Aldon Nielsen wrote:
 
> While I have not at all
> agreed with some of the opinions expressed here about the current
state of
> graduate education in the U.S., I think it is demonstrably true that
poetry
> has been slighted in recent years.  This was odd enough during the
> ascendance of poststructuralist theory, as so many of its best-known
> writers write so frequently about poets, but becomes even odder in the
 
> contexts of new historicism and cultural studies.
 
Absolutely. For many North American critics and scholars, the various
forms of
critical theory seemed to have replaced poetry: instead of reading
contemporary
poets, they're reading contemporary thinkers. It's a bizarre turn, not
just
because everyone from Nietzsche to Kristeva writes about and even
privileges
poetry, but also because so many of the contemporary poets are reading
and
responding to critical theory. (I think you had that in mind, Aldon, but
I
figured I'd make it explicit.)
 
It's probably worth noting in passing that the North American
understanding of
critical theory often seems to be at odds with its origins on the
continent.
For one thing, there's often a strong Puritanical streak in it, a sense
that
political questions (which are usually ethical or even religious
questions) are
ultimately reducible to black and white. Obviously, Pound's not goping
to come
out too well with that kind of perspective. And Barbara Johnson mentions
 
somewhere that deconstruction in America is often simultaneously treated
at
exotically Gallic and presented in terms similar to the New Criticism.
 
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I think critical theory
has
sometimes been hurt as much by its Anglophone defenders as by its
detractors.
 
 
Bill Freind