[Quincy Lehr]

Over the past couple of weeks, give or take, we've looked at five, well, youngish poets, with interviews and often lively discussion. There have, perhaps, been some common threads among the five of us (though one might question whether this is a matter of the generation or the selection--five people is a very small sampling), as well as some real divergences. My question to all of you (interviewees, discussion participants, and those who've lurked off to the side) is roughly the one I raised at the beginning--does my era seem to be producing a "style" that is distinctive?

I thought of this particularly while leafing through the recent Swallow anthology David Yezzi put together, where, with the exception of Morri Creech and Erica Dawson (and maybe one or two others), the bulk of the authors range in age from a bit younger than Tim Murphy to fractionally older than David Rosenthal. You'd all know the names, many of whom are still lauded as the young ones at the various conferences--Williamson, Mehigan, Stallings, Yezzi himself, Downing, etc. And without rendering an aesthetic judgment on the anthology as a whole (I'm not even sure that's the most useful way to approach an anthology), some things did stand out. In large part, there was an aggregate tendency to play things a bit looser where the form was concerned, but even where the writers were not ensconced in universities, one often detects a fairly academic intelligence animating the poems. (Again, keep in mind that this is a broad generalization that applies a lot to Ben Downing, but a lot less to Erica Dawson.) What I mean is this--there's a certain airiness to the work that can work quite well, but it's not an especially visceral poetry.

If there are certain themes that have kept coming up in these discussions, they seem to include a sense of rootedness in--and perhaps loyalty to--things in one's own background that are not literary as such, a less "political" approach to form (though I'd argue were share that with our somewhat-elders), and, perhaps, a more visceral approach to the poems themselves, perhaps paradoxically combined, in some cases at least, with a more coherent "big picture." Again, this may well have something to do with the selection process (where, in essence, Jehanne and I picked according to our own tastes, Rolodexes, and time constraints), but on the other hand, not all of us have even met outside of cyberspace. We didn't all go to the same schools. Aaron and I both live in Brooklyn (though opposite ends of that borough), but aside from that, it's a reasonable geographic spread for five people. And we picked without having a coherent notion of "proving" anything to anybody.

So, any thoughts on the matter?