Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers
IT’S A CHARLES BERNSTEIN-KIND-OF-DAY:
From a statement read at an event marking the release of Best American Poetry 2008, held last night at The New School, in New York City. David Lehman is the series editor of Best American Poetry, and Robert Polito is the director of the writing program at The New School.
Chairman Lehman, Secretary Polito, distinguished poets and readers—I regret having to interrupt the celebrations tonight with an important announcement. As you know, the glut of illiquid, insolvent, and troubled poems is clogging the literary arteries of the West. These debt-ridden poems threaten to infect other areas of the literary sector and ultimately to topple our culture industry…
–Carried on at Harpers Magazine
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What The “Subprime Poetry Crisis” Means For The Overheated Metapor Market
Last night at a poetry reading marking the release of the 2008 Best American Poetry anthology the distinguished poet and Finding Forrester star Charles Bernstein delivered a stirring plea for swift intervention to stave off the subprime poetry crisis. “As we know, lax composition practices since the advent of modernism led to irresponsible poets and irresponsible readers,” he said. “Simply put, too many poets composed works they could not justify.” (Read the whole thing; it is awesome.) But it made me anxious! At the risk of pronouncing a subprime trend post by adding this news to that of the subprime mortgage crisis and the subprime celebrity crisis I personally underwrote, I am going to leap a few logical conclusions ahead and ponder whether this liquidity crunch has begotten too many issuances of new metaphors…
–Continued at Gawker.com
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AMY KING View All →
Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She co-edited with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She also co-edits the anthology series, Bettering American Poetry, and is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
AMY KING 
had to get arrested…his fame was fading