a few nice grenades

'...Historically, any significant shift in poetry has been a shift ‘down’ – to the demotic, the current vernacular as experienced by readers... Such a shift usually involves taking the cues for writing directly from life, rather than from the canon of poetry with which the poet may be attempting to ingratiate himself... In the moments when it becomes culturally relevant or emblematic, poetry interrupts, derails, shifts; it does not reinforce. Yet the world one becomes familiar with if you aspire to write poems is quite different from anything these notions might suggest: a liberal establishment firmly in control of publishing channels, made up of bodies with decades of personal and professional investment in the type of poetry they write and write about. This would seem to explain the continuation in poetry of styles that have long outlived their reasonable lifespan...

...When a magazine or publisher that survives almost entirely on arts funding is unable to generate enough interest to support its own programme, the efforts of many internet zines/publishing houses/poets, operating almost entirely outside that framework of support, yet receiving an enviable quantity of traffic and attention, should at least be acknowledged...

...It can appear that ‘gatekeeping’ authorities artificially perpetuate a tradition of poetry simply because it is easy to do so, and within that define a comfortable notion of ‘quality’, to the point that it results in a genuine repression of what kind of poetry is being written. It is not an exaggeration to say, in the UK at least, that aspiring poets not only learn to write in accordance with a broadly accepted style, but also share broadly accepted aims, in order to increase their chances of publication. This seems to be a very effective way of strangling an art form, ensuring a certain tradition is bought into by emerging writers and remains the dominant one...

...Poetry has become used to positioning itself as an ‘anti-commercial’ mode of culture, a somehow economically untainted art form... Of course, no poetry publisher would actively discourage people from buying its books... [poetry] still operates with a structure of production and capital...

Here is George Szirtes discussing Riviere discussing a ''deliberate flatness and an almost obsessive use of qualifiers''... And, below, something I re-posted quite a while ago, with other reasons for refusing metaphor, writing 'pared-back' etc (go to 3:00 in), which I would say, despite Tao Lin's apparently almost congenital tendency toward these things, go back to big and important arguments about "the destitution of the old myths of depth" (Robbe Grillet)...