Bernadette Geyer’s latest blog post discusses how we poets are often ready to fight, cluck and ponder amongst ourselves about how different we all are.

How different we all are is nothing new.

What seems new to me is a fresh perspective that all of the difference doesn’t matter much when it comes down to reading a poem and assessing whether you like it or not.

What strikes me most about the reviews is how each seems to take most issue with the idea that there are only two camps and a poet has to be from one or the other. That an editor or editorial team can absolutely decidedly affix a label on a single poet based on the handful of poems from that poet’s ouevre that fit their editorial slant. Want to call so-and-so a lyric poet? Sure, go ahead. Just don’t include any of the narrative or political works that he/she may have written over the years.

Göransson mentions in his review the portion of Swenson’s introduction that references Robert Lowell’s quote that there is “cooked” and “uncooked” poetry. And on the same day I read that review, I was reading an interview with Peter Gizzi in issue #14 of jubilat, in which he says: “When I was a teenager, I began with the Beats, Rimbaud, Homer, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Whitman, but I never read just one stream. To me the tradition is much larger than just the recent postwar ‘raw and the cooked,’ as Lowell broke it down. I didn’t want to think of it in those terms.”