Regarding Burt's The New Thing

         
                                             
                                              
essay in The Boston Review, which I read today  
via a link at Silliman's Blog, several thoughts:             
                                                    
Stephen Burt did a lot of research.                    
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His essay is therefore historically valuable.               
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Establishing and supporting the existence of a          
poetic trend requires a node of activity dedicated  
to making poems of a particular kind.  That, as Burt  
recognizes, poems of the kind he discusses have been  
made for years do help to support his position; they   
are not sufficient to establish a trend.             
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Anthologies, presses, journals, blogs, poet-to-poet
communications are the means by which trends are   
established.                                        
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I and many, many others are among those who for    
years have written poems of The New Thing kind;
but it wasn't until recently that numerous poets    
began writing entire books of such poems.  *         
Stephen Burt notes that the two best books are                 
Mark Levine's Debt and Rae Armantrout's Next Life.
                                                                   
                                                                 
                                                                  
                                                                 
                                                                    
kh00028