20 June 2004. I'm resting today, so am posting just a short observation: that all poets can be divided into knownstreamers and otherstreamers. The former make poems that diverge in no significant way from the kind of poems known to all university English departments, commercial and academic publishers of poetry, editors of mainstream poetry anthologies, and critics and reviewers with readerships of more than a few hundred. The latter make poems of a kind that few or none of those people know anything about, and close to none respect.

All this is my standard boilerplate. But it leads to my latest fling at a Poem poem:

One other item to report: a couple of days ago, I divided Otherstream Poets into undisciplined and disciplined Otherstreamers. Yes, bad/good--the ones with little if any idea of what they're doing except that it's unconventional and anti-establishmentarian, and the ones who craft-consciously use innovation to make works that cohere into higher beauties than the best accidents can yield.

To retain symmetry, I split knownstreamers in two, as well, calling the bad ones "Knownstreamers by Default," the good one (yes, I believe there are good ones--very good ones) "Knownstreamers by Choice." The former make conentional poems because standard poems are all they are aware of, and they are natural conformists; the latter make conventional poems because, after exploring a reasonably broad spectrum of kinds of poetry, they have found that conventional poetry comes naturally to them, and still seems to them have enough unmastered consequential nooks and circuits to build fresh new worlds out of.