Me: It seems to me that most names come about (unnaturally) when someone writing about a group of poets pins one to them. I have recently been writing about those influenced by Cummings and tried to think of a name that might apply to the current widespread, much-more-than-vispo group of poets I think as a group following the tradition of Cummings. Couldn't come up with one, so tried to get a discussion going here. It degenerated into a discussion of the pros and cons of naming, as just as all discussions I've tried with poets on just about anything having to do with the analysis of poetry have.

My "Kaldron School" is a valid name, but I tossed it out in a fit a childish pique, knowing that it would irk the people irking me, and knowing that it wouldn't work, politically.

This will be my last post on this to spidertangle. I remain convinced that there is a group of poets as closely associated as, say, the beat poets, who will eventually be named. They comprise, basically, the poets at spidertangle. Some pairs of them have less in common with each other than they have in common--except for what I might call ultimate insanity (I think of mIEKAL and myself, for instance)--which I consider of crucial importance. I also believe that the American starting point of these poets was the Williams anthology, and that there was a pronounced gap between the Something Else Group, as I've called it, and those that followed, some of whom became associated with Kaldron. It took me a very long time to get anything accepted by Kaldron editor Karl Kempton, by the way, but even if I hadn't, I would consider myself a Kaldron School poet because of my ties with Karl and many of the others he published. Geof was a Kaldron School poet because he published stuff by Kaldron School poets. Etc.

This group, which--until I get a real name--I call the nymophobic unalliance, is certainly, a discrete entity chronologically. Because it's more than a visual poetry group, it can't just be called the contemporary visual poetry school. I also want to distinguish it from what I call the Ubu vispo school, which I (and others) view as competitive (though we may merge with them eventually, which I'd be all for. We aren't what I call the Iowa Plaintext school (and consider myself a member of because I sometimes write Iowa Plaintext Lyrics), which I consider the dominant poetry school in America at present, nor are we language poets, though many of us are more language-centered than most of the poets called language poets. (An amusing side-thought: I've decided as a taxonomist that Ron Silliman is not a language poet, but a jump-cut poet--but this is without my having made any kind of serious study of his first-rate work. But he's in the langpo school.)

There. I think I've just written my blog entry for today. Without pissing anyone off? I hope so, but suspect not. (Huth doesn't count.)