Incomplete

For Christmas I received some new books. The Best American Poetry 2008 and The Treasury of American Poetry (an old text book, I think.) The two are very different creatures.

I am going to take these to work with me tonight and put up some comparative examples. The one definite thing I noticed in the The Best of was that most of the poems were centered around the author - a singular experience or a smell or toast, or something. But poets in The Treasury did this too, you see (I have been reading a page of "Song of Myself" everyday, or trying to - I highly recommend by the way, with breakfast or before bed,) however they seem to touch on a worldliness that the modern poetry doesn't hit.

Today is a "you're whining over nothing" day for me.

I feel like what some consider the best new poetry are poems that are as different from what poetry was last generation as possible. But that is not a new phenomenon. You cannot compare Dickinson/Melville/Whitman with E.E. Cummings or Langston Hughes. You just can't! They're worlds away even when they're on the same topic.

So maybe this is what poetry *is* now, and maybe it will last.