It’s probably important to bear in mind that Bloom was grinding an ax with a chip on his shoulder while sticking his thumb in Adrienne Rich’s eye when he edited that Best of the Best anthology. He was picking his favorites from a decade of Best American Poetry collections, and he had an agenda. He didn’t include anything from the 1996 anthology that Rich had edited, and everything he did include may have been chosen partly because of what kind of poetry it wasn’t, not just on the basis of what it was. (Just for the record, I think it’s a good poem. And I think of it as being written in a nonce form, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that other people are more knowledgeable than I about its formal antecedents.)
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