Book Review: Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense
A few years ago nearly everyone thought that poetry was finally dead, that the few remaining poets were living solitary lives as poetry presses shut down and poetry readers diminished. Then along comes technology to the rescue: new printing technologies, vast social networking sites, poetry blogs, online publishers, and inexpensive personal web sites. Now new publishers and virtual communities of poets or other special interest groups bring more poems to more readers than could ever have been imagined. Much of the new poetry is wretched, but some is not. Poetry good and bad thrives. No