Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

Even as I fully endorse Robert Archambeau’s level-headed assessment of the current situation of poetry and its pluralities of style as one for which “we may count ourselves lucky,” the plurality of the discussion in general deserves further examination.

After all, it was under the auspices of the Poetry editors that the initial set of manifestos critiqued by Archambeau were published, with the same editors also responsible for the publication of his response in which he praises the current state of poetry. But as institutions such as Poetry (and other “corporate benefactors,” as Jed Rasula calls them in his American Poetry Wax Museum) are saddled with the burden of both regulating and maintaining the fate of poetry-at-large, an honest assessment of the situation seems difficult, if not impossible.