BOOK VS. TALK:
The story of 20th-century American poetry. Oh joy! What more can be said? Perhaps something new can be extrapolated from something very old : say, the battle between text and oral performance. [...]
American poets, I suppose, will continue to cluster in groups of various kinds. But I would guess that these groupings in future will have more to do with feelings of kinship stemming from political, class, ethnic, religious, or other kinds of social allegiance, than with a sense of kinship based on chosen literary styles or theories of poetry. Because the stylistic and theoretical allegiances which evolved in the 20th-century – based, so emphatically, on text rather than performance – are already irrelevant to contemporary practice. The new/old poetics must take the measure, not of text, but of incantation.
This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy
on Thursday, October 27, 2005 at 10:04 AM.
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