"The specific is in the dirt the vegetables grow in, the poets then eat, it's an American soil."
A moment from a a Q & A with queer poet CA Conrad:
Do you believe there is anything specifically American about American poetry past and present? Is there American poetry in the sense that there is said to be American painting or American film?
OF COURSE! My collaboration with my good friend and brilliant American poet Frank Sherlock The City Real & Imagined (Factory School Books, 2010) is such a testament! The very opening of the book is the very American and new translation of the word Philadelphia which you may want to know in order to caress the chin in imagining what is American poetry, in this American idiom.
What is specifically American in all of this? What scholar can be as agile as simply reading a Frank O'Hara poem? All your answers are there. What is absorbed in reading will suffice. Gertrude Stein, Pattie McCarthy, Garrett Caples, Kevin Varrone, Charles Olson, Eileen Myles, Jonathan Williams, Allison Cobb, Hoa Nguyen, Alice Notley, kari edwards, Joseph Ceravolo, Ron Silliman, Anselm Berrigan, Karen Weiser. These are merely a few American poets who can say is BEST through their poems, and better than anything I can muster for you.
The specific is in the dirt the vegetables grow in, the poets then eat, it's an American soil.
Jack Spicer, Stephen Jonas, John Wieners, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Carol Mirakove. Reading American poets, loving poetry, but loving poetry through American poets, this is what I say to your questions about specifics.
