A query re poetics

In a recent email, Vikas Menon writes: “while i’ve been reading a great deal of poetry, i realized i’ve been sorely negelecting texts on poetics — can you drop me a line when you get a chance on some texts that can act as guideposts to further reading?” I tried to do just that, writing down what quickly came to mind and easily to hand off the shelf. What struck me most compiling this brief list, sitting here in Albany & relying on my English-language library, was that it included very little non-North American materials — some fall backs on European Avant-Garde traditions, sure, but not much beyond (in Ed Dorn’s words) “some business recently transacted in the White World.” (Alcalay’s, Rothenberg’s, & some of my essays being the exceptions that confirm the rule). As if a poetics based on a single language & culture were still a valid situation. Especially when that culture is swaggering all over the place, imposing its “vision” — both culturally & politically — on the world at large. Of course the fact that much poetics material from other places & cultures hasn’t been translated or gathered into accessible books, can be seen as an integral part of yankee hegemonic strivings. My own limitations are also flagrantly visible, in terms of intra-North American ethnic poetics. So, I’ll reprint the list below, more or less in the randomish order in which I put it down for Vikas, in order to elicit responses, additions, suggestions, etc., while beginning to take notes toward that “other” list I think is needed to counter the all-too US-oriented inclination of this one. Of course one way to do this would also be to send Vikas — & the readers of this blog — back (or forward, as the case may be) to the Poems for the Millennium anthologies, which do carry a certain charge of poetics, in the commentaries and in the “Manifestos” section.