Poet Versus Poet
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.
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.”