6 May 2004. Today, just a new word: "plainlay." It's my term for "conventional free verse poem," or--using my formal poetics taxonomy--for "plaintext poem." I felt this to be a needed term because the term, "Iowa Workshop Poem," comes up so much in discussions of contemporary poetry--and, as I mentioned in some other of my blog entries, I'm sure, I want a less negative replacement for that term. A shorter one would be nice, too. "Centrimodal free verse poem" didn't do it for me, though it was an improvement on "Iowa Workshop Poem." I could now go with "Centrimodal Plainlay," but have decided I prefer "Iowa Plainlay" in spite of its associations. "Iowa" seems appropriately to suggest "heart of America" for one thing, and Iowa University was a main reason the kind of poem I'm talking about caught on so widely.

On the other hand, I've often decried the use of places or people of origin in a poetry school's name instead of something objectively describing the kind of poems the poets in the school make, so I may bring back "centrimodal." What I really hope for, of course, is that I come up with a word meaning the same thing but shorter and less klunky.