[Janice D. Soderling]

Reading an old copy of Rattle for breakfast, I underlined the quote below which reminded me of what this thread has veered into. (Maybe this post belongs more correctly in Maryann's current GT thread on pubs and sales, I dunno, but I'm putting it here--also because of Susan's remark about "project poetry".)

In an interview (Rattle Summer 2010) by Alan Fox, editor-in-chief and founder of Rattle, Carl Phillips says this (my underlining and italicizing):

(...) I feel as if there is sometimes is a lot of focus these days in poetry on technique and a kind of hook that might make for a sequence of poems that might make for a contest winner. It's almost as if the work then is changing because it's feeding into this system whereby a first book usually has to win a contest. I don't alway feel as if the writing is committed to what the writer really has to say or really has to write about. There's less vulnerability and it seems more about polish and keeping up with the latest trends. And that's where I feel lucky that I didn't know what the latest trends were when I was writing the poems for my first book, and I was mostly reading dead Greek and Roman poets.

That is something I agree with one hundred percent and think the trend business is why we have so much bland and standarized poetry around us. And poems that rely on effect, particularly bandying the word "blow jobs" in poems seems to be a trend to shore up an otherwise limp poem. I could write an essay on that but will refrain from doing it here.

I want to add that before Susan mentioned it above I had never heard of project poetry and was puzzled because I didn't know what it was. But since then (yesterday) I've coincidentally run across the word several times so it has been around me all the time and didn't register.