A few weeks back Andrew Shields posted some thoughts on the notion of “mainstreams.” I commented on it and want to clarify and expand on that comment a bit, mainly because the use of “mainstream” as a pejorative in the poetry world is so annoying. Every poet wants to be an outlier, a rebel, radically individual or at least a member of a radically individual crowd. Hence the spectacle of tenured professors denouncing “mainstream poetry.” But does mainstream poetry exist? Well—yes and no.
I think mainstreams exist only in retrospect. The backward look simplifies and so falsifies what was, in fact, an almost-chaos of individual practice. I say “almost” because there are certainly anti-entropic forces at work, though they work as they do in real streams: there are swirls, eddies, rapids and backwashes, rain that swells and freshens, droughts that shrink and encourage stagnation. Only after the season has passed do we seem to see the “mainstream,” its offshoots and tributaries—though we see them all through a contemporary lens, almost never the way they were seen at the time.
One example: readers of poetry a sense of which poets, right now, are “major” and which aren’t. (The Library of America, in what may prove to be an excess of enthusiasm, has already devoted a volume to John Ashbery.) But isn’t that sense a fantasy—a kind of hubris? Best to keep in mind that in 500 years the language we speak—the language of our poetry and this humble blog post—will be so archaic that extensive footnotes will be required to read us at all, and even then the subtleties, such as they are, will be lost or accessible only through scholarly research.* If reading is still something people do then.
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* I wonder what a three- or four-sentence footnote on Ashbery will look like in 2511.
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
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Even if you wanted to, "you could not step twice into the same stream (sic); for other waters are ever flowing on to you"<br />:)!
I like your development of the stream metaphor here.<br /><br />(And I'm delighted that my comments were so thought-provoking!)
"It's one reason Ed Baker, for example (yes, you, Ed), is so refreshing: he sounds like nobody else. The post-avant project seems to be to sound like anybody else. What an impoverishment!"<br /><br />Well said, Joseph.
I'm not sure about a "globalized homogeneous state." I'd have to read a dozen languages to know if there is one; translations, being brought over into the dominant English idiom(s), give a globalized impression—much distinctiveness squeezed out of them. I have to assume (blind optimism?) that there is a distinctiveness I can't appreciate there. But to see English language
Joseph,<br /><br />you seem to be saying that, in a sort of literary darwinism, mainstream signifies the winners of a long-ago battle for prestige. The metaphor of "swirls, eddies, rapids and backwashes" suggests an original chaos out of which (even if it's an illusion) an "official verse culture" has arisen. And that the winners today (such as Silliman, e.g.) have become
I like Conrad's term:<br /> "radical sameness"<br /><br />and<br /><br />as far as what people thing (about my stuff) say<br />50 years after I'me dead ?<br /><br />then as now .. Icouldgiveashit !<br /><br />as I am sure Ashbery would agree …<br /><br />He, also is not responsible for anyboddhi's intelligence or understanding….<br /><br />