Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Not much time for a detailed response here (caught up in the translation of self we call moving), but as I'm still irked after a couple of days, I do feel compelled to say that I prefer "confusion" to the kinds of easy certitudes expressed in this post by the usually wonderful and thrilling Kasey Mohammed. What makes the Lib. of America anthology work, and I do think it's successful despite some grievous intra-poet omissions ("Discrete Series" yo!), is that multiple editors with different aesthetics were involved. I, for one, do want an anthology that includes both C.K. Williams and Susan Howe, Richard Wilbur and Bernadette Mayer (I'm not intentionally gendering these pairs). If, a la Godel, we have to choose between consistency or completeness; or a la Heisenberg, location or velocity, I'll take the latter.

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