from moderators (well, a moderator), that I don't have what it takes for the "Deep End." And I could go on.

This is, of course, par for the course, and perhaps relates tangentially to what Philip was saying, that the time at which one claws one's way in, the manner in which one does so, etc., are very important, too. And while no one's claiming that this is unique to the current crop of thirtysomethings... well... we're the ones (or some of them) who have to deal with it right now.

But in this case, you know what? Screw it. I'm just some over-earnest self-important whippersnapper talking out of his a$$.

Quincy

It's an interesting conversation, and what Quincy is saying largely mirrors my experiences in life, let alone poetry. When I was sixteen I used to be involved in a pro-technology group that had an emailing list (this was before forums...). I never made mention of my age, and thus all of my commentary amidst this fairly large think tank was taken on its own merit. A year or so later, I flew down to this organization's conference in San Jose, and I remember the shock on countless faces that I was who I was...and yes, I think it changed perception of me a bit. Nonetheless, four years later, when I was only twenty-one, I was the one who organized all the operations, speakers etc. for the same conference. Ultimately, my age played a factor in how I was perceived, but it didn't play a factor in how my work was received.

The same has been true of my poetry avocation. Now that I'm thirty, I don't feel as much stigma about admitting my age...but I still feel a bit squeamish about it, simply because it strikes me as irrelevant, while it may not strike others as irrelevant (on some level, conscious or no). I'd rather not be known as a "young poet", but rather be known as a "good poet" (hopefully), or just a "poet".

I've never been ashamed of my age, but I've certainly felt disinclined throughout my life to make a point of broadcasting it.