Just dropping in to make a few short announcements. Sorry for the brevity, but these must be mentioned and I haven’t much time. I’ll write more later:

1. The Twitter poem experiment for National Poetry Month went very well. While I wasn’t much impressed with some of the poems I wrote for Twitter distribution, it seems my audience liked them. I appreciate those of you who are now following me as a result of the experiment. You’ll be glad to know that I’m planning to keep it running through May. Twice daily – at 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. EST you can catch my Twitter poems by following me on Twitter.
2. If you haven’t seen the free chapbook, Hardwood, based on the full-length poetry book of the same name by Gary B. Fitzgerald then I encourage you to download it for free along with the Poetry Toolbar. A second chapbook titled Softwood, also by Gary B. Fitzgerald, will soon join it. Download the toolbar for free and get both chapbooks and many other literary goodies.
3. Recent purchases include American Hybrid and Lyric Postmodernisms.

I will write more on this topic in the near future, and I know I still owe you one on vanity publishing, but I just wanted to remark that American Hybrid, edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John, appears to be the book that confirms what I’ve been saying on this blog for the last year-and-a-half. The anthology consists of poems that, according to the editors, flow from the preceding poetic traditions of traditional verse and avant-garde poetry, fusing the two into one poetic style that many times is exhibited within the same poem.

While Swensen and St. John call this type of poem a hybrid, I have taken the liberty of calling the movement itself the Millennial School without ascribing a name to the type of poem. I essentially meant the same thing that Swensen says in her introduction, which I’ll quote a piece of in a moment.

When I started this blog in September 2007 I did so with the intent of putting a voice to this direction in poetry, a philosophy I have adhered to since I started writing poetry in the late 1980s when the Right Wing and the Left Wing of American poetics, New Formalism and Language Poetry, respectively, were pounding faces in competition for the Golden Glove. I rejected that neither should prevail and still do. It seems I am not the only one.

My Hybrid Confession
I have not spent much time over the years conversing with other poets about poetics. I am not much of a social being and prefer to keep to myself. Not quite a recluse, but just enough asocial to not be antisocial. I guess, somewhere in between. My point in saying that is that my poetic philosophy has mostly been developed by my own preferences and some observations that I’ve made in the direction of published poetry in the popular journals over the last 20 years. So I am delighted that others have seen the same developments.

Until I started writing this blog I’d never heard anyone speak of the fusion between the traditional and the avant-garde. Ron Silliman speaks of the third wave of poetics and the “post-avant”, but I sense that his meaning is much more constrained than mine. The late Reginald Shepherd, author of Lyric Postmodernisms, defended the same idea on his blog and is one of the poets in Swensen’s and St. John’s anthology.

Here is what Swensen says in her introduction to American Hybrid:

The hybrid poem has selectively inherited traits from both of the principal paths outlined above (traditional and avant-garde). It shares affinities with what Ron Silliman has termed “third wave poetics” and with what is increasingly known as “post-avant” work, though its range is broader, particularly at the more conservative end of its continuum…. Today’s hybrid poem might engage such conventional approaches as narrative that presumes a stable first person, yet complicate it by disrupting the linear temporal path or by scrambling the normal syntactical sequence. Or it might foreground recognizably experimental modes such as illogicality or fragmentation, yet follow the strict formal rules of a sonnet or a villannelle. Or it might be composed entirely of neologisms but based in ancient traditions.

This is precisely what the Millennial School of Poetics, and the philosophy behind this blog, is based upon. The idea is to learn new techniques from any corner of poetics and employ them into one’s own without prejudice as to form or substance.

Swensen continues:

…hybrid poets access a wealth of tools, each one of which can change dramatically depending on how it is combined with others and the particular role it plays in the composition.

I am currently muddling my way through an epic narrative poem written precisely with these tenets in mind. Titled “The Sandbox”, it is based on my own experience as a soldier-participant in the Iraq War though the setting is post-experience.

I just wanted to share an initial impression of this book after having read the first introduction. I will leave you with these thoughts and return to them later.