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15 April 2005: Hey, it appears that the readership of this blog has jumped from ten to eleven recently. A guy named Dan (Waber?) has now sent me two comments. The second casts a fie "on poets who read Bob's posts and cheer in private but don't leave comments!" Support, at last! Just kidding, because I know I have some support in my opposition to the American Poetry Establishment, though most of it is from poets too busy with their own work to want to bother opposing so trivial a foe, and I certainly don't hold it against them. My own efforts against such institutions as the Academy of American Poets are puny, and more to let off steam than to do any damage.
Speaking of the Academy, I've just found out that it has a list of "31 Groundbreaking Books" at its site. Here's the list:
Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman
When I saw this, I opined (in response to stasguard third-class Jeff Newberry's wondering "if everybody (with a book on the list) is a mediocrity," I wouldn't call any of them a mediocrity, but whoever wrote the list definitely is. My own press has published more groundbreaking books than are on this list. In my evaluatory scheme there are three levels of major poets; I'd only put six of the poets whose books are on the list into any of those three levels. A few would barely make the lowest of my three levels of minor poets. (But I hold that even that is a very great achievement.)
"I think it comic but completely unsurprising that nothing by the most ground-breaking American poet by far, E. E. Cummings, is listed. Zukofsky's "A" should be on it, too. I assume 1950 was the cut-off date, as it is in 98% of what the Academy does. I know, some of the books have later dates, but their contents didn't postdate 1950, except in the trivial sense of when they were written or published."
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