Tuesday, September 14, 2010

What is the State of American Poetry?


That's the question posed to several leading American poets by the Huffington Post.

From the piece....

This seems to be a particularly angst-ridden moment for the followers of American poetry. Is it savagely alive, reaching its tentacles into new corners of consciousness, or is it a moribund corpse, having long been administered last rites? The debate is particularly acute now, as new avenues of poetry publication proliferate as perhaps never before and there are more "poets" writing and publishing poetry, even as critics claim that the MFA system has led to uniform mediocrity and tentativeness. So which is it, and is there a way to put this conflict in some bigger historical context?

We asked the poets the following questions:

Is American poetry at a dead-end? Have American poets betrayed the great legacy of modernism? Why or why not? What worries you about the present moment in poetry? Do you see signs of life? Where is the most promising work coming from? What is your advice to a young poet trying to make sense of the current poetry scene?

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