What is Open Form poetry?
I expected to include plenty of Whitman here and discovered, reading him, a sort of seasickness at all those undulating lines of Uncle Walt’s perpetual swoon over grass and leaves and camerados. There are good poems there, and it’s a mistake to omit them, but Walt is the Typhoid Mary of American Lit: so much bad poetry can be traced back to him (and not brief bad poems, either), he gave so many dreadful writers permission to lavish themselves upon us. Garrison Keillor (23) 20th century American poetry is the best era for poetry since the Tang Dynasty The Japanese are reading more (of it) than Americans are. Theyre reading Philip Levineand Allen Ginsberg, including all (his) crapola. Sam Hamill a poet of some local interest, perhaps. T.S. Elliot on William Carlos Williams (1) Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams. To read the words of these intelligent, thoughtful people, youd think that poetry would have been better off without these three luminaries. After ten years of
