Tom Orange has a response to the Argotist essay "voices of denial: poetry and post-culture"

in the narrow poetry scene where a former BRANDING exec derides academia's influence in poetry while flogging his Stanford BA to the head of the NEA and embracing Weldon Kees as -- well, as everything free verse is not poetry, then Kees is a Beat poet? something like that -- and of course Beat poetry is not academic (although, hm, don't some of those Beats teach?), so gotta choose one of "them", the identification of experimental (I'm preferring "adventurous" poetry right now) poetry with academia seems a crucial dismissal since it is "unreadable" to those without suspiciously large amounts of schooling (although there are more "experiementalists" coming out of MFA programs now than in the recent past)

anyhow, when Orange quotes Olson's "getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the "subject" and his soul" I just wanted to add that one of the neat things about the Beat Buddhists and other Buddhist poets (Whalen) is that Buddhism doesn't have a notion of the soul -- now, the Buddhists were formerly not Western (there are plenty of them this side of the international date line now, however), as Olson has in his quote, but --

anyhoo, onward, rhapsodes

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