Stephen Burt mentions forthcoming 42 Mile Press poet Allan Peterson in his take-down of Mark Edmundson, author of the latest dismissal of contemporary poetry, which appeared recently in Harper’s Magazine.
In Every Generation: A Response to Mark Edmundson
“First, I’d like to thank Mark Edmundson for writing the sort of attack that provokes a defense—the sort of frustratingly passionate piece that provokes responses and that makes editors publish them. I can say till I’m blue that Joseph Massey’s short poems are the best thing to happen to the sense of vision since the invention of photography; that Angie Estes has recently created some of the most beautiful verbal objects on the planet, or at least on the part that reads English; that Allan Peterson’s meditations on domestic tranquility and ecocatastrophe are so smart that they could actually make you smarter; &c. But only the people who already read book reviews devoted to not-very-famous single authors will notice. Now that Mark Edmundson has attacked contemporary-poetry-in-general in a national magazine, though, other national magazines and websites and blogs can get attention with pieces—like Seth Abramson’s in the Huffington Post—that recommend individual poets by coming to poetry-in-general’s defense.”
