It's kind of an emblematic situation: Gioia at the NEA (while it
yet lasts--), & off in the hills, like a Ho Chi Minh of Cyberspace:
Silliman's Blog. Pope & Anti-Pope (oh, i thot Marjorie Perloff
was the LangPope?). --Naah (though it would be nice to be at
least a LangCardinal, i admit--). Blogs are more like the old literary
salons, except you can't see who's in your living room & the
refreshments are strictly metaphorical. We aren't so much busy
drawing up canons & lists of ex(non)communicates, as trying
each to map our own bewilderment. Blogging is poetry waged
by other means. I respect anyone who's read something i
haven't. Nevertheless...when Swinburne died, the young
Yeats is reported to have cried out, "Now I am King of the Cats!"
Robert Lowell, for whatever good it does him now, was King of
the Cats. I rather think today's King of the Cats is going to turn
out to be someone we've never heard of, probably off on the
fringes of the English-speaking world right now; & i don't
mean myself (although as a joke, i plan to try Yeats's line &
a sky-kick when Cohen dies--& i hope that's not anytime soon).
I only mean to figure in that late 20c anthology: among the 10
million minor poets.

"...The broken glass in the corner,
even though you cut your foot upon it,
seems only a moment of confused sunlight
in a room without windows." --William Virgil Davis

"...and at dawn
The small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn." --Robert Lowell

"The apothecaries have Books of Gold, whose leaves, being opened, are so
light that they are subject to be shaken with the least breath; yet, rightly
handled, they serve both ornament and use." --Thomas Campion

'So thick the confusion,
Even the cowards were brave.' --Archilochos, fragm 281, tr Guy Davenport

"An ambiguous situation arises when poems are read for reasons other than
those for which they were written..." --Laura Riding, 1938 preface

"Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth."--William Blake