Competing Nostalgias and the Politics of the Accessible Poem
“…we have to get over, as in getting over a disease, the idea that we can ‘all’ speak to one another in the universal voice of poetry” (Charles Bernstein, A Poetics, 5) Today on my drive to campus, I found myself mulling over a recent discussion with a poet friend about appeals to the “common reader” and “universal human truths” in the discourse around contemporary American poetry, and our mutual distrust of these terms. Poetry, so the story goes, has lost its ability to spe