Yes, mainstream shouldn't be a dirty word when applied as a qualifier to "poetry," but neither should a statement like, "Literary taste vanished, or was banished, from the curriculum when he was a student" be accepted at face value either. Whose literary taste?
Farley writes:
In the time I've been paying serious attention - the past 15 or so years - there's been a steadily increasing anxiety over the marketing of poetry. I have to say, if marketing only meant promoting something already extant and rendering it more visible, then we'd be worrying over nothing. Poets, reasonably, would like to be read. Has anybody actually altered or skewed the way they write in order to conform to somebody's marketing mix? God help them. But one area of activity that has, I think, been actively damaged by marketing is the serious criticism of poetry. So much recent engagement has been focused on awards and prizes, on a perceived sense of hype over here and concurrent neglect over there, that any insightful consideration of form and shape and the constructed-ness of poems seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Some interesting observations there, but they are marred, for me, by this barely unspoken assumption that 'mid-century American formalism' and its antecedents are the only poetry worth caring about. "New formalism" (call it whatever name you like) has been aggressively marketing itself for more than a generation now, with the same predictable arguments, yet has never regained the standing of 'mid-century American formalism' in said marketplace. Perhaps a new approach might prove more uhm marketable.
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