The Age of Incompetence 2

Last time, I wondered if poetic competence is a useless concept right now; if "a baseline level of craft viability," as Kasey puts it in his original post, is no longer necessary or desirable to aim for in poetry. Competence might even be inimical to contemporary ideas of poetic excellence—having one, it would seem, means you can't have the other. The "step beyond competence," as Kasey points out, isn't competence plus a little extra fairy dust. Instead, it jumps off the graduated scale of "...