30 April 2004. The first thing an organization like the Academy of American Poets would do if it wanted to be more than guard the status quo would be to hire someone like me to gather together a team of investigators whose duty would be determine exactly what kinds of poetry are being composed in America. This is my standard constructive suggestion for improving the state of poetry in this country: list the poetry schools. Then publicize that list. There are simply too many kinds of valuable poetry being composed in our country that no one except its creators knows exists--in kind. What do I mean be a school of poetry? A group of ten or more poets who are doing a kind of poetry that is significantly different from any other kind of poetry being composed--that is, poetry that is as different from any other kind of poetry being composed as beat poetry, say, is from neoformalist poetry. Yes, there will be arguments, for subjectivity will be unavoidable. But the arguments about whether one group is a true school or not will themselves be fruitful and informative. But what about my only requiring ten poets for a school? I say that all schools start with only one or two poets, and would really drop the requirement for a school to have some specified minimum number altogether, but too few people I'm trying to get on my side would go along with that.

One virtue of the attempt to list all the schools of poetry could be, finally, an objective list of just what it is that poems materially and explicitly do--as a means of defining schools. Most poets think their little mechanisms superior to explicit material elements, but they're mistaken.

Once all the schools of poetry have been rendered visible, organizations like the Academy of American Poets, publishers of poetry like Knopf, critics like Helen Vendler, newspapers like the New York Times, anthologists like Garrison Keillor, prize-givers like the one I'm in, The National Book Critics' Circle, and grants-bestowers like the Guggenheim will at the very least be forced to recognize that their view of the poetry scene is limited. Some may, as a result, decide to educate themselves, though that is unlikely.

So far as the Academy of American Poets is concerned, the value of a full list of schools of American poetry would be toward their setting up a new way of evaluating poets' fitness to join an organization supposedly for the best poets in the country. I lack the time to say more about that in this entry, but should return to it in tomorrow's. (Eventually, I hope to use this series of entries with an updated version of my own essay on schools of poetry (in which I asked the public in vain for additions to an incomplete list of schools I made that is now at the About Poetry site, and has been published in Small Press Review and elsewhere), the 2,500 words I wrote yesterday while substitute teaching about the essays Dana Gioia and August Kleinzahler wrote in the latest issue of Poetry about Garrison Keillor's anthology of poetry, Good Poems, and other relevant scraps I've written and hope to write to make a possibly Important Essay. Just gotta keep going.