I Can't Believe It's Not Shakespeare

This is a guest post by Michael Swellander, the founder and editor of Pinecones: a Podcast of Young Poets, which features interviews and readings from poets young and old. At the moment, he is studying in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Besides being an editor and a student, he is a poet and musician. He is from San Antonio, TX.

Lately, in a particularly active corner of the poetry blogosphere, much of the discussion has been about “schools of poetry,” and whether or not one may really say “poetry” anymore without a hyphen in front of it. Does one make Flarfist or Conceptualist poetry? Is one poet a member of some as-yet-unclassified department of the School of Quietude, or does he or she fit somewhere among the post-avants? Is what he or she does even poetry? What is poetry?

One of the most beneficial things to come out of this discussion is poets who have said that they just write “poetry” without an affiliation to any school or tradition are put in a position where they (we) need to second-guess ourselves. The binary of School of Quietude and post-avantism that Silliman’s set up is most helpful in that it challenges poets who have taken poetry as a given for as long as we can remember to reexamine, from an almost atomic level,  just what it is we’re doing. Even if, in the end, we are unable to identify with a group of other poets to our complete satisfaction, it’s worth the work to try to find out who we are, and why we are the way we are. Story continued below… (more…)