25 May 2004. Subject once again: taxonomy. I want to announce a change I made yesterday or the day before to my Official Literary Taxonomy (which is HERE). I changed "idiolinguistic poetry" to "language poetry." I resisted using this latter, widely-used term for years because no one agreed on its meaning. Besides that, I wanted to keep infraverbal poetry separate from it. That's because the language poetry school has, in my view, been an enemy of what I and my closest colleagues have been doing in poetry for years--though certain members of it have been the opposite of enemies. By "enemies," I mean that they disregard our existence (as much as they can) by, for instance, mentioning us as little as possible in their essays about poetry, rarely including us in shows they curate or inviting us to conferences they run, and teaching courses on "visual poetry" that don't mention any of us (see the archives of the Poetics discussion group for me versus Marjorie Perloff, the language poets' lead critic, which you can click to from its homepage; it has a search function but I got an error message just now when I tried it). Our side hasn't been all that innocent in the matter. But all this is besides the point. I just giving background to why I avoided grabbing "language poetry" as a term.

Probably my main reason was simply that all poetry is "language" poetry, a view many share and have expressed in print. Now, though, I lean toward accepting "language poetry" to represent poetry that is centered on language, which most poetry is not. This came after I felt I should accept "sound poetry" as a term even though all poetry is "sound poetry"--because the sound in sound poetry is emphasized more than it is in regular poetry. Similarly, all poetry can be seen; "visual poetry" is still a useful term (at least for those who use it to distinguish one kind of poetry from other kinds of poetry). All these terms do say pretty directly what they're about, though their exact meanings will always be debated.

I now accept "language poetry" to stand for one of my three main classes of "burstnorm poetry" because "idiolinguistic poetry" is, as I've always been aware, a mouthful; and because "language poetry" has been used by at least some people to describe all the kinds of poetries I called "idiolinguistic." As for infraverbal poetry, well, it certainly focuses on language, and I'm mellowing away from my hostility toward language poetry. (I've never not occasionally praised individual language poets and language poems, and have always wanted to know more about it. I even personally like all the language poets I've personally met, and the second generation of language poets seems much less ghettoed than the first.)

It now strikes me that some language poets may accuse me of trying to jump on the acadominant language poetry's bandwagon. By my definition, my own infraverbal poetry is very . . . languagic. I've done other poems that break grammatical norms. All I can say in my defense is that I will continue calling myself an infraverbal/pluraesthetic/solitextual poet, and only very infrequently mention that I've done language poems, and just about never that I am any kind of language poet.

For those curious, the second kind of the two kinds of language poetry in my scheme is "sprungrammar poetry." This is poetry that significantly breaks rules of grammar--order sentences out of getting, for instance, or if you foolings around with inflectioned. You know?

The other two kinds of burstnorm poetry are "plurasethetic" and "xenological" poetry. You'll have to read my essay on literary taxonomy to find out what they are if you can't guess.