Richard
Sorry I had to cut my previous post short - I'm subject to call.
I guess I was brought up on the old-fashioned side: poetry is an oral art, yet nothing I was reading in college seemed to take that into account. I was also somewhat conservative with a plethora liberal professors - some of them still stuck in the previous decade or two. The students of the late seventies weren't relating well with the former anti-war and race activists who were now the professors - and I think their 'poetry' alienated me. Their sentiments weren't mine, their priorities weren't mine, and their expectations of a poem weren't, either.
One professor spent half of her time bragging about her (past) importance to the race movement, the other half telling us that white women wanted to get tans because white men preferred black women, and any other time that was left assigning us readings of angry black men.
I could be interested in what others have to say about their lives and observations, but they weren't saying it well. It's not really about form, but all the other tools of the craft that seem to have been eschewed with it. There no longer seems to be any craftsmanship, generally, and that's what I think has alienated people. They no longer understand why a particular piece is poetry, when it seems more like short - and often unfocussed - prose. This is the one place I've found where writers are attempting to restore craftsmanship in poetry.
What are the would-be poets of today being taught? Perhaps you can answer that for me.
Sorry if this crossed the line to rant.
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