A return to poetry

Yes, again.

*

There's been some interesting back-and-forth in the comment boxes; thought I'd chime in. Tony wrote that "the poetry that interests me as 'new' lately is the poetry that can be the most up to date in its inappropriateness." Let's take as given that we're all in pursuit of not only what's new in poetry, but what's new and succeeds at making us feel something. (I'll have to chime in on Goldbarth and feeling later tonight.) But a poem's "inappropriate" qualities would therefore seem to take on a new level of complexity.

Segue: I don't want to name these poems as inappropriate, because I don't think that they are, but D. A. Powell's work in Cocktails -




- seems to be both new and, well, *surprising*. Again, I can't say inappropriate, because there's nothing inappropriate about these words, issues, or images. Rather, the words, issues, and images gain everything through the way this guy's staggering his lines - setting up syntactic expectations and thwarting them, thwarting them. He's doing things with rhythm that I haven't seen done before, and not because I haven't read everything there is to read. This fellow's rhythmic sense, coupled with his subject matter and his, ah, articulation of his consciousness, reads new.

*

This is less a response to those comment-box comments, I suppose, and more a related tangent. But I like this conversation.