Ange Mlinko has a response to Chris Lott’s email yesterday.

 

Dear Ron,

 

I have often wanted to drop you a note saying how much I liked this or that in the blog, but the exigencies of new parenthood limit my time on web and email. I am, however, so outraged by the letter you posted in your blog today that I have to, well, spew. You know how it is when Republicans maintain a pseudo-embattled stance in the face of the liberal "elite"? It's not enough that the school of quietude, the school of broken-up-plainspoken-prose-is-so-poetry, the school of "John Donne would totally be writing broken-up-plainspoken-prose today!" poetry, the "official verse culture," what have you, is a behemoth that systematically vanishes great poets like Robert Duncan or even John Ashbery (an acquaintance with an MFA from Southwest Texas had never heard of him) and leaves writers branded "experimental" with no place to publish except for a handful of journals they don't put out themselves. And if that sounds like sour grapes, I'll gladly be sour enough for all the excellent poets in their fifties & sixties who appear in Shiny but never in the Paris Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, etc. But I'd like to save the majority of my sourness for the idea that we should all be some happy poetry family on a "spectrum." Because that's a patent lie, and the poetry establishment is afraid of great poetry (where is Michael Palmer's MacArthur? Susan Howe's? Alice Notley's? just to name a few names who are more widely influential), and anyone outside the "experimental" "club" who whines about the "club" can take a flying leap – in his Republican-borrowed suit.

 

Thanks for letting me rage.

Best,

Ange

 

I don’t entirely agree with Ange (maybe it’s because I have appeared in The Paris Review), so I will add my own two cents tomorrow & the next day.