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8 June 2005: I'm in my null zone again--maybe a kind of delayed reaction to the stress of all the driving I recently did. In any case, it took me a while to think of something to put in this entry. Finally, I remembered my latest new word: "mimeostream." Ah, and I now propse "slickstream" to describe its opposite. "Mimeostream" came to me when I was thinking about why visible commentators on poetry failed to notice the influence of Cummings on contemporary poets. Obviously, it was because they were only reading mainstream and academic publications. They weren't aware of zines, or knew vaguely about them but didn't think them of value. As I thought about this, I realized that the split probably took place around the sixties or even early fifties--with mimeograph machines, the first technology that allowed superior (and woeful) poets to get around deadheaded middlemen to reach a public. That evolved into xeroxial publications--which is now becoming electronic publication. All amateur, for the most part, and unslick. And invisible to the slickstream critics and reviewers.
Note, I didn't want to use "otherstream" for what I'm calling the "mimeostream" because "otherstream" was not intended as an antonym for "mainstream," as "mimeostream" more or less is. "Otherstream" (my coinage) is intended to be an antonym for "knownstream," which--needless to say--all slickstream or mainstream poetry is. But there is a lot of poetry that's knownstream but not slickstream or mainstream.
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