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19 May 2005: I was pretty pleased with myself early the morning of 20 May, for I'd gotten my blog entry for the day out of the way. Unfortunately, I had neglected to post my previous entry, and in typing the new one, had obliterated that previous entry. Idiotic.
I didn't say anything much in the obliterated entry. It was mainly musings about where I, and those I feel to be my colleagues, are in the history of American and Canadian Poetry. I see myself as a member of several schools. One is the mainest-stream school of serious poetry going, the Iowa Plaintext Lyric Poetry School, as I call it. Others call it similar names. Ron Silliman may be thinking of it as his "School of Quietude," but he's a lousy definer, so I can't be sure. I suspect his term is for a larger group, those poets not concerned with politics. My solitextual poetry is mainly Iowa Plaintext Lyric Poetry--albeit usually pocked with infraverbalisms and a langpo move or two. It tends toward surrealism, too, but I consider a touch of surrealism part of the standard Iowa Plaintext Lyric Poem. I have no problem with the school, just with the stasguards who think only the kind of poems its members produce of any value--or only such poems, and neo-formalist poems.
I also consider myself a member of the Infraverbal Poetry School, which may be too small to call a school, and the Mathematical Poetry School, which is certainly too small to be considered a school (unless there are a slew of math poets out thar I don't know about). Both of these groups seem easy to name, and name with taxonomical appropriateness. Then there are the contemporary visual poets of Canada and the U.S. I divide them into two groups, one based at the Ubu site, which I could call the Perloff-Certified Visual Poetry School (though some in my crowd have work at Ubu), and the other consisting of the visual poets first published in Kaldron and the visual and related poets who joined them as that magazine faded, then ceased existence except as a display space on the Internet. The Ignored Visual Poetry School? Or, as I put it in my entry for today, The Nymophobic Unaffiliation?" I have no name for it.
What I'm more interested in, though, is a name for the group more or less gathered at Spidertangle, each of whom does one or more of the kinds of poetry I've mentioned and/or sound poetry and/or various kinds of computer poetry and/or other kinds of poetry.
Okay, now to see if I can post this--and my entry for 20 May.
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