one of the things that I think it may be important to begin talking about it that it is now possible, beause so many publications (at least that I have been reading) are early books by recent MFAs, and so many poets are teaching in MFA and PhD Creative Writing programs, to consider a variety of types of influence. For example, a poet who was taught Jorie Graham, a poet who was taught BY Jorie Graham, and a student who read (independently) and was influenced by Jorie Graham's form, subject matter, etc. etc. bear the markings of influence in entirely different ways, and talking about those ways seems to be to be important.

The other thing -- and I suppose this is tangentially related to some brief conversations I had with Kasey Mohammad about "sufficiency" in workshop writing, of "competent poems -- is that I read for some sort of "excellence" and that is a very tricky value, but it is one that is NOT found in the Iowans of the 60s and 70s, and it is not found in many recent MFA grads writing an occasionally interesting domestic surrealism with overtones of contraints of various sorts -- of course some flarfeurs are interested in "badness" -- but not here --